Fstoppers Original Articles

Yes I said it. I can hear the outraged shrieks of equipment addicted photographers, but hear me out. In February, I went to Capetown for a month to please my trigger finger and shot eight stories in the same location using just natural light. South Africa is a renowned location for occidental productions. When it is snowing in Europe and in the States, it is summer season there. During that time the only weather complication can arise from wind with the upside being constant blue skies. During my stay, I got unpredictable rain and clouds. When I was done throwing tantrums at the black skies and banging my head against a wall questioning my decision of spending hard earned bucks to fly to the southern tip of Africa, I capitulated and went with the flow. And learned a lot in the process. Getting out of my comfort zone reminded me about the core of photography: my vision.

There are quite a lot of complaints like: "Canon won't release a 4K video camera." At the end of the day, most photographers and filmmakers publish visuals online, and most viewers watch them on sub-2K mobile devices. Here's how much resolution you truly need.

I don’t use Adobe Lightroom. I use Bridge and Photoshop to retouch my client’s and my own images. Here are some tips and advice on how to use certain tools in Photoshop to get the best out of your work.

I feel like I write a similar article every few months, but this whole theory I have about going and shooting is something that just continues to benefit me day after day. Of course it can be challenging to always go out and shoot or to always even just want to shoot. I know some of us are young, some of us have other jobs, some of us have families or some of us do photography as a hobby...

Haida recently sent me their new M10 Filter holder kit for review. I tried to spice up our review video with an interesting photoshoot and ended up destroying our Nikon D850 in a rogue wave.

Photography is a lot of fun, but it can also be a very lonely journey filled with worry and self-doubt. It is important to surround yourself with other like-minded artists and people who inspire you and that you can learn from.

Turning the work you do on a personal project into something that makes you money isn't a new idea (just ask stock shooters.) However, the forethought required to concept a personally fulfilling shoot or production that will also have the chance to generate some income can be tricky to figure out. This past weekend I had three shoots, and they were all because of one personal project I created a month ago. And I actually planned for this to happen.

Spoiler alert: building a successful Instagram page takes work. Hard work. I'm sorry, but to be incredibly honest with those that have followed me since the beginning it takes more than a snapshot with my iPhone and hitting the post button. Breaking down the hours and even minutes in my day to show you my process and commitment to the platform will give you an insiders look to the mindset you need to be successful on Instagram.

So much of the discourse surrounding the latest cameras is usually about Eye AF: how fast it is, how consistent, is camera X’s better than camera Y’s. There’s a reason for that, and it’s not just because it’s the latest buzzword.

Architectural photography is an exacting discipline. Consequently, small mistakes can make a large impact on your body of work. In this article, I cover five common mistakes that I’ve observed in architectural photography.

Ultra-high-resolution photography has been around for years now but the technical difficulties associated with the creation of gigapixel images tend to limit the artistic output of this type of photography. People find it incredibly fascinating and like to explore every little detail of a scene, but they wouldn't want to put one on their wall as artwork. The aesthetic is often sacrificed in the race for resolution. That’s precisely why a group of photographers joined forces to create a collective called VAST in order to conciliate beauty and high definition.

A few weeks ago I released a video featuring my friend and fellow photographer Blair Bunting in the backseat of an F16. The video blew up on Reddit (#1 in r/Videos making it to the top 5 of the front page), was featured on Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Daily Mail, Telegraph, CNN, ABC World News with Dianne Sawyer, hundreds of other blogs and even was officially recognized by YouTube. But for reasons still unexplained to me, it has been removed from YouTube and there is nothing I can do about it.

Lightroom presets are a great way to create quick and effective edits, but if you’re relatively new to photo editing, it might be useful to know how to make the most of them and when they should be avoided.

How many pixels do you need in an image? Sounds a simple enough question and the inexorable megapixel race doesn't seem to have ended, in much the same way that the PC processor race marched on unabated for several decades.

In August 2015, I quit all working commitments and took the leap in to full-time photographer. In March 2016, I wrote an article of advice about being a photographer I wish I'd known earlier after I began to scrutinize my performance under the new, professional microscope. Well, time has elapsed, shutters have shut over 100,000 times, and more things have been learned. My photography business has grown in this interim and I found myself thinking about this aforementioned article again. Here are seven of the most important things I have learnt about being a professional photographer that I wish I'd known earlier.

