Although everyone has a different "favorite" lens, the 24-70mm 2.8 lens usually ends up being used the most. It's standard zoom range and fast 2.8 aperture makes it usable for almost any type of photography. Today, I'm comparing the three most popular 24-70mm lenses to determine which one is best.

So if for some reason you've still never tried a graphical tablet for your image retouching or digital illustrations, seriously stop waiting around. Worst case scenario is that you find that you really don't like it so you turn around and sell it. Best case, you revolutionize your retouching habits; pretty much a no-brainer. You can pick up used tablets online at huge discounts or you can buy new if that's your thing. For the sake of retouching, just try one out. Give it about a week if it's your first time with a tablet. Here is an awesome video with some tips and tricks you can apply to get you flowing right out of the gate.

In this series, I attempt to identify the key professional virtues I have found to be the most important in building my own career, as well as identifying traits of other successful photographers and business leaders that are most key to their success. Today’s virtue: adaptability.

Be honest: when was the last time you drooled over the latest piece of gear? If you're like most of us, it was probably more recently than you'd care to admit. And while there has been a lot said on the subject, I think this rant really cuts to the heart of the matter.

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.

In a lot of genres, you have to shoot quickly and efficiently, lest you'll possibly miss an important shot. In other genres and situations, being in too much of a rush can be what actually causes you to miss the shot or come home with less-than-stellar results. This great video examines the idea of patience.

Fashion Photographer Alexi Lubomirski recently sat down with Kyle Hagler, president of NEXT models, for an intimate and candid chat about the modeling industry and what photographers can do to succeed. Hagler offered an array of fantastic advice that almost any photographer can draw on. Solely focusing on abstract aspects of what makes a great photographer, he is able to provide advice that resonates in a unique way.

Often when retouching skin we want to clone away high contrast blemishes without also cloning the texture surrounding it. Advanced techniques such as using frequency separation can be a great help to make this sort of thing easier by separating detail from broader tones. One often overlooked technique that does a great job of preserving mid-tone detail while cloning is to leverage the power of blend modes to target only bright tones or dark tones when cloning.

Fstoppers Analog Review is a quick throw down on some of photography’s greatest equipment. In a world where we are constantly defined by the rapid progression of technology, these posts are intended to remind us about our love for the fundamentality of capturing life in silver and light. Each week we’ll review another piece of pivotal photography equipment, discuss the history, review its capabilities, and share our results! This review will go to the fabulous Nikonos V, a waterproof 35mm camera with a history as deep as diving itself. This handy sidekick will blow you away with its capability!

We all like to get results and to know that our efforts have not been for naught. Sometimes, though, getting that killer shot is just not in the cards, often because of forces outside our control, which is when it's important to remember how effort and persistence will eventually pay off.

Phase One announced a couple of new medium-format digital backs this year, the Trichromatic and the Achromatic. The latter is available for a whopping $63,000 in a kit with the XF body, and for that price it only shoots in black and white. At least that’s the way many seem to consider it. However, it’s much more than that. It captures black and white images like no other camera, and for the photographers that like black and white shooting film, this gorgeous beast offers a very similar workflow. See how it works and performs in this video.

I'm just starting to look into adding drone photography to my commercial photography services, so I've been trying to learn as much as I can about it when I have the time. Quick videos like this one usually teach me a thing or two, and they don't take long to watch. I'm all about learning something new while eating breakfast, editing photos, or even folding socks.

Although I now work in the commercial world, my passion started with documentary photography. I was, and still am, obsessed with Annie Leibowitz’s work with the Rolling Stones and I loved William Egglestone’s color observations of the mundane world he found himself in. When I find a free day, there is nothing that I enjoy more than walking out with my camera to document someone else's life. However, unlike the plethora of studio lighting tutorials available, there seems to be a real lack of articles on documentary photography. Here are six tips on how to improve your images.

The Hasselblad X1D-50c is one of the more recent of the more affordable medium-format digital cameras to come out. And it sports Sony’s 50-megapixel CMOS sensor that has made these cameras much more affordable than their predecessors — all in a body that is by no small margin the most compact and portable in its class. The only question is can it perform?

One of the coolest things you can do with Photoshop is get rid of stuff you don't want in the picture fairly easily in most situations. If you're relatively new to the app, this helpful video will show you two such tools for doing that: the Healing Brush and Spot Healing Brush.

When creating videos, sometimes finding that perfect song, music score, or track takes a while. Then when you place it together and the music isn’t long enough, manually cutting and extending the track can take some time. What if I told you there’s an easy and automated way to extend your selected track to any length.

Perhaps a better question to ask is: “Why am I a photographer?” In recent months, I feel like I've completely lost touch with why I became a photographer. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love what I do, but sometimes I forget why. When I was first starting out as a photographer and all of my shoots were “just for fun,” it was easy to see why I enjoyed it. After all, there were no consequences if I screwed something up, and I looked at photography as more of an escape from reality than a job.

Photography is, by its nature, an interruptive thing: it freezes a moment in time, and in doing so, it can either subvert the dynamic nature of time and all that moves in it or (if done correctly) can enhance it. This helpful video shows you one element you can add to your images to breathe dynamic nature into a still medium.

If you do this long enough, you're going to be asked to do work by friends, and they're going to want a discount or simply not value what your services are worth. Here's how to handle that potentially awkward situation.

When it comes to filmmaking, a really popular look is the cinematic look. This is something that can be really difficult to perfect especially when you're first starting out in the industry. Fortunately, Armando Ferreira, a YouTuber and filmmaker has provided some techniques that are relatively easy to implement. The great thing about the techniques outlined in this video is that they're either completely free to do or may only cost a small amount, making them very viable. Personally, what I love about the techniques Ferreira discusses is that they're so simple to do and even a complete beginner shouldn't find them too difficult.

A photojournalist is often called upon to photograph a scene at a moment’s notice. It can be a car accident one day, a music festival, the next and a protest the day after. With that in mind, there are two useful lenses that every photojournalist should carry in their bag to cover such a diverse range of photographic opportunities.

When you're creating a composite image, it's a game of balancing and matching a ton of parameters to make the different elements convincingly look as if they all originated in the same frame. This helpful tutorial will show you some of the most important aspects you need to have mastered to create your best composite work.

Industry icons like Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz often look to us plebs like they’ve been blessed by the photography gods with talent the rest of us can only dream about, yet their success stories often include incessant practice, unwavering determination, apprenticeships, and lucky breaks. What separates those of us at the bottom from the select few at the top? And, if you want to be front and center stage, how do you get there?

One of the coolest parts about being a photographer or videographer is that you often get to rub elbows or work with people you might not ever meet otherwise. Here's how to increase your chances of getting a response (and a positive one at that) from those celebrities when you reach out to them.