Fstoppers Original Articles

Since the pandemic, running remote photoshoots where the client is not physically on set has become more commonplace. In this article, I'll share my best tips on how to run a successful and efficient remote photography service.

If you are like me, you probably have a closet full of random tiles, boards, and construction scraps just in the event you need an interesting surface to shoot on. These new photography surfaces by Duo Boards set out to change my messy studio, and this photography tutorial shows you how useful these backdrops can be!

The modern autofocus systems are advanced. Sometimes, it looks like you will never again miss a shot when it comes down to focusing. But the autofocus can still fail under certain circumstances. Let’s look at the moments when even the most advanced autofocus can give up.

Once upon a time, we would learn a skill, practice it, hone it, and that would be our main area of expertise and way of making a living. In 2022, however, it would seem that mastering your camera, actually taking photos, editing them, and then applying that skill might not be everything you need to be a successful photographer in today's climate.

Night photography can be technically daunting. Even with modern cameras, it's not easy to capture high-quality night photos. While photographing the stars already requires high ISOs combined with wide apertures, capturing details in the landscape is even more difficult in the dark. In this article, I walk you through my night photography workflow, which combines image averaging with time blending and focus stacking to achieve high-quality results.

Lightroom presets come with a mixed bag of acceptance. Some think they are an abomination to a learned skill and craft and should never be used, whereas others enjoy the look and feel they provide to their images. It's not just as black and white as that, and it's down to the individual whether to use them or not, but one thing to make no mistake about is the time it takes to create them.

Needless to say, there's a fair few logistical complexities when photographing ice cream. After shooting for a vegan ice cream brand for a couple of years now, here are my best tips for running a smooth shoot when you’re capturing ice cream.

Good organization skills are crucial in almost every business environment. The same obviously applies to professional photographers, especially when it comes to managing photos. Many photographers will use the built-in catalog system available in Lightroom. However, a company called Mylio may have a much better solution available for you.

Outdoor Photographer awarded the grand prize of their "Great Outdoors 2021" to a composite image that violates the rules of the competition as stated on the official website. This controversy gives rise to an ethical question regarding photography competitions that fail to enforce their own rules.

I have likely made a great many mistakes over the course of my photography career, but one could well still be impacting me today. The question is, are you making it, and if you are, should you do anything to change?

Seascape photography is so different from shooting landscapes. Its dynamic nature makes it one of our most exciting and challenging subjects. The distinct difficulties of capturing the ocean require a different set of skills and learning some of the secrets of the sea.

The Fstoppers community is brimming with creative vision and talent. Every day, we comb through your work, looking for images to feature as the Photo of the Day or simply to admire your creativity and technical prowess. In 2022, we're featuring a new photographer every month, whose portfolio represents both stellar photographic achievement and a high level of involvement within the Fstoppers community.

Most expensive lenses include a lens hood. For the cheaper lenses, you have to order a lens hood separately. Is a lens hood so important you have to use it, or can you do without such an accessory? Let’s look at lens hoods a bit in this article.

Fstoppers has teamed up with Infinite Tools to bring you the best retouching plugins online. These tools are relevant for every type of photographer and will dramatically speed up and improve any retouching workflow. We are offering them at 20% off in the Fstoppers Store through July 5th.

We all want to improve our photography and get recognition for our work. However, there are two big distractions that we need to push aside to achieve success in our art. The first obstacle is the largest. Usually hailed as the key to photographic success, it has more disadvantages than helpful attributes.

Nikon has been busy on the super telephoto lens front as of late. The latest addition, the NIKKOR Z 400mm f/4.5 VR S, presents an option for photographers who need the extra reach without straining your budget.

After taking the top end of the market by storm with the Z 9, Nikon looks to secure the other end of the spectrum with a camera designed for social media creation.

What urges you to travel, hike, and camp out for landscape photography? How do your emotions affect what you shoot and how the output turns out?

It's time to be honest with yourself. It's time to ask some hard questions about your work and answer them straightforwardly, even if you hurt your own feelings. Grab a pen and paper, drop your ego, and tackle these questions.

What a time to be alive for photography! Advances in technology, combined with reduction in pricing and the “gear wars” that brands wage against each other continue to make image-making hardware of the highest quality more and more accessible to the every person. This market process continues to make it possible for us to minimize sacrifices in image quality we once made when shooting in less than optimal conditions.

You’ve received an enquiry from a potential new client and you’re looking forward to booking them in. Here are five questions to ask on your discovery call to make sure you understand what the client needs and that you can quote for the job accurately.

You probably have one or more camera bags for transporting your camera equipment. A shoulder bag, a backpack, perhaps a trolley. Do you place your camera in your bag with or without a lens attached? Or does it depend on how you use your camera bag?

While browsing through various photo-sharing platforms, you might get the impression that everything has already been photographed. After all, millions of photos get uploaded each day to Instagram alone. But if you take a closer look, you'll see a lot of repetition. Many photos show the same places, the same compositions, and often similar light and editing. Even today, it's possible to discover new photo spots. In this article, I show you my favorite way to do so.

Sometimes, two is better than one when it comes to gear purchases.

