Exclusive articles and expert opinions written by Fstoppers’ talented team of creative professionals. Here we cover everything from the latest photographic techniques to advice on running a successful photography business, to first hand accounts of working in the photography industry.
Birth photography has become a popular sub-genre of documentary photography that shows the raw, real, and beautiful journey of bringing new life to the planet. It seems fitting to spend a few minutes on this Mother's Day remembering how your mom earned the right to exclaim: "Hey, I brought you into this world, so [insert personalized threat]!"
Finding the best quality of light is most of our job as photographers, and a great place to start looking is window light, especially north-facing window light. This type of light creates a soft transition from light to shadow, and can be very flattering on our subjects. Sometimes, however, we need to get consistent results all day, as in the case of this menu shoot, and using a window will cause too much variation in the light.
I’m sure most of us have been there before: standing on a street corner, your “camera bag that doesn’t look like a camera bag” slung casually over your shoulder. Your camera is in hand, its strap hanging loose, dancing in the summer breeze. You raise the rangefinder window to your eye and snap: the perfect shot of a homeless man! He looks really sad; this will finally change everyone's mind — straight to Instagram. But there’s a fine line between biting social commentary and “Poverty Porn,” and sometimes, it's hard to see which side you’re on.
I bought my first camera on a whim. It was a secondhand Canon 350D, and I bought a 50mm f/1.8 to go with it. It wasn’t expensive, but I couldn’t believe the pictures I could take. It was as if I had opened a secret door and revealed this beautiful landscape awaiting exploration; I was hooked. The problem was I stepped through the doorway, and the door closed, slapped me on the arse, and then promptly vanished. Suddenly, I was very aware of the vastness of what I was growing to love and how so much of it was all but unreachable for me.
As a creative artist, I am always looking for new perspectives as a way to improve my work, and usually, when I see something fascinating, an orchestra plays inside me; I crave to try something new. However, not all cravings can be satisfied, simply because they are way too extravagant and unaffordable. Here is a fascinating list of some lenses you might have never came across before.
As a new writer on here, sometimes, it is hard to come up with new content to write about. I really have to put my brain to use. Sometimes, I randomly come up with ideas and topics to write about, and that is definitely one reason I'm glad I switched back to the iPhone. Whenever I come up with a thought or idea to write about, I hop into my Notes app and start writing some ideas down. Now, when I go home, it’s on my iPad, computer, phone, etc., and I can sit down and start to write more about it.
It is no secret that Nikon is starting to fall behind in the lens game, partly because competitors, such as Sigma and Tamron, have doubled down on quality and focused heavily on innovating, but also partly due to Nikon's seeming unwillingness to invest in new and updated, innovative designs. As the demands of modern sensors expand, so does the demand for sharp, high resolution glass. Nikon has several legendary lenses in their past, which with a modern facelift could become some of the most competitive lenses in today's market.
Strap yourself in, and get ready for a really dorky article on lighting. I promise to get only slightly technical and hopefully open your eyes to the amazing differences you get from the various options available to both motion and still photography.
Snapchat has quickly become one of the more popular social networking platforms. Users are no longer following just their close friends, but also movie stars, musicians, comedians, and even popular photographers. But with more and more people to follow, we now have a longer list of friends to sort through. At this current time though, Snapchat doesn't have any sort of way to group friends to allow for easy sending. Luckily there is a trick you can use to make sending snaps to a group of people much easier.
You're about to become better at post-processing! Raiatea Arcuri, a landscape photographer from Hawaii, has an impressive portfolio. I was pleased to learn that he also shares some of his secrets to processing his landscapes. Arcuri teaches you how to process a stack of images shot at night to create a wonderful star trail nightscape using Lightroom and Photoshop, and I will share some additional tips to help you achieve stunning star trails.
I just attended a talk by the renowned Travel Photographer Jon Reid. He has been delivering work to Getty Images on a regular basis for over 10 years, but most of his work is commissioned by the largest travel agencies in the world. He shoots stills and video, and his work gets used online to provide information on a specific city or country.
