Fstoppers Original Articles

For any photographer with ambitions of working in the fashion industry, or for those with a focus on portraiture, there will come a time when you work with a subject that is unfamiliar with being in front of the camera. This can range from a newly signed model at an agency, to a client interested in a corporate headshot. While a photographer’s eye can be their greatest asset, communication skills are just as important. Below we will take a look at some of my top tips for making the most of your next session.

Welcome to the first installment of Fstoppers’ Gear Tuesday! Below, you will find the answers to last week’s questions, including great topics such as walk-around lenses, magnesium vs. plastic bodies and the future of APS-C.

Everything in life comes and goes. Sadly, photographers using Facebook to promote their work is coming to an end. It wasn’t that long ago when newsfeeds were sorted by the things most recently posted and not by what Facebook thought we’d be interested in. There was a time when followers of any given Facebook Page would scroll through their newsfeed and they saw every photo or status posted. The good old days are behind us. Facebook’s algorithm is a bottomless, money hungry pit. After making some huge mistakes on Facebook, I now realize that Instagram is the only platform that provides photographers with the greatest reach.

I'm excited to announce a new weekly segment, where you the Fstoppers community can submit your favorite image to be edited and retouched by me, Lance Nicoll. Post an image you recently shot, that hasn't been retouched yet, in the comments below. On Thursday I will retouch it an post the recording of the entire process! If you guys love it, I will continue to do this every week! – And maybe in the future even do it as a Live Retouch with Q&A. The rules are as listed below. Really excited to see everyone's submissions. Submit your image by Wednesday at Midnight to be selected.

Anyone who has been booked as a wedding photographer knows that this genre of photography can be extremely challenging. Perhaps no other field of photography throws as many variables at you more than those found on a typical wedding day. Whether it is crazy weather, horrible lighting situations, demanding wedding planners, strict church rules, or overall disorganization, there are a many many things that can cause the day to go less than expected. Here is what every bride should know about the challenges of photographing a wedding ceremony.

I knew when I saw this image up in the photo section of our Fstoppers website, I had to inquire about how it was created. It is clearly a thoughtful re-imagining of the iconic painting "Liberty Leading The People", but I had no idea how much effort Anthony Kurtz went into creating this photo. Little did I know that it took three weeks of preparation, two days of set building, one day of photographing, and 50+ hours of retouching and it was all done on a shoe string budget with borrowed props and location. What he created with very little money and a lot of brilliant strategy and vision is inspiring. Read below to learn how Anthony did it.

A few months ago we launched the Fstoppers Community which allows members create profiles, share their portfolio images/videos, and connect more easily with other readers and the Fstoppers staff. I've compiled a list of 10 of my favorite photographers on Fstoppers right now.

Photography is a business largely built on referrals, word of mouth and reputation. How you present yourself to others and take advantage of chance opportunities can make or break your career. Are you presenting the best possible version of yourself to clients and fellow photographers?

Creativity is the core building block of every great photographer. Those who know how to foster and stimulate the power of their creativity often can enjoy a tremendous boost in their work. Some methods such as listening to music or getting hammered are pretty common knowledge but there are also an endless collection of somewhat less orthodox methods that are also worth giving a whirl!

Holy butts. Sometimes the fact that I'm an artist and I'm allowed to get weird slips my mind. I don't have a boss, I'm allowed to create what I want, I'm allowed to try new things for the sake of playing, and I'm even allowed to start a blog post by saying "Holy butts." That rocks.

The number one questions I receive when talking about Instagram is "How do I build a huge following like you?" and I usually laugh and reply "I honestly have no idea." Though this is true in some sense, there must something attracting these people to follow me by the masses. Whether that be by liking, commenting or even reaching out to collaborate it's still a bit of a mystery to me. Beginning today I am going to break down the various ways to use Instagram for business but first I want to give you all 3 comprehensive steps to building a huge following.

Photographers often get worked up into a frenzy when they feel their business has been abused or taken advantage of. This isn’t more true than when it comes to discussing the improper use of images that are proofed online or shared via social media.

