Fast Frame Rate Portrait Technique

Shooting several frames per second can make for better portraits, especially when photographing groups and kids

William Sawalich

I’ve found over the years that sometimes the simplest assignments present the biggest challenges: family portraits, for instance, or portraits of young children. These subjects are fairly straightforward and yet they can be immensely difficult and frustrating if you’re not sure how to do it right. And if you’re not quick, you can miss the perfect... Read more

The Simplest Portrait Posing Trick

Help your subjects look natural even when they don’t know how

William Sawalich

Aside from all the technical difficulties of choosing ideal camera and lighting equipment, then deploying each to its fullest potential, portrait photographers are also faced with a challenge they have much less control over: posing their subjects. The challenges these days are even greater, as portrait styles have become increasingly natural with anything... Read more

Choosing The Right Format For An External Hard Drive

From exFat to APFS, drive formatting options are wide—and not very obvious

William Sawalich

There are several factors to consider when it comes time to format an external hard drive. Whether you’ll be using it to back up photos for travel, shuttle video files from machine to machine or archive files for the long term, the format you choose for the disk makes a big difference. Here’s help to choose the right hard drive format whether you... Read more

Automatic Panorama Stitching In Photoshop With Photomerge

Photomerge is a powerful tool for automatically combining multiple frames into one big panorama image

William Sawalich

Sometimes, a single frame doesn’t do justice to the big, beautiful landscape before your eyes. In other cases, the lens you’ve got isn’t wide enough to take in the whole scene. Still, in other cases, you need a larger file than what your camera can deliver. Whatever the cause of this conundrum, there’s a simple solution: stitching multiple frames... Read more

Simple Home Portrait Studios

Two great options for useful home setups that don’t require much equipment

William Sawalich

For obvious reasons, photographers everywhere have been photographing at home more than ever. For portrait photographers who want the look of a studio that entails a bit of ingenuity but doesn’t involve much specialized equipment, here are two approaches to a simple home portrait studio. One requires a few simple elements such as a strobe, a stand... Read more

Photographing Autumn Sunsets

Fall presents the perfect opportunity to capture beautiful, vibrant sunset landscapes

William Sawalich

Around September and October of each year, I inevitably gasp the first time I catch a glimpse of the vivid pink, orange and red hues that signal awesome autumn sunsets are beginning to arrive. The sun sets earlier in the day this time of year, and for most of us in the U.S., the early November time change makes it possible to photograph the sunset before... Read more

Flash Blur Fun

Combine flash with ambient light to add motion blur to moving subjects

William Sawalich

When many photographers think about techniques for accentuating motion blur, they consider shutter speed exclusively. And for good reason—as a stationary camera and a moving subject create motion blur, so does panning the camera to keep the subject sharper while the background blurs. But the problem with this approach is that it’s awfully easy for... Read more

Portrait Lenses, Focal Lengths And Faces

Why a long lens produces better portraits than a wide angle

William Sawalich

We’ve all heard of portrait lenses, right? And we maybe even know that lenses with a minimum focal length of approximately 70mm constitute these portrait lenses with popular portrait-specific focal lengths including 85mm, 105mm, 135mm and longer. But do we know exactly why these lenses are considered ideal for portraits? Here’s a look at the... Read more

Photographing Starry Skies

Getting started in astrophotography requires little more than a wide-angle lens, a tripod and dark skies

William Sawalich

Late summer is a great time to photograph the night sky. Cooler evening temperatures make for comfortable working conditions across much of the U.S., and the Milky Way is at its highest point of the year. Here’s a primer for getting started photographing nighttime landscapes that include the moon, stars and even the gorgeous Milky Way. Avoid Manmade... Read more

Layered Hair Repair In Photoshop

A Photoshop retouching technique for effectively eliminating flyaway hair

William Sawalich

When portrait subjects ask me to retouch their favorite pictures, there’s one thing they request above all else: “Can you fix that flyaway hair?” And, as is often the case when it comes to post-production, there are many effective ways to tackle this retouching challenge. But one of my favorite methods involves a layer mask to quickly and effectively... Read more

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