I don’t remember that last time I did some self portraits. It’s the old photographer’s dilemma… always behind the lens and never in front of it! Since I live about a block away from my good buddy and fellow pro photographer Martin Perreault, he usually takes my photo.  But this time around, he was away on a 3 week trip to Australia and I really wanted to update my blog photo on the ABOUT YPS page.

I decided to make this a fun time and turn this into a mini fashion shoot with some of my recently acquired threads. So I cranked up the tunes, set my D300s on a tripod with a 10 second timer and shot away! It took about 2 hours in total with 163 shots taken. Out of those shots I liked 22. Not bad.  Here’s how I Continue Reading »

If you haven’t heard yet, Lightroom 2 is great! Ok, ok you might have heard me mention it a few times but learning is about repetition. 

So here I was post processing my Greece photos in Lightroom playing around with the main basic adjustment sliders when I thought to myself… hey! this kinda looks like an HDR photo. So I tweaked and tweaked until I got a pretty cool HDR look that looked cool. Then I thought that you guys might like to know how to do it too.  So here I am.

Now, before I go on, and before the true Continue Reading »

I truly hope that all of you are enjoying this festive season and that you’re taking lots and lots of pictures!

Before sharing with you the top 5 most popular  tutorials on YPS,  I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued support. 2009 was YPS’s first full year live on the Web. It’s still a baby at only 21 months. I’m filled with gratitude knowing that my posts are helping many passionate photographers from around the world.  Your comments and support keep giving me the motivation to keep sharing my knowledge and photography Continue Reading »

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you know that I recently did a big 12 day shoot for one of my favorite clients. My main mandate was to shoot well composed,  evenly lit photos to be used in a new edition of their best selling didactic cosmetology book. As a second mandate, I had to produce “artistic” shots to be used as chapter openers and page fillers.

So the first thing I asked them was what they meant by “artistic”. You know Yanik, dramatic stuff with cool shadows and Continue Reading »

Back in Adobe Lightroom 2 today and I’ll be showing you a cool way to add a virtual photo frame to your images without ever leaving Lightroom.

Of course, you don’t have the versatility and complete control of doing it in Photoshop (which I’ll cover in another tutorial) but you can still have great black or white frames. This is Continue Reading »

One of the great things about Lightroom 2 is the ability to create presets and share them with the world.

If you’re not familiar with presets, it’s basically a saved series of photo adjustments that you can then apply to any image. Kind of like actions in Photoshop.

In this post, I thought I would share with you the many places where you can get a ton of  free Lightroom presets to play with. But before Continue Reading »

This was a fun Photoshop tutorial! A reader asked me if I could do a tutorial on making a photo look washed out and old like in the 70s and I thought that was a great idea!

I’ve done this style a few times in the past but it had been a while. It came back to me very quickly though.

This video tutorial is a 3 step process to Continue Reading »

Here I was just doing my daily Web surfing when I came across a Youtube video by Michael James. In this video, he compares various ways of creating HDR images. The one that caught my attention was Lightroom plugin Enfuse. The reason it caught my attention was the fact that I could create an HDR image directly in Lightroom without ever leaving Lightroom! I’m all about workflow efficiency and this option sounded great. If you missed my Photoshop tutorial on HDR, you can also check it out.

The best news of all is that Continue Reading »

I’m on my way to Los Angeles California for a quick holiday and I just bought my ticket for the L.A. Zoo. I have to admit that I haven’t been to many zoos. I’m always conflicted when I go there. Seeing animals in small enclosures like slaves breaks my heart but at the same time, I can’t deny the education those zoos give us, especially children. They create an awareness of how precious, diversified and beautiful life is. That we need to take care of it or else…

It’s also a great opportunity to photograph animals that we would probably never see otherwise.  Zoo photography can be a Continue Reading »

Are you a Lightroom 2 Addict like me? Do you find yourself going less and less in Photoshop? If you answered YES then you’ll appreciate this Lightroom video tutorial.

Quite a few of you have written in to ask me about specific Lightroom keyboard shortcuts so I thought I would put together my shortcut keys and show them to you in one simple video.  Once you start using them more and more, you’ll see how drastically your workflow Continue Reading »