Have you ever wanted to create a dramatically lit portrait but you have felt limited by your lack of camera gear? Pye Jirsa over at SLR Lounge has just released a very technical video showing how you can accomplish complex lighting with just a single on-camera flash. The results are pretty incredible, and I would have never thought these images were created with such a simple lighting solution.

Recently, Richmond Virginia-based wedding and portrait photographer Meagan Abell made a stunning find in a thrift-store box of old images. Among the half-century-old family snapshots she uncovered a set of jarringly beautiful transparencies (slide film) and a desire to find the women on them. The #FindTheGirlsOnTheNegatives campaign has, overnight, caught fire, garnering worldwide attention and press. Ms. Abell was kind enough to take a few minutes out of her schedule of NatGeo and BBC calls to chat with me for an exclusive interview.

I am probably going to piss off Lee Morris and Patrick Hall and probably some of you with this post but there has been a lot of conversation lately, including multiple posts on Fstoppers.com, about ‘discounted,’ ‘gray market’ and ‘on sale’ cameras dramatically priced lower than their manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP).

Gear, of course! Camera bodies and lenses galore! Nothing makes you a better photographer than dumping thousands of dollars on the latest technology! Right? No? Ok, I digress, I guess blowing all your hard earned (or borrowed) cash on the latest and seemingly greatest in camera equipment is probably about the least effective thing you can do to improve the quality of your work. So what SHOULD you be spending your money on then?

I've made 2 posts on Windows in the last couple of weeks and people seem to think that I'm a Windows hater. I'm not. All of my computers are Windows machines. Every computer in the Fstoppers office is a Windows machine. But I'm not some fan boy who is going to lie about my experience either and Windows 10 so far has not been a good experience.

Update: "Something happened". The day has finally come, Windows 10 is available to the public and if you currently have a computer with Windows 7 or 8 on it, you can get Windows 10 totally for free. Let me give you a few tips about upgrading your operating system and a few warnings.

Naomi and I just celebrated our 40th month of being on the road full-time and living a 100% location independent lifestyle. Looking back, it seems like a lifetime ago when we made that crazy decision to sell nearly everything we owned and adopt a life filled with travel photography. In a way, it really was a lifetime ago because we were completely different people back then living very different lives; two people with a dream of what could be, teeming with optimism, but with no real idea of how it would all work out in the end.

Welcome back to our weekly segment of Photographing The World Behind the Scenes where we take you through the process of filming our landscape photography tutorial with Elia Locardi. In last week's video, episode 2, we ran through 4 different lessons in 4 completely different locations around Iceland. This week's location, a glacier ice cave, was so amazing that we decided to dedicate an entire episode to it.

With July coming to an end, summer in the North East is in full swing and what better time to get out and shoot than the present. Whether you are shooting portraits or landscapes, in the daylight or under the stars, sometimes the best way to stay motivated and make sure you are having fun with your photography is to keep things simple. While I don’t go bare-bones with one camera and a lens, if I am out adventuring, chasing a sunset, or on a day trip hiking through the forest, I like to keep my gear minimal. While each piece of equipment has various uses, here is a look into my camera bag and different ways you can use each piece of equipment.

Last week I wrote a post about how Nikon really needs to jump on the 4k bandwagon. I got a few comments that basically said; "Why do you care about 4k? nobody even owns a 4k TV at this point." They were right, 4k TVs aren't very popular, but I have no interest in producing 4k videos right now. I want to shoot 4k footage to enhance my 1080p videos.

Controlling your image is a valid quest for any photographer, as we all want to protect our brand. Seeing one’s work altered without permission can be frustrating, as can discovering your work on blogs that are void of any credit. The first response for most photographers is to watermark their images, ensuring that their logo or website graces every image that hits the internet. In today’s landscape, is watermarking your photographs the best way to protect them? Let's review both sides of this debate, and explore the current state of the watermark in photography.

Color management is constantly an issue for photographers, digital artists, and videographers. We spend money on great monitors, only to know that we have to calibrate them and our input devices and our output devices as well. Some of us even opt for a wide gamut monitor designed specifically for those who work in the digital arts, allowing us to adjust brightness, color, and contrast like we would an image. This introduces one more, slightly more insidious potential problem: color management within our web browsers.

