Fstoppers Original Articles

For the past few months I've been looking for a new laptop to edit videos on. As you probably know, I'm a Windows user, but because Apple just refreshed their MacBook Pro line two days ago, I decided to throw one into the mix as well. The results of my tests were both shocking and depressing.

The dramatic looks that can be achieved with strobes can very well be accomplished with natural light if utilized correctly. Understanding how to use the sources and the environment will increase the overall image every time. Using pull backs of each shot is a valuable tool in order to truly appreciate and understand how each image was shot. One photographer shows just how to light dramatically with minimal set ups.

If you’ve ever spent time shooting product photography or still life, you probably recognize and appreciate random surfaces and textures that would make flattering surfaces to photograph things on. Here’s an easy and inexpensive way to create leather texture the next time you find yourself in need of a classy surface.

Perspective Control lenses for SLR cameras were developed primarily for architecture, interior, and still-life photography applications. PC lenses simulate some of the movements and control that photographers can get from a view camera. They are great for keeping lines parallel and subjects in focus. Just as PC lenses allow photographers to control what is in focus, they also allow you to control what goes out of focus and how quickly it does that. Fashion and portrait photos with enhanced bokeh or selective focus create dreamy blur and guide attention to the areas remaining in focus.

Sometimes 30 seconds can change your life. Has the following story ever happened to you?

The camera technology in today's phones is one of the most competitive areas of modern electronics. Every big phone release leads with the specs of the camera. This includes megapixels, low light capabilities, auto focus, and of course HD video. While the capability to capture higher quality imagery has arrived, the included storage on the phones has essentially stayed in the 16GB to 32GB range. Since that storage has to share with the phone's operating system and all the apps, it is good to have all your photos on a constant conveyor belt to the cloud.

I was hired to shoot graduation photos for a client recently, a particular job that certain photographers may be at odds with accepting. Simply put, it’s one of those gigs that can be hard to get motivated for if it isn’t your style. As a working photographer however we must all make decisions with our career and in my case, work is work regardless of the genre. So how can you take something as simple as a graduation shoot and turn it into an experience? Here are a few tips.

Whether or not you have an interest in wedding photography, as a photographer it’s inevitable that at some point in time, you will be presented with an opportunity to photograph a wedding. It could be a request from a friend who is well aware of your abilities. It could be from a recently engaged bride who came across your online portfolio, and after not seeing any wedding photos, contacted you to ask if you shot weddings. One of the most difficult aspects of venturing into the dark side that is wedding photography is deciding on your fee. There are several popular schools of thought on how much to charge for your first wedding.

There are so many camera options when considering a primary camera and a secondary backup, so there’s quite a bit to take into consideration. As the saying goes, two is one, one is none, so for big trips and always for professional work, a backup is a must. If you are looking for a second camera, how do you know what to choose? Rather than looking at specific brands, here’s a look at which gear combinations might be the best for your still photography projects.

Some model poses seem to pop up everywhere repeating across different mediums and across decades. Many photographers deride these posing cliches, but these cliches can be useful on fashion and other model shoots, especially when working with new models still learning how to move. They can help create serviceable images when you are stuck for ideas or when you need shoot a series of good looks in a short period of time.

As the phone rings, I breathe easy to calm my nerves. I'm about to interview one of the most successful modern portrait photographers in the world. I'm halfway through leaving a stuttering mess of a message when he cuts in. "Hello? Hi, I had the music going and didn't hear the phone ring..." Buck has built a career over the past 30-plus years photographing some of the biggest names in Hollywood and politics. He has carved out a space for himself in the upper echelon of photographers working today. And he has a land line. Somehow, given his old school, dogged approach to portraiture and his recent switch to digital, I think that's just perfect.

When I moved in to my studio a little over three years ago, I needed a place to hang, store, and use my rolls of seamless paper. I didn’t have many — just a few nine-foot rolls of white, gray, black, and green — but I wanted them out of my way. Storing them vertically wasn’t a good option in the space, and storing them laying down is never a good idea. So, I wanted to figure out a simple system that I could build that would do the trick. Here’s what I came up with.

