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.
"Shoot more" is one of the most common pieces of advice a photographer receives. We usually read "more" as more places, more subjects, more opportunities. Repetition may teach considerably more than novelty does.
A good monitor is hard to appreciate until you have used a bad one. While we spend decades arguing over which camera has better color rendition, we don’t pay as much attention to the screens we view these colors on. If the screen is wrong, everything is wrong.
Look at the picture and you see an empty Paris street. Wide sidewalks, a row of trees, tall buildings, and almost no sign of life on what should have been a busy morning. Then your eye catches it: down in the lower left corner, one small figure stands with a foot up on a shoeshine box, and a second figure crouches at his feet.
A drone is the rare piece of camera gear that can get you fined, grounded, or into a courtroom before you have taken a single good photo. Most beginner mistakes with a new camera cost you a bad frame. A handful of beginner mistakes with a drone cost you a four-figure penalty, a wrecked aircraft, or an angry neighbor with your registration number written down.
The most beautiful cameras ever made were not styled to be beautiful. They were built to work, and the beauty is what happened when the engineers refused to hide how the machine did its job. They still sit under glass in collections not because they out-resolve a modern mirrorless body, but because you cannot stop looking at them.
NYIP started as a correspondence school in 1910 and runs entirely online today—but the old-school discipline it teaches has given me something my cameras can't: structure, critique, and a mindset that works whether I'm shooting with my Canon AE-1 or my Canon EOS 6D.
Before they spent more than seven decades trying to bury each other, Canon and Nikon were partners. The very first Canon cameras of the 1930s shipped with lenses ground by the company that would become Nikon, because Canon could not yet make its own glass.
If you missed the big solar eclipse earlier this month, you have a shot tonight and early tomorrow morning at seeing a deep partial lunar eclipse, where about 96% of the Moon will be covered by the Earth's shadow. The result should be a very reddish, blood-moon-like appearance.
I've used a lot of cameras. I have had hands-on experience with basically every Sony release for the past five years, plus the latest from Nikon, Canon, Leica, Fujifilm, and even Hasselblad. My main workhorse and my everyday carry camera is still Sony.
In 1858, a French balloonist who called himself Nadar leaned over the edge of a wicker basket tethered above the village of Petit-Bicêtre, just outside Paris, and made the first photograph ever taken from the air. You cannot see it. That plate, and every other aerial photograph Nadar made in those first years, is gone.
In an age of near-psychic autofocus, what's the point of vintage glass anyway? A vintage Canon FD SSC can be cheaper than a G Master Prime, but let's put the costs aside and look at the biggest motivator: character.
In February 1996, five of the biggest names in photography, companies that spent the rest of the century trying to bury each other, walked onto one stage in Las Vegas and formally launched a film format they had built together in secret. The five of them had already sunk around $500 million into it between them and expected to spend roughly that much again.
Two centuries of photography prove some pictures are timeless, but today photographers are forced to pick a lane. Or are we?
Johannes Brahms’ Sonata No. 1 vibrates from the speakers. Opus 38. I’m told it’s in E minor. Any unsuspecting passersby down below can surely hear it leaching out from these open windows.
Two photographs can be equally strong in composition, light, and technique, yet only one continues to unfold after the first impression. The difference often lies in what the elements of the frame are actually doing.
In 2005, if you asked a working photographer to name a Sony stills camera, you would get a shrug and maybe a Cyber-shot pointed at you. Sony had no professional lens line, no professional autofocus heritage, and no seat at a table Canon and Nikon had set for themselves decades earlier.
Who doesn't love a good theme park ride photo? Faces contorted in delicious mixes of fear, anticipation, and fun make for interesting photos. And while it's easier than ever to buy the photos, sometimes all you get is crushing disappointment in the form of thumbnail-sized photos that look like they were taken with a potato.
In April 1972, at Polaroid's annual meeting, Edwin H. Land reached into his jacket, pulled out a camera folded flat enough to hide in a suit pocket, and in about ten seconds fired off five color photographs. There was no timer to watch, no negative to peel away, no wet chemistry to wipe off your fingers.
Panning is an integral part of sports and action photography, but mastering the technique can add interest and intrigue to many genres. I am going to break down the five things I consider when trying to create a good panning image.
Somewhere on or below Everest's northern side, perhaps buried in snow, rock, or moving ice, there may be a camera the size of a bar of soap.
There is no camera more synonymous with "learning" than the Pentax K1000. For nearly 50 years, it has been arguably the best-known student film camera ever made. But in 2026, it's time to stop looking at the K1000 as a "beginner" camera and start appreciating it as a masterclass in "three-dial" simplicity. It does exactly three things: shutter speed, aperture, and focus.
For about five minutes on May 29, 1919, the Moon blotted out the Sun over an island in the Gulf of Guinea and a hard-baked plain in northern Brazil, and two teams of astronomers pointed their cameras at a patch of sky no one could normally see. They were not photographing the eclipse for its beauty. They were trying to measure whether a handful of stars had moved.
For the past couple of years, I've found myself reaching for film cameras more often. Not because they're better than digital—they’re not. For the analog look then? No, I believe you can get a film look with digital, if you know your way around an editing app. It’s really because they remind me why I fell in love with photography in the first place.
When a hurricane spins up over the Atlantic, the most frequent, most continuous pictures of it come from a camera parked 22,236 miles above the equator. That camera is the Advanced Baseline Imager, the primary instrument on NOAA's GOES-R series of weather satellites, and it works nothing like the one in your bag.
The best culling software is the one that gets you to your picks faster without deciding for you. Narrative sorts a shoot by scene, ranks every frame for focus and expression, and shows you why it ranked things the way it did, so the final call stays yours. That last part is what separates it from tools that hand you a finished selection and ask you to trust it.