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Alex Cooke

Cleveland, OH
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Articles from Alex Cooke

Lightroom's Tone Curve Explained: Every Trick You Need to Know

The tone curve in Lightroom is one of the most powerful editing tools available, and most people barely scratch the surface of what it can do. Knowing how to use it well separates flat, lifeless edits from images with real depth, color, and punch.

Don't Miss These Amazing Photography and Video Deals at B&H Photo Right Now

B&H Photo is running some aggressive discounts across cameras, lighting, support, storage, and accessories this week. We dug through hundreds of active DealZone listings, sale prices, and lowest-in-180-day markdowns to find 30 that are worth your attention, sorted by a combination of percentage off and absolute dollar savings. These deals are time-limited, most running through the next seven days, so act quickly on anything that catches your eye. Whether you are building out a studio, restocking expendables, or hunting for a serious gear upgrade, there is something here for you.

The Return of Camera Design as Identity

Somewhere around 2010, camera design stopped mattering to the photography industry. The DSLR era had produced bodies defined by ergonomics rather than aesthetics, and the first mirrorless wave carried forward the same logic. Cameras were tools, tools looked like tools, and any photographer who cared about how a camera looked was suspected of being a poseur. The mainstream press reinforced the assumption. Reviewers evaluated bodies by their grip comfort, control layouts, button feel, and weather sealing, and any discussion of aesthetics was treated as either irrelevant or faintly embarrassing.

The Real Advantage of Micro Four Thirds Nobody Talks About Enough

Choosing a camera system means committing to an ecosystem, and for most systems, that means locking yourself into one manufacturer's lenses. Micro Four Thirds breaks that rule in a way that has real, practical consequences for what you can carry and shoot.

Lumix S1 II Review: Incredible Dynamic Range, But There's a Catch

The Lumix S1 II sits at $3,200 list price, currently discounted to around $2,900, and it's trying to compete with video-focused cameras from Canon, Sony, and Nikon on both features and value. Whether it actually pulls that off depends heavily on a few specific trade-offs that aren't obvious from the spec sheet.

Shooting Minimalist Landscapes When There's Almost Nothing to Shoot

Minimalist photography is harder than it looks. When the summit of Pikes Peak closes due to a storm and your backup plan becomes a flat, windswept stretch of Colorado grassland, the only things separating a great shot from a boring one are patience, the right glass, and knowing how to work with almost nothing.

5 Things That Are Worth Splurging On in Photography (and 5 That Are Not)

Photography has a spending problem, and it starts early. The moment you get serious enough to move past the kit lens and the auto mode, the industry opens a firehose of recommendations pointed directly at your wallet. Better bodies, faster glass, studio lighting, editing software, bags, straps, filters, presets, printers, and accessories that promise to make your work look professional before you have figured out what "professional" means for you.

Photoshop 27.6 Has 14 New Features: Here's What Changed

Photoshop 27.6 dropped with 14 new features, and some of them are genuinely useful while others expose real limitations in Adobe's AI tools. Knowing what works and what doesn't before you spend credits on generative fills can save you a lot of frustration.

The Viltrox 35mm f/1.2 Lab N Fixed What Was Already a Near-Perfect Lens

Viltrox's 35mm f/1.2 Lab was already one of the sharpest, most capable lenses in its class when it launched. The new "N" version strips out the OLED screen and replaces the unconventional control ring with a traditional aperture ring, and that single change makes a lens that was optically exceptional finally handle the way it should.

Why the 85mm f/1.8 Beats the 85mm f/1.4 for 95% of Photographers

The 85mm prime is the rare lens that almost every working portrait photographer owns, eventually. It is the focal length that does the most flattering work on faces, the easiest one to recommend to a portrait beginner, and the lens most photographers reach for when they want to make a person look the way they want to be seen.

The Best 35mm Lens for Fujifilm X Isn't What You'd Expect

Choosing a normal-length prime for your Fujifilm X system sounds straightforward until you realize there are seven legitimate autofocus options sitting in roughly the same focal length range, each with a different price, build, and rendering character. The gap between the best and worst of them is smaller than you'd expect, but the differences in autofocus reliability and real-world usability are anything but trivial.

Why a Career Canon Shooter Is Switching to the Nikon ZR

The Nikon ZR is a camera that has generated a lot of conversation since Nikon acquired Red Cinema, but most of that conversation focuses on specs and codec comparisons. What's harder to find is a perspective from someone who actually shot on a Red camera for years, sold it, moved on, and then picked up the ZR expecting to be underwhelmed.

