Articles written by Jaron Schneider

As many of you who have your own photography pages probably already noticed, Facebook drastically changed their Pages organic reach algorithm on December 3, 2013. We have been living with the changes for a month, analyzing the effects on our brand and how it affects you, and the news isn’t good. With dramatic decreases in reach and engagement, our Facebook community is not nearly what it was. So what can you do about your own Pages?

(Updated with more images to whet your appetite until we see some test shots!) Sigma has just announced two new lenses, a redesigned 18-200mm F3.5-6.3 DC Macro OS HSM and 50mm F1.4 DG HSM. The pricing and availability has not yet been made public, so for now these two images of the lenses will have to do. The 50 f/1.4 has been highly anticipated, and I'm sure there are many of you who are ready to add this lens to your collection.

With all the announcements in the past few months from manufacturers like Olympus, Nikon and Sony, it's easy to forget that Samsung has a large footing in the interchangeable lens compact (ILC) market. I know many of you may not consider their cameras presently, but Samsung is taking the development of their ILCs very seriously. I had a chance to sit down and chat with the folks at Samsung as they walked me through their latest announcement, the NX30.

If you recall, we partnered with Profoto USA this month to give away their new B1 TTL location light. The new Profoto B1 makes it easier than ever to use your flash off camera. With battery-power/ without cords, the 500w/s B1 goes wherever you go. Combining performance and the legendary Profoto light shaping system the B1 makes great light easy. We picked a random winner and it turned out to be Ryan Williams who isn't just a photographer, but a United States soldier actively deployed in Afghanistan.

Thanks to our friends at Photography Life, we have recently organized a Nikon D610 / Canon 6D / Sony A7 Giveaway, which ended on the Christmas day. After the list of participants was cleaned up and a bunch of entries were disqualified (fake email accounts from mail services like yahoo.de, inbox.ru and mail.ru, plus newly created Facebook accounts), we were left with a total of 33523 entries (Facebook and non-Facebook participants combined). Well, it is now time to announce the lucky winner, who gets to pick his favorite camera. Random.org picked a number for us and it is...

Sigma, feeling rather in the holiday spirit, created this fun, seasonal size comparison graphic to showcase their line of lenses as we near Christmas. I thought it was a cool look at the diversity of lenses and might actually help you decide what to get and what you can fit into your bags. I want that one the size of a bazooka.

Yesterday I got my hands on the new Sony a7R for a review here at Fstoppers, and I was instantly and somewhat begrudgingly a fan of it. It feels great in hand, doesn't lack physical buttons like with other interchangeable lens compacts (ILCs), and it sounds fantastic (the shutter has an absurdly glorious “click” that you can’t help but love). My feelings for the a7R were such that I began to wonder why Canon and Nikon can’t seem to get it right in the ILC market. The answer to making the perfect compact appears so clear, but they don’t seem to have any interest of going this direction.

Tamron has announced the launch date of the newly-designed 150-600MM F/5-6.3 DI VC USD today, saying they anticipate the lens to be available in the USA on January 17, 2014. For more information on the lens, please see our original story on the upcoming Tamron glass. If you are interested in how it performs, we also posted sample images purportedly taken with the lens.

Adobe has announced Lightroom 5.3 and Camera Raw 8.3 to provide additional camera raw support, lens profile support and address bugs that were introduced in previous releases of Lightroom. New raw support includes cameras like the Canon EOS M2, Fujifilm X-E2 and Sony A7R.