Fstoppers Original Articles

There’s been a multitude of social media apps popping up for us to use at our leisure and it might be hard to stay up to date. The most recent of them being Periscope. Periscope was recently purchased by Twitter before it was even launched in the app store, and it’s steadily gaining traction. It was developed as a real time news app but the possibilities in the creative realm are endless.

Many photographers use the word “make” to describe their process of photography. “I made these images,” you might hear a professional say describing his work. The layman phrase, “take pictures” or “capture photographs” evokes a feeling that the photographer did not put any work into the image, that they simply pointed the camera and the photo just came to be. Any creative medium takes skill and I’m not here to argue the artistic validity of a photograph over a painting or sculpture. But a somewhat fatal flaw of the digital age is the ease of which photography can be transferred, saved, downloaded, and reproduced in comparison to that of physical artistry.

I was originally going to call this article "five things I learned from coffee with John Schell" but in typical Schell fashion, our meet up involved Pho which doesn't mix too well with coffee. The former Fstoppers writer and current Los Angeles-based photographer has had one of the quickest rises to popularity that I've seen in photography in quite some time. His identifiable style and consistent stream of quality work have made him an extremely identifiable brand that has grown a 20,000 plus Instagram following in a fairly short amount of time. Here are five things I learned about Schell, his work, and his journey to photography.

This month I'll be traveling to 5 European cities with Vincent Laforet to shoot and edit video for him as part of Project AIR, his new night aerial stills project. We have been working hard to offer something pretty unique – a totally free, direct first hand social event open to anyone who is interested in photography, video or the creative process, where we can share skills, technique and project support for your own projects as a result of what we’ve learnt with AIR. If you live in London, Barcelona, Berlin, Paris or Venice, we are throwing the doors open to you all.

As a fairly established photographer, many beginners ask me what camera to buy to get started. What’s more important: body or lenses? Or is it the brand? My standard advice has always been to buy a cheap, used body and save your money for quality lenses. A beginner just doesn't need a high-end camera. That’s easy to say, of course, when you shoot on a Nikon D800 with some pretty nice glass. Perhaps it was time to do a little experimenting of my own to see what, if any, difference there was between a top end camera and something cheap.

May is upon us, wedding photographers. Its the beginning of the season and we need to prepare ourselves for the long haul. Sure, we could brushing up on lighting techniques, talk about new lenses, buy faster cards, or argue about presets, but what we really need to think about are the intangible must-haves. The greens socks, my friends. That's right, I said socks.

CrossFit is taking the world by storm. With 11,000 affiliates and growing, it has become a great way to get into shape and is an untapped resource for photographers to sharpen their skills. I started shooting CrossFit as a member in 2010 and learned many things along the way. This is what I learned and how you can improve your skill set.

Before I learned about makeup I used to strengthen or create contouring in post the same way on every single picture. However, because everyone’s face is different, contouring should differ from person to person. Contouring not only can help create dimension it can also help alter shapes. Let see how we can make our model’s and client’s face look their best without going crazy with the liquify tool. Shadows and highlights are photographers and makeup artists best friends!

Two summers ago, I attended a music festival in Italy, where I had the opportunity to attend a master class given by Louis Andriessen, a prominent figure in new music composition. Classical musicians are known for striving for perfection, so when I opened one of his scores and found the following note regarding the ossias (alternate passages of music), I was struck:

Who are you? Ok, now who are you? You know that name you've decided to call yourself and now have x amount of people calling you that? How often have you stopped to think about how important your social media name — your brand — is? It's something that, many times, I myself have come to revamp, change the style of, market differently, and so on.

The creation of a successful fashion image is often a team effort. Aside from the model and the photographer, the contributions of a talented creative team can elevate your fashion photography from good to great. In this article, we will review the key members of a creative team, and how you can cultivate a reliable crew.

Street photography continues to be a growing area in the industry. More and more people enjoy it and are learning how hard it is to get it right. Here are some tips from distinguished professionals Eric Kim, Yanidel, and Martin Parr on how to improve your own street photography.

As nature photography has grown, so has its critics. Wardens, legislators, and police officers have begun to push for laws that would better protect animals in nature and create more concrete boundaries by which a potential shooter would follow. Are we, as photographers, the new law-breaching intruders, à la poachers? Are we destroying nature?

As professional photographers and videographers, we are constantly striving to stay ahead of the game doing the best we can and give our clients the best possible product. We are constantly looking at new gear and techniques, improving our post-production skills, and putting in long hours studying and editing. While hard work, solid equipment, and good business skills are a must, here are a few simple tips that can help open doors, bring in new clients, and help give you the confidence to make important decisions.

If you aren’t familiar with the work of Dave Lehl, it’s about time that you change that. Dave is not only one of the top photographers in the snowboard industry, but he consistently creates work that transcends genres and has landed him gigs shooting for a list of clients that includes the likes of Red Bull, Nike, and Lamborghini. He has been published in nearly every major snowboard magazine including the covers of Pleasure Mag and Transworld Japan’s photo annuals.

Color lookup tables (also known as LUTs or 3DLUTs) have been a popular tool used by colorists in the video industry for a while and are just starting to find their way into photography. LUTs are a great alternative to actions or expensive plugins that can help speed up your editing workflow.

