Featured Articles
A Portable Projector for Portraits, Outdoor Exhibitions and More
I've been looking for new ways to exhibit my photo and video work, ways that aren't tied to white walls or interior spaces. That search led me toward projectors, and I found one that fits. The appeal of something untethered is obvious in the fact that you can take your work almost anywhere. I initially expected I'd need a separate power station, but instead I found a quality projector with a built-in battery, making the whole setup far simpler than I'd imagined.
Photography Doesn't Need You. So Why Do You Need Photography?
"How you make a picture is much easier to articulate than why you make a picture." I read this statement in a comment under one of my articles here on Fstoppers, and it inspired me to talk about this in more depth.
Turn a Flat Sky Into a Dramatic Storm Scene With Contrast Alone
A flat, cold panorama of a cloud over farmland becomes a dark, dramatic storm scene using nothing but contrast adjustments. The difference comes down to knowing which sliders control contrast globally and which ones do it locally, then applying each in the right place.
What Happens When You Ask a Chemist to Build Your Dream Film
Custom film built to one photographer's exact wishes, coated by hand sounds like a dream, and this version is wildly unusual. Film that behaves this way rejects almost every rule commercial stock follows, and it opens up a way of working most shooters never consider.
Haters Never Show Their Faces and Photographic Work
I've always wondered what goes through someone's mind when they decide to become a hater. Being a hater is a kind of job: you have to create fake accounts, which guarantee anonymity, and then, from those accounts, launch attacks against the object of your hatred.
GoPro's Founder Is Lending His Own Company $20 Million to Keep It Alive
GoPro's founder and CEO is lending his own company $20 million to keep it running while its board looks for a buyer. The action camera maker warned last month that it might not survive the next 12 months without new money or a sale.
'Missed the Mark': Meta Retreats on Instagram AI Photo Grab
Meta has removed the feature in its new Muse Image tool that let anyone generate AI images from your public Instagram photos, just three days after switching it on. The company said the feature "missed the mark" and is no longer available.
11 Landscape Photography Mistakes Beginners Keep Making
Landscape photography looks like it should be easy. You find a beautiful place, point the camera at it, and press the shutter. Then you get home, look at the files, and the magic that was right in front of you has somehow drained out of the picture. Almost always, the cause is not your gear or the location. It is a handful of specific, fixable habits that nearly every beginner falls into. Here are 11 of the most common, each with a fix you can apply the very next time you are out.
After 15 Years and a Dozen Cameras, Here's What I Learned About Shooting the Street
In 2010, I made a decision that didn't make much sense on paper. I sold my Nikon gear and bought the first Olympus Pen E-P1.
The Sharpest 24mm Lenses You Can Buy Right Now
A $200 lens outperforming a Zeiss on corner sharpness is exactly the kind of result that shows how fast optics have moved. The 24mm focal length gives you a wide field of view with just enough drama to hold onto your subject, and paired with a bright aperture, it delivers backgrounds that fall away beautifully.
The Shutter Speed Range Most Photographers Skip Over
Most slow shutter advice sends you straight to a tripod, a waterfall, and a 30-second exposure. There's a whole range of shutter speeds you can shoot handheld that keeps part of your frame sharp while letting motion streak through it.
A Fast, High-End Nikon Camera Is Reportedly Weeks Away
Nikon is reportedly close to launching a fast, high-end, professional APS-C camera, with an announcement expected in the next couple of months. The most talked-about spec is a 45-megapixel stacked sensor in a body built for speed.
Meta Just Made Your Public Instagram Photos Fair Game for AI
Meta's new AI image generator lets anyone pull photos from a public Instagram account and feed them into AI creations, without asking the account owner or telling them afterward. The feature is switched on by default for public profiles.
650 Freelance Photographers Are Fighting the WSJ Over an AI Contract
Roughly 650 freelance photographers who work for The Wall Street Journal have refused to sign a new contract they say could funnel their images into AI training. The fight centers on two changes: who owns the photos you shoot on assignment, and the paper's new right to license those photos to third parties without asking you first.
Myth: You Must Shoot in Manual Mode to Be a Pro
There is a belief that follows almost every beginner around: that real photographers shoot in manual mode, and that the semi-automatic modes on the dial are a kind of training-wheels embarrassment you are supposed to outgrow as fast as possible. The aperture priority setting even gets the dismissive nickname "A for amateur." It is one of the most persistent myths in photography, and it is wrong. Plenty of working professionals shoot in aperture priority every day and have for decades. The mode you use says nothing about whether you are a pro. What matters is whether you understand what the camera is doing and why.
Hohem MT3 Pro Gimbal: A Solo Creator's Dream
At this point, there are so many brands of gimbals that it can be hard to know which direction to go, especially with heavy-hitting names like DJI at the forefront of most publications and media outlets. But when I saw the MT3 Pro from Hohem, there was a standout feature that made me pause.
Why Depending on One Client Nearly Ended a 20-Year Career
Editorial work once brought in 75% of one photographer's income. Today it accounts for about 5%, and the shift wasn't forced on him by failure.
Large-Format Film in the Quarries of North Wales
Abandoned slate quarries hold more than dramatic scenery. Some hide names carved into stone over a century ago, tools left where workers dropped them, and connections to people you'd never expect.
Why a Two-Decade Full Frame Shooter Switched to Micro Four Thirds
Twenty years behind a camera can lock you into fixed ideas about what gear delivers the results you want. A long-held bias against Micro Four Thirds is exactly what gets challenged here, and the reasons have less to do with specs than with how you actually shoot.
The Minimal Setup That Gets to Places a Camper Van Can't
Three days, two nights, and a mattress thrown in the back of a car with no sheets on it. That's the entire kit behind a photography trip along the northern coast of Spain, where the real work turns out to be finding angles that cooperate.
What Is the Difference Between F-Stops and T-Stops?
You may have noticed that photography lenses are marked in f-numbers, f/1.4, f/2.8, f/8, while cinema lenses are marked in T-numbers, T1.5, T2.9, and wondered whether they mean the same thing. They are closely related, they sit in the same spots on the aperture ring, and a T-number looks just like an f-number with a different letter in front. But they measure two genuinely different things, and the gap between them tells you something real about how lenses work and why a cinematographer cares about it while a portrait photographer mostly does not.
The Elegy of Imperfect Photography
There is a peculiar cult operating inside photography. You have seen them: the Autofocus Clergy.
The $150 Pancake Lens That Gets You 90% of the Fujifilm X100VI Experience
The Fujifilm X100VI has a cult following for good reason: it packs an optical viewfinder, IBIS, a built-in ND filter, and a fast fixed lens into a body small enough to carry anywhere. The catch is the price, and increasingly, the availability.
Sony RX10 V First Look: From the World Cup to the Ballard Locks
I had the good fortune of spending some time with Sony's new RX10 V, and I shot the entire range of my life with it. A World Cup match here in Seattle one weekend, then a family outing to the Ballard Locks the next.
The Tamron 17-70mm f/2.8 vs. Sigma 17-40mm f/1.8: One Wins on Paper, the Other Wins in Practice
Choosing between a wider aperture and a longer zoom range is one of the most common trade-offs in APS-C lens selection, and few comparisons make that tension as concrete as the Tamron 17-70mm f/2.8 versus the Sigma 17-40mm f/1.8. These two lenses cost $200 apart, share the same weight, start at the same focal length, and yet produce noticeably different results depending on what you're shooting.