Fstoppers Original Articles

What should a photographer do when surrounded by thousands of dead fish, some of the fastest ocean tides in the world, and wild bears that want to eat anything in sight? You take a deep breath and attempt to capture the beautiful scenery. Welcome to Valdez!

Years ago Instagram was filled with poorly filtered and over processed HDR images. Thankfully we have moved away from those days but how did we end up in a world without much color?

Adobe is taking all the hard work out of 3D compositing, by marrying stock models with their 3D scene creation and rendering app.

With the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR, Apple introduced the ability to control the amount of blur in the background of its Portrait Mode photos. But what seems like a gimmicky tweak takes what was a gimmick and turns it into a pro feature.

Please stop tagging the exact location of your outdoor photographs.

Getting your prints to look exactly how they should is a constant battle for many photographers. Minimize the amount of time and money wasted on reprinting by downloading these free templates and using a traditional technique borrowed from the darkroom.

Playboy Magazine is famous for one thing, — okay, maybe two things — but there are no nude women in any of my photos, nor do I have any shots of the late Hugh Hefner. So, how did I do it?

You wanted it and now you've got it. Almost every single video-capturing device today boasts 4K capture. Do you feel the future is here?

Two trips in two weeks, and on the first day of each trip, I'd lost a camera. How did it all come about and where did it end?

Have you ever heard someone say they do not want to go to Iceland because it is over-photographed and too mainstream?

Patrick and I recently were recently planning a trip to Alaska, and Patrick became obsessed with a particular excursion: a plane ride that landed on a glacier on the top of Denali Mountain.

Editing your images can be a love/hate relationship depending on how you feel about post production. Getting tied down in your workflow can be a result of not having the right displays and shortcuts for better visualization of the final result. A few key tricks will lay out your most used tools and displays to get you in and out of Photoshop.

I have been a photographer for almost eight years, and to be honest, it has not always been fun. No career path is without its ups and down, and certainly, the creative industry is no different.

One of the lies we tell ourselves when presented with a challenge — an opportunity to stride forward — is that we aren't ready or aren't prepared enough. Well, you never will be.

Lighting schemes should always have a purpose, whether it's to flatter a client, show the details in a product, or create a mood. In this fantasy portrait, my purpose was both to flatter the model and to create a sense of place. Let's talk about how it was done.

A few of the major players have recently released cameras that are attracting quite a bit of attention. The Canon EOS R, the Nikon Z7, and Fujifilm’s X-T3 are all great for their intended purposes. But are new releases enough to keep you loyal as a customer?

Behind the scenes videos are a fantastic way to increase the visibility of your work, and ACDSee Video Studio 3 will help you get your BTS video edited and ready to view in less than an hour.

I find so many photographs today to be technical masterpieces, yet they lack any sense of life. They don't draw the viewer into the photograph or encourage the viewer to spend several moments viewing the photograph.

This has been the year of mirrorless! There have never been so many attractive options for DSLR shooters to make the transition as there are now. But should we?

By now, most of you have figured out that light is everything in photography. When the time of day isn't a variable you have control of, you may have to visualize how the available light will work with your subject.

Maybe you don't need any practice in Photoshop, maybe you do. Perhaps you're just looking to kill some time and create something fun, bizarre, hilarious, or something simply unlike anything you've ever done before.

In late 2017 I shared the photography podcasts that constituted my listening rotation. Thanks in part to our awesome community, 2018 has been even more insightful with these updated podcast additions.

We all have our favorite songs that we sing when are going through bad times or want to pump ourselves up. In this hilarious photo series, a photographer captures his friends singing their favorite songs and imagining that the camera is not there. See which song each person was singing!

We have all heard the old adage: buy cheap and buy twice. Here are five things you shouldn’t skimp on.

One of the most common questions photographers have is “should I upgrade my camera?” It’s right up there with “what lens I should buy” and “can I take selfies with this?” (That last one isn’t actually a common question.)

The Fujifilm X community of photographers are a loyal bunch, sometimes to a fault. It’s understandable, though, as Fujifilm provides consistent updates, even for cameras of previous generations. But recently, this seems to have become a crutch, and the X-T3 has inspired me to write this open letter.

For all you creators out there! LG understands there’s more to the final output. There’s also the “process.” All the hours spent working, toiling, creating, that no one ever sees. The endless brain-strain and ideating a creator dedicates to their goal is what makes up their UltraWide Time. Few will ever see or understand the process, where all the work and magic happen. But LG understands.

