Fstoppers Original Articles

Photography, at its core, is a tool for communicating meaning between human beings. We use it to advertise, share memories, and occasionally Photoshop an aeroplane in to add to the meaning we've already captured. In the right hands, photography can be an extremely powerful tool to do good in the world. It can bring about change, help people, and communicate ideas we couldn't otherwise communicate.

In November 2015, my mom came up with some old photos of my deceased grandfather, which were negatives printed on film. She said that she had asked several photography studios if it was possible to get normal prints from the printed negatives, but the answer was always no. As those were some of the only photographs left of him, she had kept all of them with a hope. Years after, it was my turn to try. The process to get some decent prints and move my mom to tears was ever so easy.

I love going out to shoot landscapes and finding new places that I think will look really cool at night. However, sometimes it’s hard to get to these places because of how far you actually have to go to get there. Here is my story from the night of May 25.

The jump from hobbyist or part-time to full-time photographer can be a daunting experience. About three years ago, I took the plunge into full-time photography. Overnight, I dropped my career as a teacher and decided to pursue this creative art. It was one of the most difficult decisions I have made and one of the most rewarding.

Four years ago I purchased my first set of studio strobes in an attempt to learn how to shoot portraits like the ones I saw in my favorite print magazines. Having shot most of my portraits using available light at f/2 and under, I thought this would translate over easily when I switched to shooting with strobes. As I snapped my first frame and realized that even at the lowest power setting on the strobe the image was overexposed, I set out to find a way to be able to accomplish the effect. The answer was high-speed sync.

As long as I can remember, I've adored summer and heat, and when the season comes, my head starts exploding with ideas that I can realize outdoors without the limitations the cold weather brings. The usual scenario is generating an idea and seeking locations to make it real, but my most outstanding shots were done when I got inspired by the location. I have already described how that inspiration happens in my previous post on my "unLimited" shoot. It was the same was with "Summertime." When my sister moved to her new apartment, I started looking around, and the moment I looked down from her balcony, located on the 5th floor, I knew something would happen there.

Your online portfolio is one of the most critical tools you have at your disposal when looking to make a sale. Clients are looking to your website as a sign of both your skill and professionalism. The customer wants to find a photographer who is the perfect fit so your website needs to be built to enable that feeling. Below are four priorities that photographers often overlook when designing their websites.

I attended the Canon Roadshow, held once a year, where Canon gets to show off their latest gear. We got to have lunch with the Canon people, and we also had great keynote speakers who told their story and presented their work and how they do what they do. One of the speakers, Laura McCullagh, shoots live music events. She's shot acts like Die Antwoord and Mumford and Sons, to name a few. We were fortunate to get some pointers from her on how to get great shots.

The rock band Garbage is out with the first single off their forthcoming album "Strange Little Birds," and while the track is undeniably awesome rock fare, the visual geek in me cannot get past this extremely cool camera effect that invokes "bullet time" from The Matrix. I have a hunch as to how it was done.

One of the most commercially viable careers as a photographer can be fashion or beauty photography. In fashion photography, you are mostly shooting people, and you have details like clothes, makeup, and mood that you can capture in creative ways. You can create fantasies, capture a personality, and really build a name if your images are unique, and you will get people asking for you if you’re able to portray a certain feeling or mood. How to get started is often most aspirational photographers’ stumbling block. I can tell you that it is the ones who "show up and shoot" who build the careers and names for themselves from it. So, how do you do it?

From Vogue to People, including Playboy and National Geographic, all these popular magazines are familiar to us and instantly recognizable, but just a few of us know what their first editions looked like decades ago. As time passed by, bringing forth new faces, new fashion, and a whole new way of thinking, magazines needed to evolve with their time and adapt. Some have stayed faithful to their initial visual identity, having only undergone minor changes because they knew what worked for them. On the other hand, other magazines covers have changed drastically, their covers being a far cry from the original design.