Learning how to light your subjects with one light is easy. Learning how to light a subject in a variety of ways using one light and one modifier requires a bit of creativity. When you're using one light, each inch you move your modifier ultimately affects your scene. Lighting at that point becomes very purposeful.

The natural beauty contained within Enrique Pacheco’s latest time-lapse video “Reflections from Uyuni” is striking and remarkable. During South America’s rainy season, Pacheco journeyed through the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world, down to the Bolivian desert capturing surreal landscapes of these flooded lands. Fstoppers is happy to share the Spanish cinematographer’s insight as to what the experience was like shooting in such surreal locations.

Shooting in harsh sunlight is always a challenge. Recently I shot a test while out on a trip in Los Angeles. Due to scheduling we had to start shooting around 4 p.m., so we were dealing with hard sunlight. In this post we will look at five different setups you can use to shoot in and manipulate these less than ideal lighting conditions. In a previous post, I showed how to quickly scrim hard lighting. In this quick tutorial we will look five different ways to light while in the same environment and conditions in order to alter the look of our image.

With budget options for aerial video becoming more affordable, while the quality and abilities of the cameras they host getting better, I knew it was only a matter or time until I got my hands on such a system. Even though I was a little skeptical from the onset, I’m pleased to say that the DJI Inspire is a phenomenal drone/quadcopter unit for adding dramatic footage to video or still projects, even for first time users.

When you are shooting for magazine publication (outside of the medium format realm), one thing you always have to consider is the aspect ratio of your images. Paper sizes, in most cases, do not match up to image size, so there are crop variables you have to constantly keep in mind -- especially for editorials where there will be titles, typography or article copy on the page as well.

"A Book of Beards" is exactly what it sounds like. Dudes and huge gnarly beards documented in black and white by photographer and art director Justin James Muir. What started out as a simple idea, evolved into something much much bigger.

If you’re like most photographers, sharpness is probably near the top of your list of desirable attributes in a lens. A lens that is sharp from corner to corner is often worth its weight in gold (or so the manufacturers tell us). How do we measure sharpness, though?

You have probably heard it a few times: photographers raving about how Capture One is awesome for developing portraits from raw files. However, just like when I first installed it, you might not see any advantage over the current raw processor you are using. Then I found a few functionalities that made my workflow that much quicker and my images look a tad better before even retouching them in Photoshop.

I rarely write in first person but because this is a topic I feel very strongly about, I want to tell you about my personal experience. When I was reminiscing with my wife about the one thing that changed my photography, it was the day I saw the light. Literally. The only way I was able to conceptually grasp light and the way it works was because I started retouching. There is no way to deny it, as I mastered retouching my photography was taken to the next level.

Post-Production and Retouching is just as much an integral part of creating a great image or series of images as pre-production and the actual shoot, especially when you are shooting for a client and not just for yourself. Each genre of imagery, advertising, beauty, fashion, etc. has a slightly different set of rules and parameters when it comes to retouching. In this tutorial we will look at the complete start to finish of a fashion editorial image. Last week I posted the complete gear list for this exact shoot. This week we will look at the first part of retouching, including cleaning up our white seamless and correcting distractions in our image.

Dana Pennington is a Los Angeles-based Fashion photographer. He recently moved to become a permanent resident in Los Angeles, from his home town Denver, Colorado. I had the chance to sit down with Pennington during my first trip to L.A., over the past weekend, and talk to him about his journey into the fashion photography industry.

Fstoppers.com owner Lee Morris recently decided to shave his 5 month beard while having a little fun. Lee created 8 different "characters" with different lengths of facial hair and then released his unretouched images to the Fstoppers.com. These photographers took these files and pushed them to the max, creating 8 hilarious final images.

When you’re first starting out as a professional photographer, nothing seems quite as sexy as getting your first traveling gig. Initially, it's a status symbol — an illustrious validation of your success. Eventually though, that quick hop to New York or jaunt to Cozumel becomes less revered. In fact, for many photographers these trips can be downright nerve-wracking. The reason for this is simple: Gear. Don’t be mistaken, there is still the appeal of being the confident traveling photographer reading some Tom Robbins in the terminal with your feet resting on your roller bag while waiting...

There is that spark in all of us. For some it's the first press of the shutter. For others it's that first dollar we make for creating art while doing something we love. It's that spark in our mind, in our very souls, that sprinkles us with those day dreaming thoughts about persuing photography full time. Everyone who has ever picked up a camera has had the "I could make a living doing this" moment.

In the digital age you as a photographer are expected to be familiar and knowledgeable with Photoshop. It can be argued back and forth if this is right or wrong and whether Photoshop is ruining photography. But I see Photoshop as a tool, just as the darkroom was a tool to manipulate images. I have put together this list of 10 techniques that helps me get the most out of my images.

A gut-wrenching mobile video clip depicting South Carolina police officer Michael Slager killing Walter Scott went viral earlier this month. The bystander behind the footage, Feidin Santana, has partnered with celebrity publicity agency Markson Sparks to license the footage, causing a stir among those who claim he's profiting from a death.

