Fstoppers Original Articles

Here are some of the biggest Photography deals we've found lasting Black Friday through Cyber Monday.

To look at Jabari Jacob's life as a successful commercial photographer who flies from coast to coast working with brands like Nike and Sony, you would never guess he slept on an air mattress on the floor during the beginning of his career.

Bella Kotak is an international fine art, fashion, and portrait photographer whose magical aesthetic has gained her fans all across the globe and garnered her features in industry magazines like Rangefinder and PhotoPlus, but her photography career didn’t start in the happiest place.

Whenever you are preparing for a shoot, sketching your images should be a part of your pre-planning process. The sketches don’t have to be the perfect storyboard. But it should have enough details to guide a creative vision.

What are the things you should look for when shopping for your next camera purchase? Here are a handful of things I consider before placing my order.

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 2018, 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.

Our friends over at GuruShots, "The World’s Greatest Photo Game,” recently offered a challenge where particpants submitted their best images "Lit by Twilight." There were thousands of entries and 39.4 million votes throughout the contest but the top winners have been chose. See who won as well as the 100 top rated images below.

This week's episode of Critique the Community brings a lively discussion between Lee Morris and Mike Kelley on what makes a quality fine art photograph. We received hundreds of image submissions from the Fstoppers community and Lee and Mike hold nothing back with their critique. In the midst of everything, we also play a prank on Mike.

Storehouse angered a number of power users in its big shakeup with the release of Storehouse 2.0 which ditched a number of features for a streamlined, more privatized system that made it harder to use the platform as a photographer’s social media marketing dream. But the numbers are out, and while it may not become the next Instagram of photo marketing and discovery, here’s why there’s a good chance it’ll find its way into your living room, regardless.

Today, I’d like to take a charitable break from discussing gear, to chat about something I’ve found to be far more important to understand about photography.

It is quite an uncertain time for wedding photographers. We don’t know when our next event will be or what weddings will look like in the near future. What we do know is that people will still be getting married one way or another. However, it can feel creatively exhausting to go for months on end without photographing what you love.

Deciding which images to keep and which to throw away is one of the hardest lessons to learn for new photographers. One would think that it gets easier with experience, but the more you learn the harder it can get.

Beginning in 2013, I began to spend a lot of time photographing on a five-block street in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan called Greene Street.

Trying to choose the right underwater housing can be overwhelming. Depending on the camera body you have, an underwater housing can easily be double what the camera cost. How can you be sure it’s the right fit before you splurge on this expensive piece of gear?

My new product, Hat Mask Clips, is now live on Kickstarter.

A little over a month ago, I got married. Now that the dust has settled, I thought I might share some realizations I had from being on the other side of the camera lens for a change.

Adobe Max is a three-day conference in Los Angeles, CA attended by designers, illustrators, photographers, and social media content creators. Attendees can watch presentations by Adobe representatives and attend educational sessions given by independent creators. This year, Generative AI was mentioned in many presentations. This feature is implemented in unique ways across the programs that make up Adobe’s Creative Cloud, and it often feels to the user that they have more effective communication with programs that have AI enhancement.

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 2024, 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.

The Internet can be a cruel and unforgiving place, especially when sharing your art, opinions, or creative endeavors with people worldwide.

It has been a long time coming but the newly redesigned Fstoppers.com has finally become a reality! The biggest change coming to the website is an active community run by YOU - our readers. Today marks the first public release of the new site design and hopefully you are as excited to become a part of this community as we are!

Does that mean all art is subjective, and then, that any image is good if I say it’s good? Not so fast...

In this article, I share one of the most important things you can do to take better landscape and cityscape photos.

With the advancement and affordability of video technology available to consumers now, the number of budding and aspiring film and video makers has seemingly raised exponentially. One of those advancements has most definitely been in regards to how the color correction process is handled. There's certainly no one path to success sort of idea with this either, but there are some things that you can do to help simplify and organize your process in order to work quicker and more efficiently.

Photographers have preferences on everything ranging from their favorite camera to their best lens, how they edit their photos, and what photo paper they use to make prints. What if your own preferences aren't aligned with what your potential clients enjoy? We asked dozens of normal people which photo papers and print products they prefer, and the results were not exactly what I had expected.

In our first two segments of building a business plan, we’ve talked about defining your product and forming a long term vision. In this final section we will talk about some of the practical steps you need to take to take those hypothetical concepts and put them into action.

With landscape and travel photography, you might only have one chance at the shot, regardless of the quality of light. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through how I edited a blue hour shot of the Virgin River in Zion National Park, using ACDSee Photo Studio and targeted adjustments.

