Recent Opinion Articles

A Missed Opportunity or the Dawn of a New Age? Nikon's NX MobileAir App

Transferring images from the camera to the customer is a complex process that — depending upon your genre — will require a greater or lesser number of intermediate steps. Irrespective of who you are delivering to, you need to get photos off your camera, and this is where the fun and games start. Nikon has released NX MobileAir as another solution to fix the problem. Has it missed a beat or taken a bold step forward?

5 Not-So-Easy Upgrades DSLR Makers Could Make That Would Make This Photographer Very Happy

DSLR makers have developed a rather interesting propensity to focus their R&D budgets on creating the fanciest, most marketable sensors possible. A camera, however, isn't just limited to the scope of its sensor. There are so many other upgrades that could be made that have nothing to do with megapixel numbers. Below are a few straight out of my dream list that likely would be pretty difficult to make work.

The Great Tragedy of Photography and Social Media

Photography has always existed in multiple spheres - as an artistic medium, a vehicle for documenting history, a channel for self-expression, a tool for surveillance, and a form of casual communication. With the meteoric rise of social media in the 21st century, however, the ways in which photos are produced, consumed, and understood have profoundly changed. While social media offers photographers unparalleled opportunities for visibility, it has also homogenized photographic styles, marginalized minority voices, and constrained creative freedom.

The Ethics of Street Photography

Street photography is one of the most popular genres of photography, both for professional and amateur photographers. Done well, it can produce art that not only tells a story about a particular moment in time but also provides us with a window onto the human condition. Questions have been asked, however, about the ethics of street photography, and whether photographers ought to be doing it at all.

Clever Marketing - 4 Unconventional Ways To Better Market Yourself For Free

When teaching workshops and talking to other photographers, I’m constantly asked how I market myself to gain more exposure and business. While there are no surefire ways to insure your success when it comes to marketing, I have found four really unconventional ways to better market myself.

A Real-World Test of the New iMac Pro: Is It Worth the Money?

New and shiny gear from Apple is always good looking and always sounding good on paper. We've seen lots of paid reviews on various products of theirs and lots of boring laboratory benchmarks showing soulless numbers we had to believe in. How about ditching all that and making a real-world test in workflows that demand a good amount of hardware resources? You guessed it: video processing. The guys from cinema5D got an iMac Pro and decided to see if it could get the work done better than what they already had.

Mormonism And Homosexuality: The Book Of Mormon Missionary Positions  [NSFW]

First, let me start off by saying that I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Yes, I am Mormon. When a fellow Fstopper writer posted this piece in our writer's group at first I was saddened to see the material within the link, but then I took a step back and really processed what this series of photographs meant. The photographs depict a pair of Mormon missionaries in various sexual positions. The photographs may be quite simple, but the message is not. Warning: Some of these photographs might be offensive to some readers.

Affinity Photo: First Impressions and a Call to Action

It's already been a couple weeks since Serif announced the release of the Affinity Photo beta. I, along with literally thousands of others, have downloaded the program and started putting it through its paces, trying to fit it into my own personal workflow. In this little first impressions review I'll focus on Affinity Photo as a raw converter, a basic retouching platform, and put it up against the big dogs: Affinity versus Lightroom, and Affinity versus Photoshop.

Is the Fujifilm GFX 100S Too Much for Weddings? 

I’ll admit I was seduced by digital medium format, with its ridiculous resolution and that “medium format look.” It has been two years of full-time use. Do I still think it was worth it? Better yet, should you drop $10K+ for a medium format digital camera kit?

Is the Next Ansel Adams Going to Be a NVIDIA GPU?

While this view of the Tetons and Snake River, as made famous by Ansel Adam’s iconic photo, doesn’t have great resolution, there’s a reason for that. One of the biggest changes to photography might start with landscape photos just like this, only it doesn’t involve hiking or even camera gear. Want to know what it is?

How Much Camera Do You Need for Your Photography?

How much camera do you need? No, for once I'm not talking about how many cameras. Though my inadvertent collection is growing and for every vintage camera that I sell or give away, it seems two new ones await. Gear Acquisition Syndrome (known also by the unfortunate acronym of GAS) is real and many are afflicted. Don't make fun of us. We're fellow humans. We suffer. Ok. Maybe not that much. I'm wondering instead about how much camera you need. How big, how rugged, how professional-looking does it have to be?

