Yesterday four Panasonic GH5s finally arrived at the Fstoppers studio and I spent all day playing with the cameras. As you may have heard, we have decided to finally switch from shooting videos on Nikon DSLRs and the GH5 is quite an upgrade. There seems to be one major issue though... The auto focus while recording isn't reliable.
Globe-trotting ocean photographer George Karbus shares some of his near-20 years of experience in photography, including how he found using the new Nikon Z fc, and what advice he’d give to those looking to turn professional.
When a storm hits it is time to grab your camera and get out shooting because the light and dynamics of the weather are phenomenal!
A Portuguese inventor claims that mobile titan Huawei flew him to meet with them to pitch his patent pending 360 camera, only for them to cease all contact and launch their own with undeniable similarities.
The Google Pixel line pushed the limits of what a phone’s camera could do, but the Pixel 5 looks like just a refinement, not a leap forward. The rumored specs for the iPhone 12 are similarly boring, particularly for regular photography. Is this setting the stage for real cameras to rise like a phoenix?
It is quite often overlooked when it comes down to creating a stunning photograph, although it has a big impact on the composition and even on the story of an image. We are talking about the right focal length. Avoid one of the biggest traps about focal lengths and find out how to impact your composition with the right lens.
If you want to be the best, you need to refine and perfect your craft. You also need to recognize your errors and eliminate them. Here are two of the most common amateur mistakes that the best photographers never make.
There is a wealth of information for every step of the photographic process, but one area that drastically improved my work some years ago is also one of the areas discussed the least.
In today’s social media, followers have become currency with the most popular Instagrammers wielding a lot of power. It’s no surprise that many unscrupulous users have been tempted into buying their prominence rather than earning it. Fortunately, there are now quick and easy ways to spot those who are trying to cheat their way to social media success.
Manufacturers are determined to keep their systems insular so equipment from other brands is incompatible. However, there is one area where this blinkered approach degenerates into silliness and damages photography: the naming of functions.
When buying a quadcopter, it’s hard to know where to draw the line on what accessories you should be buying with it. It’s already an expensive investment independent of all of the extras you’ll practically need. It’s even more painful to consider how a simple, inexpensive component can keep you from flying successfully. After adding a DJI Phantom 4 Pro + to my lineup, I complied a list of all of the hardware I found most valuable to help you get the greatest return on your investment.
There’s a lot more to the placement of subjects in a frame than many photographers know. Considering left and right can impact how impressive your photos appear to others, and the flip horizontal is a more powerful creative tool than most people give credit to.
Today, cameras are easy to use. The skill of photographers has shifted from learning how to handle a camera to learning how to handle what happens in front of it. Do you have this skill?
Low-light shooting brings its own problems with underexposure, high-ISO noise, and difficulty focusing. But with a few tweaks in Lightroom, you can save those otherwise lost photos and bring them back to life.
One of the most difficult things in editing isn't knowing how to color grade, use radial filters, or Photoshop. It's knowing what a photo needs once you sit down to edit it and these five tips should help guide you in tackling any photo you have.
Would you like to hang up a boring picture on your wall? Properly not. But what can we do to turn boring weather conditions into interesting photographs?
Understanding your fundamentals is, well, fundamental to photography just like it is in anything else. In a previous article, I discussed the basics of aperture and exposure. Now, moving forward I want to address one of the key elements of aperture which is depth of field. All variables in photography have a give and take, and with your aperture as we gain light we also lose depth of field. But aperture is not the only variable the affects depth of field, and in this article we will take a look at those other variables.
When going through hundreds of photos, workflow processing can be a real pain. Tools like Lightroom can help speed up the process, but nothing can compare to the Adobe Photoshop. Here are a few tips that can help you speed up your workflow process considerably.
Instagram's popularity with photographers is incomparable. What is essentially a free portfolio building app disguises itself as a powerful marketing tool to connect with prospective clients, but it suffers at times due to its sheer size and scope. Maybe you're bored of sieving through lame #goals and #inspiration posts, and want to know what mobile friendly alternatives are out there? Well folks, I'm here to tell you.
From the perspective of the film community at large, things have really seemed to be on the up and up lately, almost to a point that it’s annoying. Then, Fuji brought us all back to reality.
Black Friday has returned in the middle of July! That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, Prime Day is upon us. Starting today, Monday, July 16 at 3 p.m. EST (12 p.m. PST), Amazon will have exclusive deals for their Prime members.
In a recent article, I shared a selection of easy-to-avoid photo editing mistakes. Today, it's time for five more. Some of them might sound obvious, while others are more subtle. What they all have in common: they can ruin an otherwise great edit.
Recently, I was flown out for the first time as a photographer, and this is everything I learned from the experience, as well as what I would change for next time.
As a family photographer, I often find myself pushing the limits with how fast I'm moving. Sometimes I'm trying to get a shot before the 2-year-old child decides he hates what is happening, and other times I'm rushing to make sure I accomplish everything the family wanted to get. It doesn't matter what situation I'm in. Anytime I'm rushing, my images suffer. Last year at WPPI while attending one of Jerry Ghionis' classes, he said something that really stuck with me, and helped improve my photography. Ghionis said to slow down.
Film production equipment is notoriously expensive. But some of the most helpful tools can still be had for a song.
Getting to “yes.” It is the story of our lives. Whether pitching a client a new idea or nervously asking the woman you met at the corner store for a date, that sweet little three letter word can be pure music to our ears. But as we progress in life and the choices become more complicated, we realize that the questions themselves aren’t always so black and white. And, sometimes, our three letter friend isn’t always the right answer.
Let's imagine you've lost the drive that houses all of your RAW files for Lightroom. Let's also assume ninjas broke into your off site location and stole your backup. Let's even go so far as to say that hackers erased all of your images backed up in the cloud. If you've made previews there may still be one way to recover your work.
