In 1896, a woman settled into a chair in front of the fireplace in her Washington, D.C. studio, hiked her petticoats above the ankle, crossed her legs like a man, and aimed her own camera at herself. One hand held a lit cigarette. The other cradled a stein of beer.

When this tripod came out years ago, so many of us wanted it to the point that a lot of us forced it to be useful in situations where it wasn’t the best fit. Now that we’ve seen the brand’s other tripod offerings, where it fits best is more obvious.

The Nikon ZR puts RED's raw video format, 32-bit float audio, and a 4-inch screen into a body with no viewfinder, so most of the conversation around it stays on codecs and cinema workflows. If you shoot both stills and video, the more useful question is whether it's a camera you'd pick up on a day when there's nothing to film.

You get to a beach at sunrise, the light finally shows up, and nearly every frame you take is the widest view your lens allows. That habit leaves most of a location unphotographed, and it pins the whole morning on one composition and one patch of sky.

Nikon now has three autofocus f/1.2 primes for its Z mount, a 35mm, a 50mm, and an 85mm, and each one weighs more than a kilogram. If you shoot for yourself instead of for clients, you have to decide whether any of them earns a place in a bag you actually carry every day.

A couple finds your portfolio, likes what they see, fills out your contact form, and then waits to hear whether you're free on their date and what you charge. Every hour of that wait gives them time to open another tab, and most wedding inquiry setups make some kind of wait unavoidable.

At a fashionable beach resort in the 1890s, a posted notice reportedly warned bathers about a brand-new menace with blunt words: "PEOPLE ARE FORBIDDEN TO USE THEIR KODAKS ON THE BEACH." Around the same stretch of years, hand cameras were barred for a time from the Washington Monument.

A camera strap is just a camera strap. Right? Peak Design changed that with a Kickstarter back in 2014, and having only undergone one or two subtle changes over the years, it still sets the standard. 

Laowa's ACRIS 35mm f/2.8 1X Macro APO reaches 1:1 magnification at a focal length that keeps the background, the sky, and the setting in the frame while your subject fills the foreground. Wide angle macro is a small niche, and the lenses built for it often ask you to accept unusual compromises in exchange for that perspective.

A 75mm f/1.4 is a short telephoto that isolates a subject without forcing you to back across the room, and the Thypoch Simera 75mm f/1.4 brings that focal length to Leica M mount in an all-metal body. Because it's a manual focus rangefinder lens, plenty of people will adapt it to mirrorless cameras, which raises fair questions about how much performance survives the trip.

A 600mm prime that weighs about 1 kg and costs $3,698 reads like a list of compromises, and Sony's new 600mm f/6.3 asks you to give up aperture in exchange for a lens you can carry without a second thought. If you shoot birds or wildlife handheld, the gap between a lens you can hold for five minutes and one you can hold all morning decides how many chances you actually get.

Packing for a trip usually turns into a negotiation between the 35mm, the 50mm, and the zoom, and plenty of people settle it by bringing all three. Whether that extra glass earns its place in the bag affects how you shoot, how much you carry, and how many moments you actually catch.

In March 1942, the Acme photo agency sent a photographer to Naval Air Station Alameda for a story about what women should and should not wear around machinery. On March 24, he made a frame of a 20-year-old machine shop worker bent over a lathe, her hair tied back in a polka-dot bandanna.

For over a decade, Pixieset has built its name on gallery hosting and then expanded into photography business management with Studio Manager. Now it turns its head to tackling what happens in the gap between the shoot and the delivered gallery.

If you’ve ever been out exploring a place, especially one that has a lot of interesting subjects, you would know how having an organized and efficient bag can impact your output. These new accessories for the WANDRD ROGUE bags offer to take the user experience to a whole new level.

Photography has worked without a camera and without shooting. Generative images test what is left after that.

You spend twenty years building a photographic archive, then train a generative model on it. The model begins producing images that look unmistakably like your work. Are those images photography?

The way you set up your Lightroom Classic catalog decides how fast you can find a shoot from two years ago and how much work your next backup will be. Most people make that call in their first month with the software, long before they have enough photos to see how it plays out.

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.

Flat, evenly lit landscape files often sit unused on a hard drive, even when the location itself was beautiful. Lightroom's masking tools let you decide where the light falls after the shutter closes, so a dull frame of a field and a hill can be rebuilt into something with real depth and contrast.

You can shoot thousands of frames in a busy wedding season and still struggle to name the few that pushed your work forward. Separating the images that pleased a client from the ones that changed how you shoot is a useful habit, and it takes more honesty than most portfolio reviews ask for.

Sony's a7 V is the general-purpose body in its full frame lineup, yet it now carries a 33-megapixel sensor and uncropped 4K at 60p, which puts pressure on the pricier models above it. If you shoot weddings, events, or a mix of stills and video, the question is how much paid work a base model can carry before you need something more specialized.

Today, I’ll give you my initial hands-on impressions of Nikon’s new entry-level mirrorless camera, the Z5IIC. 

On April 3, 2013, one company turned off the lights in more than 2,000 portrait studios in a single day. CPI Corp. ran the Sears Portrait Studios and the PictureMe studios tucked inside Walmart, and when it collapsed it took the mottled blue backdrop, the laser-beam background, and the sheet of wallet-size prints down with it.

Modern cameras are so good now that they pretty much do all the work for you. Focusing is instant, you get large, detailed files with incredible dynamic range, and the camera has the ability to correct many optical shortcomings of the lens attached in-camera, resulting in technically polished images. How predictable. And boring.