Is that summer I can see just around the corner? I do believe it is! Unless you are one of those very lucky people who live in a part of the world where beach days are an all year round thing, for the rest of us, the warm weather means we can get ourselves down to the beach without having to wear five layers of clothing!  And of course, with every weather change comes a new host of shooting opportunities, so here are 8 Tips for Shooting at the Beach.

Have you recently bagged yourself a new DSLR? Here are 10 camera settings that you should look to change or check before you start shooting!  

In the Live Snap Love Facebook Group, I notice that some of most common questions that come up is around camera gear, and lenses in particular.  I also know that for many of you just starting out with a new DSLR, and wondering what lens you need to get, it can be especially confusing! 

So, today, I'm going to break down why your kit lens is NOT the best lens for you when trying to learn photography and what you should look for instead.  Upgrading your lens from the kit one really will help you enormously when you starting out, as you will be more easily able to get sharper, cleaner images. 

Let's dive in! 

There are loads of different ways to use color in photography, but for this particular post we are going to look and how we can convey contrast using color. This is often called chromatic contrast, but personally I think it’s easier to use the term complementary or contrasting colors - but either is good :)

Here's a useful guide on how we can use this to add interest to our images!

Adding star / sun bursts to your image is a great way to make an everyday scene or moment look a little bit more interesting, so it’s a great trick to have in your photography arsenal! I actually don't play around with this as much as I should, but since I have just reminded myself of it's awesome affect - I'm off to play with it again today! 

If you want to give it a go, it's really simple! Here's a step by step guide on how you do it....

I love shooting with a shallow depth of field, where you have only the subject sharp and clear, but everything else soft and out of focus.  It's such a great way of drawing the eye straight to the subject of the photo, and eliminating any distractions around your subject.  You can get this affect from shooting wide open, but it can be tricky to perfect!  So, today, I'm giving you five tips for shooting at low apertures. 

But, before we get to the tips, let's rewind a little bit, and start at the very beginning, with what shooting "wide open" actually means! 

Today, we are talking specifically about how to rate, delete and keyword your images in Lightroom.  You'll need to do this to keep on top of your ever expanding library of images, so we are going to dig deep into how you can do this! 

The eyes are a huge part of a successful portrait (they don't call them the window to the soul for nothin'!) and one way we can make sure they really look their best is to make sure that they have catchlights. 

A catchlight is nothing more than light being reflected in the eyes of your subject - they are the white areas you can see in the eyes on the examples below. They help to make your subject look alive, and give depth and life to any portrait - without them the eyes look lifeless and empty.  The good news is they are incredibly simple to achieve - it really is all about how you position your subject! 

Are you getting tired of taking the same old photos and fancy mixing it up a bit? One way you can do that is simply be changing the angle you shoot from!  Instead of only shooting the front of your subject, why not try shooting from above or below? Or get behind your subject, or get down low and be on the same level? You never know what will look the best until you take the shot, so move around you subject and shoot from as many angles as you can think of. Here's some more information and tips for taking images from all the different angles, and of course some example images to get you going!

Although we can literally do a ton of things in editing, and fix many in-camera mistakes from the safety of our computer desk, there are some things we just can't fix in processing, no matter how hard we try! Out of focus images, bad lighting, and clipped highlights are some of the things that we simply can't make right after the fact. 

Here's are the five things I believe you should get right in camera every time...

If you are a photographer parent, or a photographer who shoots event and birthdays, you will inevitably need to know how to take great pictures of children blowing out their birthday candles.

Although it might seem like a challenging task at hand, taking birthday candle pictures is honestly very simple! With the right knowledge of camera settings and lighting, taking birthday cake pictures will be a breeze.

I just love taking silhouettes - they are dramatic yet simple, and they always seem to stand out in a group of photos. And the best news? The are actually pretty easy to do! You just want to keep a few key things in mind when taking your shot to get the image you are going for :) 

So let’s get crackin’ with the steps to an awesome silhouette! 

If you are following along with our Learn Lightroom series, you'll now have some images files imported into Lightroom, which means we can now get stuck into creating a great organization system for your images!

One of the best features of Lightroom, in my humble opinion, is the ability to create Collections with your images, so that's what we going to look at today. 

Photographing children can be pretty challenging! Especially so if you are photographing your own children, since they would rather be doing ANYTHING else rather than sitting you with and having a camera thrust in their face. (And it can be the same if you are the hired photographer too!)  I have had my fair share of pouty faces and cheesy grins over the years, along with some not-so-awesome shots of the back of their head as they are running away, and of course, the images that capture a beautiful, natural expression....but they are totally out of focus! 

In future posts I'm going to be giving you some specific tips and strategies for working with different age groups, but to kick us off, here are my top 8 tips and tricks for photographing children. 

Photography is a meeting of the technical and artistic.  We are often focused more on the technical side of our craft, learning about our equipment, which settings to use, how to use editing software and so on, but often we don't set ourselves the same time for learning or nurturing our creativity.  What a mistake! 

So why aren't we taking the same to time to grow creatively as we are technically?  Maybe because most people feel that you are either born with a creative mind or not, rather than it being a tool that you can learn and practice, just like any other skill!  Whilst learning the tools of your trade is undoubtedly valuable (we need to know HOW to create the vision in our head into a photograph, which takes technical skill) maybe spending a little bit of time nurturing our creativity wouldn't go a miss every once in a while :)