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Alex Cooke

Cleveland, OH
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Articles from Alex Cooke

The Anker Nano Power Strip Fixes the Ugliest Corner of Your Editing Desk

Every desk has one ugly corner: the gray knot of chargers and power bricks that no cable management ever truly tames. The Anker Nano Power Strip (10-in-1, 70W, Clamp) clamps to your desk edge and swallows that knot whole, and after a month running my entire charging setup off it, I'm not going back.

The Photoshop Tool You Never Use That Creates Stunning Effects

The pixel stretch effect looks like something out of a high-end ad campaign, yet it comes down to a handful of clicks in Photoshop. If you've ever wanted to add motion, energy, or a graphic edge to a portrait or product shot, this technique gets you there in minutes.

An Influencer Filmed a Stranger's Skirt for Clout. It Just Cost Him $20,000

A man with more than 100,000 Instagram followers who filmed himself lifting a stranger into the air outside a nightclub, exposing her underwear on camera, has been ordered to pay $20,000 for posting the footage without her consent. A B.C. tribunal decided the clips counted as intimate images even though the man said he was just chasing views.

10 Mistakes That Kill a Headshot

A headshot has one job: to make a person look like the best, most confident version of themselves, and to do it in the fraction of a second a viewer spends forming a first impression. That is a narrow target, and it is easy to miss. What helps is that these failures repeat. Most weak headshots are not ruined by the camera or the location but by the same handful of mistakes, almost all of them fixable once you know what to look for. Here are ten that quietly kill a headshot, each with the fix.

Starting a Real Estate Photography Business in 2026

The single biggest mistake in real estate photography has nothing to do with your camera or your marketing budget. Getting good before getting busy separates a business that lasts from one that burns out fast.

The Split-Tone Trick That Beats a Single White Balance Slider

A single sunset photo, edited three different ways in the same frame, is the kind of thing that changes how you think about white balance. The trick lies in treating the sky and the water as separate zones instead of pushing one warm slider across the whole image.

A 2010 Camera, a 2012 Lens, and a Trip to Italy

A 15-year-old camera with no USB-C charging, no eye sensor, and dated video specs still earns a spot in a working photographer's bag for a trip to the Italian coast. That says something about what actually keeps a camera in rotation years after its spec sheet stops mattering.

'We Own More Cameras Than We Have Employees': Inside Capture One's Hasselblad Deal

The announcement itself was straightforward enough. On July 2, Hasselblad and Capture One confirmed that Hasselblad's .3FR raw files now open natively in Capture One, with dedicated color profiles for the X2D II 100C, the X2D 100C, and the CFV 100C digital back, and lens profiles covering 19 XCD lenses. Tethered capture is planned for later in 2026. After years of forum threads and feature requests, the wait ended with a software update.

Three Full Frame Cameras: One Trip, One Clear Winner

Picking one full frame camera for travel means weighing color, size, stabilization, and price against each other, and the differences rarely show up on a spec sheet. Three cameras in the same price range can feel like completely different tools once you actually carry them through a city all day.

The Proof Even Legendary Photographers Miss Most of Their Shots

Impostor syndrome hits almost every creative person at some point, and if you shoot photos, you know the feeling: you look at work you admire and wonder why you even bother picking up a camera. Jesse Senko has a surprisingly practical answer to that spiral, and it comes from an unlikely source.

A $395 Lens Just Beat a $900 Nikon at Its Own Game

For years, Nikon's f/1.8 S-line lenses stood almost alone: premium optics at a maximum aperture where you rarely find premium anything. That comfortable spot is now under real pressure, and a head-to-head test shows exactly how much.

11 Mistakes That Make a Portfolio Look Unprofessional

A portfolio is not a gallery of your favorite photos. It is a sales tool, and its only job is to answer one question in a potential client's mind: can this person deliver the specific thing I need, done well? Most portfolios fail at that job not because the photography is bad, but because of a handful of avoidable mistakes in how the work is chosen, ordered, and presented. A viewer forms an impression in well under a second and decides whether to keep looking or move on within a few images. Here are eleven mistakes that quietly cost you that decision, each with a fix.

Seven Steps to a Backpack That Packs Itself

If you open the main compartment of your backpack during the day, your packing system is working against you. Every zipper you fumble with, every sack you dig through, and every rain cover you peel off burns energy you could spend covering ground.