Across the board boudoir photographers have seen an increase in the number of inquiries for couples boudoir sessions. While boudoir photographer was generally more known as a more intimate session for a female to either reconnect with her own sensual side, or perhaps to give as a gift to a significant other, the trend is now becoming for these couples to capture these moments together. So how do you coach and pose for emotions during a session if the inquires start to roll in?

Being young is something I hope to never let go of. There is a sense of invincibility that can't be taught or explained. You just have to live it. Sometimes a photograph can take you to a point in time, or evoke feelings beyond what your eyes are seeing. Alex Currie is a photographer and director currently living in Los Angeles, California, who knows how to tell a story with a single frame.

With the upcoming release of “Off the Tracks,” a documentary that chronicles the seismic shift that Final Cut Pro X introduced to the video industry in 2011, there been some chatter, even here on Fstoppers, about the video editing software’s place in history. I don’t have any qualms about its place in history: Simply put, it deserved better than what it got, which was heaps of shame, blame, and ultimately denial.

When a D1 collegiate athlete becomes a photographer, you should watch out. Zach Ancell is a commercial sports photographer from Portland and has been shooting for almost 10 years now. As any self-respecting creative, he does his own personal projects between the commercials he shoots. Pan"Tone," which is one of Ancell's recent shoots caught my attention, and he kindly agreed to share all we want to know about the set.

With the goal in mind to write up a reference for planning a week of photography in the wild, it's almost unthinkable to not include an article about gear an rules about sleeping in the great outdoors. Not on a campsite, not in a hotel or any form of modern comfort, but out in the backcountry, sleeping under the stars. This quickly grew out to be an article to bookmark, because I don't expect you to remember everything about this after a first read.

I don't know about you but I've been a little overwhelmed about the power of artificial intelligence and the speed it's replacing jobs that can be automated. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have recently stated that a basic salary should be paid to every citizen in America to make sure that people who have lost their jobs due to automation can keep on their feet and do whatever it is they've always wanted to do.

At what point do we say something is too far? My opinion is that using photography as a medium to gain fame, be it good or bad, isn’t a new thing. But as time goes on, seemingly, these things are lacking in taste more and more.

There's one question photographers should ask themselves everyday, and that is: What did you do today to build your business? Emphasis on the word “today.” Simple words I first heard while taking a business of photography class a few years back from a noted photographer. And while the class itself droned on a bit and may not have been as compelling as I’d initially hoped for, those simple words stuck with me then as they do today.

The weather. Of the many things I wish I could control, this is certainly one of them. Recently, my home of Seoul has had some of the clearest skies and nicest puffy clouds that I’ve seen in my 11 years of living here, but typically this is not so. On the few days of the year we get nice clouds, fisty-cuffs determine your tripod’s resting place at the popular photo spots, and the Internet is afire with the chatter of excited shutterbugs. However, there are so many days of the year where the haze is too thick or a monotone blanket of clouds covers the sky. I have come up with a quick and dirty method of dropping in skies from my library that I use when the job calls for it. I’d like to share that with you today.

You can do a lot with photographs in Adobe Premiere Pro: create and customize a time-lapse with the automate to sequence feature, import a layered Photoshop file as a complex layered video sequence, or animate your images in 2D or 3D space. These are just a few of the things you can accomplish. I'm going to show you seven tips I utilize when working with still images in Adobe Premiere Pro.

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.

I’ve been posting my work online for almost 8 years. What’s been consistent throughout that time is the pressure to post only my best photos. With the introduction of Instagram Stories, I feel as though I’ve found an outlet that not only relieves some of that pressure, but also allows me to showcase a bit more of myself and my personality too. It’s completely revolutionized the way I use social media.