Do you have a lens in your kit that delivers results every time? Is it your go-to lens or is it one that you don't use as much as you should?

Dear Thumbtack, you’ve been a major national player in service-sector networking, including the field I love, professional photography. I appreciate the jobs I accessed through you in the past. But the door on that past, I’m sorry to have to say, is closed.

Are you stuck in an artistic routine or struggling to become comfortable photographing people in the street? Try this simple project that'll get you out there, shooting and gaining confidence!

Hashtags are a lot more than fodder for your social media posts. You need to use them and do so correctly in order to be noticed being one small fish in the giant ever growing pond we refer to as Instagram.

It’s no secret that Instagram has been working on its algorithm for quite some time. Gone are the days of tricking the algorithm to get more visibility. Now, more than ever, Instagram values excellent content. Here are a few practices to avoid when posting on the popular social platform.

The Profoto B10 is here, and it's one of the most exciting advancements in lighting that I've seen in years.

Listen, I know what you're all thinking. "Whoa, it looks cool. The modeling light is even bi-color. But it costs how much?" I get it, but bear with me.

Time-lapse videos have grown in popularity as a direct result of their unusual perspective on the world and the success of digital stills cameras. Here's my low cost route to creating them.

Of the many lighting techniques available to us as portrait photographers, using backlight with a simple reflector is one of the most versatile and least expensive methods you can choose. This method is widely used outdoors, but did you know that you can apply the same strategy to studio portraits?

We're heading into the realm of storybook fantasy with this week's Lighting Breakdown that blends natural and artificial light.

Deciding which images to keep and which to throw away is one of the hardest lessons to learn for new photographers. One would think that it gets easier with experience, but the more you learn the harder it can get.

Storage has become increasingly inexpensive which means there are a lot of options out there to back up your photos. One of those options is reliable, unlimited, and even free if you already have Amazon Prime.

I caught up with Matt Lever, one of the top photographer’s you’d expect to see backstage at Fashion Week. He explained how he’s shooting for Elle Magazine, and the hoops you’ll need to jump through to break onto the scene.

"Is that Photoshopped?" We've all heard it; we might have even said it at one time. But the reality is that it's a ridiculous question in the first place because "Photoshop" is not a verb. Perhaps those asking the question are simply asking the wrong question, because quite frankly, it shouldn't matter whether Photoshop was used or not.

A rainstorm and a muddy field can make football look great, but if your camera gets soaked, you might miss some great shots. Being inadequately prepared to shoot in inclement weather could be a really expensive mistake.

“In 2017, just 13.7 percent of magazine covers from the top 10 American fashion publications were photographed by women,” according to Erin Cunningham of Refinery29, and yet, according to the 2010 United States Census, the female population of the United States is 50.8 percent. So, why are there so few women shooting the covers of fashion magazines?

I was recently involved in a conversation via Facebook that centered around new camera gear and becoming a better photographer. The saying generally goes: “It’s not about the camera gear at all.” While I generally agree with this way of thinking, it’s not always accurate.

Adventure photography is a broad genre. But whether it's kayaking, skiing, hiking, climbing, trail running, or mountain biking, I always am sure to carry this gear with me.

SSL has become the preferred way for all sites to be displayed as opposed to only being used for shopping carts and pages where you would enter personal data. For some time, there's been a transition from http to https, and it was a choice mostly based on the intended activities of your website viewers.

By the time you finish reading this paragraph, 500 hours of content will have been uploaded to YouTube, 65,000 posts to Instagram, and 3.3 million updates to Facebook. It is easy — and sometimes not a conscious choice — to become enveloped by this constant flow, but as artists, it is important we take intentional time to remove ourselves from the noise and continue to learn, grow, and succeed from the incredible tools the world has to offer. We just need to go out and utilize them.

Welcome to the second part of Choosing a Lens for Visual Storytelling in Photography. This week, we’re going to look at the way in which lenses help you to express distance and intimacy and dive deeper into the story you want to tell.

No, it's not by adding black bars or shooting in slow motion. There's much more to the skill of making your videos look like the movies.

Sometimes, you have to leave old technology in the dust to move forward. With two of the biggest brands having just announced new mirrorless bodies, with it comes new lens mounts to carry these camera systems into the future.