Photography and retouching are a lot of work. Framing, exposing, getting your color right, cropping, zooming, dodging, burning, sharpening: it's enough to do your head in! But sometimes, we can get lazy, and in my opinion, it can be beneficial to lean into your own laziness rather than burn yourself out working for 10 hours a day.

San Francisco-based commercial photographer, Erik Almas, is known for his flawless composite work as well as shooting campaigns for many major companies such as American Airlines, Toyota, Microsoft, and Nike, just to name a few. In January he is offering a workshop where he will take you through his entire workflow, from shooting the background plate and model, to editing. What makes this workshop even better is the fact that 100 percent of your money will be used to help build a school through Pencils of Promise!

Designed to combat flights over private property by paparazzi photographers looking to get glimpses of celebrities in their "natural elements," a new bill, AB 856, signed by California Governor Jerry Brown Tuesday, broadens the definition of a "physical invasion of privacy" to include flying a drone to record images or video over private property. While countless issues surrounding invasion of privacy and drone usage have appeared on the Internet over the years (including one instance of a father shooting down a drone recording his daughter sunbathing in their backyard), this expansion could pose more danger to well-intentioned videographers.

Our Behind the Scenes series continues this week with Episode 7. In this episode, we continue filming WAMA 3 with Mike Kelley in Charleston, while I also teach him how to kiteboard.

Besides being respected members of the photo community, what do Joe McNally, Jeremy Cowart, Greg Slater, Julia Fullerton-Batten, Brad Trent and Melissa Rodwell all have in common? Well for starters they (to name just a few) have all agreed to write something just for you, our Fstopper readers. Starting this October we will bring you posts written by some of the biggest names in photography, exclusively on Fstoppers.com. You'll have the opportunity to learn a little more about our Featured Guests and they will have an opportunity to speak directly to you and share whatever takes their fancy. Be it their latest projects, rants, opinions, advice, stories and more. Leave a comment telling us who you would like to see as a Featured Guest and we just might make it happen.

Fstoppers has partnered with the awesome folks at ViewBug to bring you sweet, sweet contests weekly! This week enter to win a Bumblebee Pro Light Backpack by Manfrotto, while three runners up will receive a 3-in-1 light PRO backpack​. Winners will be selected based on the best images that best show moments in the wilderness!

Instagram has been quickly moving its platform to be more than the sharing photos with friends app it started out as. With the news that Instagram has increased its monthly advertisers to one million and plans to increase testing of their Instagram shopping features its obvious where the new direction is heading. Instagram tells Bloomberg that in the next couple months they plan to add an option to book appointments by visiting a company's profile. One of the examples given is being able to click a button and scheduling a haircut through a Salon's profile.

Documentary movies and photography aim at creating plausible images of certain events and phenomena. But what is plausible? Can we even catch an unaltered scene?

In general, we always discuss how our industry is changing and how we should do things differently to prosper. This is not only limited to our industry of photography: take the industry of education for example. Not all that long ago, college was considered the thing to do to be respected and move forward in your chosen profession.

How much of a difference does AI-based subject detection make to your photography? The technology should increase our hit rate, but how much of a difference does it make?

Whether you are an owner of another company or someone with a nine-to-five job, you may want to start your own business offering photography or video services. This article will give you advice about how you should and should not name it.

Scouring your camera bag, you have all your most important gear: cameras, lenses, memory cards, and batteries. With the adoption of mirrorless cameras by many photographers, we have also adopted more batteries. When my primary camera was a Nikon D850, I could shoot roughly 1,800 photographs on a charge. I am using the Nikon Z7 II as my primary camera, and unfortunately, I get about 400 photos per battery. I am charging and purchasing batteries more than ever before. Enter the Hahnel Pro Cube 2 charger, a game changer in the battery charging game.

Only 12 hours remain to enter Custom USB's Unique Wedding Photo Contest! Monday we will be putting the best images up for public vote, so get your entries in while you can!