Fstoppers Original Articles

Are you proud of every commercial photo or corporate video production you’ve done? Have you ever found yourself explaining to someone, maybe even a client, about how a project you worked on could have been better, but you were held back by the lack of a big budget? That’s understandable to a point, but I think there has to be a certain standard of quality with any production, regardless of budget.

Some of my best street photography was shot while wandering the city with no apparent aim. Street photography is a genre in which you have little to no control of what your subject does, the light you’re working with, or the setting. You cannot force anything, and you cannot stage life in the streets or predict what’s about to happen before your very eyes. You’re just there, observant and ready to shoot. Here’s how I do it.

It happens at basically every wedding I shoot. I walk into the room to start taking images of the bride getting ready, and the bride offers me a mimosa. After I leave to take images of the guys getting ready, I walk in and the groom offers me a beer. Then, the ceremony is about to start, and a groomsman offers me a shot out of the flask he has in his jacket. Lastly, we are at the reception and both sets of parents and the entire wedding party are offering drinks. I have to assume that most wedding photographers are faced with at least one of these events at every job. So, the question is: do you accept?

I took a two-week trip to Hawaii last month with the intentions of not bringing along a bunch of camera gear. That was a fine thought in and of itself, but now I’m wondering if I could have mustered the courage to take an extended trip to a picturesque location without bringing a real camera at all?

PRO EDU recently released a five-part video series on their YouTube Channel dedicated to RAID. RAID, for those of you new to the term, refers to a system of file storage that can write a copy of everything you save to a separate hard drive so that you have two copies of everything you save. The benefit here is that if your hard drive fails, you don't lose all of your data and you have an identical copy ready to roll. In this video series, Gary Martin of PRO EDU explains everything you need to know about RAID systems to get started on your first RAID setup.

This week, Instagram awed us all by rolling out one of the simplest and most obvious features that we had all been clamoring for for years. OK, maybe I wasn't awed, but boy does multiple account support make my life so much easier. I’m no longer typing in my Instagram passwords 30 times per day, which got me to thinking: as a platform, Instagram is pretty good, but its features are still notoriously primitive. Here are a few features I think they should add that would make my life much easier.

Scrolling through Instagram, I came across a photo that I deemed worthy of a double-tap. Curious, I clicked on the profile to see more from the same photographer. Scrolling through his feed, I started to notice that although every photo included a human subject, there wasn’t a single face in sight. Intrigued, I had to know more and reached out: Meet Noel Alvarenga, the photographer who hides his subject’s faces.

To follow my previous article which stirred a healthy discussion about sharpness and whether that it's vital or not, it inspired to me to ask my fellow peers another question. Are the amount of megapixels on your camera crucial, or do other factors and features hold more value when purchasing a camera? Here are my thoughts.

Your headache from over-drinking (either in celebration or in deep depression) may be wearing off, but for those that had to photograph Super Bowl 50, that headache began days before the big day. The preparation for covering the game took its toll on those that enable us look back on it this week. Fstoppers caught up with ESPN photographer Andrew Hancock to get a look into the gear, setup, and planning to cover the most important event of America’s favorite sport.

Are you thinking of becoming an assistant? Trust me; assisting can be brutal, yet it can be exciting as well. It really depends on who you assist. Working in this role is the best way to gain lots of experience, especially when you're working your way to becoming a professional photographer. Working closely with a professional gives you valuable insights on equipment, processes, and techniques.

Neutral density filters seem to be all the rage these days. If you are a landscape photographer, ND filters are a crucial tool for smoothing out rough water and giving your skies a nice blurred effect. For portrait photographers, neutral density filters are great for maintaining wide open apertures in super bright situations while using strobes. Recently, we tested five different brands' filters to see which one produced the sharpest and most accurate color renditions. The results were pretty shocking.

With our current sports-focused Critique the Community, now seems like a great time to share some tips and best practices to help you improve your sports and action photography in 2016. Read on for 11 solid suggestions to help you become a better shooter.

