Top-Down
Critique the Community

Top-Down

Show Us Your Best 'Top-Down' Photographs

"Top-down" photographs are taken directly above the subject matter. We don't just want to see you shooing from a high angle, we want the ground to be completely perpendicular to the camera.  

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How to Fix Perspective Distortion in 90 Seconds

Getting the perspective of your images to how you saw them can be tricky. There are a few ways you can achieve it, but in this video, you'll learn how to do it in Photoshop in 90 seconds.

A Beginner's Guide to Using Lightroom

Lightroom is the program of choice for tons of photographers for cataloging and editing their photos, and it is a multidimensional application with a lot of different features and capabilities. If you are new to using Lightroom, this excellent video will show you the ins and outs of the important aspects of the application and have you up and running in no time.

Helpful Natural Light Home Studio Tips and Tricks

Most people start out their photography journey learning how to light their photos using natural light, and many photographers continue to use it for work at home, both because of its look and because it saves on space that might be tight wherever you live. If you enjoy working with natural light in your home studio, be sure to check out this great video with lots of helpful tips and tricks.

How to Get the Most out of a Wide Angle Lens for Landscape Photography

The wide angle is undoubtedly the lens of choice for the majority of landscape photography, but it comes with its own challenges and pitfalls. If you have trouble using wide angle lenses, check out this great video full of a ton of helpful tips to improve your images.

Canvases: Affordable Art for the Nomadic Lifestyle

I move a lot. It’s kind of my thing. In the past sixteen years, I’ve called fourteen different places home and I’m currently packing up and getting ready to move again. One thing I’ve discovered over the years is that lightweight, self-contained art — like canvases — is easier and safer to move. I’m always open to trying out different vendors for printed products, so I was excited to give 365Canvas a try and see if their products would work well for my nomadic lifestyle.

Fstoppers Photographer of the Month (August 2020): Emily Moore [NSFW]

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 2020, 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.

5 Tips for Better Photo Edits

Shooting a good photo is only half of the equation for a compelling final image: your edit also has to work to have a finished product. This great video will give you five helpful tips to improve your edits and ensure that you are putting out the best images possible.

What Makes a Good Portrait?

I stumbled across this video online a week ago and thought it more than worthy of a share. The video highlights what we get lost in as photographers and what is really important in making a great portrait.

That Nikon Guy Finally Sells All of His Nikon Gear

Now, more than ever, there are a ton of reasons to switch to a different camera ecosystem. whether you're making the switch from one brand to another or just switching to a mirrorless system. If you've been doing photography as a hobby for a long time or make a living with it, you've probably built up a collection of bodies, lenses, and even some flashes all within the same system. Sure, you can get adapters from Canon to Sony or EF to RF, but that's probably just going to save you a few bucks.

The Best Way to Edit Time-Lapse Videos

There are many ways to edit a time-lapse video, with varying degrees of success. This way might be the best, but also the most tedious. Good things come to those who wait.

How to Choose the Right Focal Length for Landscape Photography

One of the most important decisions you have to make in landscape photography is the choice of focal length. If that is something you struggle with, this great video will give you some helpful advice on how to choose the correct focal length for any given scene.

Don't Try to Please Everyone With Your Photography

Photography tends to attract a lot of fairly critical people, and it can be a bit much to take sometimes. Before you get too down about it all, it is important to remember that you simply can't please everyone with your work.

Stop Telling People to Read the Manual

Online, a common reply to a person asking a question is "RTFM" ("read the f@$%ing manual). Saying RTFM is not only not very helpful, but is also detrimental to product improvement.

How to Save Time by Using Export Presets in Lightroom

A lot of creating a fast photography workflow is finding every spot you can to create more efficient procedures, and a place a lot of people sometimes overlook is automating the export process. If you have not explored that before, this great video will show you how to create your own export presets in Lightroom to save a lot of time in the future.

A Photography Review of the Canon EOS R5 Mirrorless Camera

The Canon EOS R5 has been making lots of waves for its video features, but beyond those, it is also a highly capable stills camera. If you are interested in the R5 for your photography work, check out this great video review for a look at the kind of performance you can expect.

10 Photoshoot Ideas You Can Do at Home

As the economic slowdown continues, many of us may not have as much work as we'd like. Personally, I've had very few contracts come through the door in the last couple of months, and the worst thing about it as has been the lack of things to do.

Sometimes You Just Have to Get a Good, Paid Model Instead

There are times when you can get away working with a friend or someone willing to model for you for free, but then there are those times where you save yourself money, time, and effort by simply booking a professional model! How to decide which one to go for?

Should You Manipulate Your Landscape Images?

Photo editing software has granted us powers that were beyond our imaginations a little over a decade ago. No matter how much try to "fix it in post" though, bad light is bad light — let me elaborate.