Nikon has a long history of venerated products, many of which are still just as useful today as they were in generations past. Here's a list of some of the best products of yesteryear.

Dodge and burn, frequency separation, and other techniques used by high-end retouchers are great but time-consuming. Shooting and retouching weddings, as well as fashion and beauty, I sometimes find myself spending way too much time on wedding retouching. Being used to cleaning skin with dodge and burn for beauty, I tend to do the same with weddings. Which, as you can guess, is not very profitable. The same thing goes for proofing portrait sessions. I like to give lightly retouched proof images instead of pure raw files. So for weddings and portraits proofs I had to come up with a quick way to clean skin without making my images look too bad. Here is how I do it.

I’m often amazed by how many photographers don’t really know all that much about the technical aspects of operating their gear. While I’m not expecting everyone to go out and study how the mechanics of a lens works, I think it is utterly paramount when you are on a shoot that the actual act of operating your equipment to achieve a professional-quality image should be trivially easy so that you can focus on the more important aspects.

Whether you’re just starting out in product photography and are trying to figure out where is the right direction to head, or have been in the business for a long time and want to hear another professional’s perspective, this interview with Tony Roslund is going be well worth watching. From starting up and getting his first clients, to maintaining relationships with those clients and running a business, to establishing a style and making an impression on potential clients, Roslund’s stories and experiences that he shares are a perfect mix of interesting and informational.

Are you shopping for a new lens? Wondering what the difference between a CMOS and CCD sensor is? You've come to the right place.

When it comes to all things headshots and manipulating human expression, the best guy to seek council from is Peter Hurley. Peter's career has spanned about 15 years now, and over those years he has gained a tremendous amount of knowledge. Last year with the help from our friends at Profoto, Lee and I were able to film a supplemental free chapter to Peter's Illuminating the Face Tutorial. In this video Peter takes us outside to show some of the techniques he uses out on location.

If you haven't already heard, Fstoppers has teamed up with Elia Locardi to produce Photographing The World: Landscape Photography and Post-Processing. For the entire 2 months of filming this tutorial we filmed hours of behind the scenes footage every single day and we ended up editing it down to 8, 15 minute episodes.

For those of us who admire and look to gain a foothold into the fashion photography industry, finding reliable quality resources can be invaluable. Being a great fashion photographer goes beyond lighting and encompasses understanding the genre, trends, and the ever evolving industry as a whole. In this article we rank the top online resources for fashion photographers. All of these sites can serve as inspiration and show insight for both new and established members of the fashion photography industry.

We are our own worst enemies. As photographers and artists, we can be unfairly hard on ourselves and on our work. While it is healthy to be critical of one’s creations, it can be very difficult to stay motivated if you do not receive the right kind of encouragement from others, as well as from yourself. Slumps and dry spells of inspiration are par for the course in art, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. By initiating a few simple practices, you can give back to yourself, and recognize the many accomplishments you've made in your journey as a photographer.

One of the benefits of using layers in Photoshop is to edit pictures in a non-destructive way. However, there are a couple of techniques and filters that will require you to flatten a file or create a merged layer. The liquify tool is one of them. To use it, you must create a merged layer of the area you want to edit. Sometimes it means a merged layer of the whole image. In this article, I will show how to avoid this problem using a simple, yet very powerful tool Photoshop offers. We are going to see how to use the liquify tool in a more efficient way than on a merged layer. This way you will be able to go back into your retouching process without losing anything and even edit your liquify.

I'm not one to get caught up in hype. The camera world is constantly inundated with new, interesting products and technologies, many of which scream of excitement before their release, but arrive with nary a whimper. The Sony a7RII is a rare product that has caught my attention before its release.

This week we released our 5th photography tutorial: Photographing The World with Elia Locardi. Since this tutorial was going to be filmed over the course of 2 months in Iceland and New Zealand, we decided to turn the cameras back around on ourselves and show you how we filmed this massive video project.

For over two weeks in late March and early April, digital director and photographer Oliver Astrologo traveled through Vietnam exploring its best treasures. His 1,650 kilometer north-to-south journey takes the form of “Reverie of Vietnam,” a beautiful short video that places you inside the country face-to-face with the residents and the historic and natural wonders that surround you. Read on to learn more about the production as well as see many great images captured during the expedition.

