Profile picture for Alex Cooke
Editor-in-Chief

Alex Cooke

Cleveland, OH
18 3 Star badge
1 10+ Portfolio Images badge
1 Editor's Pick badge
1 Top Contributor badge

Articles from Alex Cooke

Can One 350-Gram Zoom Really Be Your Only Travel Lens?

Packing a single lens for a long trip means giving up options you might miss, and the Sigma 20-60mm f/2.8-4 makes that gamble easier to justify. The range covers wide landscapes, tight architecture, and portraits without a bag full of glass.

The Automatic Halo Fix in Photoshop, Tested on Real Hair

Photoshop's beta 27.11 introduces Enhance Edge, an AI feature that promises to erase the halos that show up when you drop a masked subject onto a contrasting background. Hair cutouts have frustrated retouchers for decades, and any tool that claims to solve them deserves a hard look before you trust it on real work.

Two Action Cameras, $260 Apart: Which One Earns It

A 1-inch, 50-megapixel sensor, 8K open gate, and slow motion running past 900 frames per second sit on one side. A smaller sensor, a faster lens, and a $260 lower price sit on the other. That gap is the whole story, and deciding which camera wins depends less on the spec sheet than you'd expect.

OM System Revives the Legendary PEN Camera With an EVF, Weather Sealing, and 30 fps Shooting

OM Digital Solutions has announced the OM SYSTEM PEN, a new Micro Four Thirds interchangeable-lens camera built around a 20.4-megapixel Live MOS sensor, TruePic IX processor, 5-axis in-body image stabilization, and a compact rangefinder-style body. It is the first PEN-series camera released under the OM System brand, as well as the first model in the series to combine an electronic viewfinder with a dustproof and IPX1-rated splashproof design.

The Last DSLR Maker Just Discontinued Its Whole Lineup

Ricoh is ending production of its current Pentax K-series digital SLRs and starting work on a brand-new line built on what it calls an entirely new concept. The move retires the existing lineup while the company tries to reinvent what a DSLR can be.

The Best Value Lens for Every Camera Mount You Can Buy Now

Every camera mount has one lens that makes the rest of the lineup look overpriced. It is rarely the flashiest piece of glass in the catalog, and it is almost never the one the marketing pushes hardest. What follows is the single best value in each major mount you can still buy new today, one pick apiece, from Canon RF through Leica M and the two medium format systems to the three DSLR mounts that refuse to die.

Three Anchor Points to Kill Aperture Overthinking

Aperture stalls you in the field because you treat it as a math problem with dozens of correct answers. The same setting looks different across cameras, lenses, and shooting distances, so memorizing what each value produces is a losing bet.

The Cheapest Autofocus 85mm You Can Buy, Tested Against a G Master

Put two portrait shots side by side, one taken with an $1,800 Sony lens and one taken with a $99 lens, and most people can't call which is which at a glance. That gap between price and image quality is worth understanding before you spend money on your next portrait lens.

The Funnest Drone to Fly, With One Big Image-Quality Catch

A 360 camera bolted to a 249 g drone changes how you fly, because you stop fighting the camera and the flight path at the same time. That single shift is what makes the Antigravity A1 worth a serious look, and it explains why one creator kept reaching for it long after the video was supposed to be finished.

Sigma's New 85mm f/1.2 Art Combines a Huge Aperture With a 905 g Body

Sigma has announced the Sigma 85mm F1.2 DG | Art, a new large-aperture portrait prime for full frame mirrorless cameras. The lens will be offered in L-Mount and Sony E-mount versions, with a planned launch on October 6, 2026, at a suggested retail price of $1,599.

Joseph Petzval Calculated the First Fast Portrait Lens in 1840 and Watched Someone Else Get Rich

By May 1840, a mathematics professor in Vienna had finished a lens before a single piece of glass had been ground for it. Petzval worked the design out on paper, with a squad of army computers grinding through the arithmetic under his direction, and the result gathered roughly 20 times more light than the lens sitting on the front of a typical daguerreotype camera. A few portrait studios were open by then, working with mirror cameras and bromine chemistry. The industry that followed ran on Petzval's design for the next 40 years.

A Full-Frame Kit You'll Actually Carry All Day

Fifteen years of hauling heavy DSLRs around the world can leave you wishing for something you can carry all day without noticing the weight. A small full frame body paired with a compact prime now delivers most of what those older bricks did, and that shift changes what serious travel photography can look like.

Shooting Iceland's Highlands With a Telephoto Instead of a Drone

Most Iceland landscape work you scroll past now was made from the air, with wide drone panoramas that flatten an entire river system into a single graphic. Shooting the same terrain from the ground with a very long lens flips that habit and forces a different kind of seeing.

Your Landscape Kit Is Already a Wildlife Kit

The camera in your bag right now, the one built for sweeping vistas, might already be a capable wildlife machine. Landscape and wildlife shooting used to demand two completely separate kits, but that line has blurred to the point where the same body and a long zoom can do both jobs well.

Why Your Photos Look Cluttered (and the One Skill That Fixes It)

Two photos of the same subject, shot by the same person with nearly identical gear, can read completely differently: one holds your eye instantly, and the other leaves you scanning corners for something to land on. That gap comes down to a single skill, and once you name it, you start seeing it everywhere in your own work.

10 Technologies Photographers Inherited From the Military

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.

Stop Judging Light as Good or Bad and Start Using It

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.

Why Time Blending Beats a Single Long Exposure

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.

Turning Yosemite's Chaos Into Clean, Minimal Landscape Shots

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.

Delete Someone From a Group Photo Without Ever Opening Photoshop

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.

Lens Flare and The Incredible Physics of Modern Lenses

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.

Six Underrated Canon RF Lenses You've Probably Overlooked

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.

Continuous Light vs. Flash: What Actually Changes in Your Portraits

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.

20 Photoshop and Camera Raw Updates You Probably Missed

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 Just Replaced Brightness and Contrast With Something Better

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.

How Long Exposures Erase People: The Math of Making Crowds Vanish

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.

Five Edits That Take a Landscape Photo From Okay to Finished

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.

Why the Pentax 17 Won Him Back After a Year

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.

Why the Best Light Shows Up When You Have No Time

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's New XF 400mm f/4.5 Offers 609mm-Equivalent Reach at Just 2.74 lbs

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).

The First Photo Ever Transmitted by Wire, and the Machine That Sent It

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.