My name is Nico, and I'm a professional urban/street photographer based in London. In this article, I will show how you too can use Twitter to get more photography jobs, develop your network, and get your work seen by the right people. At least 90% of my paid photography work, including Adidas and Amazon, has come from interactions on Twitter, and anybody with a high-quality portfolio can do the same by following my simple tips.

Let us venture back in time for a minute. 35mm film was always considered small. In fact, it was developed in the early 1900s as a means to make high-volume shooting and consumer photography possible. If you were a working professional, you were shooting at least medium format (6x4.5-6x19 cm) or even more likely, large format, like 4”x5” or 8x10”. The idea is that the larger the format, the more detail you can see. As we fast forward to digital, full-frame is the ideal format for many working pros in a variety of genres. While full-frame can be expensive and yields incredible image quality, there is something more.

The world wide web was set ablaze this week by the photography community when Brides.com published an article telling prospective brides which vendors they should and shouldn't be feeding, and this advice strongly suggested photographers should not be fed. Of course, anger ensued. Surely, in this day and age, the author would have crafted a rebuttal or an apology to the legion of photographers in the trenches that she had scorned. Nope. They silently covered it up.

Almost everyone goes through times when the belt need to be tightened because money just isn’t abundant. During these times when income dips, we need to take care to avoid spending as much as possible. Photography, however, is an expensive vocation that seems to be an endless drain on the bank account. It becomes increasingly helpful to avoid having to replace gear you already own due to wear or damage.

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 2016, we'll be featuring a new photographer every month, whose portfolio represents both stellar photographic achievement and a high level of involvement within the Fstoppers community.

Glamour photography, fine art nude photography, lingerie photography, swimwear photography — all of the above involve nudity. Sex sells — no explanation needed here. Or, at the very least, it will get you more likes on your page or your Instagram account. Is the sexiness in itself a problem? This is a recurrent debate. The #WomenNotObjects campaign, launched by Advertising Executive Madonna Badger, is calling on the advertising industry to put a stop to objectifying women for marketing purposes. As photographers, do we have a responsibility in this controversy?

For wedding photographers and stylists alike, getting published is one of the biggest keys to growing your brand and bringing business to your market. Over the past five years, the emphasis on wedding inspiration blogs from not just the vendor standpoint, but also from the client standpoint has given way to an overwhelming number of wedding blogs. In this post, we will look at the top five most influential wedding blogs over the past year.

Fstoppers is happy to announce the next round of Critique the Community. We invite everyone to submit your best sports image to be critiqued by the Fstoppers team. The image doesn't have to have any particular style but it must be related to sports and action, incorporating a human element (not just products or sports equipment). Please follow the guidelines for submissions below to ensure eligibility for your image to be chosen. We will be accepting submissions through Sunday night, February 7th and will be offering feedback to a total of 20 pictures.

Every portrait session with a new subject could bring new challenges. Some people are more comfortable in front of a camera than others, while some just take a little time to open up. I've put together a list of tips that may help you along the way during your portrait sessions.

Getting accurate Autofocus must be one of the most frustrating things an event or wedding photographer deals with on a daily basis. How many times have you been in the right place at the right time, taken a photo at the absolute peak of the action, and then found yourself cursing under your breath when you review the image only to find it wasn't in focus? This used to happen to me a lot at weddings, and I still see many of my assistants struggling with autofocus in extremely low light situations. Luckily there is a very simple solution that works everytime.

Keeping a fair amount of texture seems to be an issue for a lot of photographers and retouchers. No matter what technique they use to clean the skin of a model, I often hear people trying to find a solution to get a more natural and visible texture. Here is one for you!

Everyone wants to win the lottery. In this day and age winning the lottery can mean many things, one of which is hitting it big on social media. Creating a body of work, an brand image, and a following so massive it creates clout behind your name so high, it is easily seen by everyone as the best in the business. For photographers and creative alike, achieving something like that can easily be seen as difficult, but in reality for some it was outrageously easy and can still be done thanks to Instagram.