Model Mayhem has long been the double edged sword that many of us starting in fashion photography have to deal with. How do you find talent and put together your team when you first start? Finding those resources and assets is difficult and the idea of having a database of people looking to do the same thing you are is brilliant, but the go to source for that is slightly less than brilliant. Model Mayhem requires that you put together and add a portfolio before getting started, but the vetting process is very much lacking. Those of you, especially photographers know the often agonizing process of finding good talent through MM. Especially for those of you, like myself, who live outside of the major fashion markets. We now – finally – have an alternative in the new service, Portbox. I have been fortunate enough to take a look at the new site and speak with its inceptor, Joseph Evans.

Most photographers are constantly on the hunt for great new locations. From graffiti-adorned alleyways to vast blooming meadows, the search for new backdrops is an endless challenge.

In September of 2014 Patrick and I met Elia Locardi totally by chance in the basement of a German beer house during Photokina. That night we learned that Elia had sold all of his possessions and had been traveling the world nonstop for 3 years taking landscape & travel photographs. Soon thereafter we decided to team up on the biggest project any of us had ever worked on.

Sometimes you just need to slow down. Last year, I shot just north of 95,000 digital photographs. That may not seem like a lot to some of you wedding photographers out there, but it was enough to make me take a step back and want something else. How many did I throw away? How many were made without thought or conviction? This was enough to trigger the impulse to try something new, and that something new was large format photography.

“Expect the unexpected” is great advice for anyone, especially for a photographer. Making the necessary preparations for a photoshoot is essential to success, but what about matters that are beyond your control? We will review three of the most common obstacles that can potentially derail your next session, and how to best handle them both preemptively and after the fact.

Rob Hammer knows all about stories, adventure, and experience. He is a San Diego-based commercial shooter. He has worked for many clients such as Nike, Adidas, Foot Locker, and Under Armour. If you have a chance to follow his Instagram feed, you'll probably find images of him backpacking in a foreign country, photographing old barbershops in the Midwest, or hiking up a mountain with his friends enjoying a cold beer. He lives the life that he photographs. I believe that shooting what you love will ensure you to always have a steady stream of good clients. But when you are photographing your own lifestyle, the possibilities are endless.

In dealing with bigger paid jobs lately, I've had to find ways to refine my retouching workflow. I used to do most of my skin cleaning by dodging and burning problem areas. It then had to be color-corrected of course. Negative dodge and burn gives you excellent results when mastered, but it eats up a lot of time. For some clients or projects, justifying 1-3 hours of postproduction per image is simply not possible. Being confronted more and more with this real-world issue, I have taken the time to look into my workflow and see how I could spend less time in front of my computer. Here are some of the things I have changed as well as a few tips I could give anyone facing similar issues.

When shooting digitally, more information is almost always better. Here’s an exposure technique that maximizes the available information your camera can gather in a photograph.

In today's age of digital manipulation and overabundance of imagery, it is quite common to turn on your computer or phone, hop on the internet, and instantly become bombarded with dozens of images. From soccer moms to Insta-famous teenagers, just about everyone seems to be a photographer these days. With easy-to-use website and portfolio templates, affordable DSLRs, and tutorials all over the web, becoming a “professional” photographer is easier than ever. While I am all for following your dreams, here are some basic guidelines for your journey to becoming a pro.

Photography is crazy hard to master. That difficulty becomes impossible when you start locking yourself behind walls of your own creation. Stop deluding yourself, those little restrictions that you keep using as crutches to excuse your lack of progress are only inhibiting your ability to grow. Shatter those internal lies so you can keep pushing your photography forward and become the photographer you dream of.

Sometimes you need to get rid of that frizzy wind-blown hair but you don’t have the time to mess with cloning and blending. This can be even more difficult and time consuming with more complicated backgrounds that have gradients in them. I’m here to show you my quick and dirty way to get rid of those flyaways.

Adding hyperlinks to your descriptions on 500px can be extremely helpful if you'd like to grow on other social media platforms. For example, my natural light tutorial, Facebook page and many more links are all shared in every one of my posts on 500px. In this short article you will learn exactly how to create these links easily.