David Lynch's Empty Rooms

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. It marks 30 years since Agent Dale Cooper drove into our lives. February 24 at 11:30 a.m., 1989 (ish).

The Best And Worst Cameras And Lenses Of 2013 By The Camera Store

It isn't the end of the year just yet, but The Camera Store released this great video depicting the best and worst lenses and bodies of 2013. They typically make great videos and this is one of them. It may give you a great insight on some lenses to consider for the holiday season as well! If you received gift cards or cash for the holidays, these suggestions may tempt you.

I Destroyed a Drone on My First Flight and Here's What I'd Do Differently

The first time you do anything, you’re bound to do it poorly. The first time I shot football, I thought a 1/200 s shutter speed would be perfectly fine to stop action. The first time I shot portraits, I thought my f/1.6 photos were perfectly sharp (they were not even close). And the first time I flew a drone was a catastrophe worse than both of those experiences.

Sigma Announces New 14-24mm f/2.8 Art Wide-Angle Zoom Lens

Sigma's Art-series lenses represent its top-of-the-line image technologies for the highest-end lenses at competitive prices. Now, the company fills in a gap at the wide end with a fast, f/2.8 wide-angle 14-24mm zoom lens to finally fill in the wide end of its f/2.8 lineup.

Your Next Camera Might Be a Subscription: Here's Why

Even before the economic disaster of COVID, the camera industry was contracting. The software industry has adopted SaaS pricing, with Adobe Creative Cloud being the most recognizable example. That pricing model, or one like it, might be the next big change coming to camera hardware.

Less is More: Retouching Tips

Retouching in photography has many forms. Everything from skin work to background manipulation. With the latest software abilities to retouch and manipulate an image, there is an endless source of possibilities to create. Even with all the tools available, there is a fine line and perhaps sometimes too much is too much.

Groupon Photographer Accused of Ripping Off New Parents

Photos of newborns are precious, once-in-a-lifetime moments. Now, some new parents in Denver are wondering where their images are. Photographer Amy Barlow under the name A MoMent Photography studio based in Lakewood, Colo. recently ran a Groupon promotion for newborn photography and is being accused of taking the money and running, leaving several families complaining that their images have not been delivered.

"What If Money Didn't Matter": Great Tip To All Creative People Out There

Take a 3-minute break from whatever you're doing right now, and listen to this short recorded lecture of British philosopher and writer Alan Watts (1915-1973). This is a very inspirational, thought-provoking and interesting to anyone who ever wanted to work in the industry - Doesn't matter if its as a photographer, film maker, sound-man or a retoucher. Listen, and decide: 'What do you desire?'.

How to Use a Big-Brand Strategy as a Beginner Photographer

If you take a look back at Ikea's marketing catalog used to showcase their new products and looks for the season, there was a time where they decided to use images displaying only the products and Ikea-styled sets with no human intervention or interaction. At one stage these images were computer generated and rendered to make a simulated environment look as perfect and clinical as possible.

How To Create an Indoor Rain Photoshoot

I've always found that photos that capture and freeze rain to be exceedingly interesting. Rain gives the photo depth and a moodier feel, but usually you have to wait for a storm to blow through your area, or invest in a rain machine. No longer. Benjamin Von Wong has figured out a way to create those wonderfully drenched and moody shots without even stepping outdoors.

Unique Beauty - Lighting On Water

As a photographer, my skill set is constantly put to the test. In most cases, I’m handed an idea on a slab of wood and the mission is to hand that idea translated to a tangible artifact back to my client on a silver platter. It’s never an easy process, but it’s a part of my job.

A Systematic Approach for Getting New Clients for your Photography or Video Production Business

One key to longevity in filmmaking or photography is to have regular clients that you enjoy working with. What’s even better is when you have enough work coming in from those top clients, so that you can actually pick and choose the projects you take on, and even go as far as to expand your business or pass work off to qualified associates for a modest finders fee. It takes a long time to get there, but being savvy about building a client base can help tremendously.

Landscape Photography and Self-Expression

What urges you to travel, hike, and camp out for landscape photography? How do your emotions affect what you shoot and how the output turns out?

Download Multiple Cards At Once With This Workflow Solution

You've been out shooting for 12 hours, you've got 4 cards full of data, it's midnight, and you have another shoot first thing in the morning. Wouldn't it be nice to have a solution that allows you to pop all those cards in a reader at one time thereby getting your download done 4x faster than if you did it with one card reader. Now there is with the new Lexar Professional Workflow Reader Solution.