Why Getty Just Abandoned Its $3.7 Billion Merger With Shutterstock

Getty Images has killed its $3.7 billion merger with Shutterstock, refusing a condition set by UK regulators that would have forced Shutterstock to sell off its entire editorial photography business. The deal had already cleared US antitrust review with no strings attached, which makes the UK objection the single reason two of the biggest names in stock photography will stay separate.

Why Your Photos Look Worse Than the Scene You Saw

You stand in front of something stunning, a valley flooded with evening light, a city skyline at dusk, and you press the shutter sure you have captured it. Then you look at the file and the magic is gone. The colors are flatter, the sky is blown out or the ground is a muddy mess, the mountain that loomed over you looks like a small bump, and the whole thing feels ordinary. The instinct is to blame the camera, or your skill, or to start shopping for a better lens. Usually none of those is the real culprit. The real explanation is that your eyes and brain were never showing you the scene the way a camera records it, and once you understand the gap between the two, you can start closing it on purpose.

Turn a Flat Sky Into a Dramatic Storm Scene With Contrast Alone

A flat, cold panorama of a cloud over farmland becomes a dark, dramatic storm scene using nothing but contrast adjustments. The difference comes down to knowing which sliders control contrast globally and which ones do it locally, then applying each in the right place.

What Happens When You Ask a Chemist to Build Your Dream Film

Custom film built to one photographer's exact wishes, coated by hand sounds like a dream, and this version is wildly unusual. Film that behaves this way rejects almost every rule commercial stock follows, and it opens up a way of working most shooters never consider.

'Missed the Mark': Meta Retreats on Instagram AI Photo Grab

Meta has removed the feature in its new Muse Image tool that let anyone generate AI images from your public Instagram photos, just three days after switching it on. The company said the feature "missed the mark" and is no longer available.

11 Landscape Photography Mistakes Beginners Keep Making

Landscape photography looks like it should be easy. You find a beautiful place, point the camera at it, and press the shutter. Then you get home, look at the files, and the magic that was right in front of you has somehow drained out of the picture. Almost always, the cause is not your gear or the location. It is a handful of specific, fixable habits that nearly every beginner falls into. Here are 11 of the most common, each with a fix you can apply the very next time you are out.

The Sharpest 24mm Lenses You Can Buy Right Now

A $200 lens outperforming a Zeiss on corner sharpness is exactly the kind of result that shows how fast optics have moved. The 24mm focal length gives you a wide field of view with just enough drama to hold onto your subject, and paired with a bright aperture, it delivers backgrounds that fall away beautifully.

The Shutter Speed Range Most Photographers Skip Over

Most slow shutter advice sends you straight to a tripod, a waterfall, and a 30-second exposure. There's a whole range of shutter speeds you can shoot handheld that keeps part of your frame sharp while letting motion streak through it.

A Fast, High-End Nikon Camera Is Reportedly Weeks Away

Nikon is reportedly close to launching a fast, high-end, professional APS-C camera, with an announcement expected in the next couple of months. The most talked-about spec is a 45-megapixel stacked sensor in a body built for speed.

Meta Just Made Your Public Instagram Photos Fair Game for AI

Meta's new AI image generator lets anyone pull photos from a public Instagram account and feed them into AI creations, without asking the account owner or telling them afterward. The feature is switched on by default for public profiles.

650 Freelance Photographers Are Fighting the WSJ Over an AI Contract

Roughly 650 freelance photographers who work for The Wall Street Journal have refused to sign a new contract they say could funnel their images into AI training. The fight centers on two changes: who owns the photos you shoot on assignment, and the paper's new right to license those photos to third parties without asking you first.

Myth: You Must Shoot in Manual Mode to Be a Pro

There is a belief that follows almost every beginner around: that real photographers shoot in manual mode, and that the semi-automatic modes on the dial are a kind of training-wheels embarrassment you are supposed to outgrow as fast as possible. The aperture priority setting even gets the dismissive nickname "A for amateur." It is one of the most persistent myths in photography, and it is wrong. Plenty of working professionals shoot in aperture priority every day and have for decades. The mode you use says nothing about whether you are a pro. What matters is whether you understand what the camera is doing and why.

Large-Format Film in the Quarries of North Wales

Abandoned slate quarries hold more than dramatic scenery. Some hide names carved into stone over a century ago, tools left where workers dropped them, and connections to people you'd never expect.