Fstoppers Original Articles

Two 10-stop filters put through their paces side by side. Both advertise they do the same thing but are they really the same? In short, yes and no, but mostly no. You'll be interested in the reasons why.

Since I began photographing events, I've been paying close attention to the amount of images I've shot per hour. Why should you? Because overshooting creates problems.

As you can imagine I spend a lot of time in Photoshop. And when you spend as much time in Photoshop as I do, you want to work as fast and efficiently as you can. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Knowing keyboard shortcuts is crucial in creating a faster more efficient post-production workflow.

There is a saying that zoom lenses can make you a lazy photographer. And that might be true if you use them the wrong way.

I recently earned my Remote Pilot Certification, which allows me to fly a small UAS (drone) for paid photo and video work in the USA, under the FAA’s Part 107 rule. With no background in aviation, passing the test was no easy feat for me. If you’re considering taking the test yourself, read about my experiences to make sure you’re well prepared.

Takashi Aizu is based in Japan and makes mouthwatering time-lapses of his baking. He sets up his iPhone 6s, and documents the process and reaction of the specific dough to become breads, croissants, or baguettes. We often take the beauty of the croissant we get at Starbucks for granted, but here we can actually see how much knowledge, patience, and effort goes into baking and what the process looks like when you get it fresh and hot out of the oven. It’s a simple process concept, but he has over 25,000 followers on Instagram, and his baking is obviously rated as very good in Japan.

The primary objective for boudoir photographers is to empower their subjects, encouraging them to embrace their unique beauty and sensuality. Photographers can highlight the individual's strengths and showcase their personality through careful posing, lighting, and composition, creating a personalized and intimate experience.

Today, I state the obvious. But sometimes even the most obvious things can be easy to forget.

The votes are in, and you've helped to choose our Fstoppers Photographer of the Year! We've also randomly selected one reader who voted to receive a free Fstoppers tutorial of their choice!

As you progress in landscape photography, you might find yourself wondering how others get everything in focus within their images. In this article series and video, I'll go over how to focus stack while in the field and what to do once you sit down to process your images.

This year has been tough in every aspect, no question about it. Has your love for photography also suffered through this?

As you all know, we are currently pushing ourselves here at Fstoppers HQ to produce 30 videos for the month of January. Patrick Hall didn't want me to miss out on the fun, so he challenged me to recolor an image. Not an old black and white one, but an image he took with our new Nikon D850. Want to give it a try too? You could win a free tutorial if you've got what it takes to colorize an image.

As we near the end of another difficult year, we look forward to new beginnings. What will you be doing to ensure that you grow and improve as a photographer in 2022? Here are five ways you can guarantee you are moving in the right direction.

Black Friday sales are here and we at Fstoppers want to keep the photography community informed of noteworthy deals. Some of these savings are only available for a very limited timeframe, so if there's something that piques your interest, make sure to act on it now!

I recently spent three days in Ensenada shooting with the talented TEMPT Media crew during the Baja 1000. On the second night while unwinding at our Airbnb, in walks a guy with three beefy rigs with all the lenses wrapped in gaff tape, underneath what would appear to be a layer of dust that most normal human beings wouldn’t subject their Canon 1DXs to.

Recently, I got into a discussion with a guy on social media about one of my photos. He claimed it was fake. I had manipulated the image by adding birds, he said. The incident got me thinking about how easy it is nowadays to change an image completely. How do you prove your image shows the reality?

Do your photos get noticed? Do you have a sizeable Instagram following? If you answered yes to those, you are probably in for a shock.

When we start out as photographers, it can be a little underwhelming, I mean, we all have this idea of what we're capable of and yet we start out working on small jobs (often) with low budgets. Assisting helps you keep your enthusiasm while rising up through the ranks of experience and gives you access to productions possibly decades away from your current skill set.

Smoke grenades: foul smelling, clothes staining, and a primary tool for celebrating the birth of our nation. Recently, while in Austin Texas, I was introduced to a model, Valerie who suggested we use smoke bombs during the shoot. I was immediately intrigued at the creative possibilities...

One of the most useful lenses any photographer can own is an ultra wide-angle zoom lens. One of my favorite zooms in this category is the Tamron 15-30mm f/2.8 lens. Tamron recently released the upgraded G2 version of their already great SP model and I wanted to see if this redesigned lens was worth the upgrade.

For my inaugural post on Fstoppers, I want to run down of a few of the apps that my studio manager and I use almost daily to help manage the studio and keep things running smoothly. Many of these you’ve probably heard of, others may be new to you. The list is actually endless, but I’ve narrowed it down to these nine to get us started:

"If you’re not on Instagram, you don’t exist." How many times have you heard a statement to that affect? I recently had a discussion with a fellow professional photographer about the value of Instagram. In this article, I’ll explore our conclusions.

Almost every video you see online holds an element of sound production made up of music and sound effects. For us to produce a quality body of work, we need to know where to look. I’ve recently started focusing more on producing, shooting, and editing and wanted to share this list I created where you can find awesome music for your projects.

With every new camera, new options and enhanced features are introduced, sometimes small and perhaps even insignificant, sometimes groundbreaking. The end result is never perfect, but what if you could design one yourself?

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 2021, 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.

Are some types of landscape photography inevitably doomed to failure? If they proceed from a desire to depict what Immanuel Kant referred to as "the sublime", then this may well be the case.

Capture One is one of those programs that, once learned, is hard to do without, but due to the common experience of learning post-processing software within an Adobe ecosystem, anything different like Capture One can appear less intuitive or more challenging, even if it isn’t.

I don't know about you, but many of us, your humble author included, had a pretty horrific upgrade to Big Sur, the latest and apparently, not the greatest OS from Apple.

