Photography Tutorial · 2021-02-28
Improve Your Taste: 6 Websites a Pro Photographer Swears By
Thomas Chu Photo
For photography enthusiasts, beyond gear, technique, and shooting practice, broadening your vision and improving your aesthetic taste are just as important!
Today Thomas shares the 6 free websites he uses most often, where you can see a huge number of outstanding photography and fine-art works — bookmark them without hesitation~
Video tutorial
▶ Watch the video tutorial on Bilibili
This is the illustrated companion to the video above. For photography lovers, better gear and technique are only half the game — expanding your thinking and aesthetic is what truly moves the needle. Here Thomas shares the six free websites he uses most, all dense with excellent work and worth mining for years. They are organized below in the order of the video, with keyframe screenshots of each site.
01 Behance: A Library of Professional Creative Work
The first recommendation is Behance, the portfolio platform owned by Adobe. It is professional by design: within the creative fields, once you pick photography, what fills your feed comes mostly from working photographers and is editor-curated, so the quality of the timeline stays remarkably high (at 0:43 in the video).
Two examples from the video make this vivid: a set of pink-and-blue desert images — high definition, dreamlike, textured, with very deliberate layering, a world away from the soft, mushy desert snapshots you usually see; and a set of foggy-day works that are quiet, clean and full of restrained mood (at 1:39 in the video).
Beyond landscapes and architecture, automotive photography, images with an almost CGI-painted feel, and fashion are all strong on Behance. Photographers publish complete projects there because agencies, ad companies and clients scout for talent on the platform — so what you see comes from some of the most active professional creators in the world today (at 2:33 in the video). The only catch: it is an overseas site, so you need a VPN to reach it.
02 Zcool: The Professional Platform in China
The Chinese counterpart to Behance is Zcool (zcool.com.cn). It positions itself the same way — a showcase for professional artists, illustrators, photographers and designers: pick photography in the Discover section and you get a flood of professional-level work, from landscapes to product shoots, food photography and many complete commercial case studies (at 3:31 in the video).
One serves the international scene, the other the domestic one; what they share is a role as showcase platforms for professional and commercial photographers, with a very high overall standard. If you want work above the industry baseline, start scrolling these two.
03 FilmGrab: Learning Taste from Film Stills
The third site, FilmGrab (film-grab.com), hosts not photographs but meticulously curated film stills. For a huge range of classic and visually distinctive films you can search stills by director, title or category (at 4:28 in the video).
Why do film stills matter for photographers? Because cinema is where industrial craft meets art: every beam of light and every set element on screen was deliberately designed by the director, the production designer and the whole crew. Viewed as stills, they carry immense mood and visual refinement — for portraits, still lifes, or how to shoot forests and dense woods in a distinctive way, they are a bottomless reference library (at 5:44 in the video).
04 1x.com: An Online Gallery with Editors
For a broader range of photography, Thomas recommends 1x.com. It works as an online gallery: everything shown has been screened by editors with real aesthetic judgment, so weak work simply never appears, and the overall level is strongly guaranteed (at 6:26 in the video).
The categories are comprehensive — architecture, city, landscape, macro and more — so you can browse by interest, which makes it a perfect daily stop for feeding your eyes (at 7:01 in the video).
05 Instagram: Mining Accounts Through Recommendations
Among social platforms, Instagram is the first choice if you are abroad or can use a VPN. Don't know whom to follow? Start with Thomas's account @thomaschuphoto and go through his following list — it is already filtered down to photographers and collection accounts worth watching (at 7:35 in the video).
An even more efficient trick is the recommendation chain: open any photographer's profile and tap the button below to get similar accounts. If you like street photography, follow one street account and keep tapping — the algorithm keeps surfacing high-quality pages of the same kind, and curated collection accounts often show exceptional taste. Follow the chain and the good accounts snowball: photographers, painters, artists (at 7:55 in the video).
06 Tuchong: The Domestic Image Community
The last one is Tuchong (tuchong.com), the domestic photo community benchmarked against Instagram. It hosts many excellent photographers; in the Recommended or Curated Landscape channels you find trending and editor-picked work of decent overall quality — a go-to feed for browsing and inspiration inside China (at 8:48 in the video).
Beyond these six sites, the video closes with a teaser: Thomas also tracks authoritative, influential photo contests, then follows the thread from winning images to their makers — visiting their homepages and Instagram and digging through everything an award-winning photographer has shot. How to study contests systematically is saved for the next tutorial (at 9:25 in the video).
1. Expanding taste and thinking is decisive for photographic growth, and the right websites are the most cost-efficient daily practice; 2. Watch complete professional projects on Behance and Zcool — one international, one domestic; 3. Learn light and composition from film stills on FilmGrab, and rely on 1x.com's editors to guarantee the floor; 4. Let Instagram's following lists and similar-account recommendations snowball, and use Tuchong's curated feeds at home.
Summary of the websites recommended in the tutorial:
www.behance.net
www.zcool.com.cn
film-grab.com
1x.com
www.instagram.com
tuchong.com
HD video:
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1oT4y1A7Bc/