The weather here is not great and I haven’t been out shooting, so today I am writing about people that I follow online that I can learn from to improve my photography. I follow several photography related YouTube channels, a podcast, and some websites and check them on a weekly basis and I would like to share and recommend these people.

Nigel Danson

Nigel Danson is a landscape photographer in the UK who publishes a weekly vlog on YouTube in which he discusses tips for composition and lighting in landscape photos. Most of the shooting that he does seems to be around the scenic areas of the UK and Iceland. He does a really good job of expressing himself and I have learned a lot by watching his channel, and I recommend that you check his channel out if you are interested in landscape photography.

Landscape Photography IQ

Another channel that I really enjoy is called Landscape Photography IQ. This channel is run by a landscape photographer named Tom Mackie who seems to be an American, but mainly shoots around the UK. He generally has videos of less than 10 minutes that cover an important technique or concept in shooting landscapes. I recommend you check out this channel as well.

Evan Ranft

Evan Ranft is a street and city photographer in the United States who has a YouTube channel. He is passionate about photography and you can really tell by watching his videos. He provides a lot of great tips about going out on photo shoots in general, running his photography business, and his thoughts on creating good compositions. This guy is a lot of fun to watch and I highly recommend his channel as well.

There are a few other YouTube vlogs I follow, but those are the main three that I look the most forward to each week.

Photo Podcast Network

I also listen to a lot of podcasts on the way to and from work each day. I have an entire rotation ranging from cars, Ted talks, Star Trek, to photography. The main photography podcast that I listen to is a weekly podcast called Photo Podcast Network. It is hosted by a German man named Marco Larousse who mainly specializes in street photography. He covers a variety of topics each month, but the thing I enjoy the most is interviews. He will pick a good professional photographer and spend the episode interviewing them about their career, their shooting style and techniques, how they manage their work. It is usually very interesting and worth a listen if you like podcasts.

Photography Life

There are several websites that I check out, usually on a daily basis that have photography related content. One of my favorite websites is called Photography Life. This site seems to be run by people who are mostly in to landscape photography and publish a lot of content about this topic. Their blogs are very well written and thought out and have a lot of good information. They do some gear reviews, but they aren’t the kind of click-bait reviews you find on a lot of photography blog sites with sensational or controversial headlines. Their reviews are usually very deep, with a lot of testing results, and may be on products that have been out for month or years. When thinking of a new lens or other gear, I generally go read what they have to say about it.

There are some other photography websites that I frequent like Fstoppers and Petapixel, and they are good for the occasional thought-provoking article about some photographic technique, but they seem shovel out a lot of content to generate clicks. Titles about some terrible defect in a popular camera, or why you should switch brands, and I usually avoid those articles. Really, if you have a modern camera and lens system in proper working condition from any of the big name brands and you aren’t getting good photos, it isn’t the camera’s fault; they will all take amazing photos.

Flickr

I also try to follow good photographers on Flickr. These can be a bit hard to find amidst all the noise on the platform, but I appreciate seeing their compositions. Flickr was recently purchased by Smugmug from Yahoo and that will probably be a good thing as I don’t think Yahoo ever knew what they were doing. So, Flickr is probably my preferred photo platform online.

I am on Instagram and Twitter, but Instagram seems to mainly be a selfie cesspool in my opinion, and I get so much random useless content thrown in front of my face, that I get a bit frustrated with it. And Twitter has frankly turned into a dumpster fire.

Anyway, that covers a lot of the stuff I follow online as part of this hobby of mine. Let me know what your think.