Articles from Alex Cooke

The zoom ring on a modern 70-200mm traces back to a viewfinder accessory the US Army Signal Corps clipped onto its 35mm combat movie cameras. Frank Back, the Austrian-born engineer who designed it, spent the war improving cameras and lenses for the Signal Corps and then turned the same optical trick into the first zoom lens that caught on. That kind of lineage runs through more of a modern kit than most people expect, and it runs shorter and less often than the retellings suggest.

Light gets talked about like it comes in two flavors, good and bad, and that framing quietly limits what you shoot. Treating every kind of light as workable, rather than sorting it into keepers and mistakes, opens up scenes most people walk past.

Light trails on a road can turn a flat night shot into something with real energy, but capturing them all in one clean frame is harder than it looks. Time blending lets you combine several exposures so the streaks flow together the way a single long exposure rarely manages.

Yosemite gives you waterfalls, granite walls, and postcard viewpoints that practically shoot themselves. The harder task is walking away with something nobody else made, and that starts with subtraction rather than addition.

Remove a person from the middle of a group photo, close the gap as if they were never there, and do it all without touching Photoshop. That option is now sitting inside Lightroom for anyone who has never gotten comfortable with layers and masks.

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.

The best Canon RF lens for your kit might be one almost nobody talks about. Six of them sit in the shadows of pricier alternatives, dismissed over a single spec or forgotten entirely, even though they deliver image quality that holds up against Canon's L-series glass.

The question of flash versus continuous light comes up constantly, and the honest answer sits somewhere between "barely any difference" and "a huge one," depending on what you're shooting. Both can produce nearly identical portraits, yet the way you work with each changes how you shoot, how you meter, and how much room you need.

Photoshop's autofocus point checker inside Camera Raw 18.6 shows you exactly which points your camera locked onto, so you can catch a blurred watch face or a hand in focus before you commit to the wrong shot. That single feature answers a question you've probably asked yourself a hundred times while culling: did the camera focus where I thought it did?

Photoshop's Brightness/Contrast slider is gone, replaced by a new Light adjustment layer that pulls Camera Raw controls straight into the main editor. Exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks now live in a single panel that behaves like a nondestructive version of the Camera Raw sliders many of you already trust.

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.

Every landscape image is different, yet the same handful of moves show up in almost every edit that actually works. Learn those moves and you stop guessing your way through post-processing and start finishing photos on purpose.

The Pentax 17 landed in 2024 to a wall of loud opinions, and a year of actual use has a way of softening the sharpest first impressions. A camera you dismiss on a one-week deadline can look very different once you've dragged it through Colorado, the Jersey Shore, and a 4:30 a.m. boardwalk sunrise.

You shot 36,000 photos in your first year and kept maybe 10. That's not failure, and treating it as failure is the thing quietly holding you back.

Rain in the forecast for the first time in months, dark clouds gathering to the north, and a family lunch that can't be moved. That collision between perfect conditions and almost no time is the reality most people shooting landscapes live with, and it shapes every decision made across one very short morning.

Fujifilm has announced the XF 400mm f/4.5 R LM OIS WR, a new super-telephoto prime lens for the X Series system. Designed primarily for wildlife, bird, sports, motorsports, and aviation photography, the lens provides a 400mm focal length, equivalent to 609mm on full frame, while weighing approximately 2.74 lb (1,245 g).

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 best photo shoot of your year will probably be the one you never planned. Every photographer eventually runs into the gap between careful preparation and the messy reality of shooting, and how you handle that gap shapes the work you end up proud of.

Take a single trip with six different cameras and a hard question follows you home: which one actually earned its place in the bag? Peru offered a real test of that, pitting a video-friendly workhorse against a stills machine that stopped everyone cold.

A fisheye lens locks you into curved horizons and bowed lines, but the 7Artisans 10mm f/2.5 for the Nikon Z mount ships with a way out. A free lens correction profile straightens those shots into a clean wide angle look, and applying it takes a handful of clicks.

Fresh snow skimming the peaks, streams cutting through beaches, and moss-covered cascades that only exist because the storms haven't ripped them clean. Fiordland packs more usable foreground into a single beach than most locations offer in a week, and knowing how to read it is the difference between a snapshot and a photograph you'll return to for years.

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.

Most photographers plan every trip down to the parking spot, the light, and the exact viewpoint. There is another way to work, one that starts with knowing nothing about what you'll shoot when you leave the house.

Presets that carry AI masks are the trick most landscape shooters overlook, and they can shave real minutes off every edit. Fall gives you a short window of color, cool air, and quieter parks, so the less time you spend clicking through the same steps in Lightroom Classic, the more frames you bring home.

A $700 smart telescope and a $4,000 traditional rig pointed at the same patch of sky on the same night in northern New Mexico, and the gap between them was smaller than the price tags suggest. If you've been weighing whether a point-and-shoot device can stand in for a full Milky Way setup, this is the comparison that answers it.

A landscape image either pulls the viewer into the scene or leaves them looking at a flat surface, and the difference usually comes down to how you handle depth. Master a few composition habits and your photos start to feel like a place someone could walk into rather than a picture on a screen.

GoPro has agreed to merge with a privately held optics company called Starman Optical in a deal worth $285 million. The company will stay listed on the Nasdaq, keep selling cameras, and push into AI data center hardware and defense.

Dyson has built a toothbrush with a working camera inside the head, and it streams a live view of your mouth to a phone app. It went on sale September 1, 2026, at $499.

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.

Most of the strongest documentary and street photographs come from moments the photographer almost missed. The difference between catching them and losing them often comes down to whether you were paying attention at all.

A highway fire less than an hour outside Los Angeles is the kind of thing that stops most trips before they start. Here it became the first frame of a 3,000-mile drive across the country, and the moment sets the tone for everything that follows.

Most camera companion apps are an afterthought, slow, clunky, and quick to disconnect the moment signal drops. Hasselblad's Focus Mobile is the rare exception, and it finally runs on Android after living on iPhone alone.

Four handmade photo books arrived in one week, and each one circled the same feeling: nostalgia, and the ache of things passing. That thread runs through this entire round of submissions, and it turns a simple show-and-tell into a quiet lesson on how personal work holds together.

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.