Joshua Dunlop

In the acting and modelling world, black and white headshots are commonplace in portfolios, and if you want to diversify your own photography portfolio then it would be a good idea to add this skill to it. Headshots are laid back and can be a lot of fun as you play around trying to come up with something creative.

The general idea is that you find a way of syncing you camera with your flash so that you can take it off of your camera and illuminate your subject for a different angle. You’ll need a separate, off camera flash, but there’s plenty of choice to suit your budget and needs. When you take your flash off your camera, you open up a whole load of different options when it comes to diffusing the light through various umbrellas, softboxes and beauty dishes.

Dynamic tension is a way of using the energy and movement available in various features of the frame to draw the eye out of the picture in contrasting directions. We’ve already looked at a variety of different lines that you can use in a photo to make it more interesting, but dynamic tension takes these lines and adds varying degrees of contrast between them, making them much more interesting.

The reason for writing this post was not to show you why you should never be a photographer, it’s to show you the pitfalls that await you when you decide to take it on, and what you should avoid when trying to start a professional photography career. Hope it helps.

If you’ve been following my basic composition technique tutorials, you’ll already know how effective the use of lines can be when composing a photo, and finishing off the lines section, we have perhaps the most useful; converging lines. There are various ways to use these lines with different degrees of effectiveness and that’s exactly what we’ll be looking at in this post.

I almost always carry a flash with me whenever i’m out now, even in the day time, as there’s a ton of different uses for it. We’re gonna start by looking at possible uses of the flash and then look at when you wouldn’t want to use it.

If you were to sit down and learn how to use everything on your camera in one sitting, you’d be completely lost by the end of it. Cameras are pretty complicated and take time to fully understand, so take my advice and start with these 10 easy steps and you’ll soon pick the rest up along the way.

Vertical lines come right after horizontal lines in importance and that’s for a single reason – the way our eyes view an image. Our eyes scan a photo from left to right horizontally and will pick up horizontal lines first, and because of this, vertical lines are excellent at complimenting horizontal lines with their perpendicular, stopping nature when they intersect. This is a great technique to adding tension into a photo.

Horizontal lines are in everything we see and are at the base of every composition. Even photos with no straight lines in them are bound by the horizontal or vertical frame that they’re contained in. It’s important to understand the affect that a horizontal line has on a photo because then you’ll better understand how to use it effectively.

I personally love working corporate events as they’re always different. There’s lots to learn from people speaking at events that others have paid thousands to see. It’s an easy relaxed gig and they pay is great if you’re going after the right clients. This rather long post is a complete definitive guide as to how to work a corporate event and get repeat business.

Autofocus is often not the most reliable tool for focusing when the subject is at the side of the frame. Focal lock is built into all modern digital cameras as a way of correcting that; it allows you to select what you want to focus on by pointing at it and then moving your camera back to how you had it composed previously.

This post is all about taking better photos indoors, using an external flash. It covers the advantages and disadvantages of using different shutter speeds and apertures.