I'm a photographer because my life is filled with hot models all day, every day, right? No, but really, photography, as a career, should not be taken for granted. Let’s be honest, we’re hardly saving lives here, and we should be very grateful that we can make a career of essentially taking pictures. That’s not to say it isn’t hard work or a lot of responsibility, because it is. I just know I’m feel very lucky to be making a living from what I love doing most. And there’s so many reasons why it has to be the best job in the world.
Some people use social media platforms as their emotional outlet, some for vanity purposes. I use social media to brand my photography business. This approach may not fit every photography niche, but I would like to explain how it fits mine, and I am sure you will note a thing or two that you could use as well. I hope you can interpolate my experience onto the niche you work in.
Where Leica goes, controversy is sure to follow. Last week, the M-D Typ 262 rangefinder camera was announced, and as usual, photographers were there to complain about it. While the constant eye-rolls in the direction of Leica are usually in regards to sky-high prices or other minor design decisions, this time, there's something truly worth talking about. The M-D is completely lacking an essential element of all digital cameras: the screen. It's bold, it's beautiful, and it was the perfect move for Leica.
In some ways, working with clients is a lot like the dating scene. So how do we get that second date? Wouldn't life be easier if you didn't have to look for new clients all the time? What if you could retain the best clients you've worked with before? Maximize your resources, get better recommendations, and make freelancing far more relaxing. Maybe we're all guilty of annoying a client or two, but if you find you're not being approached by anybody for that second date, then maybe it's more than your bad breath. Here are five great ways to go about it.
With the wedding season right around the corner, it is time to find a solution to improve last year’s workflow. Most event photographers complain about the same thing: culling. It can quickly become a very time-consuming task, and it is far from being the most interesting part of the job. Although, there are a few ways to help speed up the process while retaining a solid quality control.
Whether Pablo Picasso or T.S. Eliot had said "good artists copy, great artists steal," I think they were both trying to emphasize the significance of finding and later on evolving a unique style for your art or craft. Well, this quote is quite ambiguous in some points and I doubt if stealing is still vital for being a "great artist."
The history of camera gear is rich, storied, and well, weird. Camera design has evolved in many different directions over time, sometimes in magnificent arcs of ingenuity and design, others in pit stops of absurd creativity or questionable judgment. Today, we're celebrating some of the strangest stops along that journey.
Photography is an art and a wonderful hobby to get yourself involved in. There comes a point where many hobbyists decide to turn that passion into a full-time career, and when that happens, it is imperative to have a solid strategy in place to be financially stable. Photography can be a volatile career, more so than most businesses, so here are three strategies I use to make sure I stay profitable.
In my journey to separate my family life from my work life, as detailed in my last post, a change in my work environment has been key. Namely, my wife was tired of seeing my hard drive sitting on the kitchen island and I was handily kicked down to the basement. I took this opportunity to switch up my workflow from using a local external hard drive to a NAS (network-attached storage). Here are some interesting things I've discovered along the way.
When I wrote "Seven Things About Being a Photographer I Wish I'd Known Earlier," I wasn't expecting such a strong response. I had far more than seven things I wish I'd known, but I tried to trim the fat and keep the article lean. Well, I liked the fat. So, now I'm compiling the trimmings into their own article, although I don't mean to infer that these eight are less important than my first seven; they aren't. I also can't guarantee there won't be a further set in the future. Make of that what you will.
After recently buying 200 tintypes from the deep archives of estate sales, eBay, and Etsy auctions, I became transfixed by seeking out if there was still anyone making imagery using this 160-year-old process. I found a wide range of Instagram accounts ranging from those just starting out to those with thousands of followers. These are the top 10 tintype photographers that stood out with their compelling visuals and dedication to keeping this lost art alive.
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.
A few weeks back, we discussed the idea that you really need to know your gear so that it will get out of the way for you. The next step is to know what to use when. The old adage goes that you can't fit a square peg in a round hole. As much as this applies to misfits or carpenters, it also applies to the art and craft of making images. The idea that certain tools or ways of thinking are not a fit for the task at hand is a powerful one. It can help us make purchase decisions, technical choices, and even post-processing choices.
