Tutorials

Digital photography tips and tutorials on everything from sports photography to wildlife and fashion photography.

How to Calculate the New MFD of a Lens When Using an Extension Tube

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I recently received a comment on my popular article – The Ultimate Guide to Extension Tubes – which asked how you would go about calculating the new MFD (minimum focus distance) of a lens, once you have added an extension tube. In that original post I did include the mathematics for calculating the new maximum magnification of a lens with an extension tube, but at the time I decided not to dig deeper and explore the calculation of the new MFD itself, since the math is a little longer. The new comment reminded me about it, so I decided to …

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Get Some Waders and Get Down Low!

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When it comes to wildlife photography, one of the easiest things you can do to improve your images is to get down nice and low so that you’re at eye level with your subject. This has two main effects on the image: It makes the viewer feel as though they are part of the animal’s world, instead of just looking in on it as you would do at a zoo exhibit. It usually moves the background much further away from the subject, and this has the effect of blurring it out, thereby isolating your sharply focussed subject on the soft …

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3 Types of Automation for Your Photography Business using Zapier

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Some years ago I wrote a very popular post about automating your photography business, and I still find myself often directing people to that post because I truly believe in the time savings that are possible using automations services which are available for free. Back when I wrote that post, I was using a combination of two services called Zapier and IFTTT. These days I perform all of my important photography business automations with Zapier because in the past few years they have vastly expanded the number of services they integrate with, and they also continue to add amazing new …

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My Photo Backup Routine – Mid 2017

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I started this particular series of posts back in 2015 by detailing my photography backup routine and outlining some of the basic strategies for a safe and redundant backup system. If you’re uncertain about the basics, you should start with that post first. Time and time again I hear stories of people losing their precious images, and it’s not just amateur photographers either, I’m constantly reading about professionals running into trouble too and frankly they should know better. The biggest problem is that too many people still think of digital photography as being “free” because there are no film costs …

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Did You Know That Canon Has Three Different Sizes of APS-C Sensor?

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I thought I’d write a quick post about this because it caused me some confusion recently while I was creating some resources on calculating field of view and angle of view for camera lenses. The calculations for this require the dimensions of a camera’s sensor, and while working on the data list for Canon lenses I couldn’t figure out why my numbers weren’t quite matching some of those that I had come across on Canon’s own website. A little digging back through archives revealed to me that Canon actually uses three different sizes of APS-C sensor, although I wasn’t able …

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How to Install Lightroom Presets in Under 30 Seconds

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Today I’m bringing you an Adobe Lightroom tutorial in two different ways. Lightroom presets are a key component in speeding up the photo editing workflow. You can make them yourself (time consuming) or you can buy them for next to nothing from a number of different online stores. Once you’ve purchased them, you’ll need to install them, and that’s what I’m going to show you how to today – in less than 30 seconds! Actually I’m going to give you two videos. The first video shows you the best way to install Lightroom presets with the sub 30 second method, …

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21 Essential Adobe Lightroom Classic Shortcuts – Free Download

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I recently published a free downloadable PDF guide to all the Adobe Lightroom Classic CC keyboard shortcuts, but it occurred to me that it might also be useful to have a second simpler download that was just a single printable page. The full guide is really useful, and well worth a read because it’ll probably teach you a few things about Lightroom that you didn’t even know it could do, but a condensed one-pager of the most useful shortcuts also sounds like a great idea, so that’s what I’m bringing you here! It’s not possible to memorize the hundreds of …

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