Any good makeup artist will tell you that great eyebrows will make any face look good. Think of eyebrows like frames for prints: when they are beautifully crafted, they will make your prints standout. Eyebrows will do the same for a model's face, whether it is a male of a female model. They can totally change the expression and the look of someone depending on how they are shaped. Sometimes, a makeup artist can only go so far and we are left with work in post-production. So it is important to have a little knowledge on what the eyebrows should look like to get the best out of a model's face.

For many centuries, scientists fought vehemently about the nature of light. Two sides debated a question pivotal to the development of physics: is light a particle or a wave? It wasn't until the 20th century that one of the most startling revelations about our universe came to prominence: light is both.

Is it art? It's an age-old question, but as the centuries pass and technology continues to flourish, the question only seems to get harder to answer. The New York State Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of photographer Arne Svenson who was brought to court by a family who he had photographed in their Tribeca apartment without consent.

We’re all working hard. We all shoot as much as we can — a lot of it for free or little pay. We do our studies or go to work and try our best to stay in shape and take care of ourselves. There are a lot of hard-working people in the world. But most are quite lazy inhabitants of this planet; and odds are that you’re one of them.

Civil Engineer, Thomas Berge, is a hobbyist filmmaker from just outside of Stavanger, Norway. He has carefully edited together a ridiculously gorgeous combination of timelapses and hyperlapses of the west coast over the last three years that will have you calling your travel agent to book a flight out his way. It’s a five minute feast for your eyes that you don’t want to miss.

Getting perfect skin tones can be quite time consuming and difficult. Because everyone's skin complexion is different, the corrections needed will be different every time. Even so, there are some recurring problems such as over-saturated reds in darker tones. A great makeup goes a long way in helping with redness, but sometimes it is not enough. The best example is the red seen in the ears when the model is backlit. Because of the nature of skin and the human body, the ears are going to turn red and no makeup will totally solve that. So let’s see how we can correct that very effectively and quickly using Photoshop.

How do you tell a better, stronger, more compelling story through your photos or video work? How do you get booked for the work you want to do? Film makers and story tellers, Jared Levy and Justin Hamilton, will today share some secrets. Their new, beautiful, compelling mini-documentary entitled ‘Updating Philosophies’, helped them realize much of this, and we can all learn from their experiences.

I, like many photographers out there, don't have a studio, or don't have the money to rent out studio space every time I want to do a shoot. While shooting inside my house or garage is always an option, I found myself wanting to experiment more with ambient and natural light. Although I love shooting in a studio, a completely controlled environment, I learned shooting outside with backdrops was a great experience and taught me a lot about light.

I will soon be releasing a start-to-finish retouching tutorial video here at Fstoppers on my most recent fashion editorial photoshoot. But before I do, I wanted to start warming our readers up with a complete gear list. In this article, I share with you everything I used on my shoot, the breakdown of costs, and where to find all the gear and extras: from the Profoto Strobe all the way down to the gaffer tape.

A photography business requires many things to nurture long-term success, not least of which are determination and business prowess. But after years in the game, can being a successful photographer serve as adequate training for starting another business altogether?

When a fashion photographer travels between both coasts of the U.S., shoots assignments in the Caribbean islands, and spans the continents of Europe and Asia for work, it’s safe to say he’s “made it.” Living through those experiences when the stakes are so high prepares you for anything – and that’s experience from which we are all lucky to learn.

Photography isn't always the safest pursuit, especially when you delve into the world of documentary and travel photography. Shooting out in the field can be unpredictable, from the weather and terrain, to the wildlife and the local people. The more you push the extremes of your photography, oftentimes, the more risk you'll take — to both your gear, and yourself.

Many makeup products can make the skin glow and can look great when associated with a good contouring. However, shiny products when used under strobe light can be difficult to dose out correctly. In a previous article I showed you a technique to diminish that glowing effect when too much highlighter or too few setting powder is applied. Let’s see how we can amplify the glow of the skin when more products could have been used to give a fresh look to your model's face.

For the last 5 years, Fstoppers has been an outlet for education, news, inspiration, and behind the scenes photography content. Even with the amazing writers we have on Fstoppers, we have always wanted you,our readers, to have a voice. Well today I am happy to announce a new part of the Fstoppers Community: the Fstoppers Groups.

As the photography industry continues to grow, so does the amount of different mediums for education. From tutorial based websites, to tutorial DVDs, to workshops and even websites like Fstoppers here, there are multiple ways you can find new techniques and grow your craft. And maybe this year, is the year you truly take advantage of them.

PRO EDU just wrapped a week of shooting video in New Orleans, where they captured content of Dani Diamond teaching his approach and style to natural light portrait photography. This behind the scenes video takes you along for the ride and shows you the locations, models, and gear we got to use, and what it takes to make a video tutorial come to life.

Brothers Will Pattiz and Jim Pattiz are on a mission to spread greater awareness to the treasures that reside within America’s National Parks through visually stunning imagery. The first results of which are 3 short films, with a staggering 49 more in the works. I interviewed half of the Pattiz brothers, Will, and learned a bit more about how they got involved in such an ambitious undertaking.