Whether you're a photographer, videographer, or a retoucher, you've probably been asked for free work once in your life. Recently, I've noticed an enormous increase of job postings from companies or individuals who are seeking free photography or videography work, or in their own words, "volunteer work." In the past, free work ads were a relatively rare occurrence, but recently they have become quite commonplace. It is possibly related to the increase of photographers in the market as well as the increase in the number of photographers or videographers who want to dive into the market. It's not difficult to offer an explanation for the growing trend of free digital imaging work, and it is even easier to find a solution that might overcome the problems caused by it: Never ever work for free in any circumstances.

For most of us living in the Northern Hemisphere, the wedding season has begun, and the first images are being sent out to brides and grooms. Delivering pictures to clients is more important than most photographers would like to think, especially for weddings. It is an opportunity to surprise customers, get referrals, and sell more prints or albums. The smallest details will help you separate your business from the crowd.

There’s an obvious difference between a Canon Powershot and a Hasselblad, but we all know that it’s not the equipment that makes the photographer. Should you make more money just because you have better equipment?

When traveling (flying, to be specific) for a photo or video job, there’s a lot more planning and logistics that go into being prepared for not only the job, but living out of a suitcase, sometimes without the support of people available to help you. I’ve put together a checklist of things that I often need to consider when traveling for a gig.

Oh, what's that? I'm using flashes to take a portrait? Well let's turn those bad boys up to 11 and make that subject pop! When you're first learning to light with flashes, the temptation can be overpowering to drown out all the ambient light in your scene to make your subject stand out. I'd argue that, at least for environmental portraiture, sometimes subtlety with flash is a more compelling way to go.

Last weekend, my wife and I enjoyed a wonderful spaghetti dinner at the house of wedding photographer, and fellow survivor of the Australian music industry, Col Hockey. As the night drew on and we sat around the warm glow of his Spotify account, taking turns picking dinner party background music, we set our minds to solving all of the problems inherent in the modern wedding photography world. We discussed gear, marketing, and the mountain that must be climbed: the post-wedding cull and edit. We’re both musicians, so the thought of spending days editing in secluded silence seemed completely alien, but it got me wondering if we were making the right choice.

As a British person, I have an innate talent for moaning, queuing, and observing humour about our ever-changing weather. One spring morning last month, while wiping the snow off my sunglasses and mopping the sweat off my brow with my thermal gloves, I began to ponder the first of this talent trifecta. One rich vein of moan material is mistakes, and being conscious of my miserable inner monologue, I attempted to shift the focus to something more useful.

One of the greatest ways to show the passage of time is with a time-lapse. A time-lapse is essentially a series of still images taken of a single subject over any given period of time (minutes, to hours, to even days), and then played back quickly to form a video. The usage of stills is really important. A common misconception is that a time-lapse is just sped-up video. While you could do this, there are issues with battery life, overheating, and storage space. With stills, you have the advantage of raw recording, better battery life, and far more storage space.

It is not a coincidence that so many creative types suffer from depression. It seems elemental to the process of creativity that one must suffer internally to give life to art completely unique and beautiful. According to a 2008 CDC study, it's estimated that one in ten people suffer from some form of depression; however, the connection is thought to be stronger in those of us that create for a living. Evidence suggests that creative types are more susceptible to the life-flattening effects of depression. One photographer wants you to know you are not alone in your struggles.

One of the most exhilarating aspects of environmental portraiture, especially when out on assignment, is that you never quite know what your shooting environment is going to look like. If I had a nickel for every time I walked into an awesome location, only to be quickly shuttled off to a closet-like space to do my work... Well, I'd be able to buy a sandwich. But a really nice sandwich. Here are some tips that may save your sanity while trying to compose an interesting portrait in a postage stamp sized room.

Professional Aerial Photographers Paul Hoelen, Emmanuel Coupé, and Scott Jon McCook are here with the ultimate guide to getting you started with aerials yourself. And of course, they shared some mouthwatering imagery that will make you ask the question: “Are these shot on Earth at all?”

Working with a team may be a blessing or a curse. Having a task delegated to a professional may sound relieving — assigning team members control of specific portions of a production, thus reducing headaches for you. It sounds like a great plan, and usually it is, until things go wrong.

I think we can all agree that the thing we want more of as photographers is additional time in a day. How exactly do we get more hours in a day? It's simple: we cheat. Over the last few years that I have been shooting, I have tried to hone my skills in photography while also learning any way I can to refine my process in shooting, editing, and eventually delivering my shots to either clients or posting them to social media. Here are a few hacks I have learned to use on my iPhone in a pinch.