Not so long ago, I was sitting, browsing through the work I did in 2023. This year was marked by me going outside of my comfort zone. Having spent yet another year as a professional photographer, here are the takeaways I will bring into 2024.

On June 7th, 2021 Apple streamed their Worldwide Developers Conference Keynote for 2021. This keynote had been eagerly anticipated, as we’re now halfway into Apple's transition to Apple Silicon, and many people have been waiting to see what new software will go alongside the impressive hardware launched at the April Spring Loaded event.

Gina Manning Photography has been working with the Bruno Magli team for two seasons now, shaping their brand and new campaign and collections visually. I’ve been fortunate enough to harvest an incredibly collaborative and artistic relationship that has led the way for us to make the art I love seeing in the world!

There are two distinct approaches to photography: reactive and proactive. The type of photography you do depends on your personality and how comfortable you are with each of those approaches. What kind of photographer are you?

When stuck at home, a portrait shooter turns the lens back on themselves.

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.

Peter Hurley is a master of headshot photography with his ability to connect with clients and draw out the most flattering poses from his subjects. This Black Friday, Fstoppers is discounting all of Peter Hurley's tutorials. See the details below or visit the Fstoppers Store to see every deal being offered during the holiday season.

The third episode of Mike Kelley's Behind the Scenes series from his architectural tutorial is now live. In this episode, Mike shows you how you can turn an overcast day into a sunny afternoon, how to photograph a resort from a helicopter, and also teaches you an effective way to make a hotel lobby look more inviting. You can also watch as the Fstoppers crew goes night diving with massive manta rays off the coast of the Big Island of Hawaii.

I love photographing actions sports like surfing, skateboarding, cycling, MTB, and of course motocross and Supercross. Motocross and its cousin Supercross are great sports to photograph and are easy for fans with cameras to get close to the action. Read this first article of a three article series to get some tips to make your first outing or your hundredth outing a little more rewarding.

This week's top 10 list is sure to bring a smile to your face. We challenged our readers to show us photos displaying happiness, and the results should help to brighten your day.

Taking inspiration from cinema can lead to evocative images that also strike a nostalgic chord with movie lovers. Take full advantage of that power to create cinematic photographs that will charm viewers.

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 2017, 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.

Avoid the rookie mistakes that other amateurs make and jump ahead with some professional preparation for your first, or your next wedding photoshoot. You'll be surprised how often these steps are overlooked.

In an effort to please everyone, setting expectations and educating your clients is something that creatives often shy away from. But why not create a shiny little brochure to educate your wedding clients?

For the last few weeks, Fujifilm teamed up with Fstoppers to offer a brand new X-Pro3 mirrorless camera and a XF 16mm f2.8 lens to one lucky entrant. The contest has ended and Brianna Kiser was randomly selected to win the camera, congratulations! We'll be in touch with you via email.

I’ve been in the game for a little while, and along the way, there have been a few "new" things. New flashes, diffusers, scrims, softboxes, continuous light panels, LED wands, animated photos, cinemagraphs, mirrorless cameras, the list goes on and on, not to mention Photoshop and Lightroom, which update more often than I wash my sheets. But the one "new" I was not expecting to face was a new photography usage that has made me have to think anew about composition: Instagram.

Improve your landscape photography this fall with one of my favorite techniques for composing within the photo: the use of leading lines.

This photo is striking. Skimming through the archives at the Library of Congress, I was immediately drawn to this image. But why?

This article is for first time visitors to Sydney, Australia. The city and its beaches are riddled with picturesque spots so it will be difficult not to find a unique location. I will include the general areas around the beautiful harbor.

As the world essentially stops moving due to the widespread Coronavirus, many photographers and creatives are left with canceled jobs and nothing on the horizon. While we wait for businesses to open back up, we need to find ways to survive these stressful times. Here are a few helpful tips to get you through this event.

For the last month, we've teamed up with Wix for a series called "How to Build a Website." In this series, Lee and I talk about some of the advantages and mistakes photographers make when creating their own website. Today, I release my new commercial photography website and walk you through the process.

Finding new ways to evolve creatively is a never-ending process. Take a deeper dive at implementing audio into your workflow in this follow-up focused on photographers and writers.

“In 2017, just 13.7 percent of magazine covers from the top 10 American fashion publications were photographed by women,” according to Erin Cunningham of Refinery29, and yet, according to the 2010 United States Census, the female population of the United States is 50.8 percent. So, why are there so few women shooting the covers of fashion magazines?

Photographer Sana Ullah got the idea for her “Places You’ll Pray” photo project while shopping with her sister, who ducked into a fitting room once to pray as part of her Muslim faith, and so, it’s fitting that the first photo she took for the series several years ago was in a shopping mall.