Fstoppers Originals

Exclusive articles and expert opinions written by Fstoppers’ talented team of creative professionals. Here we cover everything from the latest photographic techniques to advice on running a successful photography business, to first hand accounts of working in the photography industry.

Behind the Shot: How Do You Even Go About Photographing Radio Telescopes Under the Milky Way?

How do you photograph something like this? Two enormous radio telescopes, the Milky Way rising between them, and a foreground that actually has detail instead of disappearing into blackness. The answer involves a little planning, some tricks to reduce noise, a way to light the radio telescopes, and access to one of the most extraordinary locations in California.

Why Fujifilm Survived the Digital Apocalypse That Killed Kodak

Walk into a department store in Tokyo and you can buy an anti-aging skin cream made by a camera company. It is called Astalift, and the collagen and antioxidant science inside the bottle came straight out of the labs that once kept your photographic prints from yellowing.

Hundreds of Photo Tips

Today is the last day you can get access to some of the best educational content in photography this year. Yes, it comes with a price tag but the value is pretty insane. 

 

Woodland Photography Is Hard, But Does It Have to Be?

Woodland photography is something I have always found difficult. I am primarily a seascape photographer, and while I photograph other types of landscapes, the coast is where I feel most comfortable. When I arrive at a coastal location, I can usually start looking for the elements that might make up the photograph.

The Psychology of Hating Photos of Yourself, Explained by the Mirror Problem

You have felt it a hundred times. A friend snaps a candid, hands you the phone, and the person on the screen is a stranger who happens to be wearing your clothes. The nose is wrong. The smile is crooked. You look tired, or lopsided, or somehow older than the face you saw in the bathroom mirror twenty minutes ago. Everyone else in the frame looks fine. Only you look off. 

Feeling Stuck? Here's How to Jumpstart Your Creativity in Photography

Have you felt burned out? Stuck? Lacked motivation? Had a fear of failure or felt silly? I will discuss several approaches for creating opportunities for creativity to flourish. You never know, but for some, this might be one of the most influential photography articles they ever read.

 

The Strange Story of the Kodak Disc, the Worst Camera Kodak Ever Shipped

In 1982, Kodak sold roughly 8 million disc cameras in a single year, and its president told shareholders the disc system would be "the new engine that will drive this industry forward." Inside those flat little bodies sat a genuine engineering triumph, including the first mass-produced molded glass aspheric lens element the camera industry had ever seen.

Night Photography: Turn Everyday Places Into Art

We have all driven past the same location a hundred times during the day and never once pulled over to reach for the camera: the gas station, the empty parking lots, a small business on Main Street. Travel through there at night, and these locations stop us in our tracks. Daylight documents a place; night light transforms it. Same place, different photograph.

How the Bayer Filter Works, and Why Your Camera Sensor Is Colorblind

Every photosite on your camera's sensor is colorblind. A 61-megapixel full frame sensor is a grid of roughly 61 million tiny light meters, and each one reports a single number: how much light it collected during the exposure. It records the brightness and nothing about the color. Left alone, your sensor would only ever hand you a grayscale image.

 

School Picture Day: The Strange Economics of the Largest Portrait Operation on Earth

One company photographs roughly 30 million children a year. Not over a decade. In a single school year. A kid sits on a stool, a stranger says "chin down, eyes up here," a strobe fires, and the whole thing is over in the time it takes to sneeze. Multiply that by tens of millions and you have the largest sustained portrait operation the world has ever run. 

Spend $186, Get Over $4,700 in Photography Products Now

Fstoppers has partnered with 5DayDeal to offer the best photography deal of 2026. The bundle is filled with education, software, and tools from a wide variety leaders in the photography industry. The product list is fantastic.

 

Five Legendary Lost Photography Archives, and What Became of Each One

Some of the most important photographic archives ever assembled are gone, and a small number of historians have spent their careers trying to get them back. One of those hunts had a storybook ending. In December 2007, three weathered cardboard boxes reached New York's International Center of Photography, carrying roughly 4,500 Spanish Civil War negatives that had been missing since 1939.

Every Color Space You Edit In Was Defined by the Eyes of 17 People in 1920s England

In a darkened room at Imperial College in London in the late 1920s, ten people looked at a small split circle of light, about the width of a thumbnail held at arm's length. Half the circle carried a single wavelength; the other half carried a mixture of red, green, and blue lamps the subject could turn up and down until the two halves fused into one uniform patch.

Why Every Culture Poses Differently: A World Tour of Photographic Body Language

Hand a phone to a group of teenagers in Osaka and start counting. You will rarely reach three before the first two fingers go up beside a chin, while the same camera pointed at strangers in Moscow gets a level, unsmiling gaze that an American would read as hostility and a Russian would read as basic composure.

Five Poses for When Your Couple Starts Looking Posed

I want to start by defending the thing this article might look like it is against.  Static posing in wedding and portrait photography is the backbone of every couples session I shoot. The five foundations I teach are all static positions, and they are static for good reasons. They are fast. They are repeatable. They are flattering on almost everybody.

Hands On With Adobe's New Prompt to Edit Lightroom Feature

As part of its ongoing efforts to make photo editing as quick and easy as possible, Adobe is introducing Prompt to Edit in Lightroom. This feature lets you restore an old photograph by selecting one of Adobe’s example prompts or creating your own prompt. You can sharpen out-of-focus images, colorize black-and-white photographs, and adjust the color of photos with a dramatic color cast.

If AI Is Trained on Your Photographs, Is the Result Still Photography?

Photography has worked without a camera and without shooting. Generative images test what is left after that.

 

You spend twenty years building a photographic archive, then train a generative model on it. The model begins producing images that look unmistakably like your work. Are those images photography?