Fstoppers Original Articles

The debate surrounding the relevancy of film cameras is an ongoing one; the opinions about which vary from photographer to photographer. The resurgence of digital camera technology in recent years has meant DSLRs are now widely used by the masses, pulling the future of film photography into question somewhat. Is it now just a novelty? I chatted with Howard, one of the owners of a North England-based camera shop that shunned digital cameras in favour of film... and found that business is very much booming.

Wacom has renewed its Intuos tablet lineup with two new models, including the paper edition in medium and large sizes, while still offering the old Intuos Pro model in small size. The new design seems like bringing some novelty, but in fact, innovation might not be always safe. Because as a long time user, my disappointment was the same like the time Apple started ignoring its core users' needs.

Frequency separation is a Photoshop technique that involves "separating" the colors in an image from the textures. Though typically used by portrait photographers for retouching a model's skin, it's a useful tool for landscape photographers to have on their belts. In this article, I outline two cases in which frequency separation helped me process a recent image.

When it is all but gray outside, when the leaves have fallen, the temperature is nothing to write home about, and most people would stay inside, it is time to bring out the camera.

Language is a slippery thing. The meanings of words are constantly evolving. Add in the continuing leaps being made by the technology underlying photography, and it's no wonder that the language photographers use is in an almost constant state of flux.

In this article I'll share five tips on how I actually improved my photography. Here I'm not talking technicalities such as sharper images, shallow depth of field, using a tripod, or removing your lens cap.

When you're new to photography, you might feel a bit overwhelmed by all of the various technical parameters and artistic guidelines you have to keep in mind simultaneously. Well, I'm here to add another one to the list, but I promise that it will improve your shots drastically.

For many photographers, Instagram is still the biggest and best social media platform for spreading and showing our work. Growing on Instagram is, however, a long, weird, confusing, and sometimes frustrating process.

This is your chance to participate in the Flashlight challenge, prove you can make an amazing photograph with any light source, and have your photograph featured in an Fstoppers article all about you!

It’s a mystery as to why Lightroom doesn’t offer a quick and easy way to add borders to images when exporting files. However, there is a simple solution.

I've been one of the loudest critics of Apple's current Thunderbolt-only laptops, but they've quietly admitted their mistakes and brought back HDMI, SDXC, and MagSafe in the new Macbook Pros. I'm going to give them another chance.

You’ve got a solid website, your photography skills are on point, you’ve been around for awhile, but you still aren’t getting any clients. Peers’ businesses are booming, you know there are plenty of clients to go around, and yet, you’re still struggling to get by with your photography business. There are a ton of factors that go into why a business fails, but here are a few reasons why your photography business may be failing.

Editing astrophotographs can be tricky as there's a lot to go wrong, especially when working with the Milky Way. Thankfully, Lightroom has some powerful features that can help transform drab snaps to galactic masterpieces.

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.

Lightroom does some things really well, but one area I always wished I had more control over was web culling. After some investigation, here's the best method I've found for efficiently sending out photos for clients to peruse and select.

Getting started in photography is expensive. Sometimes frustratingly so. This expense tends to compound a bit if one has to pay professional models to build a portfolio. Fortunately, you don’t. Models also need to build a portfolio, so collaborating with photographers to create images becomes extremely valuable. TFP (time for print, or time for portfolio) has becomes a keystone of the beauty/fashion/glamor world.

One of the biggest questions photographers have when starting their business is if they’re pricing themselves correctly. Even seasoned professionals sometimes question whether their pricing is correct. Here are a few tips to ensure you’re pricing realistically and accurately for your services.

It’s important to have a subject in your photo. Without a subject, a photo may be less interesting to look at. Sometimes, the subject is easy to spot, but at other times, it might be more difficult. You can get some help from Lightroom to check if your photo has a subject.

When I started out my photography business, I was always told how important it was to have a strong and personal style. At the time, I did not understand what that meant. I knew all my pictures were too different to make for an impactful portfolio. I also knew that my retouching was inconsistent. But no one told me how to create that sought-after "photographic style." Even the word "create" was probably wrong. Rather, it appears that a style is developed and refined shoot after shoot, job after job. It is a neverending process. However, there are some points to help develop an impactful style.

A fundamental lesson in photography is the exposure triangle. Learning about ISO, shutter speed, and aperture is something all photographers should do.

With this 30-second check, you can ensure your images have the exact right contrast and levels, with it being particularly effective for black and white imagery.

If you were on Fstoppers at all last week you probably read at least one of my articles about the Panasonic GH5 and the debate over its autofocus. Although we are no closer to a fix, this story keeps getting more entertaining.

Despite being one of the best jobs in the world, photography and retouching are both technical processes in which you usually deal with some problems and find solutions afterwards. Every shoot is a different problem to be solved, and mostly, this is the fun part of this job. But sometimes, you have to be prepared when dealing with large amounts of photos with a tight deadline. So, here are some tips for fast-paced workflows for a commercial photo shoot.

Adobe introduced the Range Mask to Lightroom Classic a few years ago, and it’s a useful means for targeting an adjustment when the local tools — Adjustment Brush, Gradient Filter, and Radial Filter — are simply too clumsy. If you want a deeper understanding of how it functions in relation to Luminance, read on.

Today we are asking our readers to vote which of these two photos is the better image. I'm not going to tell you anything about these two images, but I'm excited to reveal the twist in a few days after everyone votes on the more appealing image.