There have been several posts on Fstoppers over the years extolling the virtues of the pre-shoot location scout. Knowing your location in advance not only helps to keep the crushing dread of a possible creative block to a minimum, but your confidence and decisiveness carries across to your clients. They start to see you as a god of light, a master of scene. But sometimes, location scouts don’t go as planned: sometimes, it rains, sometimes, you don’t plan for a gigantic Buddhist festival to be taking place, and sometimes, you accidentally bring a two year-old.
Almost every video you see online holds an element of sound production made up of music and sound effects. For us to produce a quality body of work, we need to know where to look. I’ve recently started focusing more on producing, shooting, and editing and wanted to share this list I created where you can find awesome music for your projects.
Branding yourself is probably one of the most important things you can do as a photographer. It is important to showcase your work, whether it is your best work at the time, your best work overall, or even some of the work you just like most. I personally put up the images I think are best, but a lot of the time, I can be very picky, and I tend not to like certain photos when other people still really like them. This is something that is 100% up to you. You are the person choosing what you want to show as a reflection of you and what you do.
For many of us, photography is a form of art, or at least there is an artistic process behind it. More than that, each of us strive to have a "style" that is an artistic consistency to our work. Photography, however, is quite different from your traditional art-making process. There is as much technical knowledge required as artistic or creative inspiration and thinking. This separates the process into two distinct parts: the shoot and the edit. These two parts are equally important to your identity as a photographer.
As a headshot and portrait photographer, I'm always looking to streamline my process and create consistent results for my clients. With that in mind I want to share with you my "bread and butter," super-simple setup I've been using for the last two years.
When the term "compositing" comes up, one often considers it a destructive, transformative process that involves frankensteining a myriad of images into a single, completely new, composition. This method can draw as much ire as it does praise. Personally, I love great composites, but many feel that they are too fake. Not all compositing has to be a metamorphosis creating a brand new image, however. By leveraging compositing technique to make slight alterations to your image you can, instead, create a shot that is much more true to reality but still creates a sense of fantasy or surrealism.
Let me preface this article by saying that I LOVE Billy and the rest of the team at Resource. I’ve shared quite a few hung-over mornings with you guys at misc. photo conferences and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I would also like to note that I disagree with much of the article that they just ran.
You can have the tools, and you can have the know how, but what is one of the most powerful skills that most photographers, videographers, and just about anyone else will swear by in a creative industry? The power of forethought and pre-planning. Granted, for some this step isn’t as important as it is to others. However, whether you sit down and make a shot list, sketch out some rough ideas for shots, or just develop a really strong concept of what you want to accomplish on a project, most people do pre-plan in some way shape or form.
The Fstoppers team has been working on a new project with Mike Kelley. While we're with him, we wanted to give some of our readers the chance to have their architectural images critiqued by one of the best in the field. Join us for our next episode of Critique the community by submitting some of your pictures below in the comments. We will be selecting a total of 20 images to give feedback to. See the instructions below to submit your images correctly.
Most photographers have a difficult time turning their social following into income – Yes, even those with HUGE social followings. The great part is, it doesn’t take a genius to learn how to capitalize from your social following, whether it’s 100 people or 100,000. It just takes some research and small bit of effort.
Photography is one complex profession which requires many skills, from the technical to the psychological. We have all been faced with unpredictable scenarios which have put us or our clients/models in an awkward position ,or a state or panic. It can be anything: an insecure model, no time to set up your planned light, an equipment which breaks or malfunctions, a sudden rainfall, an unhappy bride, etc. Being well-equipped won’t always save the day. And if we lack self-control, good communication skills, and if we lose creative approach in stressful situations, we could just pack our gear and go home with an unhappy client glaring at our back. Being able to deal with these different scenarios might be surprisingly beneficial both for your photography and business.
