Fstoppers Original Articles

Photographers across social media channels chimed in late this week as leaked documents were made public by the Washington Post on Thursday detailing the proposed size reductions and restructuring of both the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument as well as the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.

I recently spent three days in Ensenada shooting with the talented TEMPT Media crew during the Baja 1000. On the second night while unwinding at our Airbnb, in walks a guy with three beefy rigs with all the lenses wrapped in gaff tape, underneath what would appear to be a layer of dust that most normal human beings wouldn’t subject their Canon 1DXs to.

If you have a camera and access to a street, you can play with street photography. Like landscape photography, it’s one of the most accessible forms of the craft. If you’re anything like me, however, it scares the hell out of you. But it doesn't have to.

At first look, this image can evoke a sense of fear of some post-apocalyptic chaos. However, if you are are a documentary photographer it might remind you of the long held traditions that symbolize the start and end of religious customs.

Having a flawed mindset about yourself or your photography is often the biggest hindrance to your creative work. From each of our unique life experiences, we have all developed ways of thinking that can either allow us to move forward or could greatly hold us back. Here are four mindsets that, over time, I have seen negatively effect creative people, including myself. I encourage you to read through each one and see if any of these have hindered you as well.

I've got a simple question for you: is there a photo that you're chasing right now? An image that you're dying to get right? Your white whale (hooray “Moby Dick” references); something that you can see in your mind, you can picture it, almost feel how you want it to look. Whatever the genre, you know exactly what you're looking for in the mood, the vibe, and the scene. The chase and that drive can be something very useful to a photographer. It can inspire and motivate us to keep going, to keep improving, and keep working towards whatever image that we're chasing after.

A chain is only as strong as the weakest link, so the proverb goes. We could modify that for photography and say that our processing is no faster than the slowest component. It's not necessarily about having the latest great-and-good, but rather about having matched components. And there's no better place to start than when offloading your photos from the camera.

We have a lot to be thankful of as photographers. We make our livings doing the things we love. Clients hire us to create images because they love what we do. They entrust their most precious moments to us, and believe that we will deliver. Personally, I have photography to thank for the fact that I am able to live in another country, travel the world, and meet everyone from farmers in remote villages to presidents of entire countries. The diverse work that I do gives me experiences that not too many people have. So why is it that every winter I dig deep into the recesses of my soul and question who I am and why I do what I do? Why do I always want to quit?

One of the best ways to step up your photographic game as a portrait photographer is to improve the quality of your subjects. There are a variety of ways to do this ranging from improving your ability to coach strong expression, working with better makeup artists, or improving the quality of styling. The easiest method, however, is by working with experienced models who are practiced in interacting with the camera and already know the fundamentals of posing and expression. Finding a strong model to work with means the shoot becomes more of a collaboration that provides you the opportunity to elevate the quality of your work.

I don't have a vendetta with the color blue, or any colors for that matter; that would be odd. I do, however, remove the color blue either entirely or nearly entirely from the lion's share of my images, and for good reason.

From the outside looking in, the creative industry can be daunting. We think we need thousands of dollars of equipment to take images on par with our peers – but that’s not strictly true. Here’s a breakdown of how I photographed one of British pop’s biggest acts using cheap lights from eBay.

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. In 2017, we're featuring a new photographer every month, whose portfolio represents both stellar photographic achievement and a high level of involvement within the Fstoppers community.

In this series, I attempt to identify the key professional virtues I have found to be the most important in building my own career, as well as identifying traits of other successful photographers that are most key to their success. Today’s virtue: teamwork.

Short documentary films have the power to reveal a unique story, inspire with insights and even motivate change in the brief duration. How easy or difficult it is to make one? In this post, we will discuss the steps involved in making a short social documentary film.

Multi-light setups can seem complex and intimidating for several reasons, not the least of these are all the variables involved. Where do you put the lights? What power settings do you use? How do you balance everything? What if there is ambient light from other sources? Then there’s the cost aspect. How can I afford enough lights for these complex set-ups? Luckily, I’ve made things complicated for myself so I can make them as easy as possible for you. Let’s break down these three shots and find out how you can light a complex scene without making your wallet cry and, hopefully, without too much hassle.

About this time last year, the Sigma 85mm 1.4 Art series lens was released and I went ahead and decided to pull the trigger and invest in the new glass. I had heard great things about other entries in the art lineup and understandably Sigma's new 85mm focal length was getting a solid amount of hype. For the past year, I have been shooting exclusively with Sigma's 85mm. It's been the only lens in my camera bag and the only lens I've used for a straight year. What follows are my impressions after a solid year of use; what I like about the lens and what I don't like.

German photographer Max Leitner travelled to Warsaw, Poland alongside an urban gymnast to capture this series of unconventional architectural shots that possess an air of optical illusion.