Have you missed all of the drama surrounding Tony Northrup and his ISO claims? Let's take one final look.

There are plenty of ways to get better images, we’ve all seen articles on which new camera to purchase, which new laptop will improve your editing, which courses to purchase, or where in the world you can visit to get stunning images. But what about some truly effective ways to improve your ability to get the shot without spending a penny?

Air travel is a fact of life for jobbing amateur and professional photographers alike. At some point you need to stuff your gear in a bag and get on a plane. Here are my top 5 rules for air travel.

It seems like the whole world (or at least the photographic world) is buzzing about the new Osmo Pocket 3 from drone maker DJI. It's a portable, full featured kit for video makers, YouTube creatives, and even regular consumers who want to easily capture high quality 4K video with a gimbal mounted camera.

A major update is now available for Creatic, the free iPhone photo editing app. In Creatic 2.0, users now have access to many more editing tools, a preset manager, live filter camera, and a newly designed discover tab for browsing and interacting with the community. After using it for a few days, I found that there’s actually a surprising amount on editing control in this app not found elsewhere.

Are your handheld landscape photography photos never quite sharp? Do you struggle with what camera settings to use once you start trying to handhold the camera for your photos? I have five tips to help maximize your success with handheld landscape photography.

When it comes to boudoir photography, everyone has their own opinion as to what constitutes as a boudoir session. It is soft and romantic? Is it edgy and seductive? Is it only meant to be seen by the clients partner? Or is it an expression of the client finding comfort in their own sexuality?

The highly-anticipated Mavic Air finally landed at Fstoppers a few days ago. This tiny quadcopter comes with an impressive set of features but everything is not perfect. Here is short preview of what I like and dislike about this drone.

We all wish we could make money doing photography, but one macro specialist found a way to have his photography made into money. Twenty Canadian dollars, to be exact.

In the days when film reigned, most people thought that once you took a photo, the image was completed. They thought that clicking the shutter was the end of the process (They obviously didn’t know much about darkroom manipulation). But, as photographers know, that “click” is only a small part of the photographic process. The rest lies in forethought before taking the image, and the way in which it’s processed after it’s taken.

Just a couple months ago Patrick and I made the last minute decision to move to Puerto Rico. We've rented a giant house to live and work in and we will be sharing the process of turning this empty home into the new Fstoppers Studio.

I'm not a strong supporter of business cards nowadays. It's not because they don't do any good, but because most people are throwing them in the trash bin without even visiting your website and seeing what you do. Despite of that it's good to have some in your pocket. Here is my solution to using a special type of business cards that your potential clients may not throw away.

Something that happened last week really hit home for me. Everyone probably already has heard, as it has been reported by almost every single news agency in the world; Australian photographer Brett Costello was robbed of $40,000 of camera gear in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil last week while in town to cover the Olympics. However, this article isn't about him specifically.

I stepped into photography world over 10 years ago and was lucky enough to have a wide variety of clients from different parts of the world. This made it essential for me to be flexible while negotiating or taking jobs despite cultural differences, from Armenia to U.S., from Mauritius to South Africa, Singapore, various European countries, and more. Usually you will get hired based on your portfolio, but sometimes there are clients who don’t understand much about photography. This is where the danger is. Everyone wants to get top results for the money they spend by hiring you, but what is considered the best for such clients?

Everyone has a different feeling on collaboration. I feel that it's a very good thing for a new photographer, but I also feel it can be greatly misused or misrepresented. I used a model/photographer finding website to gain skills and experience via collaboration, and I feel it was a shortcut to what would otherwise have been years of work.

Nowadays, it seems that every YouTube photography celebrity has a batch of presets that they want you to buy. This begs the question: is it worth handing over your hard-earned cash when you might be better off investing your time rather than your money?

In the six years that I've been using Lightroom, I've never paid for a preset. In the past, I've downloaded a few free packs, clicked laboriously through every preset and decided that they were all useless: blunt tools creating over-edited results and deploying settings that I could easily have achieved myself had I...

Polarizing filters are one of the last camera filters that cannot be replicated by software. But is a polarizing filter better to reduce haze in landscapes than Adobe Lightroom's Dehaze tool?

