Articles from Stephen Ironside

When Nikon’s Z series mirrorless cameras were introduced, they caught a lot of flak. Although I wasn’t a fan at first, I’m starting to come around. Turns out I just had to use one.

This past weekend marked ten years of me being a full-time professional photographer. There have been ups and downs since 2010, to be sure, but I’ve learned a few things along the way.

One of my biggest fears as a professional photographer is that someday, somehow, for some reason, I’m going to lose critical images from a shoot and make a client, and myself, very unhappy. A memory card gets corrupted, a hard drive fails, or my studio burns down.

What seems like it could have been an April Fools joke if it had come out a few days sooner, the Lensrentals blog has posted a great (and enlightening) story on something that apparently has happened more than once: somehow, for some reason, a full-sized fly got into a lens, and the entire lens had to be disassembled to remove it. The question is: did it affect image quality?

Last autumn, I finally decided to get my butt in gear and become FAA Part 107 Certified to be able to fly my drone commercially. Since I had pretty limited time in the busy fall season, and had zero prior aviation knowledge, I decided to give one of the many online courses out there a try.

It’s the height of tax season, and an odd thing just happened to me. I was at my accountant’s office filing my business taxes for 2018 last week, and she said to me, “Wow. I have a lot of photographers as clients, but most of them aren’t making a living. What are you doing differently?”

It’s something that seems almost too good to be true: a wealthy family in the UK is apparently searching for a photographer to tag along and document their vacations for £80,000 with all expenses paid. What’s the catch?

How good are we at remembering former presidents decades after their service is over? What are the things that help us to remember their time in office? Obviously, since this is a photography community and education website, I'd wager this: that the photographs taken during their presidency help shape our memories of those years. 

It's always refreshing to me to get behind the scenes and see how some cool images are made. Then, to realize that the only light source was a cell phone LED along with a few props, I realized that my studio needs a shopping trip.

If you're based in the U.S., you know that the day after Thanksgiving is a day where everyone around you is extremely prone to gas. Photographers in particular are particularly prone to it, so here are some tips on how to avoid it.

A little over a month ago, I got married. Now that the dust has settled, I thought I might share some realizations I had from being on the other side of the camera lens for a change.

A young couple fell to their deaths in Yosemite National Park last week. We should all take it as an unfortunate reminder: no photograph is worth your life

This past weekend, I was running around shooting a half-marathon race for charity with my Nikon D5 and Fujifilm X-T2. Whenever I'm touting a huge and a small camera like that, the questions start pouring in about the differences between the two, so I thought this video from Jared Polin going back to the basics about mirrorless and DSLR cameras would be a good one to share.

On October 5, President Trump signed the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018, funding the Federal Aviation Administration through 2023. The law includes several new measures that could affect drone pilots in the U.S.

If I were a betting man, I'd wager that you've seen this image from 1932 of construction workers sitting on an iron beam, called "Lunch Atop A Skyscraper." I'd also wager that you hadn't thought much about the photographers that took the image.

In a week full of mirrorless camera announcements, Fujifilm has stepped up to the plate again with its announcement of the X-T3. 

It won’t be for everyone, but I think it’s something everyone should try at some point: shooting in black and white (monochrome) mode in camera. 

I’ve been working as a full-time professional photographer — meaning that 100 percent of my income is from photography — for over eight years. For the most part, I know what I’m doing. But I still make the time to assist other photographers when I can, and here’s why.

Sometimes, as photographers, we get a little tied up in having everything about a shoot be as professional and as perfect as we possibly can. But, as Daniel DeArco points out in this great video, it doesn't always have to be that way.

There's a new photo-related YouTube channel called "Light Club," and their first video reminded me of something: it's OK to break the rules.

Back in March, I got an email saying that my website had been taken down due to malware. Essentially, I got hacked. In the months that followed, I learned some things about being a photographer, about web design, and about myself.

I'll be the first to admit that I am not an expert at Photoshop. There's so much I've yet to learn about the software, and it can be daunting. In this video from photoshopCAFE, 13 Photoshop wizards share tips at Photoshop World 2018.

“What kind of camera should I get?” is probably one of the questions I get asked the most often. So, I’ve become pretty quick at coming up with recommendations, and I figured it might be nice to share how I come up with them.

I recently came across an article by Scott Kelby that talked about something I had taken for granted and figured everyone knew, and thought it would be worth making sure our readers know that not all backups are created equal.

We all know that cell phones take photographs that are just as good, if not better than DSLRs or other larger cameras. And this new video ad from Apple proves it. 

I probably won’t ever be, or pretend to be, an expert at Adobe Photoshop; I spend so little time in it, using Lightroom for 90% of what I do, that I just don’t take the time in the program to figure out all of the little tricks that would be useful. In this great video, you’ll learn a new tip every couple of minutes that could really help out your photography and up your Photoshop game.

One of the trickiest things about being a portrait photographer is being able to come up with a variety of backgrounds in a small area in a short amount of time. Here are five tips to make it easier.

If you use Final Cut Pro to edit video and share those videos to Vimeo, you might be interested in checking out this new app. Vimeo just released a native app client for MacOS, and it looks like it could be pretty handy.

Some of you may have seen my recent article about the Irish photographer who was mistaken for a gunman while carrying a tripod on a beach to do astrophotography. Here's an update, straight from the source.

A photographer in Ireland who was out for a stroll with a tripod at night was mistaken for a gunman by a passerby, who called the authorities. A manhunt ensued. And he had no idea. 

Spring is coming. If you're anything like me, you'd rather be out in the woods pretty much all the time right now. And if I'm out in the woods, chances are I have some kind of camera with me.

I don’t know about you, but I love a good teardown video. And if it has to do with cameras? Sign me up and hand over the popcorn.

When I spoke with photographer Anthony Manieri, he was sitting at home in the middle of editing images from a routine event before preparing to fly to Los Angeles to do another shoot for a personal project that has been more successful than he ever anticipated. He didn’t expect a one-off shoot to turn into a personal project taking him around the world creating portraits of diverse, mostly gay men to promote positive body imagery.

It took me until high school to meet and befriend a set of identical twins. Growing up, I had always assumed identical twins were basically the same person.

If you've wondered why registering your image copyrights is a good thing, here's a case for you. Insect photographer Alex Wild is seeking $2.7 million in an image-use case in which a pest control company used 18 of his images without permission and refused to take them down.