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Alex Cooke

Cleveland, OH
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Articles from Alex Cooke

Who Should Actually Buy Micro Four Thirds

The Micro Four Thirds crowd doubles your depth of field on every shot, and depending on what you shoot, that either ruins the image or saves it. That single trade-off decides whether this system belongs in your bag or stays on the shelf.

 

Photoshop's New Blemish Tool Keeps Skin Texture Intact

Photoshop's newest blemish tool doesn't just erase spots. It removes them while keeping the skin texture underneath exactly as it was, which is the part that has tripped up automatic retouching for years.

 

How NASA Blindly Aimed a Camera From Billions of Miles Away

Imagine trying to photograph a moon the size of a fist while flying past it at 45,000 miles per hour, using a camera you cannot see through, cannot focus by hand, and cannot even talk to in real time. Every instruction you send takes hours to arrive. By the time you learn whether a shot worked, the target is long gone, and there is no second pass.

Why Pointing a Light at a Wall Beats a Soft Box Every Time

The softest, most usable light in a room often comes from the simplest move: pointing a single fixture at a white wall and turning it all the way up. Get this foundation right and the rest of your lighting becomes a matter of small refinements rather than a fight against the space.

 

The Lightroom Slider That Kills the White Halo on Mountain Edges

Adobe's August update for Lightroom Classic added a pair of sliders that quietly change how you build masks. Feather and edge controls now sit inside every AI mask, and they let you push a selection in or out until the edge sits exactly where you want.

 

How to Edit Harsh Midday Sun in Lightroom Classic

Editing a landscape shot in harsh midday sun sounds like a losing battle, yet you can pull a flat, overexposed frame into something with depth and direction. The trick lives almost entirely in your masks.

 

Budget Real Estate Photography Gear That Actually Holds Up

A $1,000 camera body, a $160 tripod, and a $12 umbrella can carry a full real estate photography business. The gear that separates clean interior work from amateur shots costs far less than most people assume, and much of it gets skipped entirely by people starting out.

 

'Lunch Atop a Skyscraper': Unraveling Photography's Most Famous Mystery

Eleven men sit shoulder to shoulder on a steel beam, more than 800 feet above Manhattan, eating sandwiches and lighting cigarettes as if the drop beneath their boots were nothing more than a curb. There is no safety line, no net, no visible fear. It is one of the most reproduced images of the twentieth century, and almost everything the average person assumes about it is wrong. 

Two Months With a 67-Megapixel Camera That Never Misses

67 megapixels at 30 frames per second used to be a contradiction. That combination now sits inside a single full-frame body that also handles portraits, landscapes, and wildlife without asking you to change tools.

 

The Cheapest Way Into Full Frame Nikon, and What It Costs You

There's a version of the Nikon Z system where you carry one lens, shoot your whole family trip, and never touch a second piece of glass. The Nikkor Z 24-105mm f/4-7.1 is built to be that lens, and the honest question is whether the compromises baked into that convenience are worth living with.

 

Why There's No Such Thing as Bad Light

Most photography advice hands you rules to memorize and light to chase, then leaves you disappointed when your pictures still look like textbook exercises. The alternative is treating light, composition, and moment as choices rather than commandments.

 

The 190-Degree Fisheye That Can See Behind You

A single lens that sees 190 degrees, wide enough to catch what sits slightly behind you, now exists for Canon's full frame mirrorless bodies. At $1,900, the RF 7-14mm f/2.8-3.5 L Fisheye STM sits firmly in specialist territory, and whether you can justify it comes down to how often you'd actually reach for a fisheye.

 

Murder, Movies, and Horses: The Strange Life of the Man Who Made Photographs Move

On June 19, 1878, a thoroughbred named Sallie Gardner ran down a track in Palo Alto and broke twelve threads stretched across her path with her chest. Each thread fired a camera. When the plates came out of the darkroom, they answered a question that painters, sculptors, and horsemen had argued about for centuries.

 

The Ten Rarest Weather Phenomena Ever Photographed

On July 6, 1989, physicists at the University of Minnesota aimed a low-light video camera at a distant thunderstorm to test the equipment and accidentally caught the first image of what is now called a red sprite, a burst of lightning firing upward toward space.

What f/8 Really Costs You on a 400mm Wildlife Lens

The Sony 100-400mm f/5.6-f/8 costs $850, roughly a fifth of the price of the pricier 100-400mm f/4.5, and that number tells you almost everything about the tradeoffs waiting inside. Whether you shoot wildlife, travel light, or just want the long end covered without emptying your bank account, the question is what those savings actually cost you in the field.

 

A New Font Reads Normally to You but Feeds AI Scrapers Nonsense

A new open-source typeface called ShieldFont looks like ordinary text when you read it, but hands AI scrapers a corrupted version of the same page. It swaps out select words in a site's source code so bots collect subtly wrong sentences while you see the real thing.

 

Why Cameras Still Cannot See What Your Eyes See

You stood at the canyon rim at sunset, took in the glowing sky and the shadowed rock below in a single glance, and pressed the shutter certain you had it. The file came back with a white sky or a black cliff, never both.

Can a 20-Year-Old Canon Prime Still Beat Its RF Replacement?

Plenty of photographers hang on to Canon's old EF f/1.2 primes because they swear those lenses render people in a way modern glass can't touch. That belief gets tested directly on a portrait shoot, with EF classics adapted to a current RF body and shot side by side against their RF replacements.

 

The One Leica M That Drops the Rangefinder Entirely

The Leica M lineup split into two camps you can hold side by side, and one of them ditches the optical rangefinder that has defined the M for seventy years. The Leica M EV1 trades the mechanical viewfinder for a built-in EVF, and it now sits as the entry point into the M11 generation after Leica discontinued the standard M11.

 

Lightroom Classic 15.5 Finally Lets You Fix AI Masks After Creating Them

The masking upgrade in Lightroom Classic 15.5 lets you feather and reshape AI masks after you create them, which turns rough selections into precise, believable edits. That single change addresses one of the oldest complaints about automatic masks: they grab too much, too little, or leave a telltale glow around your subject.

 

Does Your Camera Actually Matter Anymore? One Studio Test Says No

Most photographers assume a flagship body is the price of entry for paid client work, but a full studio fashion shoot on mid-range Nikon gear tells a different story. The gap between "professional" and "affordable" has narrowed enough that your lighting and lens choices now carry the weight your camera body once did.

 

How to Balance Flash Against a Bright Sky Without Blowing It Out

Backlighting a subject at the beach solves a problem that trips up plenty of people shooting in bright sun: harsh shadows, squinting eyes, and a washed-out sky. Put the sun behind your subject, add your own light to the front, and the whole scene falls into place.

 

How the First Photo of a Black Hole Was Actually Made

The first picture of a black hole was not taken with a camera, and no single telescope ever saw it. It is a reconstruction, assembled from petabytes of radio data recorded at seven observatories scattered around the globe, then flown across the planet on hard drives.

The Photography Path for 2026

A blueprint for learning photography that 340,000 people watched has aged in a way its own creator didn't expect, and three stages of it now point beginners in the wrong direction. The reason is AI, which arrived between the original video and this update and quietly changed what's worth practicing.

 

Should You Buy the New RF 45mm f/1.2 or a Used EF 50mm f/1.2 L?

Canon's RF 45mm f/1.2 STM and the old EF 50mm f/1.2 L USM now sit close enough in price to make the comparison real. The used market has pushed a once-aspirational L lens down to roughly the cost of a modern budget prime, which forces a genuine choice.