Motion & Still Photographer Ivan Agerton’s Beautiful Portraits - And What We Can All Learn From Them

What inspires you to pick up your camera? For Ivan Agerton, it’s people – and for all the talk about convergence between the worlds of stills and motion, Ivan is doing it. His ‘stills from motion’ portraits are both a visually gorgeous treat with their sublime use of slow motion, and thought provoking in the connection with the subject Ivan has captured. Not just creating eye candy, Agerton is a fascinating character and provides a great example of the life we can all construct for ourselves – if you decide to take the plunge and go for it.

Why I Love the Nikon 58mm f/1.4G Lens

In my experience, there are two kinds of great lenses. The first is the kind that gets the job done. These lenses are technically amazing and produce extremely high-quality images. The Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art is one of those lenses. It produces sharp, high-contrast images time and time again. But it doesn’t really have character — a feeling — of its own. This brings me to the second category of great lenses. Every now and again a manufacturer produces something truly special, a lens with qualities that can't be measured on an MTF chart or in lab testing. Nikon's Nikkor 58mm f/1.4G is one of those lenses.

How to Make Your Retouching Workflow Faster and Mobile With These Five Pieces of Hardware

As photographers and retouchers, we are often required to travel. But travel eats up a lot of time and thus it is crucial to optimize one’s workflow. While gear is not everything in our industry, it still maintains a critical place, especially to help save time. Spending more and more time on the road, I recently had to take a look at my editing workflow and find new solutions to make it better and faster. In this article, I’ll share with you some of the accessories I use or have since discovered to cut my retouching and keep me sane.

How to Shoot and Edit Natural Looking Holiday Home Photos

Real estate photography, while not the sexiest of photography genres, is quite accessible and a handy way to earn some cash, especially if your starting out. Many interior design and architectural photographers cut their teeth taking photos for estate agents and holiday home companies, but much of the high volume stuff looks way too flashy. In this article I'll show you a relatively easy way to get natural looking light without blown-out windows.

Amazing Desert Photography in Morocco

Photographing sand dunes can be a very productive photographic endeavor if you find a stretch of desert remote enough that not every inch of it is covered in footprints. In this article, I show you my favorite place to photograph dunes, and I give tips on how to get the most out of this sandy subject matter.

Bite-Size PS Tutorials: Sharpening with High Pass Filter

Two things converged for me recently: an increase in questions sent to me regarding my commercial photography and the unexpected popularity of my bite-sized Photoshop tutorials. Both occurrences are born from the same inquiry of understanding how certain things are achieved. I used to bother people constantly with questions on how I could attain a certain look in post-processing, or how an image is so sharp, and so on. From time to time, I still do. So, I'm going to do my best to make the answers to the most common questions readily available with this mini series.

Are Photographers Even Artists?

Have you ever heard the argument that photography isn’t art, because everyone can do it? That’s bull. All forms of photography need artistic thinking to some extent.

"Open Letter to Adobe" Answered by an Fstoppers Reader

Last week I published an open letter to Adobe Lightroom written from the perspective of photographers that use the web gallery feature in Lightroom. It generated a decent amount of feedback both positive and negative. Many people told me that this couldn't be done and that Adobe would never offer something like this. Then I read a comment from a reader that was doing exactly what I wanted. Problem solved!

Master Manual Exposure Blending With This Foolproof Photoshop Workflow

With modern HDR-blending algorithms making exposure blending so quick and easy, manual exposure blending may seem like an outdated skill for landscape photographers. However, automated software doesn't always produce the cleanest results. In this article, we'll discuss a foolproof workflow for manual exposure blending that will give you total control over your images and ensure results of the highest quality. The good news is that this workflow doesn't require any third-party panels or difficult luminosity masking!

Canon Announces the Full Frame EOS 6D

Here it is Canon faithful: the Canon 6D! We've been hearing a lot about what this camera could be, the rumored specs, and the possible pricing for the past couple months, and that all became real this morning. The Canon 6D is packed with a whole lot to love, 20.2 megapixel, ISO range from 100-25600, Digic 5+, 11-point AF, and a 3-inch LCD all at a price that we were anticipating yesterday: $2099 USD.

What Canon Cameras to Expect Next

We have already seen Canon's mind-blowing lens roadmap for the RF mount, but now that the EOS R5 and R6 are here, what can we expect next in terms of cameras?