This story happens much more often than any of us would like to believe. A beautiful model receives a text from a highly respected photographer asking if she would be interested in doing a swimwear shoot at the beach. The model has heard great things about the photographer or maybe has even worked with the photographer before and jumps at the opportunity to shoot with him. The model, back home for the holidays, drives 7 hours across the country for an opportunity of a lifetime only to find out that she has been catfished by a creeper posing as a real photographer.

I encounter lots of people who are torn between pursuing their passion for photography as a career or keeping it as a treasured hobby. There’s naturally that underlying paranoia that doing what you love full-time and taking on the pressure of monetizing it will kill your enjoyment. I’d like to say that years after going “pro,” I still love what I do every day. If you’re unsure and need convincing, here’s why I believe you too should take the plunge.

In a recent discussion with a friend over coffee, I was asked how it is that I gain access to photograph so many different people, specifically about the portraits that I have set up for some of my personal projects regarding artists and craftspeople. Some of these images require quite a bit of setup and a significant contribution in time and skill from the subjects of the photographs themselves. The answer to this question was quite simple: I ask.

Computational photography is quickly becoming one of the leading threads for the future of our industry. Whether we realize it or not, it is already deeply integrated into our DSLRs and cameraphones in a supporting role, while other manufacturers have embraced it as the fundamental basis for equipment. Recently, I chatted with the team from Algolux about how they’re tackling some of the most relevant problems in photography to enable a future in which software and hardware work more in tandem than ever before.

If you look back to the beginning of photography, color didn’t exist. In fact, it didn’t exist for a long, long time. Even as 35mm film pioneered the way that photography was used and purchased, black and white was king. Slowly, as time progressed, color film began to take a foothold in the industry. Once legendary color films like Kodachrome and Kodacolor became widely available, black and white became far less popular for commercial use. Now, in the digital era, almost every digital camera records information in color. Why then, would I bother viewing my images in monochrome during my shoots, even if I know I’ll deliver them in color?

We all have that time of year when lethargy seems to run rampant by pulling our desire to keep creating great photos to the ground. For Vancouver, where I live, that time is right about now. Vancouver was carved out of the middle of a rainforest, which means we have a rather aggressive rainy season. It is pretty common to go weeks without even seeing a hint of sun. During this time, the motivation to shoot seems to wash away. As photographers, we need to take this time to toss several new logs on the fire and re-ignite that passion that is threatening to slip away.

In Episode 12 of Photographing The World Behind the Scenes, we spend our final three days in Singapore. Elia teaches one final lesson for the Cityscape photography tutorial, but the highlight of our time in Singapore was spent with the locals.

Casting is time consuming! It can suck up all your energy. It can leave you exhausted and frustrated. It is mostly the one part of photography that always demands tons of effort, and does not always reward us with the results we hope for. That’s why there are casting directors, both in the stills and film industry. It is a job! When you are working on your portfolio you rarely have the means to hire one, so better to get efficient with it on your own. If you are a landscape or a still life photographer, move along gleefully.

When learning about retouching, selections and masks should be on top of the list along with curves and brushes. But each of these tools have so many options, and it is hard to know the in and out of each of them. In this article, I will guide you through different ways to create precise and refined luminosity masks to help you improve your retouching skills.

Running your own business can be the most fulfilling and most frustrating thing someone can ever embark on. It's both draining and empowering at the same time; quite simply, it's the most toxic relationship you will ever be in, but you'll always be going back for more no matter how crazy people say you are.

How many of us picked up our first camera because it was a way to make a buck? For most videographers, the hustle of media production work gradually evolved from a passion for filming into a business formula based on our strengths, reputation, and market necessity, but fun was the kickstarter.

In my last article on flash photography, I gave you a few simple techniques for keeping your flash looking natural and allowing it to blend in with your existing light without calling attention to itself. This time around, we're going to do exactly the opposite, and look at how varying the amount of ambient light in a photograph can affect the way your flash appears and how this can be used for dramatic effect.

For the last several weeks, the Fstoppers team has been working with Joey Wright in Curaçao filming a new original tutorial on swimwear photography. While we were filming, we used some of our time with Joey to offer feedback to a variety of images submitted by the Fstoppers community. We chose 20 images to critique. Check out our selections below and add your thoughts and ratings to the comments below.

