Fstoppers Originals

With the mirrorless camera transition happening around us people have been switching camera manufacturers more than ever. I for one am staying put with the brand I've trusted for years. Am I wrong for doing so? 

You can watch as many YouTube videos as you want. The only way you will ever know how to do something well is if you’ve actually done it, and repeated it a few times to make it stick. 

I can swap faces in Photoshop to suit the chosen composition better, and I can add hair over a woman’s breast if it's too raunchy for the cover of a magazine.

Are you aware of Back to the Future Day? October 21, 2015: the day Marty McFly and Doc Brown came back to Hill Valley to try to correct Marty's timeline. Similarly, film and literature fans celebrate Judgement Day, or Bloomsday. The first being the day that Skynet became self-aware; the latter, the day Joyce's Bloom wandered Dublin. Well, this week is Twin Peaks week.

As I've written about recently, I'm pushing incremental changes that provide compound interest. One of the most effective of which I have been tweaking for some time, and it has paid off. 

Like thousands of others, I received an email last week from Kodakit asking me to sign up. “Get more photography shoots!” it promised, but what’s the truth behind this Uber-like company, and is it worth your time? 

You’ve probably seen the viral video of the toddler whose father mic’ed him up during hockey practice, where he discovered that his son was thinking mostly about naps and McDonald’s. If you wanted to find out what’s on your kid’s mind instead of sports, here are tips to accomplish what Hockey Dad did. 

With endless dunes stretching for hundreds of kilometers, abandoned houses, rocky mountains, and soils that look like the Martian surface, Namibia should put some wind in your photography sails. Check out the full list of the best photography locations in Namibia, as well as advice about appropriate gear and shooting times for each of them. 

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.

When was the last time you can remember having fun with your photography? Not the joy of landing a photography job or the excitement of nailing that one photo, but rather childlike fun while shooting. 

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

Fstoppers is teaming up with SLR Lounge and B&H to put a brand new Canon EOS RP Mirrorless camera in the hands of one lucky community member. All you have to do is enter the giveaway below. 

It's one thing making the leap in to a photography career, but as is the case with most startups, longevity is the greatest obstacle to overcome. 

In the last two years, Samyang has introduced a number of autofocus prime lenses specifically for Sony’s FE mount and, having recently bought the Sony a7 III, two in particular caught my eye: the 24mm and 35mm f/2.8. These tiny lenses have been in my bag for the last month and I think they’re fantastic value for money with unexpected performance given their size. 

When processing your precious photos in Lightroom, Photoshop, or any other photo processing software, you make sure the exposure is spot on, the colors are perfect, and the contrast is pleasing. For that reason you may have a calibrated monitor, and the optimum light situation in your room. But did you think about the background shade of your photo processing software?

Continuing on our serialization of a photography themed short story, here is Part 3 of "In the Blink of an Eye." If you didn't manage to read Part 1 and Part 2, then catch up to find out what Charlie Sydcup videoed during a trip to the City of London and what his image processing revealed. 

Once you find a great location, do you share it or keep it secret? If you keep it secret, why? Are you doing it to protect a fragile location or to protect your investment in searching it out? Do you have other reasons?

Tripods and light stands are found in virtually all photographer's kit bags. While most of these stands already do an excellent job, a few low-cost modifications can make them infinitely more versatile. 

There are always an abundance of lists explaining misconceptions and lies about being a professional photographer, but there are almost none telling you which rumors are true. 

The world of landscape photography has grown exponentially since the transition from film to digital and even more recently with a large social movement to get outdoors. What would your feed look like in 1943? 

Repeatedly say something is good, loud enough and long enough, so that anyone who listening to you believes it. Raise that single voice to a chorus and then that belief becomes fact. So is fine art photography the classic con job? 

There is an entire generation of memories currently trapped in VHS and unless we act to rescue them, these may continue to languish there. Years of video footage are stuck in these old tape formats that are usually relegated to a bookshelf somewhere in the house or stored in a box in the basement.

The mirrorless versus SLR debate is the most hotly discussed topic in photography circles. One of the main reasons given for sticking to the SLR system is the superiority of the optical viewfinder (OVF). Over the past couple of years, I’ve started to question this point. In this article, I explore the areas where an electronic viewfinder (EVF) offers an advantage over on OVF. 

I have no doubts there will be lots of people who are familiar with this item, but for those who aren't, this little tip could drastically improve your quality of life while traveling with your camera. 

I'm sure you have a beautiful portfolio as do most professional wedding photographers, but have you ever stopped to think what may be wrong with showcasing such a filtered representation of your work to potential clients? 

With the continued introduction of new lenses, bodies, and roadmapped development, do Nikon’s F and Canon’s EF-mount lenses have a future?