Social Media

A known photographer has decided to cease production of his range of elephant skin bags after outcry from the photography community. Some of the bags listed on his site would retail for up to $40,000.

This week, our readers were challenged to find shots containing circles. Using a shape opens up the possibilities and the results are wonderful. Be sure to share with your photography circles if you enjoy.

With all the hectic distractions that come with today's fast-paced lifestyles, it's nice to slow things down sometimes and focus on one thing. That is exactly what long exposure photography offers, and our readers made it hard to pick out the best photo, as there were so many great shots this week.

Sure, the photo-focused social media app is saturated. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it to drum up more business. If you’re a photographer wanting more clients, Instagram has the potential to be a powerful marketing tool.

Instagram has unveiled its latest feature — entitled "Focus" — similar in nature to what Apple currently offers with its portrait mode in the iPhone 7 and beyond. The difference is the feature will be available to those using an iPhone 6s or later.

Jared Polin, best known as “The Fro,” recently released his latest Froto Story, where he visits Philly Typewriter in hopes of getting a family heirloom, a Remington Standard typewriter, back in working condition. Polin gives viewers a glimpse of his process for planning and executing the photo story.

Street photography is a popular genre and a favorite of mine to admire. This week's submissions by our readers produced an exceptional list and helped the WeeklyFstop gain some needed street credit.

When people come together to help each other, good things happen. This idea is what spurned one of the more popular trends on Instagram called “pods.” Instagram pods are used to help beat the algorithm that so many users despise. I decided to join one and give it a try recently, not only to test it out, but also to share my thoughts regarding this trend and why you should or shouldn’t get involved in one.

Well, it has been about a year since I published one of my first popular articles titled "Why Us Average Joe Photographers Suck at Instagram" and I think it's time to update some things. If you think I'm better off now with thousands of new followers and busy influencing left and right, you'll be disappointed.

While I'm pretty sure we said the theme was "macro" this week, I think everyone heard "bugs" instead. That's okay with me since Spring is finally here so let's check out the insanely insect-heavy list and find out this week's theme.

Changes to the Instagram timeline have been the hot topic on the Internet as of late. Today they have a couple new announcements that aim to meet the most frustrated users on their platform halfway.

Instagram has always limited the bio field on your profile quite strictly. However, today, they're allowing full linked support for hashtags and profile links in your bio. But what does this actually mean?

A lot of us think of social media as a sort of necessary evil: if we're not comfortable with it, we still engage with it because it gets our name and work out there. One photographer deleted all his high-follower accounts and went without social media for a year, and he was quite pleased with the results.

Instagram is reported to have started rolling out a new feature in its mobile app that allows users to reshare posts — albeit to Stories, not Feeds. A small number of users have seen the arrival of the new option and TechCrunch has received confirmation from Instagram that resharing is being live tested.

Your posts will still be out of order. And here's why we are so confident about it.

Are you sure you are entering photography competitions that are legitimate? We've found one that doesn't seem so and we contacted some of the "judges" who turned out to be unaware of it.

Most clients today look at a digital portfolio rather than a printed book. Granted, the higher up the ladder you go, the more it leads toward print, but for the vast majority of us trying to make a living from photography, digital is king. Here are some tips on how to get bookings from your website.

The end of this color trifecta of themes is another great one featuring a precious metal in a number of different forms. The wide variety and quality of submissions in this list make it easily worth its weight in gold.

Instagram may be changing the way you see images in your feed once again. The surprising thing is that this new change might actually be for the better.

At long last, we can say goodbye to push notification scheduled Instagram posts. As all my workflow articles reiterate, I am always looking for the most efficient way to accomplish my tasks especially since I work alone with no assistants. For my Instagram postings, I have been using Later which has been good, because it allows me to get my caption and hashtags ready on the computer and do my final posting from my phone.

Perhaps in keeping with its name, Later has caught up with Hootsuite and now allows users to automatically post images to Instagram, joining a small number of social media management tools that offer this feature.

One woman has revealed details of how her quest of acquiring a large Instagram following left her in $10,000 of debt.

A Canadian newlywed has been ordered to fork out $115,000 in damages after it was ruled she slandered her wedding photographer online.

If you missed the original story, it was about a guy who ordered a $6,000 Canon 1D X Mark II from Amazon and got a box of stones instead. After he got a "replacement," this time two bricks, the retailer responded with a result from their investigation.

I see it daily with newbies on Instagram: "like-for-like", "please follow me", "validate my existence, please". The fact that I see it daily also says something about me: Hi, my name is Mike, and I'm addicted to likes.

If you have noticed how many well-known photographers shared about using Vero recently, you aren’t alone. Here is a summary of what has made the latest social media trend so popular.

500px announced that Visual China Group (VCG) — aka China’s Getty — has acquired 100 percent of its shares. Thanks to 500px’s huge user base, the move means that VCG is now the world’s third largest visual content provider.

We have all heard about how choosing a single color palette can be a good design choice for a photo shoot, a room, or even your Instagram profile. For this edition of the weeklyFstop, everyone rose to the occasion and shared some beautiful photos featuring the color pink.

Amazon has been a reputable store for many years. But this happened: a guy received a Canon 1D X Mark II box full with rocks. You think that's all? See what happened when the Amazon representatives apologized and sent a second package to him.

I would never have guessed that a simple prompt like "green" could have produced such amazing results this week. Our readers really showed up with arguably the best top 10 list yet.