5 Tips to Master Your Wide-Angle Landscape Photography

The wide-angle lens is very well known to be “the” landscape photography lens. That being said, it can be a little hard to figure out how to use it in the beginning. Here are five tips.

It's a Great Time to Print Photos at Home: Here Are Some Ways to Get Started

My first experience with professional photo printers was in graduate school in the mid-2000s. Back then, whatever behemoth Epsons the school had would always jam, eat paper, spew ink, and generally make it incredibly difficult to make prints, though when they did work, those prints were beautiful. Fast forward more than a decade later, and that’s not the case anymore, for Epson or any other brand. Here are a few options to get started in the world of large format, professional printing.

5 Reasons to Consider Buying a DSLR in 2020

There is no doubt that the industry is heading toward an almost totally mirrorless world, but that does not mean that DSLRs will suddenly become useless overnight. In fact, now might be a better time than ever to consider investing in a DSLR for your work, and this great video discusses five reasons why.

The Beauty of Velvia Film

Back in the era of film photography, you based a lot of your work and creative style around your choice of film stock, which could make a huge difference in the final look of your images. If you are interested in using film for landscape photography, be sure to check out this great video that shows what it is like shooting with one of the most famous landscape films ever, one that was the stock of choice for many shooters.

How and Why You Should Print Your Photos

However good your photos might look on your screen, there’s nothing like holding a print in your hands or having it hang on your wall — and there’s a few other good reasons to have physical editions. Photographer Joris Hermans explains why you should be printing your work and has some solid tips on how to go about it.

What Do You Get When You Spend $60 on a Film Scanner?

Photography can be an expensive business, and for those shooting film, while they might occasionally save some money on camera bodies, the process of digitizing images can present some financial hurdles. Just how good can a film scanner be when it only costs $60? This short video from Negative Feedback finds out.

Fstoppers Reviews the Viltrox 23mm f/1.4 APS-C (Don't Buy the Fuji Equivalent)

Viltrox comes with a pedigree for manufacturing good quality lenses at a low price point, so the entry of the 23 mm f/1.4 in Fuji X-mount and Sony E-mount is highly anticipated, not least because it is nearly $600 cheaper than the Fuji equivalent. Is it worthy of the hype and does that make it the perfect travel prime?

How a Pressure-Sensitive Pen Tablet Can Transform Your Editing

By far, one of the best investments a photographer can make is a pressure-sensitive pen tablet. They can make a huge difference in your editing workflow, both in terms of precision and efficiency. This great video illustrates why a tablet can be so useful in a photographer's workflow.

Just How Good Is the Tamron 70-180mm f/2.8 Di III VXD Lens?

The 70-200mm f/2.8 lens is one of the most important in a wide variety of photographers' bags, but such lenses are rarely affordable. Nonetheless, with third party alternatives becoming both more available and of higher quality in recent years, it is a great time to look at different options. This great video review takes a look at the Tamron 70-180mm f/2.8 Di III VXD lens.

One of the Worst Mistakes Made With Telephoto Lenses in Landscape Photography

Most landscape photographers prefer to use wide angle lenses for the majority of their work, but that does not mean telephoto lenses cannot be useful as well, and in fact, they can be a great way to distinguish your work from that of others. However, telephoto lenses come with their own pitfalls, and this excellent video details one of the most hazardous mistakes you can make and how you can fix it.

The Eight Phases of Being a Photographer

Photography can be a very cyclical pursuit: you will often find yourself with almost a sense of deja vu as you go through different phases of creative preferences and feelings toward your own work. This great video discusses eight phases we photographers tend to go through.

How to Use All of Final Cut Pro X’s New Features

This week, Apple released a substantial update to Final Cut Pro X bringing new tools to multi-platform content creators, ProRes RAW shooters, and anyone who‘s ever work with proxies.

Do You Use the Gray Card for the Reason It Is Meant For?

Do you have a gray card? A piece of foldable card that has a gray tone which is called 18% gray? If you do, there is a chance you have used it to set the white balance. But that is not where the 18% gray card is meant for.

The Business of Photography: Fstoppers Interviews Nino Batista

The economic effects of COVID-19 are still being felt by photographers, but glamour photographer Nino Batista built a strong foundation under his business that allowed him to weather the worst of the storm. What did he do to make his business recession-proof?

How to Customize the Photoshop Toolbar so That It's Perfect for You

If you’re a Photoshop user, you’ve probably noticed that there are a ton of tools in the toolbar that you never use and others that you have to hunt for. This short video explains how to customize that toolbar to trim out unnecessary icons, make space for new ones, and make your workflow much more efficient.

Could You Shoot a Video at f/0.95?

Shooting video takes great focus skills already, so shooting it at an extreme aperture is all the more challenging. This neat video follows a filmmaker as he shoots a video at a crazy wide aperture (f/0.95).