Around 2010, I upgraded computers and was very disappointed that I’d lost my CD of Photoshop. I was even more disappointed when I went to the store and remembered how expensive it was. Begrudgingly, I did re-purchase Photoshop.
We're used to iterative developments in camera lines? Nikon's D800, D810, and D850 all provided incremental improvements. So what is unusual about the latest incarnation of Fuji's X-E lineup, the X-E4?
When it comes to landscape photography, there is always some room for improvement, but without new approaches, you may feel as though you've plateaued. These five tips can help you approach your landscape photography in new ways.
Editing your images can be a love/hate relationship depending on how you feel about post production. Getting tied down in your workflow can be a result of not having the right displays and shortcuts for better visualization of the final result. A few key tricks will lay out your most used tools and displays to get you in and out of Photoshop.
We all know how a histogram has to be read, or at least we should know. It is a handy tool to check if the exposure of the image is correct, or as correct as possible. If the image is not exposed correctly we can read the luminance histogram on our camera LCD screen and know exactly how much the exposure needs to be corrected. Well, perhaps not exactly, but enough to prevent us from guessing.
As a photographer, you inevitably meet a lot of other photographers in the industry. As much as I am not a fan of putting anyone in a box, it is still lots of fun and can make for some great jokes. In this article, I will do just that: list the seven most common photographer types I met.
I pride myself on bringing ideas to life using minimal equipment and whilst working on low budgets. I’m also in the process of setting up my second photography-related business, so I don’t currently have a ton of expendable income to splash on new gear. However, I recently invested in a cheap set of portable lights I found on eBay for a little over $200. Here I showcase a casual menswear editorial I shot using the lights and an inexpensive kit lens, as well as outline what you get for your money, how exactly I used the lights, and how you, too, can shoot professional images without breaking the bank.
Recently I put my eyes under a lot of pressure. There are habits that anybody should abide by, but sometimes it's not always easy to stick with them. What's the worst that can happen?
The day has finally come in which we are no longer bound to the square crop within Instagram. The ability to post horizontal and vertical images has been requested by users since the beginning of the app. In the past, you would have to open your image in another app, add borders, and then export the new image to Instagram. Since this is the process I follow, I know it’s a huge pain. But even with this new cropping ability, I’m sticking with my old ways.
There is something truly sublime about a fresh coat of snow. There are few things in nature that are as visually organic as snow-covered trees.
Image sharpness is, for the most part, a false economy. It is mistakenly believed to be synonymous with image quality; that isn't the case. One major difference is that image quality has a ceiling and once reached (if that's even possible), the image cannot be any better in terms of quality. However, with the sharpness of an image, you can far exceed the perfect amount (again, if there is such a thing), and it begins to cost your image dearly.
After almost eight years of the freelance life, there are some things that I wish I had gotten sooner to make my life easier. Little things that might seem inconsequential at first but have a big impact on my well-being as a photographer. Here are 10 of them.
The secret to running a successful business is organization. Developing an effective workflow that is both simple to understand, and manages your time properly is key when running a studio. Introducing fotoClient, an easy to use workflow and task managing website developed for photographers. It’s new, it's simple, and already, I can’t run my business without it.
Patrick and I decided to create a video series where we compete to see who can come up with the best image based on a set of randomly chosen rules. This week, one of us got to use an iPhone and the other had the entire studio at their disposal.
In 1987, Ronald Reagan was president, Mathias Rust landed his light aircraft in Red Square, and the stock market crashed on October 19, dropping 22% in a single day. Fox also made its primetime debut, the Simpsons aired for the first time, and "Robocop," "Dirty Dancing," and "Good Morning Vietnam" were all released. But what happened in the photographic world?
2019 has just begun, and it is time to wrap up and look back at 2018. Like last year, I have found my favorite photos, and what they have in common are strong compositions.
Most people would search for a new day job after nearly dying in a California wildfire, or after crawling to safety under a barrage of bullets during a Cleveland gang fight while on set. But Steven Holleran isn't most people.
Do you believe that your images are objective representations of reality? You might be mistaken. Here are a few arguments why.
The process of culling is used in every type of photography and is used by professionals and amateurs alike. Culling is simply the process of selecting the best images from a shoot to be edited and delivered to a client. When photographers first start out in the editing world, this process can seem like a waste of time or hard to figure out a best practice. So I’m going to explain why we cull and some of the best ways to do it.
As all wedding and portrait photographers have experienced, things often don't go as planned. Two common scenarios are, 1) timeline delays that cut into your ideal outdoor shooting times and 2) rainy or cloudy weather that covers the sun, making the popular backlit look impossible to achieve with natural light. When either of these two things happens, we at Lin and Jirsa Photography use the following five ways to recreate or fake the sun. We hope these tips will come in handy and allow you to wow your clients despite less than ideal circumstances.
Photographers almost always begin as artists. The camera doesn't draw the interest of the business minded, rather, it draws the passion of the creative. We all entered this pursuit chasing expression of some sort or another. For some, that passion eventually transforms into the longing for a career. The business of photography, however, throws a nasty wrench into the artistic pursuit of photography forcing photographers to overcome several of our most core creative instincts in order to create value that a client is willing to pay for.
We are all unique people, but there are some mistakes that almost every new photographer makes at some point. Here are five common mistakes to watch out for in your own work.
For many of us, photography is a form of art, or at least there is an artistic process behind it. More than that, each of us strive to have a "style" that is an artistic consistency to our work. Photography, however, is quite different from your traditional art-making process. There is as much technical knowledge required as artistic or creative inspiration and thinking. This separates the process into two distinct parts: the shoot and the edit. These two parts are equally important to your identity as a photographer.