Whether we admit it or not, we are living in the best era for photographers as the constant technological improvement undeniably uplifts the entire ecosystem, making the entire image-making process easier. Everything from capturing the moment to medium output can now be made within seconds. And with convenience comes the expectation to scratch an itch you never knew existed. One of them will be surrounding the myth of resolution. Specifically, having more resolution will somehow magically improve the quality of your images.

Want to easily create a 3D model from a set of photos? Find out how to do it in this tutorial.

Have you heard of "Star Wars"? John Oliver? Maybe Tom Hanks? Still no? What about Tom Brady? Perhaps you’ve heard of one of the other hundreds of stars Jesse Dittmar has photographed.

We've all seen the Instagram feeds where people post a daily painting, photo or post that displays their art. I've attempted it and lasted about a month before I missed a day or didn't have the time to post. As inspiration I follow the people who make it though, like the woman who made a paintings for ants and posted them to Instagram every day, and the guy who made a movie poster every day for a year, and then the daily vloggers like Casey Neistat who once posted a video once a day. The determination is what inspires me the most, and seeing the development of that person's skills and the following grow and the success coming from that.

For some people, the magnitude of this pandemic doesn't seem all too real. Unfortunately, these photos prove otherwise.

As you are just beginning to learn photography, finding new subjects and techniques is as simple as picking up a camera. But as your career and art form progress, sometimes it takes a bit of positive action to keep the flame alive.

I recently heard about three Puerto Rican photographers who would go out and shoot casually as friends. But, what made them unique was that these three photographers specialized in three completely different genres of photography.

Well, technically it's economics but let’s be honest, proclaiming to the world “It’s Economics!” just doesn't pack quite as big of a punch. You probably haven’t heard that competition is good for business since (if I had to guess) your high school economics class, but most of us probably weren’t paying attention anyway. No offense Mr. Holt… The whole idea that competition increases your business is a super backward concept but when you break it down, it actually makes a lot of sense. As a photographer, I am going to explain this as it pertains to the photography, but the whole idea works for any industry out there.

Financial results are one thing and pundit commentary another; however, there is nothing like hearing it directly from the horse's mouth. So, how does Nikon think they are doing? Hear what they've got to say.

Ever felt bad for photographing an iconic location? I have been part of the landscape photography community for some years now and I have heard many different opinions; some very strong and even demeaning, such as “photographing iconic locations makes you a bad photographer”.

As photographers and people in the visual media industry, we need to make our work accessible across the platforms we and the people who like photographs (everyone) browse and use on a daily basis. We need to be marketing-orientated to take our careers and what we do to the next level, whether the next level is to shoot more weddings, booking more fashion gigs, or being the go-to person for professional portraits.

Landscape photography is not my thing. I use it to exercise the fundamentals and have something to do when I need a break from the family on camping trips, but that's the extent of it for me personally. But I feel for landscape photographers. It's a crowded field in an already crowded profession. It's hard to make your images not look like everyone else's, especially when everyone has access to the same subject matter you do.

With 2018 being the year of mirrorless, it is tempting for many of us to fall into the trap of trying to spend our way to good photography rather than using our own talents. And while having appropriate gear is essential to the trade, it’s equally important to think twice before sacrificing your business for the latest trends.

The film versus digital debate has raged on for over a decade now. Digital cameras are so capable that it seems silly for anyone to go back to an archaic medium like film. Film is slow, expensive (sort of), lacks many game-changing features found in today's digital cameras, and has lower resolution (sort of). But it has some qualities to it that make it an entirely viable medium for working photographers and enthusiasts alike. One of which that I firmly believe in is that it will make you a better photographer.

Creativity is a challenge for all of us. This second article looks at five more attributes that the most successful creatives have. It includes the one most important trait of all.

Headshot photography has been making major headlines recently. A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal interviewed headshot guru Peter Hurley about the importance of a professional headshot in a quickly changing business landscape (The Perfect Professional Headshot Is Worth $1,000, and Maybe Even a Job).

GoPro has just launched the GoPro MAX, a 360 camera that’s quite difficult to sum up in a few words. Videographer Claudiu Voicu and I had the opportunity to play with it for a few days last week, and even though we ended up destroying it by accidentally dropping it off a roof, first impressions are that it is a lot of fun, especially for content creators seeking to create interesting footage on the fly.

If you haven't been paying attention to the topic of Net Neutrality, now is the time to jump on the bandwagon. To save the long explanation, take a quick visit to Battle for the Net for more info on what exactly is going on and how to add your name to the growing list of independents everywhere in support of Net Neutrality. To see the long list of companies valiantly taking this stand in support of Net Neutrality, check out their post.

So, you want to change the color of something specific in a photo and you don't have Photoshop? Here's how to do it in ACDSee's Photo Studio.

Photography as an art form is all about creating something unique and original. Photographers will travel around the world and trek mile after mile to capture that secluded hidden waterfall or that secret cliff that overlooks a valley. Then they post their amazing image to the internet and now every other photographer wants to shoot that location. One by one, photographers seek out these locations in an effort to put their own artistic spin on the area. Eventually thousands of images are captured of a single location, some of them good and some of them bad, but at what point is the location no longer worth shooting?

You take out your camera, shoot a photo and like it. After a little post-processing you print two copies and send one to a friend. In a Mission Impossible Machiavellian twist, the photo self-destructs once they open it and, at the same time, so does yours.

If you haven't seen the latest episode of Critique the Community, make sure to check out the new surprise we've added to the series. As an immediate follow up, we're inviting the community to submit their landscape images now for our next round of critique. Make sure to follow the submission rules below to keep your image eligible to be chosen. Submissions will remain open until this Wednesday, January 17, at midnight.