I am a wide angle fanatic, especially when it comes to prime wide angles. I carry four lenses in my camera bag: two of them are prime wide angles, one prime nifty fifty, and one telephoto. Out of all these four, I found myself reaching just for one particular lens: the Sigma 24mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art. This came to substitute my old Canon EF 28mm f/1.8 USM lens which I adored, but it used to struggle a bit with chromatic aberrations and at times I craved for a wider view.

For those of you may not know, we recently created a 20 hour photography tutorial with the incredible Joey Wright on all things swimsuit photography and retouching. We've been posting a weekly behind the scenes series of the creation of this tutorial. This is Episode 5.

Every year, The Knot compiles statistics from thousands of weddings in their annual Real Weddings Study, and we get to learn all sorts of things about the ins and outs of what makes up a wedding in America. While there's plenty of interesting statistics, such as how 83% of couples used a smartphone in planning their wedding, the marquee stat is cost, and for the past five years that number has crept onwards and upwards to a brand new record that's just insane when you compare it to the average wedding in Europe.

I was recently commissioned to photograph fields of Rooibos Tea (a healthy tea with no caffeine and great antioxidants found in South Africa) so the farmer could document his potential yield. He also wanted details, as in what side of the tea field to start planting so he could plan the sowing schedule for the next five years. The idea is to not sow on the same soil, so new rows of tea plants need to be formed in five years. Tea likes fresh, new soil.

Kickstarter has allowed the photography community to share and create incredible ideas. We all know the success stories. What about the underdogs, though?

Slowing down while taking pictures is not always an easy thing. For those of us that learned with digital, the idea of shooting only a limited number of frames per session seems unthinkable. However, doing with what we have, and pressing the shutter only when we are sure to have a picture we are going to appreciate, is a very refreshing approach. Having just recently started shooting film, here are five tips I could give a digital portrait photographer to get better results, spend less time working, and slow down a bit.

Not too long ago, I remember going through a phase when the process of building up a camera rig was, for me, the most exciting part of owning gear. My decisions were based less on functionality, and more on the question of “will this item make my rig look more like a cinema camera?” Big and bulky was the order of the day, and if people ever advised cliches like: “the best camera you have is the one that’s on you” or “it’s not about what gear you have, it’s about how you use it,” their advice was taken with a pinch of salt.

Hey there, Ben Sasso here! Learning new things is one of my favorite parts of what I do, and I want to be able to pass that on. If you're looking for some quick and basic natural lighting tips to play with on your next shoot, you're in the right place. Check out five easy tips! Hope you enjoy!

If I ever find myself wallowing in a creative rut, I have a few surefire ways out of that hole. My most effective method, although probably not the quickest, is to watch a documentary on another photographer. They need not be similar to your own brand of photography; in fact, I often feel it's better when they aren't. Whatever sub-genre of photography the subject does, a documentary is invariably a rich vein of ideas and inspiration.

There is no perfect shoot, but here are some useful tips that could save you and your final images against possible mishaps. It is better to be prepared against various external factors.

This is by no means a new topic, but a recent poster in the Fstoppers Wedding Photography group lamented that they felt they were stuck in a creative rut, and it got me thinking about the problem of trying to be experimental within an industry. Chances are if you’re shooting for a client, they have a preconceived idea of what you're going to provide, even if that’s just a ballpark “these kinds of colors, this kind of emotion.” If you rocked up to a wedding with the awesome idea of only shooting macros of toes, you’re going to have a hard sell when it comes time to deliver the finished product; they’d need to be really good foot shots.

Are you a Photoshop expert? Fstoppers is starting a new weekly Photoshop contest for our community! We want you to submit your best photoshopped images in the groups where fellow photographers will vote for their top five favorite images. Of those top five, one lucky winner will be chosen and win their choice of an Fstoppers tutorial. This week we are focusing on your most creative photoshops within wedding photography!