In last week’s article, I discussed three mistakes to avoid when building a career as a photographer or filmmaker. Today, let’s look into three broader concepts that you might want to lean into.

Comet Neowise is probably going to be the most positive event of 2020, so here is how I immortalized this beautiful phenomenon.

There are many ways to improve as a photographer, but not all ways are created equally. One of the most effective and well-documented methods for improving at any skill is also one not undertaken by most photographers.

PRO EDU recently released a five-part video series on their YouTube Channel dedicated to RAID. RAID, for those of you new to the term, refers to a system of file storage that can write a copy of everything you save to a separate hard drive so that you have two copies of everything you save. The benefit here is that if your hard drive fails, you don't lose all of your data and you have an identical copy ready to roll. In this video series, Gary Martin of PRO EDU explains everything you need to know about RAID systems to get started on your first RAID setup.

Packing for a shoot in your town can be a pain, but packing for an extended shoot in another country brings a whole new set of complications into consideration. Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of extended trips for my personal project “Tattoos of Asia.” Over the few trips that I’ve done, I’ve managed to pare down my kit to what I absolutely need. It has been a long process, but I’ve learned quite a bit, and I’d like to share that with you as I prepare my kit for my upcoming India trip.

Just in time for 2016, the FAA released a registration system and will require anyone currently operating unmanned aerial systems (UAS), otherwise known as "drones," to register by February 19 of this year. Although the FAA's legal authority over this issue is questionable and although this applies to anyone flying drones only within certain weight guidelines for hobby or recreational use outdoors, there are a number of reasons you should register in the next 10 days, even if these particular circumstances do not apply to you.

Let's take a step back and talk about the growing popularity of the processed photograph. Apart from some rather technical post-processing jibber-jabber, we’ll dabble in philosophy, astronomy, and the evolution of the human species. We will meet strange creatures along the way that see many more colors than we do, as we conclude this with a moral question in photography.

Postproduction is often so integral to a photographer's style that many photographers wouldn't dream of allowing their raw files to be seen by clients because they feel that their editing process is what makes the photo look like "their work." While I find postproduction just as important as any photographer, the unfortunate truth is that spending too much time in Lightroom or Photoshop might actually be damaging your business.

In my last article on flash photography, I gave you a few simple techniques for keeping your flash looking natural and allowing it to blend in with your existing light without calling attention to itself. This time around, we're going to do exactly the opposite, and look at how varying the amount of ambient light in a photograph can affect the way your flash appears and how this can be used for dramatic effect.

Great photographers are not born, they are developed. The habits we form as beginners play a huge role in that development overall.

I’ve just watched one of the best fashion shorts I’ve seen in months. It combines gorgeous color, cinematography, camera movement and Hitchcock-styled, film noir sensibility beautifully. Interestingly, after speaking to one of the directors, regardless of budget or what we’re shooting, there are real gems to be gleaned from their experiences. Read on for the full scoop.

There are many paths in professional photography. I have gone down the route of commercial photography, and whilst I am nowhere near where I want to be in professionally, I thought I’d share a few points that can go a long way to making it as a professional commercial photographer.

In the retouching world, graphics tablets are pretty much a standard. I don’t know of many retouchers that only use their mouse to get the job done. Graphics tablets allow for a more precise, and thus refined, work. They also used to cost a fair amount of money, but that was until Huion came along.

Right after the Canon EOS R5 was released, I received one from Canon for a review. I liked the camera enough to make a gradual switch from the EOS 5D Mark IV. Now, after three years, I would like to share my long-term experience and the things that could or should be improved in the next iteration.

When we hear about eye whitening our thoughts immediately turn to disturbing cases of retouching gone bad where subjects look more like dolls than humans. While YouTube is littered with videos on the subject, a good chunk of them take a brute force approach to the problem. They either crank up the luminosity or reduce the saturation; both of which will produce unnatural and sometimes frightening results.

Breathing new life into your studio space shoot after shoot doesn't have to be difficult and it doesn't have to be expensive. With just a few simple DIY tricks, it's actually pretty easy to transform a plain white studio space into a stunning set.

There are quite a few different photography communities here online where you can display your work, create a portfolio, and even enter photography contests. Is it really necessary to join all of them? Managing portfolio accounts across multiple platforms can be quite a chore, especially if you want to keep them all current.