Nikon quietly — or maybe not so quietly given the press — announced the demise of the innocuously named Coolpix B600, a product name that just trips off the tongue and screams cheap and cheerful. What is startling about this camera is that it only hit the market in December 2020. Some eight months later it has bitten the dust. Why is this and what does it say about the camera market?

Following up his 2012 viral video hit "Fall," Filmmaker Jamie Scott has only become more focused and experienced as exhibited in his timely new time-lapse titled "Spring." Watch the amazing video and get a behind-the-scenes look at how he pulled it off right here.

Reviewing your images only to find that the shots you've taken are slightly out of focus is one of the worst things in photography. But can you save those photos using Adobe Lightroom?

The wide-angle view is probably the most used in landscape photography these days. It shows the landscape and can make some highly impactful photos. Here, I show you how to use an ultra-wide-angle lens to make impactful photos.

As you're doing your holiday shopping, it can be a bit daunting evaluating all the numerous options out there. To help, we've put together a complete guide of all the best cameras, lenses, lights, drones, and accessories.

It used to be so simple. The camera shutter opened and closed again. The time in between was the exposure time. With digital cameras and mirrorless systems, things became a bit more complicated. Let’s have a look at the different types of camera shutters.

Something I get asked often is how to add color tones to your images. Often the easiest option is to use filters either in Lightroom or with a plugin software such as Google Nik. However, as you delve deeper into the world of color grading you will eventually become curious how to create your own effects.

I was cycling to catch my train a few weeks ago and after I had folded the bike and stowed it in the luggage area, was pondering the things in life I couldn't live without. It was much to my surprise that, considering this question, I actually decided it was my bike (Joey). I use it for commuting, for shopping, for leisure; it is with me most days of the week, and without it, the impact on my day-to-day life would be dramatic.

Over the evolution of photo manipulation and editing there are those features that have come about that truly change not only how we do things, but how quickly, and have us reevaluate what we think is possible; things that seem like magic.

The payouts for stock photography have become something of a joke to many photographers, but is there a better way to look at things? I’ve changed how I’ve approached stock photography, and in doing so, came away with a refreshed view of photography as a whole.

In January I broke the news Canon Italia had posted a landscape composite without credit, stolen elements, and which were taken on a Fujifilm. It garnered quite a lot of attention and Canon Italia replied, only making matters worse. Well, Elia Locardi has taken the situation to court.

Photographing landscapes is easy. After all, landscapes are everywhere. Choosing a good composition is often much more difficult. It can be helpful to take small steps, slowly building up the most attractive composition. Let me show you how I often work for my landscapes.

Have you had any trouble figuring out the proper exposure when using ND filters for landscape photography? This guide offers various ways to get you started.

Composition is a complicated topic. It's easy to throw out the Rule of Thirds because talking about things like balance, rhythm, and focus can get overwhelming but, if you stop at the Rule of Thirds, you could be robbing your images of complexity

Since this is Santa’s week of choice, I thought it might be a good time to put out a wishlist of my own.

The concept of creating a mirrorless system is very similar in the case of all the camera manufacturers: get rid of the mirror and create a new lens mount closer to the sensor. What if there was another option to do it, arguably a better one?

It really doesn't matter if you make excellent images that make your clients look their best, or that they're using your creative brain and technical mastery to sell their product. Clients deserve massive discounts, and, sometimes you just need to give them a load of images for free because they feel that they did you a favor that one time — conveniently forgetting all the other free and massively discounted commercial images you gave them.

I’ll never forget the email; I was on a plane somewhere over the Florida coast, on my way to the Bahamas for the Fstoppers Workshops 2014. Just before I left the States, I had signed on with the artist consulting firm Wonderful Machine. The first step in preparation for a press release was to tear my website apart. The critique was tough and they slashed it hard… here I am in one of the most beautiful places in the world, feeling a truck load of anxiety. For years, I had thought I had a clean and straight to the point website, but it turns out I needed to strip it down even more.

Costa Rica is a place of breathtaking beauty, with lush rainforests, towering volcanoes, and pristine beaches. From the misty cloud forests of Monteverde to the remote beaches of Corcovado National Park, Costa Rica offers an endless array of photo opportunities. Whether you are a professional photographer or an amateur with a passion for capturing nature's beauty, Costa Rica is a destination you should not miss.

In part 1 I covered the process of building the best panoramas with little distortion by finding the no parallax spot in your lens. In part 2 we add in our model and use curves and levels to colorize the sky in Photoshop. In addition, this tutorial builds on utilizing the combination of plugins and Photoshop to target specific tones of your image, which is a great technique when building a dramatic environment.

I have been sent a lot of messages and seen a lot of comments on this topic over the last year, and it is something I have shied away from tackling, but in this article I am going to delve into the taboo debate around internet photographers versus professional photographers.

Lightroom is one of the most popular photo-editing programs. We talk a lot about the library module and the develop module. The other available modules are almost never mentioned. What are these modules? But more important, are these useful?

There is nothing better than being out in nature, inhaling all the mood out there, deciding on the best possible camera position, and enjoying landscape photography. But what if there are 25 other photographers beside you so that it becomes difficult to move just 20 inches to the left or right without disturbing another photographer?

Sometimes, we like to frame and hang our vintage snaps of the family around the home, but the photos are torn or faded. Here, we'll be going through some steps to help restore the photos so they're ready for display on our walls.

In the digital age, we spend a lot of time in front of screens. Many of us retouch our own work, distribute it digitally, and even only have a digital portfolio. Some sell prints of client work, or fine art prints. And, some get published in magazines. In a past article on reinvigorating your love for the craft, I touched briefly on printing your work, and would like to expand on that today.