I keep seeing Community Over Competition everywhere. People get upset at another photographer for "stealing" a client or undercutting their prices, and go on tangents about how creating community is more important than competing with one another. While I do agree that community is extremely important, (I mean who else is going to listen to us gripe about the industry and let us bounce ideas off of them?) I also believe that competition is healthy for the industry, and for you.
The mania surrounding food photography is a pretty recent phenomenon. In the last decade, what used to be a niche in photography took social media by storm and ever since has been one of the favorite topics for a huge amount of accounts. It is supposedly the second most popular subject of photography fanatics on Instagram after the selfie tsunami. I sat down to talk with Hein van Tonder, a food photographer carving his way into the food royalty.
Do you spend more time researching photography gear than shooting? Do you believe that you can’t achieve a particular look without buying the latest shiny product? Then you might be suffering from G.A.S., also known as Gear Acquisition Syndrome. Step into my office and let me share some prescriptions that can help you cure this debilitating disease!
Retouching, much like photography itself, is a really subjective topic in the community. What one photographer considers great, another considers mediocre. While there are many debatable topics regarding retouching, I think it’s important to note these three things most photographers get wrong when they’re retouching.
Leaving the car, mountains, and solid ground behind, we get into a small airplane to do some landscape photography over Western Australia with International Fine Art Photographer of the Year Scott Jon McCook, not only to cover more ground while we’re at it, but to gain a rather unique perspective of the landscape and the story behind it.
Breaking your way into a very competitive film industry can be tough without proper guidance. While there is no real blueprint to success, there are some strategic approaches that can improve your chances of achieving a rewarding and lucrative career.
Work hard. Create personal work. Blog. Be active on social media. Pick up the phone. These (any many others) are tried and true ways to promote yourself and your business while you're trying to get noticed in a sea of other artists. But what happens when life gets in the way of your success? How do you balance taking care of your family while giving photography an honest to goodness shot?
We are living in an era that everyone complains about their bulky camera gear and how hard it is to carry it all day. Many photographers are now switching to mirrorless cameras for this reason. But hey, there is another solution for that: You can minimize your lenses and other gear, rather than changing your main camera body. That's what I did.
Late last year, I wrote here about choosing your next lens for photography. In the comments, I was asked to write a similar guide about cameras. So today, we will be discussing the important factors in choosing a new camera body, or if you are just getting into the world of interchangeable lens systems, your first camera body.
I ought to precede this piece with the disclaimer that it is meant as "photographer humour" and must be taken as tongue-in-cheek. That said, my tongue is so furiously pressed against the inside of my cheek I’ve developed ulcers.
Before the digital accessibility of today's water resistant action cameras, there was the 35mm format wonder, The Nikonos Calypso. Many are familiar with this analog, water photography staple. Generations of photographers grew up cutting their teeth for surf photography wielding these water tight beauties. The cult following of the fantastically simple camera has produced catalogs of breathtaking imagery, iconic of an era. The Nikonos Project has been a driving force in maintaining the modern revival. The young project encourages incredibly talented surf photographers to hang up the digital gear in favor of a less forgiving, more rewarding form of capture.
"What lens should I buy?" It is the question I have seen countless times over the years in so many forums. It's the question I get from friends — the never-ending question. There is only one problem: the lens you should buy really all depends on you! What lens do you love? How do you like to photograph? Where do you photograph? Do you have space to back up so you can use a long lens? What do you like?
I’m probably not going to be winning any friends by sticking up for the undercutters, but I just don’t think that they’re hurting you as much as you think they are. In fact, I think they might actually be helping you.
I recently posted an engagement photo in a Facebook group and immediately got a comment on it. The comment said: "Awful expression on her face... would not keep this picture." Although I have pretty thick skin when it comes to snide comments and CC on my images, this comment really got under my skin.
The umbrella. The quintessential light modifier, right? Wrong! Over the years, I've developed a rather severe umbrella aversion. Umbrellas are an enemy that never find a spot in my camera bag, and I'm about to tell you why!
