Fstoppers Original Articles

Today, we will talk about one of the most necessary and the most dangerous ingredients in a creative career.

Tim Tadder is widely revered as a bold and visionary photography icon. With numerous accolades to his name and a client list ranging from Amazon to Nike, he is recognized as a leader in advertising photography and beyond. Since late January, though, he has turned into a highly controversial artist in the industry with his work in AI. I sat down to chat with him about the polarizing pieces he has been creating.

My first-ever article on Fstoppers condemned the use of presets and inspired photographers to focus on creating their own color grades and styles. Looking back, I still stand by some of those points, but not all of them. You see, while using presets is bad, creating your own presets might actually be beneficial to your photography and editing workflow.

Architecture is an art form that reflects human creativity and engineering ingenuity and is not simply about buildings and structures, and one of the most fascinating ways, for me anyway, to capture the beauty of architecture is through multiple-exposure photography.

Mother’s Day is an important day for any mother, but it is even more exciting for the soon-to-be mother.

Golden hour is a magical time of the day for photography, characterized by warm and soft light that can turn even the most mundane scenes into stunning works of art. This period occurs twice a day, during the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset, and is highly sought after by photographers for its dreamy and ethereal qualities.

There have been some magnificent improvements in the abilities of cameras over the last few years, not least in lenses and camera focusing systems. The technical advancements have almost taken camera skills out of our hands. But is this good or bad for photography?

Being a photographer permanently changes the way you travel. One sees the world and every destination in a different way that is fueled by curiosity and wonder. At the same time, it also means carrying more stuff around with you.

It’s no secret that COVID put a bit of a damper on anything in person, especially large group gatherings, like conferences and trade shows. But as time has moved on, has the photo conference world fully recovered?

Have you got equipment you don’t use? Do you need to upgrade your gear bag? There are surprising reasons why MPB is the answer to clearing your clutter, bringing in some welcome cash, and enhancing the tools of your visual storytelling craft.

I love using Capture One. Recently, I have been working with the latest release: Capture One 23 and Capture One Live. Loved by enthusiasts and professionals alike, it is feature-heavy software. In this article, I would like to share some of the hidden and little-known features of this great software.

The brand of your camera is perhaps more important than you initially think. Unless you are Jared Polin, you are unlikely to change whole camera systems because one brand does something better than the other. This is why there are camps associated with camera brands. In this article, I will discuss the simple reason I use Canon.

As a photographer who constantly experiments with new ideas and techniques, I have been busy playing around with some unconventional things that you may find in a photographer's kit.

Recently, some of my gear broke, and as always, it got me pondering if I should upgrade my gear. I ended up finding the same unit online and purchased it to replace the old one. That was a light, but if it were a camera, what would I do? Very likely, the same. Here is why.

I’ve long been a believer that wildlife and landscape photography does a lot of good for wildlife by raising awareness of conservation issues. But there’s a problem that many of us don’t consider. Are you aware of what can you do to ensure your photography is doing more good than harm?

The firmware update version 1.8.1 offered Canon EOS R5 users the ability to capture a stunning 400-megapixel image. You may ask yourself if this has any real benefit over the standard 45-megapixel resolution, but it’s nice to have. How useful is the option in real life? Let’s find out.

When going freelance in any profession, you will get faced with rejection after rejection. Not getting enough love on social media, emails not being replied to, and inquiries not leading to bookings are frustrating parts of running a self-employed photography business. “Don’t take it personally,” they say. But how?

We all know what art is, right? Or maybe not.

Without a doubt, social media has revolutionized the experience, dissemination, and even creation of photographs. Social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter have leveled the playing field in a lot of ways, allowing photographers to instantly share their work with hundreds or thousands of followers. Combined with the availability of high-quality cameras in smartphones and social media algorithms, the number of images disseminated to the world has absolutely exploded. Despite this democratization of the craft, has social media actually diminished the value of photography?

What if I told you there is a social media platform on which you can earn money whenever somebody likes your content? And it's not owned by a big corporation but is governed by its community. In this article, I share my experience with such a platform that has been around for several years already.

As a photographer, focusing on improving your craft is one of the most important things to do. Money can buy the latest equipment, but it can't buy you knowledge of how to use that equipment.

What’s keeping you from being the photographer or even the artist that you hope to be? How much of it is under your control, and what can you do to get past the roadblocks?

