Boost Your Photography Skills This Weekend

Photographs can tell a story in an instant, create lasting memories, and end up as the one thing you’re so glad you kept years later. Don’t settle for crappy images — boost your photography skills this weekend and learn to capture better shots.

Learn The Basics

Before you set out into the world to take great photos, you need to learn the basics. Your DSLR, and even your point-and-shoot, is a complex tool and you can do so much with it if you know how it works. Our Photography Night School series goes over the basics you need to know to operate your camera, understand how different settings affect your images, and compose better photos. If you want to learn even more, we recently detailed a number of “secret/” features of DSLRs that you probably don’t know about. You can extend your abilities even further by learning how they work and what you can do with them. If that’s not enough for you, find out how custom firmware can supercharge your camera to add some pretty incredible features.

Get Inspired

DIY Photography recently posted a bunch of inspirational photography talks. You should check them out along with this list of fun ideas for taking interesting, unique photos:

• How To Take Sunset Photos Like A Professional
• Enter Photo Contests And Competitions To Boost Your Photography Skills
• How To Paint With Light
• Take Interesting, Selective Focus Photos By ‘Freelensing’
• What Is HDR And When Should I Use It In My Photos?
• How To Take Great Portrait Photos
• Learn Perspective By Taking Photos of Yourself
• Take Better Photos Of Kids By Getting Down To Their Level
• Take Better Photos By Analysing Your Reaction To Others

Or just go out and try something new. You can find awesome things to photograph just by walking or driving to a new place you haven’t explored and seeing it through the eye of your camera’s lens.

Upgrade Your Toolkit With DIY Projects

Photography can be costly, but you can save yourself a lot of money with DIY projects. Check out these lights, attachments and upgrades you can make on the cheap:

• Build Your Own Glowsticks Light For Portable Low-Light Photography
• Make Your DSLR Camera Last Longer With This DIY Battery System
• Never Lose A Lens Cap With The Help Of LEGO
• This DIY DSLR Stabiliser Rig Puts An End To Shaky Footage
• Turn A Cardboard Box Into A Photo Light Box
• Transform A Torch Into An Affordable Ice Light For Evenly-Lit Photos
• Tweak Your DSLR to Capture Images Your Eyes Can’t See

You can do a lot yourself and save heaps of money. Better to spend your hard-earned cash on a good set of lenses rather than use it to buy accessories you can make yourself.

Master Post-Processing

Despite our best intentions, the photos we capture don’t always come out as perfectly as we’d hope — but that’s why we have Photoshop! Adobe’s flagship application can help you do so much to improve the look of your images. If you need to learn the basics, we have a night school course on that, too. Some awesome Photoshop actions can make editing go a whole lot quicker. For quick colour adjustments, don’t forget about Photoshop’s colour adjustment layer — that’s why it’s there! If you just need to correct exposure, this little trick will do the job in seconds. If you want to take it further, you can fix all sorts of issues with your image and alter reality as you know it. Of course, not everyone wants to pay for something as robust as Photoshop. If that’s you, check out these photo-editing tips that don’t require it.