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.

Plenty of working portrait shooters still feel a flicker of guilt every time the mode dial leaves M, as if aperture priority or auto ISO were a confession. Choices about mode, file format, and aperture decide how quickly you can work with clients who won't hold still and how much room you have to fix things later.

Real estate photography depends on how many listings agents actually land, so a headline claiming most agents closed nothing in a year hits hard if houses pay your bills. When the numbers behind your client base shift, the way you choose clients, package services, and plan the next few years should shift with them.

A long exposure on a bright, sunny morning sounds like a contradiction, yet it is exactly what turns restless water into smooth glass around breakwaters and sea markers. Hard coastal light forces tougher choices about filters, exposure blending, and whether an image survives in color at all.

Native 85mm f/1.8 lenses from the major camera makers commonly run several hundred dollars, and that cost keeps a dedicated portrait lens out of a lot of starter kits. The TTArtisan AF 85mm f/1.8 Neo lands far below that range with full autofocus on full frame mirrorless bodies, which makes it fair to ask how much gets cut to reach that price.

A batch of packaging board made at a mill on the Wabash River on August 6, 1945 came out radioactive, and the X-ray film stacked against it fogged after roughly two weeks in the box. A physicist at Eastman Kodak worked backward from those spots to a bomb test about 1,000 miles away in the New Mexico desert. He then sat on the finding for four years before publishing it.

Having a comfortable and well-lit workstation is something that can vastly improve your time working at your desk, and while many of us spend hours every day working at a computer, lighting is probably something that most of us don't give a huge amount of thought to. 

Bright midday sun and a pitted concrete wall are poor ingredients for a dark, moody portrait, yet one small gridded flash can turn them into exactly that. Learning to shut out ambient light, shape a single source, and then finish the file with careful retouching gives you a look you can repeat almost anywhere with very little gear.

Butterfly eyes are pure black, and bees are dark, quick, and always hopping between flowers that expose completely differently. Getting crisp, detailed macro shots of subjects like that is hard with daylight alone, and a small flash solves more of the problem than most people expect.

When the colors in a Lightroom edit look gray, muddy, or garish, the first instinct is to open the color mixer and start pushing hue and saturation around. That approach can stack up 20 adjustments that cancel each other out, and the result often looks no better than the raw file you started with.

You can name every shot type, from a medium close-up to an over-the-shoulder, and still freeze when it's time to decide where the camera actually goes. That hesitation is often what keeps a small weekend project stuck as an idea instead of a finished film.

An old photo album pulled from a garage contains a snapshot with Clyde Barrow's and Bonnie Parker's names handwritten on it, and the man who found it believes several of its pictures show the outlaw couple in scenes that have never been published. 

The most famous face of the Great Depression belonged to a woman who wished the picture had never been taken. Florence Owens Thompson sat for Dorothea Lange for about ten minutes in a California pea field in March 1936, said almost nothing, and never earned a cent from the portrait that turned her into a national symbol. For most of the next 47 years, she resented it.

Getting my hands on the new DJI Osmo 360 II was an interesting experience, largely because the first generation was already so well-built. The original gave us solid specs that made it a serious contender right out of the gate. Because it set that bar so high, a quick glance at the Osmo 360 II’s spec sheet might initially feel like a letdown.

The railing you pass on the way to the shop, the peeling door down the street, and the traffic marker on the corner rarely look like photographs, which is why most people never point a camera at them. Learning to see images in those ordinary things means you can shoot well on any free evening, without a long drive or a planned trip.

Canon has released a wave of new RF primes since the RF 35mm f/1.8 Macro IS STM arrived, including a fast 35mm in its VCM line and an inexpensive 45mm f/1.2. That raises a fair question about whether the older, cheaper lens still deserves to be the first one you put on an RF body.

A white wall behind your subject can go pure black in the final frame, even when the light never moves. You can get two completely different portraits from one setup in a room the size of a spare bedroom if you know how to use the light already in the room and how to shut it out.

A car shoot can easily produce 1,000 or 2,000 frames, and the time you spend sorting and editing them often decides how many images you actually finish. The order of your Lightroom steps, from culling to tone curve to masking to Denoise, shapes the final look as much as any single slider does.

On October 5, 1986, the New York Times published the closest thing to an honest tally the milk carton campaign produced. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children knew of 107 children located because somebody recognized a picture of them, at least four of those from a milk carton.

Threads of Time is an exploration of legacy and lens. It is a collaborative project between kesi artist Jingwei and photographer Jing Huang, presented at the Leica Gallery in Amsterdam. I went along to see how this collaboration was woven together in a gallery setting.

Panasonic's Lumix L10 puts a Micro Four Thirds sensor and a fixed zoom into a body small enough for a jacket pocket, and it sells for $1,500. A fixed-lens camera at that price asks you to give up a lot of flexibility, so how it holds up after months of daily use tells you more than a launch-week impression can.

Every year around late summer, my inbox and DMs start filling up with some version of the same question: "What actually happens at Sony Kando?" 

An f/2.8 zoom usually costs more, weighs more, and takes up more room in your bag than its f/4 counterpart, and the price gap between the two versions of the same focal range can run to hundreds of dollars. A wrong choice in either direction tends to end the same way, with a second purchase or an expensive lens that keeps getting left at home.