Ever wonder what happens during a boudoir photography retreat that is aimed to educate those to be the best in the business? The top photographers are the best for the fact that they never stop developing themselves on their craft. Attending workshops, retreats, and conferences are part of how you started out so why stop now?

With all the sales on photography tutorials being sold over this online shopping weekend at the Fstoppers store, I'd like to share a little tip that may help some. Customizing your keyboard shortcuts is an essential part of a truly optimized workflow. However, certain basic functions I recommend leaving as default settings.

A few days ago, I took my first ever flight over N.Y.C. and before even getting in the helicopter, I had a bunch of crazy awesome shots in my head that were ready to shoot and share with the world. After doing aerial photography for just over two years with my drone, I believe that I have acquired the eye to shoot from the sky. However, being in the helicopter with the doors off 1,000-2,000 feet above N.Y.C., and shooting with a 70-200mm lens, turned out to be more of a failure to me than I had thought it would as far as photography goes.

It always surprises me in photography that the sector as a whole seems wedded to spending money. Not content with the affliction of GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) across amateurs and professionals, the sector likes nothing more than a few extra bags, filters, albums, prints, and yes, software.

If you've been out shooting recently, there's a good chance that you're now sitting down to edit a pile of photographs that capture the incredible colors that autumn brings. This brief tutorial shows you a quick and dirty trick (jump to three minutes to skip the waffle!) for getting Lightroom to make the most of those gorgeous, orangey tones.

In the previous article, we analyzed processor and motherboard options along with power supply and computer cases. Next, let’s talk about graphic cards, memory, and heat management issues. On the storage front, the introduction of affordable NMVe drives allows one to go past the bandwidth limitation of the SATA interface found on traditional SSD. Here is a short guide to help you navigate through the current offerings and avoid the marketing traps in order to build the perfect machine based on your budget.

For some reason, Photoshop has decided to bury one of its most powerful tools in a place few photographers would ever look. Here's how to find and use this highly useful feature to take virtually any image to the next level.

In the last few years, filmmakers all over the world have been expressing their creativity by shooting short and feature-length movies using their phones, showing that you should never be afraid to tell a story if you don’t own a $50,000 camera. Here are five great ones, shot on five different generations of iPhone, including one shot entirely on the new iPhone X.

As the holidays draw ever nearer, retailers are ramping up their discounts, trying everything they can to attract consumers before the close of the year. For many photographers, this represents a prime opportunity to upgrade their gear, whether they need front-end tools such as a new lens or camera body, or back-end items such as a new computer to speed up their workflow. Of course, with new gear, comes new challenges.

Instagram Stories have been around for quite a while now, and we have actually already shared a few articles regarding how you can make better use of them to build engagement on your account. In this new write-up, I wanted to share with you a couple of techniques that aren’t too tedious to use on a regular basis to help you build higher quality stories. The goal is to create stories that people will want to follow on a daily basis and thus start to engage more with you. Content may not be king on social networks anymore, but it’s still the only thing that retains followers.

You’ve honed your craft and brushed up on lighting and editing techniques. You’ve built a beautiful website and opened your door as a bonafide professional photographer. You’re ready for those client inquiries to start streaming in, and they do. Then you realize that some of your clients are a nightmare to deal with, while others become like new best friends. You may not know who your ideal client is, and you may not be marketing to them.

The essence of channeling your inner muse to create amazing photo-journalistic images requires a very specific mindset. Here are a few tips I've learned on perfecting your photojournalism skills to create more powerful intentional images, and these tips can be adapted in other forms of photography to fit your purpose.

With the holiday sales starting this week it's the perfect time to start calibrating your monitor or upgrade your old device to a new one. Datacolor is offering some great deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So pick up a new device and read through my walkthrough on how to use your new toy.

Happy Thanksgiving week to all of our United States based readers. This week's list is full of excitement due to the ever popular "action" theme. The submissions covered a wide range of movement and activities that we may all need to partake in after today's feast. Hope you like the list and we'd love to have you join in.

It’s the equivalent of a presidential Twitter feud, but for the photography world. Everyone’s favorite Anderson Cooper lookalike Tony Northrup released a video on November 4 about the benefits and downsides to shooting raw files versus JPG files, and in this video dispensed some advice on when to shoot raw files and when to shoot JPG files (and when to shoot both). Naturally, this elicited a strong response from everyone’s favorite (only?) Fro, Jared Polin of “Fro Knows Photo” fame, who is known for his shirts indicating to the world that he does indeed shoot raw. All the time.

Finding (and asking for) gifts for photographers is near impossible. They’re either way too expensive (we all want that a9, too) or we photographers already seemingly have everything we need. Hopefully, we can help a bit with some ideas, deals, and advice about shopping for your photographer friends or for yourselves, as the holidays also present prime opportunities to restock studio essentials.

We're creatives! We're supposed to love what we do and never get tired of it, right? Wrong. You can love image-making with every fiber of your being and still need a break from it, and to ignore that need is detrimental to your mental health and creativity.

