Red River Paper Blog

ost professional photographers ask themselves these questions before they shoot… and so should you. After you memorize them, they'll become part of your thought process and will go through your mind in a flash....read more

You may think think your monitor is accurately displaying the exact colors that are in your image file, but it may not, leading to prints with disturbing color casts. Here's how to fix that problem....read more

By Albert Chi— Dentist, "How important is the equipment you buy?" He knew I was a professional photographer but was not expecting the answer I gave him, which was: Not that important...read more

By Peter E. Randall— Based on nearly sixty years of experience, I believe there are two major elements to photography. First step, making of an image. Second step, to display the work....read more

By Albert Chi— Most photographers dread shooting when poor light levels require slow shutter speeds for proper exposure. Chances are pictures will end up blurred due to camera shake, subject motion, or both. And to compensate, you can only up the ISO so much before running into noise and artifacts. Here are some ways to...read more

By Suzanne D. Williams— Light is the key element in every photograph and having an understanding of it is essential to becoming a good photographer. Relying on your camera’s automatic settings will at some point become a hindrance because these settings can be misleading. The camera does not always make the correct choice. Instead, you,...read more

By Suzanne D. Williams— You can exert a great deal of creative focus control over your images once you learn how to use some of the basic functions your digital camera offers. First, though, let’s define a few terms that are essential to the process. Photographers who use the term “point of focus” refer to...read more

By Michael Freeman— One of the first tenets of professional photography is that you have to try harder, always and all the time. There’s almost too much said about this, so I’ll restrict myself to one only, from American photographer William Albert Allard: “You’ve got to push yourself harder. You’ve got to start looking for...read more

By Maggie Kornahrens– There will be a plethora of cameras and smartphones at every party and soiree in the coming weeks and if you want to capture the spirit of the holidays in fresh and exciting ways, be willing to branch out of the ordinary. Cameras these days are advanced enough so that anybody can...read more

By Joel Grimes– Part of the requirements for receiving a BFA in Photography from the University of Arizona included half a dozen semesters of art history.At the time I felt like this was overkill and was only interested in attending my photo-related classes. In hindsight, one of the greatest influences that shaped my personal vision...read more

 By Suzanne Williams– The composition of a photograph is exactly what the word “composition” itself implies.  It is the way the objects in an image are “composed”, or we could say, “arranged”.  Composition is, for the most part, subjective to the photographer’s eye.  The fact is that there are many ways to arrange the same...read more

By Suzanne D. Williams– We’ve all done it, taken that endless stream of holiday photographs with the same people doing something, only we can’t exactly tell what. Then there’s the familiar, “Oh look at the tree!” only it’s slightly blurry and the top is missing. Sound familiar? Who doesn’t have similar Christmas and other holiday pictures...read more

By Arthur H. Bleich– The Christmas card-giving tradition began in London in 1843, when Sir Henry Cole commissioned an artist friend, John Horsley, to design a card that could be mailed to his friends. Some say Sir Henry thought up the idea to avoid writing long letters in reply to those sent by friends and...read more

By Suzanne D. Williams– My daughter’s graduation from high school some years ago prompted me to comb through files filled with old photographs. She’ll always be my baby and I had several of those “mom moments,” wishing to re-enter my now rosy past. But I was also forced to revisit some really bad photographs. Why...read more

By Arthur H. Bleich– In Back To Basics: Resolution Simplified Part 1 camera and print resolution were explained. In this part, we’ll cover printer resolution, how to select the best printer settings for quality output and how to add more pixels to an image to enlarge it (within reason) without it looking like patchwork of pixels. To make things as easy to understand...read more

By Arthur H. Bleich– Resolution goes hand-in-hand with almost every aspect of digital photography– from image capture to the final print. If you want your photographs to be the best they can possibly be, it’s necessary to have a basic understanding of it. At first, it may seem confusing because many who try to explain...read more

By Bryan Peterson– You can do one of the best exercises I know near your home whether you live in the country or the city, in a house or an apartment. Select any subject, for example, the houses and trees that line your street or the nearby city skyline. If you live in the country,...read more

By Arthur H. Bleich– In the early days of amateur photography, enthusiasts were always being warned to “keep the sun at your back” because films were slow and  needed lots of light to record a decent image. But before photography became the beloved hobby of the masses, Victorian studio photographers had discovered that the best way...read more

By Arthur H. Bleich– There are few things more chilling than to see this message pop up on your computer screen during startup: “This disk is not readable by this computer.” Is your data still on the hard disk? Is it a software problem? A hardware problem? A connection problem? What happened? If it’s your internal...read more

   By Arthur H. Bleich– Chances are you already know about different post production work flow techniques that can be used in Photoshop and/or Lightroom after you’ve shot your pictures. But it’s equally important to establish a workflow you can follow before you even make the shot. Here are nine things you should think about before you lift...read more