We've all tried — and sometimes failed miserably — to take the perfect selfie to show off our latest adventure. Some people are simply better at turning the camera on themselves. But millennials' passion for showing "they were there," wherever "there" may be, is proving to be a boon to Asian tourism and a burgeoning photography industry.

So apparently "gathering" seemed to scare away some people since we only seemed to gather about 20 percent as many entries as we have last week. Luckily, the quality of the entries was right on par with the previous themes delivering yet another great top 10 list.

Before, to share someone's post on Instagram, you had to use third-party apps to download the photo and upload it to your account, usually with the source account's username and profile photo embedded in the corner. It sounds like the ability to share a post is finally coming, but probably not the way you expected it to.

"Social media is awful and we're all going to die someday (plz like and subscribe)," reads the hilariously ironic video description of this short film depicting what happens when a couple steps away from the din of social networks. Check out what happens when you sign off the computer and step out of the house.

Pressure to produce quality content for social media profiles is contributing to the unnecessary injuries and deaths of many adventure sports athletes, according to Marc Peruzzi, a former competitive rider writing for Outside.

The one constant in our industry (or most industries for that matter) is change. Few things change faster than the algorithms that power social media, thus the bulk of many photographers' presence to the world. With the new year, there are new things that we must be aware of if we wish to maintain our place in the algorithm's placement to our own followers and hopefully grow instead of just maintaining.

A few days ago, I published a copycat video on my Vimeo account. After the video was first shared by DPReview, the file became viral and got shared hundreds of thousands of times all over Internet. How did I produce this little funny video? How does having 250,000 views per day affect your visibility and social network accounts? And finally, what does this video really mean?

First off let me just say thank you to all the new people who joined in this week. Having the unique hashtags every week has made it clear how many people are playing and we broke 100 photos submitted in a week for the first time ever. While quantity doesn't always equal quality, I think you'll agree that the level of these shots is up there with our best weeks. I guess that shouldn't be surprising seeing the theme was "favorite" and not "worst ever."

Square peg in a round hole. That’s how social media platforms can feel for a creative. None of them were really specifically made to be used by creatives for networking, collaboration, and artistic development. We sort of just made it work the best we could with the options that were there. A new app, Daisie, is set to take on this much-needed role in summer 2018.

As some of you may or may not know, there has been a weekly photo theme running here on Fstoppers called the weeklyFstop. It is very easy to join in and the themes change from week to week so everyone's strengths and weaknesses get a turn. This week the theme is "favorite" which should cater well to all genres and skill sets. The real beauty is that you don't need a large following to join in. A number of our featured photographers haven't even passed 100 followers. This fact, one might argue, makes our list one of the most unique around. We'd love to have you join in and show us your favorite thing to capture.

Yesterday, Instagram announced that they had made some changes in what they will now allow to performed automatically. With this update, Instagram business profiles have gained the ability to have posts scheduled and published without any additional manual work via third-party applications. Non-Business profiles will likely gain this feature in 2019 according to the announcement. This news has been very favorably received so far, but instead shouldn’t we be running for the hills? Hear me out.

Instagram has finally opened up the possibility for its users to schedule their posts ahead of time. After years of users asking for this feature, the announcement was finally made today on Instagram’s business blog. Before you get too excited, though, there are two factors that you need to know.

CherryDeck is a new platform for photographers who mainly use Instagram to show their work. With CherryDeck, photographers can sign up for free with their Instagram account and get listed based on their area of expertise, allowing potential clients to search and find the best talent within seconds.

As the most recent government shutdown came to a close, the Curiosity Rover’s Twitter account (@MarsCuriosity) released a new batch of raw images from the red planet on January 23. The rover's Twitter account had a bit of a break during the shutdown, but while the Curiosity Rover has sent images back in the past of it as part of the Martian landscape, this latest selfie is a bit closer, and the Internet loves it.

Shooting landscape photography is not only fun but very therapeutic. The act of planning and capturing, the peace of the surrounding scenery, and the thrill of success all help your overall well-being in a way that makes photography a very effective way to uplift your spirits. For those of us that can't get out to some of these locations, looking at beautiful photos of them is also very soothing. I hope this week's list can relieve some stress for you. And be sure to check out next week's theme because I'm positive you'll love it.

I remember when Facebook introduced their messenger service and how I mentally groaned at the idea of yet another way I’d have to keep up with correspondence. Heck, at times I even threw on my tinfoil hat and thought for sure that Facebook was spying on me through their messenger service. But, once I regained my composure and gave it a chance, I learned what many already knew: Facebook Messenger is quickly becoming the new email newsletter.

Thanks to Instagram's incessant commitment to regularly changing various features on the photo-sharing app, it's more than understandable that you may not know the current image specifications for the platform. After a quick Google search brought up a host of conflicting answers, I decided to do some tests of my own and create several free Photoshop templates to make all our lives much easier.

Facebook may be filtering your business page out of the newsfeeds of potential clients, but Instagram remains a robust platform for photographers to connect with their audience. However, as the always-entertaining Peter McKinnon notes in his latest vlog, many photographers are missing out on an opportunity to use Instagram stories in a way the company may not have intended.

There is something magical about witnessing a sunrise and watching the land warm as the day begins. Unless of course, you are just still up from the night before. Then the sunrise has a whole different feeling. Luckily all of the great shots submitted this week seemed planned.

Instagram co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Mike Krieger made a rare response on Twitter this week to deny accusations that the social media platform deliberately withholds and then drip-feeds likes in order to keep nudging users to return to the app.