It’s about that time of year where the amount of projects, tests, readings, and papers due escalate and the stress of it all threatens to overwhelm many students.

Here are a few articles on managing stress as a student:

The Guardian

Campus Calm

About Education 

Here are a few things that I have found to be extremely helpful:

1) Writing Lists. It helps to keep you organized and you get an awesome sense of accomplishment when you get to check something off.

2) Sleep. Staying up for an all-nighter of studying or creating or sleeping and doing the work in the morning? Even if you’re not a ‘morning person’, I guarantee this will make you feel much healthier.

3) Time Management. This is the most important thing of all. If you plan your time wisely (lists help with this, make one a day) you won’t have to have those all-nighters! Start planning now, before final critique week hits.

Happy Monday!

Have you ever wanted to try out macro photography but don’t have the resources to get your hands on one of those really pretty, really expensive lenses? There’s one simple little trick that will satisfy all of your macro needs and will cost you no money whatsoever.

It’s called the reverse lens technique and it works wonders! All that’s involved is your camera and a lens (around 50mm focal length works best).

Step 1) Take your lens off your camera body and switch to manual mode

Step 2) Flip your lens around so that the side that normally screws into the camera is facing outward

Step 3) Hold in place and move backwards or forwards to focus

That’s all there is to it! This results in really interesting shallow DOF (depth of field) images. You can even take video like this! For an in depth talk about the mechanics of the reverse lens technique, head over to Digital Photography School. They recommend using a special ring to attach your lens backwards, but you can simply hold it there instead.

If you’re especially interested in macro photography, The Photo Cage has some sweet lenses you can rent out.

Check out this flickr pool for some inspiration.

Happy Monday everyone!