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How to Pack Your Camera Gear for Travel (Without Losing Your Mind or Your Lenses)
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How to Pack Your Camera Gear for Travel (Without Losing Your Mind or Your Lenses)

Every trip I take starts the same way: I’m standing in my Seattle bedroom, surrounded by lenses and bodies and cables, wondering what I can realistically carry onto a plane. I’ve checked gear before. I’ve regretted it. There is nothing quite like landing in a new city and watching your bag come down the carousel with a zipper that wasn’t open when you left home. So when I came across this Visual Education tutorial from photographer Karl Taylor on protecting your camera equipment while traveling, I watched it twice.

How to Photograph the Northern Lights: A Settings Guide That Actually Works in the Field
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How to Photograph the Northern Lights: A Settings Guide That Actually Works in the Field

Every so often I watch a tutorial and think, “okay, this is the one I wish existed before I embarrassed myself.” Aurora photography has been on my bucket list for years, and the mental image I had of it was simple: point camera at sky, get green swirls, go home happy. What nobody told me is that the green swirls are the easy part. Finding a composition in the dark, in Arctic temperatures, while the lights are doing whatever they want on their own schedule - that’s the actual challenge.

Three Photography Habits That Are Quietly Holding You Back (And How to Fix Them)
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Three Photography Habits That Are Quietly Holding You Back (And How to Fix Them)

There’s a version of me from about four years ago who had a camera bag packed and ready to go, a Pinterest board full of golden-hour shots from Patagonia, and approximately zero photos taken in the past two months. I was “preparing.” I was watching tutorials, reading gear reviews, and convincing myself that I just needed the right location or the right conditions before I could really shoot. Sound familiar? I thought so.

Why Flat-Folding Softboxes Are a Game-Changer for Mobile Photographers
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Why Flat-Folding Softboxes Are a Game-Changer for Mobile Photographers

Why Flat-Folding Softboxes Are a Game-Changer for Mobile Photographers I’ve been following the evolution of portable lighting gear for years, and I’m genuinely excited about what manufacturers are doing to solve one of photographers’ biggest challenges: getting professional-quality light into a vehicle that doesn’t require a dedicated trailer. The latest innovation? Softboxes that fold completely flat. This might sound like a small thing, but it represents a meaningful shift in how we can approach location work and travel photography.

Inside Karl Taylor's Photography Studio: What a World-Class Workshop Space Can Teach You About Learning Photography
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Inside Karl Taylor's Photography Studio: What a World-Class Workshop Space Can Teach You About Learning Photography

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from learning photography in isolation. You watch tutorials, you read forums, you practice in your living room with a lamp and a fruit bowl, and you still feel like something isn’t clicking. For me, the missing piece was almost always environment: the right equipment to experiment with, someone experienced in the room to catch your mistakes, and the ability to see your own images at scale and talk through what’s working and what isn’t.

How to Photograph Minimalist Landscapes When There's Almost Nothing to Shoot
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How to Photograph Minimalist Landscapes When There's Almost Nothing to Shoot

There’s a specific kind of morning that used to send me straight back to the car. Flat light, no obvious subject, the kind of scene where your eyes keep scanning and finding nothing to grab onto. I used to chalk those mornings up as losses. Now I treat them as a different kind of challenge, and honestly, some of my favorite work has come from exactly those conditions. In this Thomas Heaton tutorial, he wakes up in his van on the Scottish coast to overcast skies and a wide tidal estuary at low tide.

Can You Spot What's Real? Using Generative Fill to Push Your Photography Further
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Can You Spot What's Real? Using Generative Fill to Push Your Photography Further

Every few months, a tool comes along that genuinely changes how I think about a finished image. I resisted generative fill longer than I should have. My instinct was the same one I hear from a lot of photographers: “That’s not really photography.” But then I started watching what people were actually doing with it, and my opinion softened fast. In this Peter McKinnon tutorial, Watch the full tutorial on YouTube, Peter reacts in real time to a batch of community-submitted images where photographers used generative fill to alter or extend their photos.

What a Behind-the-Scenes Wedding and Fashion Shoot Teaches You About Staying Loose on Set
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What a Behind-the-Scenes Wedding and Fashion Shoot Teaches You About Staying Loose on Set

There’s a version of photography education that’s all clean lighting diagrams and perfectly articulated camera settings. And then there’s the version that actually prepares you for a real shoot: the chaotic, laughing, spider-on-the-backdrop, someone-just-grabbed-the-expensive-wine version. The second one is usually more useful. That’s why I keep coming back to behind-the-scenes content from working photographers, because the unscripted moments reveal how pros actually think and adapt, not just what they do when everything is going according to plan.

The Right Way to Delete Photos from Your SD Card (and Why It Actually Matters)
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The Right Way to Delete Photos from Your SD Card (and Why It Actually Matters)

I’ll be honest: I didn’t think much about how I deleted photos until the habit started costing me time. Early on, I’d stand in the field after a shoot and tap through my camera’s delete button one frame at a time, convinced I was being responsible about storage. Spoiler: I was not being responsible. I was just slow. It wasn’t until I started paying closer attention to how working photographers handle their cards between shoots that I realized there’s a real skill buried in this mundane-sounding task, and doing it carelessly can mean corrupted cards, lost files, or a very messy desktop at midnight.

How to Shoot a High-Stakes Portrait Session Like a Working Pro (Lessons from Peter McKinnon and Travis Barker)
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How to Shoot a High-Stakes Portrait Session Like a Working Pro (Lessons from Peter McKinnon and Travis Barker)

There’s a specific kind of pressure that comes with photographing someone who actually matters to you personally. Not a client you found through a job board, but someone whose work shaped who you are. I felt that pressure the first time I photographed a musician I’d listened to all through college. My hands were steadier on my camera than my nerves deserved. That is exactly the situation Peter McKinnon walked into when he flew to Los Angeles to document a collaboration between jewelry brand Clocks and Colors and drummer Travis Barker.

Keep Your Gear Tracker Powered Up: Smart Battery Management for Photography Assistants
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Keep Your Gear Tracker Powered Up: Smart Battery Management for Photography Assistants

Keep Your Gear Tracker Powered Up: Smart Battery Management for Photography Assistants As photographers, we invest heavily in our equipment—cameras, lenses, lighting rigs, and accessories that represent years of work and significant financial commitment. One of the smartest decisions I’ve made in my own practice is using tracking devices to monitor my gear, especially when traveling for assignments or working on location shoots. The challenge? Keeping those tracking devices powered up when you need them most.

When Fear Is the Filter: What Thomas Heaton's Iceland Workshop Taught Me About Creative Risk
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When Fear Is the Filter: What Thomas Heaton's Iceland Workshop Taught Me About Creative Risk

There’s a version of me that would have stayed at the bottom of that hill. I know her well. She’s the one who talks herself out of the harder hike, the uncertain light, the shot that might not work out. I thought about her a lot while watching this tutorial from Thomas Heaton, where he shares footage cut from his Iceland workshop series and gets surprisingly honest about fear, confidence, and what it actually feels like to lead other photographers when you’re still figuring things out yourself.