Shutterfest stands out as my favorite photography conference to attend each year! As I write this, I am wrapping up day three of the affair. I always look forward to the various workshops, lectures, and unique experiences available throughout this fun-filled event like no other.

There are different opinions about what makes good photography. Many suggest it’s a single ingredient; they are wrong. If we want to grow in our art, it’s by combining seven elements that we have any hope of improving.

Current Luminar Neo users are in for a treat the next time they open the app, which has quietly hit version 1.8.0. Some of the updates are evolutionary, and there's the usual gaggle of bug fixes, but there are some really nice updates here that will please Neo users.

Exactly what does it take to be “lucky?”

I recently posed a challenge to DALL-E 2 (or to myself?) to mimic one of my photos using prompts. I didn't think it was actually going to work, until it did. Almost.

Juxtaposition is something you can stumble upon when reading about composition. Although it’s not literally a composition theory, it is a great way to add something extra to your photo. Did you know you’re probably already using it?

A step up in ability makes a huge difference. Suddenly, the future doesn’t seem that far away.

It can be challenging for many photographers to get qualified leads, but there are steps you can take today to enhance your online exposure and lead generation.

We shoot with the Canon EOS R6 Mark II mirrorless camera at a real wedding and a live concert and test the camera that changes the rules when it comes to shooting in low light and at high speed.

The nostalgia of film and the decades gone is fascinating so no wonder film presets and looks are popular to buy for your editing software. They’re pretty easy to make yourself if you put a little bit of time into understanding what elements in editing make the film look different from digital. Follow my tutorial to make your own vintage film presets for Capture One, Lightroom or PhotoShop.

A few brief words on why it sometimes pays to have more hands in the kitchen when cooking up a creative project.

Last summer I bought a super telephoto lens to capture wildlife in Alaska. After more than half a year of using it as a lens for landscape photography, was it worth it?

A new Finnish startup business, Huhtikuu Yksi, offers software that unlocks advanced functionality in basic camera models and standardizes features from different brands. I interviewed the company's CEO, Harri Tyhmäläinen.

In the land of the photographer, times are harder than ever before, with companies ending their contracts at lower levels and shoots being less available, with budgets cut and a huge number of working photographers facing hard times. With all this uncertainty in the world, can we really survive doing what we love and live comfortably?

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 2023, we're featuring a new photographer every month, whose portfolio represents both stellar photographic achievement and a high level of involvement within the Fstoppers community.

Street photography is a realm of photography that carries enormous weight. A genre derived from some of the world's photographic pioneers — the big names. The generations taking cameras to the front lines of war, documenting death, destruction, humility, and the human spirit, and bringing it home to document the everyday. It’s a genre of photography like no other, and here’s why you should be shooting it.

Lighting modifiers aren’t quite as expensive as they used to be. However, some of the quality and flexibility has gotten lost along the way.

There are hundreds of cameras in existence, some more successful than others. However, some cameras have become icons that managed to define the industry and technology for years. Despite technology evolving rapidly in the past 20 years and cameras becoming too good to be true, some pieces of gear were so perfect that professionals used them despite newer versions coming out. In this article, I will look at five of the most iconic cameras ever made.

As you learned in my articles about editing mistakes, too strong image transformations can harm the quality of your photos. But if you use them selectively, they can be of great help. In this article, I show how to use selective image transformation in Photoshop to fix compositions.

Tutorials on using a 1-light setup for portrait photography are commonplace, and rightly so. There are several ways that a single light source can be positioned to create flattering lighting on a subject. You might think that switching to a 2-light setup would be twice as complicated. This isn’t the case. There are several 2-light arrangements that are easy to understand and quick to set up. Using 2 lights can make it easy for you to transition between a clean headshot and a dramatic portrait.

In this article, I share my experience with a new NFT marketplace called Fantasea.io. There's not much information available about it online. The domain has been registered just a little over a month ago, and the homepage currently feels like a work in progress. Because more and more photographers seem to get contacted to sell NFTs on this site, it's important to determine if it's legit.

I'm sure most, if not all, of you have heard about the idea of paying-it-forward. Did you know that recent studies have shown that this phenomenon is a learned behaviour? How can we as photographers use our skills to encourage others to benefit projects and philanthropy close to our hearts? I had a chance to chat with photographer Michelle Valberg, whose habit of giving back just saw her appointed to the Order of Canada this past summer.

Photography education is a constantly fluctuating space, ever evolving from one approach to the next in an effort to differentiate from the pack. The Photo Creators Conference is the next evolution in the chain.