The ability to direct models (any model) in your shoot is key to any visual project. You might have the best location, styling, and lighting setup, but if you don’t have the right kind of emotion in your model's face, it will all have been for nothing. Your mission is not just to press on the shutter release, but to also be a director. Here are the dos and don'ts and a little bonus at the end.

About two years ago, in the spirit of adventure and creativity, I decided I was going to try and photograph the ocean with artificial lighting. I had an image in my head of all the things I’ve seen in daylight hours, with the stark contrast of an illuminated wave against a dark backdrop. A run-of-the-mill day down at the beach certainly wasn’t going to do either. We were going to go straight to the top and shoot the biggest and meanest waves we could find.

I’ve always been a fan of big lights. There are certainly situations where they aren’t appropriate, but a lot of my work is centered around big, soft light. What has always drawn me to large sources of light is their versatility. Almost every subject looks good with soft light. Because large light sources cause such soft gradation in the shadows, they can be useful for both younger subjects with smoother skin, or even older subjects that may have wrinkled and scarred skin. However, there is one thing that should be cleared up: the definition of a large light source.

Faster, higher, stronger is the code by which I have made most of my lens and camera decisions for nearly a decade. I've never been satisfied with f/2.8. I've waged war between the focal planes of the eye and the eyelash, and I have the scars and image casualties to prove it. As I grow older and my battle-weary eyes begin to look back at my quest, I have begun to see the emptiness in it all. Were even my perfect shots completely out of focus?

Since its release, the Nikon D750 has been praised as one of the best full frame cameras that money can buy. It has features that outperform cameras that are twice the price. One of the little frustrating elements of this camera though, that I still see being discussed to this day, is the finicky hot shoe.

As competition in the photography industry becomes tighter and tighter, the challenge of building a successful career with the camera is ever growing. In response to this, the industry continued to fragment into an array of smaller, niche, industries where each photographer specializes in a specific area of expertise. In an vocation once filled with photographers who were focused on shooting nearly anything, the classic, generalist, photographer has become a rather rare breed. Viktoria Haack is an example of a young, rising, star who has not only chosen to buck this trend, but who has also managed to build a successful career in the process.

People continue to ask me the same question over and over, "How do I quickly grow my following on Instagram?" I will continue to tell them there is no easy way to go about this, but I have found one way in recent months that has been building my following much faster than I expected. Here are a few ways I am finding great follower growth, as well as a rise in engagement. Trust me, hold tight while I go through a few ways you as a professional can get ahead of some of these young guns with iPhones.

After a photo shoot, most photographers cull through their images on their favorite software. During this process, images that stand out are kept for post-processing, and rejects are thrown away. But what exactly constitutes an image worthy of making the cut?

It’s safe to say that this camera doesn’t suck, and in the hands of someone like Tim Kemple, who’s at the top of their game, the results are pretty incredible. I got the chance to chat with Tim about his thoughts on using the new Phase One XF 100MP camera, including what happened when he flew it on a drone over a waterfall.

Ever tried to photograph a subject, only to find out that you don’t have enough depth-of-field to get the whole thing in focus? Typically our first reaction is to stop down to increase our DOF. Unfortunately that doesn’t always give us the results we expect. The first issue is that even with our lens stopped down to its smallest aperture, we still may not have our subject completely in focus.

Working as a behind-the-scenes or “stills” photographer is an entirely different experience to most usual photography jobs. As photographers we naturally tend to take charge of the creative direction, and are used to getting our own way. Working BTS requires you to work within different dynamics, not least of which involves being surrounded by other creatives, each with their own opinions and ideas. Here are some of the best and worst things you can expect whilst shooting behind-the-scenes.

The behind-the-scenes series of our cityscape tutorial with Elia Locardi continues with episode 11. In this episode we fly on one of the longest flights in the world, from N.Y.C. to Singapore. We enjoy seeing the sights of this amazing city and we also try eating some chicken feet. Spoiler: they were awful.