How Camera Companies Are Doing It All Wrong, and How They Could Fix It

Patrick Hall shared some opinions about what features our professional DSLRs absolutely should have, but don’t, going into 2015. And he was right. But as happy as having those features would make us, not one or even all of them would allow any single company to become the next Apple or Google of the photography world. However, there’s something bigger that no one is thinking about — or at least there aren’t any signs of it. Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Phase One, Hasselblad; no one seems to be doing what it would really take.

It's Not Easy Being Brown — and a Photographer

Being a photographer with a “real” camera always carries risk. People well within their rights to photograph in public are harassed online all the time. I’d argue, though, that being a brown person in the United States adds an extra layer of risk that other photographers don’t face, namely fears that you’re a terrorist taking photographs to plan for a future attack.

Is The Nikon D600 Priced Too High For Its Features?

If there was one thing that people are unanimously saying about Nikon's new D600 "budget" full frame camera, it's that the price is entirely too high. No matter which blog you read, it seems everyone cannot believe the MSRP of $2,099.95. But are these claims valid? Does Nikon's smallest full frame DSLR really lack the features that professionals desire? In the full post I'll tell you why I just bought two of these cameras and why the price seems just right.

Review: The BenQ SW2700PT Is a Perfect Monitor for Photo Editing

The BenQ SW2700PT monitor is a hard sell on paper to those that only look at pixel count. At just over $600, it teeters on the edge of premium monitor territory, but you’ll soon see why it gets a strong recommendation here. Hint: it's not about the pixels.

Case Study: How & Why Our Best Clients Choose Us

Before my trip to Russia in August I wrote about what we should keep in mind when choosing our clients. While in Moscow, I photographed my own best clients and I thought it would be very interesting to find out how we, photographers, get chosen too.

Needless to say, there are many factors that influence relationships between creative professionals and those who hire them. But I thought that interviewing my own clients could be a great case study and we all could learn something from their answers.

Five Reasons Why You’ll Never Earn Good Money as a Photographer

The annual income of the typical photographer in the U.S. is 20 percent less than the national average. There are both good and bad reasons why photographers don't earn a decent wage and you might want to give these five reasons some thought if you want to survive as a creative image-maker in the modern world.

Hasselblad H6D 400c Versus Fujifilm GFX 100: The Best Medium Format Camera

Fujifilm has signlehandedly made medium format more accessible now than ever. Cameras such as the Fujifilm GFX 100S offer a whopping 100 megapixels worth of resolution for less than $6,000. With features such as in-body image stabilization and phase detect autofocus from the sensor, Fujifilm has made it really difficult to compete in the medium format segment.

Unique Beauty - Lighting Out Of The Box

Throughout my career so far I have failed over and over again. Although it’s the successes that I'm remembered and known for, it’s the failures that are always the catalyst. At the end of the day, the key to success lies in failure. This improvisational beauty shoot was only a success because I set myself up to fail.

Wedding Photographer Susan Stripling Writes Open Letter Tackling Industry Sexism

Award-winning Wedding Photographer Susan Stripling recently shared an open letter she wrote dealing with sexism in the photography industry. In the letter, she shares her experiences with male peers, wedding guests, employees at camera stores, and everyone in between who makes gender an issue in a field where sex shouldn't matter.

Why You Should Consider Buying an Old Film Camera

Film is enjoying a resurgence right now, and yet, in an age of ever-burgeoning megapixel counts and clinically sharp lenses, it can seem a bit strange to some to purchase an old film camera whose technical image quality could not dream of competing with modern equipment. And yet, that is exactly what you should do, as one photographer argues in this interesting video essay.

Sometimes, Photography Sucks

Photography is a fun, creative field, where we get away from the tedium and soul-sucking nature of the 9-5 to chase our dreams, to be creative, to be our own bosses. It's amazing, right? Meh, sometimes. Sometimes, it sucks.

Just Go Shoot Photos

After multiple attempts to capture sunrise or sunset and not getting the conditions I wanted, I decided I was going to take photos no matter what the conditions were, forcing myself out of my comfort zone and pushing myself to be a better photographer.

Photographers: How to Keep Going When You're Ready to Give Up

If you’ve made the transition, or are planning on making the transition from photography as a hobby to photography as a job, you’ll invariably come to a point where you’ll just want to throw your hands in the air and give up. These bouts of self-doubt and frustration will likely occur many times and seem to appear not only during your lows but even at the highs. These feelings are normal, and it is those that rise above them time and again that end up successful.