Fstoppers Original Articles

A bare, uncoated air-to-glass surface sends roughly 4 percent of the light striking it back the way it came, and a current professional 24-70mm f/2.8 zoom stacks about 30 of those surfaces in a row. Uncoated, less than a third of the light entering the front would reach the sensor as part of the image. Most of the rest heads back out the front of the lens, and flare is what happens when the fraction that turns around again lands on your picture.

There is something I have been thinking about recently, and it was not until I returned to a location I had photographed many years ago that it really started to bother me. We spend so much of our time as photographers looking for new locations, searching maps, saving places on Google Maps, watching videos, and scrolling through social media looking for somewhere we have never photographed before. We are always looking for the next location, the next composition, and the next photograph. But perhaps we should spend a little more time thinking about the places we have already photographed, because there is no guarantee that we will always be able to go back.

Put a 35mm lens on a full frame camera, stand about 20 m back from a plaza, and each pixel in the file covers roughly 3.4 mm of the ground at that distance. A person walking across that view at an ordinary pace clears their own shoulder width in about a third of a second, so across a four-minute exposure they sit over any single pixel for about 0.13 percent of the time. That fraction is the whole mechanism, and once you can compute it, and then combine the occupancy of everyone walking the same line, you can predict which people will vanish and which ones will ruin the frame.

In October 1906, a portrait of the German Crown Prince left Munich as nothing more than a flickering electric current, fought through roughly 1,800 kilometers' worth of telegraph line, and emerged at the far end as a photograph you could actually recognize. No train carried it. No courier, no envelope, no darkroom on the far end printing from a shipped negative. And the strangest part is that this was the encore. 

The Toronto Blue Jays posted an animated short on Tuesday and spent the afternoon telling fans it was not made with AI. Pull the video down and step through it frame by frame, and the props on a stationary wheelbarrow respell themselves four times in under a second.

Photographers have a myth, and like most good myths it gets told with real feeling, usually in a comment section, usually in all caps somewhere near the end. Cameras used to be affordable. Real cameras, made by people who cared, sold at honest prices to working photographers who did not have to remortgage anything. Then the industry got greedy, and now a professional body costs as much as a used Corolla.

Check the active imaging area specified for the sensor inside a Sony RX100 and you get 13.2 x 8.8 mm, with a diagonal of about 15.86 mm. That is close to 16 mm, not the 25.4 mm that an inch is supposed to be. The "1 inch" printed on the spec sheet does not describe any dimension of the imaging area, and the reason runs all the way back to a glass vacuum tube that stopped being manufactured decades ago.

I find people fascinating, and when I see someone interesting when I’m out and about, I often want to photograph them. And I do. Many photographers have commented about this and would love to do the same but don’t feel comfortable or confident doing so.

Sony sells a 100mm portrait lens with an f/2.8 aperture that meters like an f/5.6. That is not a manufacturing defect or a marketing rounding error. Sony built a disc of gray-graded glass into the middle of the lens, on purpose, and gave away roughly two stops of light to buy what might be the smoothest out-of-focus blur any lens can produce. The trick works, it has worked since the 1990s, and the lenses built around it have never been more than a niche.

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 2026, 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.

"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. That man is widely considered the earliest identifiable human being in any surviving photograph, and nothing suggests anyone planned his place in history, least of all him.

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 stakes are simply higher, because the moment your drone leaves the ground you are operating an aircraft in shared airspace, and the rules treat you like it.

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. Everything that came after, the autofocus wars, the full frame race, the mirrorless scramble, grew out of that uncomfortable early closeness.

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. Not because they're perfect, but because they give me things no other brand does, like the global shutter in my a9 III or the sheer amount of tech packed into something as small as the RX1R III.

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. Fifteen years later almost nobody remembered it existed.

Two centuries of photography prove some pictures are timeless, but today photographers are forced to pick a lane. Or are we?

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. A little over ten years later, Sony was selling the most talked-about full-frame mirrorless cameras on the market, and both of its rivals were scrambling to answer.