Fstoppers Original Articles

Marketing your photography business in 2016 doesn't have to be expensive if you’re willing to put in some elbow grease.

Creating a music video for a national act is one of the most intense tasks for a modern day filmmaker. Sure, the tools are more affordable, but declining budgets and insane turnaround times can turn your production into a sprint. Last month, my company, McFarland & Pecci, was tasked with creating two new music videos for the Grammy-nominated metal act, Killswitch Engage. My partner, Ian McFarland, and I drop everything when these guys call.

Being creative or simply having the ability to create on demand is one of the biggest assets you can have in this era. The question is "how do we unlock or keep creativity flowing?" The main steps you need to keep in mind are simple.

Professional photographers understand the quality of imagery that can come from a camera phone will never contend with the pictures and video you can capture with your DSLR. Phones will likely always have an innate handicap with sensor size, which leaves it's images lacking. That said, it would be quite unwise for photographers to neglect the most recent developments in camera phone technology. The ease of use, accessibility, and ability to quickly share your imagery can make your phone one the most important pieces of gear in your business. So, when phones like the new Asus ZenFone Zoom come out with a 3X optical zoom, it's best to pay attention.

Just like learning in any practice or aspect of life, the more you learn, the more you realize what you don't know or haven't learned. It's natural; it happens. There's so much for all of us to learn. Here are a few mistakes that I couldn't believe I was making during my photography career.

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.

Recently, a rather scathing article went up on Resource Mag’s website discussing the toxic behavior of a certain photographer. You can feel free to read the article. I, however, won’t mention him here other than to say that he is the sort of person who claims to be a teacher, but instead uses his fame to attack and belittle other, less experienced, photographers. He has made a hobby of robbing others of their love and passion for his own selfish delight.

Zen photography comes naturally with an empty mind. It’s both waiting for a moment where light, shape, and dynamics fall into place, and being devoid of planning in advance. Instead of checking the weather online before a shoot, you just venture out and essentially wing it. It’s all about being in the moment. As a landscape photographer, I want to share the ways of this minimalist sub-genre.

Both Tamron and Sigma have been shaking up the photography industry by releasing one premium lens after another. Many of these lenses are actually better than the Nikon or Canon equivalents. Tamron's 35mm and 45mm 1.8 lenses have created a new segment; wide angle primes with VC (vibration compensation). But does anyone really need this?

Music concerts are often a wide mix of sensory input, and a good concert photographer must figure out a way to capture the full scope of a concert experience in a single image. How well are your images accomplishing this difficult task? Submit your best concert photos to our next episode of Critique the Community! 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 28th, and will be offering feedback to a total of 20 pictures.

Photographing The World Behind The Scenes continues today with Episode 15. In this episode, we are finally able to leave Hong Kong (after our disaster with Vietnam Air in last weeks episode) and we arrive in Cambodia. We captured some amazing images and lessons in Cambodia and Elia almost gets his face bit off by a monkey.

Even though I am not a landscape photographer and I have never attempted any sort of astrophotography, I have always appreciated beautiful photographs of nightscapes. Recently, I borrowed the new Tamron SP 15-30mm f/2.8 Di VC USD lens and tried to photograph an interesting night scene here in Charleston. Truth be told, it was quite the learning experience. In this video, I will share my first ever approach to shooting the night sky and hopefully give you a few things to think about when tackling this interesting genre of photography.

Jeremy Cowart is a household name in the photography industry. Recently Jeremy was classified as one of the 30 most influential photographers on the web by the Huffington Post. After studying graphic design, he continued on to become a well-known celebrity photographer. We all know him from famous photos of Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, and even the Kardashians. But who is Jeremy Cowart? And what motivates him to be a photographer, an artist, and a humanitarian?

In the retouching world, graphics tablets are pretty much a standard. I don’t know of many retouchers that only use their mouse to get the job done. Graphics tablets allow for a more precise, and thus refined, work. They also used to cost a fair amount of money, but that was until Huion came along.

Now that I'm settled into my new 4200 sq. ft. studio, I have a ton of space. However, that wasn't always the case; in a smaller space, organization was the key to sanity. Tripping over gear and frantically searching for grip equipment is frustrating and doesn't look good in front of clients. I believe if you have an organized workspace that organization will be reflected in your mood while on set, allowing you to stay calm, cool, and collected. In this video, I show you four tips to starting down the path to a more organized studio.

A few years ago, simple timelapse videos were all the rage. To spice things up, videographers started to add small camera movements to their timelapses using motorized sliders. Those small camera movements have become far more complex today as some of these camera movements are miles in length. These are called "hyperlapse" videos.

As we all know, photography is ludicrously expensive. Even entry level DSLRs are a few hundred dollars these days; some point and shoots hit close to $1,000. This can be daunting to anyone looking to get into photography, as the sticker shock may drive them away. For working professionals, the price tags get higher and higher as apertures are larger, build quality is higher, and resolution jumps to ridiculous levels. There is, however, an alternative. It’s something that people fear, swear off, and curse because they got bit by a sketchy dude on eBay: buying used gear.

Keyboard warriors, draw your swords! That fool just suggested that gear is actually a really important aspect of photography! He is breaking all the conventional narratives. Fire up the torches and roast him alive!

Do you feel at a certain point, after making a long run of photoshoots, that you're hitting a wall with your creative side? Or have you "lost your touch" so to speak? This is also known as "Creative Burnout." As creatives, we've all been there before. At one point we all plateau and need to find a way to break the "funk" to get back of the swing of things. So how do we overcome this?

Our second tutorial with Elia Locardi: Photographing the World: Cityscape, Astrophotography, and Advanced Post-Processing was all about different types of cities. We started in Cinque Terre, a region of Italy where cities are basically built into the side of a natural landscape. We then moved on to Rome to shoot ancient architecture. Next we moved on to Singapore and Hong Kong for something a little bit more modern.

Even if you've never heard of Victoria Will, you probably have seen her awesome moving portraits of celebrities. These captivating images give a new take on celebrity portraits. Some might say they are simply amazing, but others might give a different opinion. We sat down with Victoria to give you this exclusive interview and discussed the inspiration behind these images.

Last week, we asked the Fstoppers Community to submit their best sports images to be critiqued by the Fstoppers team. We had a fantastic variety of images to choose from with over 250 entries. To keep in theme with this episode, we decided to film it during a recent ski trip. Lee and Patrick gave feedback to twenty images chosen from the submissions. Check out the selections and add your feedback and thoughts to the comments.

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.