The third episode of Mike Kelley's Behind the Scenes series from his architectural tutorial is now live. In this episode, Mike shows you how you can turn an overcast day into a sunny afternoon, how to photograph a resort from a helicopter, and also teaches you an effective way to make a hotel lobby look more inviting. You can also watch as the Fstoppers crew goes night diving with massive manta rays off the coast of the Big Island of Hawaii.

Life isn't always about working our tails off just so we can turn around and blow our earnings on whatever the industry tells us the next best thing is. It’s time to take a step back from your hard day at work and think about some of the other things your hard earned income could be affording you. Like a six figure side-biz slinging wieners.

With modern cameras having incredible resolution and dynamic range, we all obsess over sharpness and the tonality of our images and how flexible the raw files are. But when broken down, what really makes a good portrait? Is it the perfect focus on the eye or a subtle transition of highlight to shadow from a massive softbox? As with all things, what defines a good portrait can go out of style. This was an interesting wake up call when a friend asked me to create an early 20th century style portrait of him.

Bokeh, it’s something that we all love, whether we like to admit it or not. It seems like every other client I work with asks me to "make the background blurry" or tells me "I want everything behind me to be out of focus." The obvious solution would be to shoot wide open, but the truth is, having your aperture wide open can actually have a negative impact on the quality of your image.

Capture One offers quite a few tools to adjust your raw files. It’s best known for its color editing capabilities, but luminosity adjustments are also very well designed. One of them was introduced last year with Capture One Pro 9, and it’s called the Luma Curve. It’s a powerful feature to adjust contrast manually while avoiding any color shift. Let’s see how it works and how it compares to an RGB curve.

There’s an interesting documentary in the works if you’re a video editor. With an obvious pun for the title, "Off the Tracks" interviews professional editors, trainers, and application developers to dig into why Apple made such a shift, when their existing app suite was already successful. I’ll provide some background, but also some editorial commentary below, as I feel like this documentary has potential to either be very interesting or completely pointless.

Perhaps this article is a risk to my career by virtue of being too honest, but it's a subject I have wanted to discuss publicly for some time. In the era where social media is the backbone of perception, it's all too easy to feel you can never measure up. This isn't new information and in fact, it's a rather well-trodden path. Even armed with the knowledge, however, I still feel I walk in to the trap of taking the world that is presented to me as the only facts worth knowing. I want to sacrifice my self-consciousness to do my bit to rectify this.

Whether you are a professional photographer or an amateur, you will face situations where you have to make compromises with the image quality or image concepts. I'll share nasty situations when you can't get the job done the best way, but you have to come up with a decent solution anyway.

Back in 2015 I was pretty active on Google+ and most of my posts would get over a hundred plus ones, which are basically the same as a like on Facebook. Getting this much activity on a public post meant that more people were likely to see it. Eventually this pattern resulted in five photos being selected and featured by Google on Chromecast. While I was excited about the honor, I had no idea how many views would come with it.

For just about the past year now, I have been working in real estate and aerial photography. I mainly work with the agents directly and the most important thing for me to do is be able to establish a good relationship with each and every agent I work with. These agents are my clients and I want to be able to keep them as clients so they continue to come back to me for any photo, video, or aerial work they need to market their properties. Within this short little year I have been working, I've dealt with so much and learned more than I ever could have imagined.

Working with a second shooter has a ton of advantages: you can cover more moments, you get different angles and perspective on the same moments, and they even allow you to try new things during the day that you normally couldn't afford to do. One of the more frustrating things about working with a second shooter though, is when you get back home to later find out that your cameras were not synced to the correct time. What you're left with is images from the reception all intermixed with images from getting ready.

When you’re starting out as a photographer, it’s natural to lust after the lenses at the top of the food chain. You know the ones. Sometimes they have red rings around the front, or they are the portrait lens that can obliterate a background. Maybe you want the zoom lens that can survive a monsoon.

When it comes to shooting implied nudes, it is not as easy as simply stripping down as one might think. Soft posing, flattering light, and the trust from client to photographer is essential to capture that perfect look. Having a solid portfolio of this genre is essential to bring in new potential clients who can form a bond with your work. So how does one start out shooting implied looks if you do not already have a portfolio to show potential clients?