Fujifilm X-T30 III Review: 6.2K Video in a $1,000 Camera Is Hard to Ignore

The Fujifilm X-T30 III sits at $1,000 body only, positioning it as one of Fujifilm's most accessible entry points into the X-series system. For that price, you're getting a 26-megapixel APS-C camera with some video specs that don't match what you'd expect from a camera in this range.

The Pentax K-3 Mark III and Why DSLRs Refuse to Die

The Pentax K-3 Mark III was officially discontinued in Japan in January 2025. The Monochrome variant has been more complicated: B&H's original black Monochrome listing is now marked "No Longer Available," though it points buyers to a current matte-black Monochrome listing still shown as in stock. After roughly four years of production, the K-3 Mark III is being phased out in stages rather than discontinued cleanly, and the last major APS-C DSLR from a major manufacturer is winding down. By the standard industry narrative, this should be the end of the story. DSLRs are dead. Mirrorless has won. Move on. Except the story is more complicated than that. 

Why Your Camera Choice Is Killing Your Storytelling

Photojournalism and documentary work demand a different relationship with gear than most photography does, and Jorge Delgado-Ureña, co-founder of the Raw Society, has spent nearly two decades figuring out exactly what that relationship looks like.

What Lightroom's Yellow Warning Icon Is Actually Telling You

That yellow warning icon in Lightroom isn't just a minor annoyance you can ignore. It's telling you something specific about the order in which your AI edits were applied, and clicking "update" without understanding what's happening can quietly change your image in ways you won't notice until it's too late.

24-70mm vs. 70-200mm: Which Zoom Should You Buy First?

Choosing between a 24-70mm and a 70-200mm zoom is one of the most common lens decisions you'll face when building a kit. Both are professional staples, both are genuinely useful, and neither obviously replaces the other.

Small Town Photographer? Here's Why You're Still Leaving Money Behind

Pricing your work below what the market can actually bear is one of the fastest ways to stall a photography business, and the problem isn't unique to small towns. Whether you're shooting in a rural county or a major metro, the underlying issue is almost always the same: you're pricing for the wrong client.

Why the Nikon Z9 Is Aging Better Than Anyone Expected

When Nikon announced the Z9 in late 2021, the camera was treated by most of the photography press as Nikon's "we are still here" moment. The brand had spent the early mirrorless years getting beaten in feature comparisons by Sony, criticized for slow autofocus updates, and described in obituary-adjacent language by gear reviewers who had decided Sony had won the format war. The Z9 was supposed to prove Nikon could still build a flagship. It did. Then something more interesting happened over the next four years.

Why Your Presence Is Ruining Your Street Photos

Street photography lives and dies by your ability to go unnoticed. In a genre where the goal is to capture real moments, your presence is the single biggest variable you can control.

This Swing Lens Camera Forces You to Rethink How You Compose Landscapes

The Horizon 202 is a Soviet-era swing lens panoramic camera that produces a field of view roughly equivalent to 14mm on a 35mm camera, with almost none of the distortion you'd expect from an ultra wide angle lens at that focal length. If you've ever wanted to capture an entire mountain range in a single frame on film, this is the kind of camera that makes that possible.

9 Things I Wish I Knew About Photography Insurance

Insurance is the part of running a photography business that nobody warns you about, nobody teaches you, and nobody finds interesting until the day they need it. Then it becomes the most important conversation of your career, usually too late. Most photographers buy a policy because a venue asked for one, sign whatever the broker recommends, and never think about it again until something breaks, gets stolen, or generates a lawsuit.

The Secret to Becoming a More Versatile Photographer

Most photographers hit a ceiling not because they lack technical skill, but because they keep doing the same things over and over. Breaking out of that pattern is what separates a one-trick shooter from someone who can walk into any situation and come away with something worth showing.

The Nikon Z 14-30mm f/4 S Is Still the Go-To Wide Angle Zoom for Many Nikon Shooters

The Nikkor Z 14-30mm f/4 S has been on the market since 2019, and it remains the wide angle zoom that ends up on more Nikon Z mount cameras than probably any other. At its current discounted price of around $1,100, the calculus of buying it versus something like the Nikkor Z 14-24mm f/2.8 S at roughly $2,000 gets very interesting very fast.