Many photographers start off their careers focusing on wedding photography. I started my career as a wedding photographer in Charleston, and I still enjoy shooting a handful each year. Over the next few months, I hope to share some of my thoughts on wedding photography and how event photographers can improve their photos. Today I was reminded how important “In Camera Cropping” is for emotionally charged photographs. Read the full post to see two examples of how cropping can make or break an image. [more]
Tom Lowe’s Timescapes documentary has been in the works now for over two years, and it is finally complete! Timescapes is the first movie to be sold to the public in full 4K resolution. Shot on the Red Epic and with Canon Lenses, Tom’s outdoor documentary features some of the most amazing scenes I’ve ever seen from Yosemite, the Joshua Tree, and other parts of Western America. Tom has a great write up about the movie on Timescapes.org and you can buy the movie here. This was one of the first posts on Fstoppers and we are excited to see the final production; congrats Tom!
Everyone knows Peter Hurley uses fairly expensive Kino Flo lights to give his clients nice soft beauty lighting. Fstoppers reader Tristan Penner decided to build a portable and inexpensive alternative to Peter’s setup using standard Fluorescent lights. The setup might not improve too much on the portability but the quality of light does look really nice. What’s really cool is Tristan is able to travel to people’s homes with this setup bypassing the [more]
On Sunday, San Francisco celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge with one massive fireworks display. For all of us who weren’t able to attend, no worries; the guys over at The Seventh Movement captured the entire event with several Canon 5Ds (MKII and IIIs) and a Red Scarlet (at 48 fps). The editing job on this is amazing and all the shots were planned out really well…the twilight harbor shot is worth a watch alone!
UPDATED WITH PETER’S Full RES FILES! New cameras are getting faster and faster each year. In over a decade DSLRs have gone from 6 fps to 12 fps, and now many can shoot 60 frames of HD video. We’ve all heard it before, “At some point photographers will just shoot video and pull the best frame out” but is this really even feasible? Fstoppers.com recently teamed up with Peter Hurley to test this theory as we compared the Hasselblad H3D-22 with the Red Epic. The results are shocking! [more]
Wedding photography can be a funny thing. On one end, it probably single-handedly makes up the largest field of working professionals. On the other end, many photographers vow to never ever shooting weddings (for a number of reasons). The website Whatshouldwecallweddingphoto has compiled some hilarious video images that sum up every situation a wedding photographer finds throughout their career. Click the full post for a few of my favorites; you are going to want to reserve a good 30 mins on this one. [more]
If you are like me, you probably update to new versions of Photoshop only to not take advantage of any of the new features. Learning new techniques on your own time is always time consuming. This week(end) only, our friends at CreativeLIVE are offering a free download of Lesa Snider’s CS6 course (normally $79) which is Live now! Lesa covers all of the new features like Puppet Warp, Liquify, Lighting Effects, Video, and Content Aware as well as some basic tools you might already know about. Details are in the full post [more]
If you work out of a studio, you know how annoying paper seamless backdrops can be…they always wrinkle and warp. We recently changed over to the Savage Vinyl backdrops and they seem to last a lot longer. The guys over at OKstrobist have an even cheaper alternative for those looking for a DIY approach and it’s pretty clever. Even though this can still cost as much as $170, you aren’t stuck [more]
Right now some of the biggest names in the photography world are gathered in San Francisco for the Google+ Photographer’s Conference. Scott Kelby is the brain child of this event and you can keep up with a lot of the free video content here on the Google+ Page. Photographers like Trey Ratcliff, Peter Hurley, Jeremy Cowart, Alex Koloskov, and Lindsay Adler are giving advice about marketing, social media, growing your business, and creating “shabanging” images. [more]
Last year we told the story of how Noam Galai’s self portrait image had been stolen and reprinted hundreds of times around the world without his permission. What people were shocked to find out was Noam did not threaten or take legal action of any kind (instead he used the momentum to propel his career). Duane Lester of All American Blogger decided to go a different route and film his confrontation with the paper who plagiarized his work. [more]
Update: Mark’s is going LIVE tomorrow. Sign up for an email notification in the full post: Photography educator Mark Wallace has been featured on Fstoppers probably more than any other photographer. His easy to understand approach to lighting and tech talk has made Mark one of the top teachers in the field. On May 18-20th, Mark is hosting a FREE Speedlights 101 Workshop on CreativeLIVE. If you aren’t familiar with CreativeLIVE, they stream full photography workshops for free but also allow you to download full copies for future reference. Enroll for the free online workshop in the full post [more]
Trey Ratcliff is perhaps one of the most well known and adored HDR photographers today. The High Dynamic Range images he creates are not subtle by any means and he takes no apologies when it comes to creating images he personally enjoys. In this video, Trey talks about his gear (mainly Nikkor 12-24 and Really Right Stuff Tripods) and how he thinks through his compositions as he visits the beautiful Gorda in the Virgin Islands. Watch the 2nd video in the full post [more]
You often hear film makers say, “Your video is only as good as your audio”. Obviously video production goes a long way too but poor audio can completely ruin an otherwise great video. Until recently, DSLR cameras have been anything but great at recording audio. The on board microphones are noisy and prone to record camera noise. Plugging an external microphone into the line-in has also left a lot to be desired. So how should someone [more]
Photographing birds out in the wild seems pretty tough. Oregon photographer Jon Myers wanted to make the challenge even tougher by bringing the birds into his studio. Using large softboxes to create a space for the birds to fly, Jon was able to photograph eagles, ospreys, and hawks perfectly while in flight. The shots are spectacular, and if you click the full post you can see them shot against grey as well. [more]
It’s not everyday that you get to see a rare 1970s Nikkor 6mm Fisheye lens. It’s even more unlikely that you get to see one mounted to the rare Nikon D800 DSLR body! The guys at Grays of Westinster mounted the two elusive beasts to show how insane it is to have a 220ยบ angle of view. If you have $160,000 saved up, and need to see behind you as you shoot, it might be worth picking up one of these rare lenses. Now where are those full res D800 files so everyone can complain about purple fringing? [more]