In 2006, Leah Caldwell was eating at a Chipotle near the University of Denver when a photographer took her picture. When she got up to leave, the photographer asked her to sign a release form for use of the images, but she said no. Eight years later, when Caldwell went into a Chipotle in Orlando, Florida, she saw her picture on one of the restaurant’s walls, and subsequently in two other locations in California.

Modern DSLR and mirrorless cameras are capable of shooting razor sharp footage in spectacular 4k 60fps and up. But how do you give your footage a cinematic feel without purchasing pricey anamorphic lenses and professional cinema cameras? Fstoppers is here to help with five great hacks to achieving a cinematic feel to your video without spending a small fortune.

Telling a joke to an audience large or small can be a risk. An edgier joke can offend as many people as it amuses. Using humor in photography carries that same risk. Many photos can have a natural humor, but when a professional photographer is tasked with creating a humorous photo from scratch it can be serious business.

As a professional photographer, money is never too far outside of the frame. But even as the budgets and day rates continue to rise, it is important that an artist never forget why it all started in the first place.

Getting clients is one of the most difficult parts of being in business. Unfortunately, marketing knowledge doesn't just appear once you have your license in your hands. As a result, many of us look at what our competitors are doing and try something similar, never realizing that there is a good chance that our competitors are also operating from a place of marketing ignorance. One of the most common marketing mistakes I've seen is photographers spending too much time talking about themselves, and not enough time talking to their clients. This means many photographers are shooting themselves in the foot by making their landing pages self-centered, rather than client centered, and they may be losing out on business because of it.

Before Sony announced their new a9 mirrorless camera in April, rumors were flooding the headlines about its possible existence. Now that we know what the a9 really is, did the reports hold up?

In various forms of photography, being able to composite several photos into one final image is an important skill set. In the world of portraiture, composites are often used to create group shots in which the lighting situation is difficult or not every subject of the photo is available at one given time. Here I’ll show my process for blending several shots of people into a final image.

Most, if not all, have seen the picture profile settings in our cameras. These can include settings for Landscapes, Portraits, or even Cine-style formats for filmmakers looking to achieve that cinematic look. But what do these mean and how do they affect our final image?

Social media consumption is at an all-time high and is on pace to increase at an exponential pace for the foreseeable future. We all seem to have capable technology on us always, whether it be a cell phone or dedicated interchangeable lens camera. With this rapid rate of consumption and the accessibility of technology we are living in a world saturated with quality content everywhere we look. Standing out among other photographers is getting more challenging daily and that’s why I put together these three ways to help separate yourself from other photographers.

Beautiful images are crucial to create an attractive video, but the soundtrack is just as important if not more. Put crappy sound over your breathtaking pictures, and people will probably not even watch more than a few seconds before stopping the film. When creating content for YouTube, finding good music or sound effects can be quite a challenge. But there are solutions, here are three of them to help you out and hopefully make your clips even better!

The journey that a photographer takes in turning an enjoyable pastime into a full-fledged career is a common path that that describes the origins of many photography businesses. With limited business experience, hobbyists-turned-entrepreneurs often make incorrect assumptions about what makes a photography business successful. There is one particularly common misconception that holds a lot of photographers back in the early stages of starting a business.

As a young, rebellious teenager in love with music and films, I discovered my love of photography when I was handed an old Olympus film camera and I have since fallen deeply in love with the art of photography. Years went by as I experimented with different ways of shooting and discovering new ideas I wanted to pursue in this medium until I finished school and needed to think seriously about what I wanted to do in life. The choice was easy: either become a musician or a photographer.

For the last decade I’ve been sticking to my guns, shooting on a Canon 5D Mark II with a small selection of lenses. This camera has been the love of my life for so long even my family and friends get jealous. But what if you get the opportunity to dive into the dark depths of the deep end and shoot with a camera you’ve never dreamed of having the opportunity to shoot with before?