If you began shooting video within the last five to eight years, it's quite likely that you rode the "5D Mark II wave." Maybe you didn't own a 5D, and still don't, but that camera revolutionized the world of video production forever. Not only did that camera enable many "budget" filmmakers to make top notch content, it inspired almost every manufacturer to begin shoving video into every camera they could. No longer was it necessary to buy a dedicated video camera to create motion pictures. While I will certainly credit Canon with originally bringing professional video capability to the masses, I have to hand it to Sony for rocketing "DLSR video" to another level entirely.

The DJI OSMO is a great tool for stabilizing your footage in a cinematic way. It is sure to increase your video’s production value. It can shoot 4K at 30fps, and you can even increase the frame rate to slow it down quite considerably. You can also shoot time-lapses or intervals, and if you move through an area while doing so, you will get the a very smooth, esthetically pleasing footage.

Shooting or being involved in a fashion or beauty shoot is a lot of fun. It’s a day where creative personalities, the photographer, stylist, hair and makeup and assistants as well as the client's creative team get together to produce a story, a body of work that they want to show the world. Everyone is focussed on bringing their best ideas to the party.

Get your smartphones out! Brace yourself for some Snapcodes! For Part Two of our Snapchat series, we've compiled a list of photographers and creatives that you should be following!

It seems like everyone is a photographer nowadays, and with technology getting cheaper and cheaper, it seems like every which way you look you are seeing another person snapping away on a DSLR. The question is how do you separate yourself from the masses. It can be a daunting task to do something different. But It’s not as hard as you think. It might be something you stopped using a long time ago.

Recently, one of the most well-known photographers in history was caught in a Photoshop scandal. Naturally, this begs the question: where is the line between truth and manufactured reality in photography?

The Fstoppers team has been working on a new project with Mike Kelley. Two weeks ago, we asked you all to submit your best Architectural images to be critiqued by Lee and Mike. We had some great submissions, and 20 images were selected to be reviewed. Check it out to see if your image was selected, and hear great advice on how to better your architectural photography.

Some photographers love using macro lenses for portraiture. Others hate it. The choice of using a macro lens when shooting portraits thus becomes an individual one which has a myriad of upsides and downsides which we will cover in this article.

For those of you may not know, we recently created a 20 hour photography tutorial with the incredible Joey Wright on all things swimsuit photography and retouching. We've been posting a weekly behind the scenes series of the creation of this tutorial. This is Episode 4.

Today, more and more cameras have wireless technologies built into the body. So far, the concentration on development for the use of these antennas has centered around image transfer and social media connectivity, posting directly to other services, etc. But that’s far from all that can be accomplished when cameras start being able to communicate with one another.

The world of photography and imagery is a rapidly evolving field. As stills and video have been exponentially improving over the last two decades, a more advanced kind of imaging is making it's way onto the scene. Virtual reality is actually becoming a reality, and Fstoppers writer Douglas Sonders is one of the individuals leading the industry. Tomorrow at 2 PM EST, join Douglas Sonders, Alex Chechelnitsky, Ben Nunez, and PJ Morreale for a B&H hosted live discussion as an intro to VR as a medium and a progressive methodology for content creation.

This is a pet peeve of mine, so I am going to thank you in advance for indulging me. There seems to be a rampant misunderstanding in certain levels of the photo community as to what editing presets are, and what they actually accomplish. I (like many of you I would assume) am a member of various photo-centric groups on Facebook. In particular, I am a member of groups for people who have purchased Lightroom and ACR preset packs from a variety of creators. Almost daily I see posts in these groups that go something like this: "I thought my photos were beyond hope, but then I applied "WHIMSICAL PRESET NAME" and they were saved! These presets are amazing!!!1!111!!!" Sound familiar?

People who are new to photography or videography often have huge levels of enthusiasm. The learning curve, however, is a steep one, and it can take many years to get to a point at which you're happy with the quality of your work. How then do you ensure that you remain enthusiastic about your craft amidst the disappointment of a mediocre standard of work?

With little exception, every time you agree to provide raw images to your client, you are hurting your own brand and doing that client a disservice. Although it might be easy to feel, it may be hard to understand exactly why this is. Even more difficult is how to then explain your decision to your clients in a way that also makes them feel good about receiving 'less.' Thankfully, Austin-based commercial photographer Caleb Kerr has all of these answers.