There’s nothing quite so frustrating to anyone in the business, as having your camera become outdated in less than a year. When I look at the current line up of camcorders, I’m beginning to think that they’re about to be replaced by the cameras that should have been released in the first place. The camcorder market is falling behind.

The power of visual storytelling to create an impact in the real world is plentiful. Of late, there is this new format of social short films that are catching up and seeding change in its own ways. How strong is the impact that these short social documentary films make?

In this series, I attempt to identify the key professional virtues I have found to be the most important in building my own career, as well as identifying traits of other successful photographers that are most key to their success. Today's Word of The Week? Standards.

The fashion industry is home to some of the most dynamic and fluid trends that the world has ever seen. No doubt, the existence of this ever-changing and highly creative environment is mainly as a result of the diversity and creative uniqueness of the individuals that constitute it. However, even with this seemingly all-inclusive and globally encompassing genre, there is a prominent neglect that seems to be growing even further: the underrepresentation of black female photographers.

Natalie Lennard, the British photographer popularly known as Miss Aniela, is well known for her stunningly surreal fashion work. Her new personal project, however, is leading her in an entirely different direction; showcasing childbirth through world history, celebrating the power of women who give birth on their own terms. The fictional narrative series draws inspiration from figureheads of birth philosophy, such as Michel Odent and Dr. Grantly Dick-Read, to shine new light on how we view childbirth.

Photographers and filmmakers probably spend more time on their computers that behind a camera. We own thousands of dollars in gears, yet some of us waste a considerable amount of time struggling on a sluggish PC. However, for the price of a good lens you could dramatically improve your productivity by speeding up the entire post-shooting phase. Here is a short guide to help you navigate through the current offerings and avoid the marketing traps in order to build the perfect machine based on your budget.

Are you still buying external hard drives? It's time you consolidated all of your data on a NAS device and today, you can win a Synology DS418 NAS.

Cameras have always been at the forefront of technology. They've always pushed the boundaries of what's possible. Perhaps then it is unusual to have such a high tech sector so closely wedded to art. That is what makes photography such a passion for me. And while there will always be those that push the creative elements, with the camera purely a utilitarian device for achieving that, others will take the bleeding edge, create new imaginings, add unusual twists and embellishments, and take that edge even further. Commercially then, it doesn't pay to be second. Be at the edge and take advantage of it.

Import and culling have always been two of the most time consuming and, frankly, annoying parts of Adobe Lightroom. Despite all of its improvements over the years, the process of getting files into Lightroom has remained a huge bottleneck in an otherwise swift workflow application. With Lightroom Classic CC, Adobe finally made a full attempt to address this by allowing us to use the embedded previews from our raw files as previews for culling within the app and improved the overall speed of adding files to the catalog. So, what’s changed, and just how useful are those changes?

Photography today is more accessible than ever before because cameras are everywhere: not only shaped as DSLRs, but in phones, tablets, laptops, and in the James Bond ball-point pen. It is easy to press a button a capture something your camera is pointed to. Lots of people are thinking about taking the snapshot game to another level: buying a professional camera and making professional photographs. Most of these purchases end with disappointments, but there's not much talk about them. This article will take a peek behind the scenes of the failures newbies face when they first try using a DSLR.

When retouching we often place a strong focus on the primary subject of the photo, often demoting other aspects of the image as a fleeting second thought. Which makes sense, the primary subject of the photo is the most important aspect of a photo. This is why it is so important to pay attention to the background, if the background is distracting the viewer from focusing on the subject there is a tremendous loss of coherency throughout the image.

"Photographing The World 3" behind the scenes continues today with Episode 4. In this episode, we visit the most beautiful, and also most disastrous location of the trip, Pietrapertosa Italy.

Last Tuesday, Adobe hosted an event in London, which was headlined by a keynote speech from Nick Knight OBE, the world-renowned fashion photography visionary. He spoke about his views on the world of photography and innovation in his field, whilst offering some fascinating takeaways for his audience, not least the blending of formats and mediums that has lead to himself retiring the term “photographer” from his CV.

Although everyone has a different "favorite" lens, the 24-70mm 2.8 lens usually ends up being used the most. It's standard zoom range and fast 2.8 aperture makes it usable for almost any type of photography. Today, I'm comparing the three most popular 24-70mm lenses to determine which one is best.

Students often ask me a rhetorical question: “What is it like to be a professional landscape photographer?” Well, it’s fantastic if you’re into the outdoors, natural landscapes, and of course photography. However, that’s not entirely the point of the question. The real question you want to ask though, is “How do you find a sustainable income to support such a career?” Typically, we all have a preconceived idea of what a landscape photographer does for a living. But that idea seems to stem from a time when there weren't that many people in the business.

If you’ve ever been to a photo event in New York City or taken a pilgrimage to B&H Photo, chances are you’ve noticed the man in the trench coat with the old news photographer’s camera – bellows, big flash, and all.