Photography is awesome and I love it, but it’s super expensive sometimes. Photographers often commiserate with one another about the high price tags on tripods and ball heads (or sometimes they gloat, but the nice ones commiserate), and if you get into studio photography you are often getting into a whole new world of expenses from strobes and stands to backdrops and gels.

Now, it definitely pays off to have the right tools for the job, and that starts to become glaringly apparent when you’re doing work with people, but for so-called tabletop product photography you can often get by with some home improvement supplies and a little ingenuity and patience.

After the break, the resident product photographer and editor at Handmadeology shares a $12 product studio setup that yielded the image on the right.

And by “strike” I definitely don’t mean in the “strike out” sense, but in the “I just struck gold” sense. The other day I posted Tricks for Shooting High-Key Macro wherein I link to a cool in-studio tutorial by Atlanta photographer Alex Koloskov. Alex and his wife run AKELstudio in Atlanta, Georgia and are now literally brain-dumping all of these great tutorials and behind-the-scenes views onto the Internet and I’m loving every minute of it.

I know that I’m like a broken record when I talk about B&H, always rambling on and on about their impressive mid-town Manhattan superstore and how great their customer service is, how I’ve always felt like I was treated well by their floor staff and telephone sales folks, but you know I wouldn’t say any of these things if they weren’t true. B&H is the kind of company that inspires flattery because you just want everyone else to know how great they are.

Oh. My. Good. Gosh. I don’t normally head over to Earth Science Picture of the Day but am I glad I did today! Chris Kotsiopoulos has created just about the most amazing panorama I have ever seen, though to call it a “panorama” is almost a disservice to what is really going on within this image.

This is a compilation of images made throughout an entire day (more than a day, actually), including the full path of the sun in 15-minute steps and one magnificent 11-hour star trail opposite the Temple of Poseidon (Chris lives and photographs in Athens, Greece).

Being an excellent photographer is 50% vision and 50% technical prowess. Seeing the art all around you is only useful for the photographer who can capture it, and perfectly executing that capture means wrangling the piece of hardware you love so much, the camera.

These days, most photographers are shooting digital. Digital photography is freeing in a lot of ways, but it is also more complicated. Camera manufacturers have sought to close the gap between the pro and the semi-pro by providing all of these different shooting modes, and even though I still believe you only need three, it’s not unusual to see mode dials with 11 or 12 settings on them! You don’t need all those settings to get full control! Haje Jan Kamps helps me explain after the break.