Here comes the shock: you can get extremely sharp photos with cheap gear. Let’s have a look at what sharpness is and how we can improve it.

DJI’s Ronin 2 is hard to beat, but perhaps the latest option comes close?

Adobe has released another update for Photoshop, bringing improved features, usability, and workflow for photographers and artists alike. However, one update from a while back has constantly irritated me, the save as feature, but there's an easy solution to fix it.

If you are a Profoto user who has always dreamed of the day you could see the actual power settings of your strobes directly on the remote, today, your dream has come true. I was one of the first photographers to test the new Connect Pro in my own studio, and I have to say, this is a very welcome upgrade for any Profoto user.

With technology continuing to move on at a swift pace, there's been plenty of recent discussion as to whether digital renders can truly ever replace product photography. Taking this one step further, is it possible that one day, artificial intelligence could simply create images without needing any input from a photographer or digital artist at all?

A few years back, I managed to find a beater of a Hasselblad XPan for a song. I've tried to find a shooting style that would help me stand out from the crowd, and the panoramic format appealed to me. I didn't realize it at the time, but this purchase sent me down a rather obsessive path, trying to find the best panoramic cameras for news and editorial work.

No matter how uncomfortable it might feel to send out a photography contract at the beginning of your commercial photography journey, having a robust contract in place is essential for creating professional relationships with your clients.

Take a nice subject, awesome conditions, build up a pleasing composition, and you will get a great photograph. But there is still something important missing for getting it to world class. Therefore, we have to go even one step further.

One of the biggest mistakes I made early on as a headshot photographer was using the dreaded phrase, “I'll fix it in post.” In today's article and accompanying video, I share five reasons why I never say this to my clients, and why you shouldn't either.

Getting views on YouTube isn’t easy, especially now in 2022. With so many of us hoping to get more eyes on our work and possibly make YouTube a successful side hustle, the struggle is real when trying to get any traction in the genre of photography.

The craft of photography has arguably changed more in the last 20 years than in the century before it. With each improvement to the equipment comes the inevitable groans of many photographers who believe the technology takes away from the craft. Is that well-founded or mistaken?

Yousuf Karsh is widely regarded as one of the greatest portrait photographers of the twentieth century. In this essay, I discuss five ways that studying Karsh's life and photos can impact our own work as portrait artists.

Life as an artist is a never-ending series of peaks and valleys full of both joy and inevitable disappointment. But adding a bit of routine into a life seemingly devoid of it can make you both a better photographer and a happier human being.

A camera bag can carry a lot of stuff. It fits a camera and lenses, but also other things that may or may not be helpful for your photography. Sometimes, there’s too much stuff that seems to be essential at first, but isn’t used at all. How many things have you collected in your camera bag?

If you've used Instagram in the past six months, you might have noticed the slow decline of photography on your feed. Reels are the main culprit of that change, but there's more to it than you might think.

After shooting more sunsets than I can count along the Pacific coast, I've experienced many different conditions and learned a plethora of valuable lessons. These are the most important tips I found throughout that journey that will help you the next time you're shooting along the coast.

In this behind the scenes video, I'm going to walk you through a pretty complex photograph I shot in our garage studio. Using strobes, LED lights, a crazy light modifier, and ACDSee's new photo editing software, Gemstone, this final image turned out much more interesting than I originally thought.

For more than 30 years, I tried different camera settings for my landscape photography. With the settings I use today, I don’t only feel more flexible, but they allow me to nail each of my photographs technically.

We often describe children as creative. We are impressed at how they create art using nothing more than a crayon and a sheet of blank paper. Many adults, however, neglect the artistic spark they had in their youth and label themselves as “not creative.” The Creativity Conference, a no-cost, full-day event held in New York City on June 10, presented speakers who encouraged the adults in attendance to believe that they are indeed creatives who should be proud to pursue and share their artistic creations.

Tripods have been sturdy companions for photographers all over the world. A good tripod can help you produce images that are simply not possible when shooting handheld. Unfortunately, tripods can be a bit of a pain to carry around, especially if they're any good. This is why, in many cases, a monopod ends up being a better option.

It didn’t seem like there was much to cheer for film photographers in 2021. Supply chain issues, global film shortages, and price rises led to a wave of discontent among film photographers, leading many to cry into their soy lattes and burn their berets.

With a world full of options, why might you choose a cinema camera instead of opting for a mirrorless camera for video productions?

When we create a photograph, there are things we can do to change it from being mundane to interesting. Here are some of the most important aspects of composition and the one unteachable factor that is exclusively yours to discover.

I have already written two articles about focus stacking here. The first article dealt with how I use automatic focus bracketing in the field, and in the second article, I shared my focus stacking workflow in Helicon Focus. To provide you with even more tools, I now show you how I combine focus stacking with exposure blending.

Photographers are creators. As creatives, we have something to say. Photography, as a medium, can capture a mood or a message as powerfully as words, music, paintings, and sculptures. Embarking on a personal project is the perfect opportunity for a photographer to convey their message without the influence of any client concerns.

The things that help us survive in life are often the same as those which help us survive in business. And when you make your living from your art, survival in business can feel a lot like life or death.