Articles from Alex Cooke

The Fujifilm X half is a machine for time travel, and the destination is roughly 1997.

Standing in front of a person with a camera and no plan is one of the fastest ways to freeze up on a shoot. Having a small set of reliable frames to fall back on keeps you moving and gives every session a solid starting point. 

Masking inside Lightroom Classic separates a rough edit from a clean one, and wildlife images demand that precision more than most subjects. Feathers, reflections, and busy backgrounds all fight for attention, and a sloppy mask shows immediately. 

Two 85mm portrait lenses, one costing $1,948 and the other $569, produce photos so close in sharpness that even a 200% crop of a model's eye barely separates them. That kind of price gap between near-identical results forces a real question about what you're actually paying for when you buy first-party glass. 

Couples are posting videos accusing their wedding photographers of secretly using AI, and the reaction from shooters has split into two loud camps. The confusion this creates makes it harder for engaged couples to find a photographer they trust, and it puts working shooters on the defensive over tools they already rely on. 

Almost nobody needs a dedicated camera anymore. That is the uncomfortable truth sitting underneath every camera launch in 2026, and the sooner the industry says it out loud, the better its decisions get.  

Someone was offered a free camera with one condition attached: they had to commit to learning and using manual exposure. Was it worth it? 

The Nikkor Z 85mm f/1.8 S came out in 2019 as the only 85mm option on Nikon's mirrorless system, and today it sits in a crowded field where third-party glass costs a third as much. That single shift, from sole option to premium holdout, is the whole story behind whether this lens still deserves a spot on your list in 2026. 

Two camera traps in Madhya Pradesh's Kuno National Park caught a lean, long-legged wildcat with black-tufted ears moving at night. The animal was a caracal, one of the least-seen wild cats in India, recorded in the same landscape where the country's cheetah reintroduction project is running.

Your camera decides how bright to make a photo by measuring the light in the scene, and it gives you a choice of how much of the frame to measure. Most of the time it reads almost the whole frame and evaluates the scene as a whole, which works well for ordinary, evenly lit scenes. But some scenes fool that approach badly, and that is where spot metering comes in.

Ask ten photographers what makes a good photograph and you'll get ten different answers, and the person asking might have given a completely different reply three decades earlier. That gap between the beginner's checklist and the experienced eye is where the real lessons hide. 

Most woodland advice tells you to wait for flat, overcast light. Summer dawn breaks that rule, handing you a narrow window where low, dynamic sun arcs through the canopy and rewards anyone willing to lose sleep over it. 

In the first two weeks of July, humpback whales turned up trailing fishing line on both sides of the Pacific, and rescue teams scrambled to reach them. Some whales were freed, some vanished before responders could find them, and at least one died.

Google researchers have published a paper laying out the system YouTube appears to be using to delete AI spam in bulk, and the numbers are large. Over six months, the system terminated 50,000 clusters covering 130,000 channels.

You take a photo of a beautiful sky, glance at the back of the camera, and it looks fine. Later, on your computer, the sky is a flat sheet of pure white with no clouds, no gradient, nothing to recover. That is clipping, and it is one of the most common ways a promising shot quietly dies.

Warm highlights, cool shadows, and a foreground green cast that has to go: this is the color puzzle behind most sunset landscapes. Getting those tones to feel intentional rather than accidental is the difference between a flat raw file and an image people stop scrolling to look at. 

A 12-20mm zoom at f/2.8 sits right in the sweet spot for astrophotography, wide enough to swallow the Milky Way and fast enough to pull in faint starlight. Most shooters reach for a prime when the sky gets dark, which makes a zoom that can keep pace worth a real look. 

Strip Ansel Adams of his name, his reputation, and his place in history, then hand him a fresh account with zero followers. How many likes does "Monolith, the Face of Half Dome" actually pull? That thought experiment cuts straight into how you judge your own images and whether follower counts have anything to do with artistic worth. 

Camera Raw quietly gained a set of tools that fix a problem you have probably fought with for years: masks that stop short of the leaves, the hair, or the edge where you actually need them. Two new sliders now let you push a mask outward or pull it back, and they work on the specific mask types you reach for most. 

If you have spent any time reading about camera settings, you have heard the advice to keep your ISO as low as possible for the cleanest image. The lowest normal ISO setting your sensor is built around has a name: base ISO.

"Adolescence" pulled off something most productions only pretend to do: four episodes, each filmed as a single continuous take, no stitched cuts hiding in the shadows. The internet split over whether the show cheated, and the answer sits right in the gear the crew chose to carry. 

Nikon sells three different 35mm prime lenses for the Z mount, and picking between them comes down to details that specs alone won't reveal. The gap between the Nikon 35mm f/1.4 and the Nikon 35mm f/1.8 S is smaller than the labels suggest. 

Movie stunts that look impossible almost always come down to a physical problem someone had to solve, whether that meant building a 330 ft miniature bridge or strapping an actor to a helicopter at 75 mph.  

Walk past a certain bus stop near Meta's London headquarters and you see a glossy campaign shot: Kylie Jenner in a pair of the company's smart glasses. Step to the side and the poster becomes a black-and-white X-ray of her face under the words "We're always watching." 

Flat light gets a bad reputation. The moment the sky turns from blue to a sheet of gray cloud, a lot of photographers pack up, assuming the good light is gone for the day. That instinct is backward.

An 800mm equivalent lens that fits in a hand and a 1,000mm equivalent monster share the same day out on the Welsh coast. That kind of reach used to mean carrying gear you could barely lift, and the shift toward smaller sensors covering it is one of the more interesting developments in wildlife photography right now. 

Most wedding shooters carry a 24-70mm and a 70-200mm so they never get caught without the right reach. That habit can quietly wreck the consistency of your work, and the fix has nothing to do with which lens you own. 

Ask any printer to be cheap, good at black and white, and simple to use, and you're chasing something that doesn't exist. Anyone who has tried to pull a truly neutral monochrome print off an inkjet knows the frustration of watching subtle color casts creep into what should be clean gray. 

Federal authorities have charged hundreds of people for flying drones too close to FIFA World Cup sites, and some of them were not even filming the tournament. One pilot got footage of a church, another was shooting for a real estate business, and both ended up facing federal charges.

Every desk has one ugly corner: the gray knot of chargers and power bricks that no cable management ever truly tames. The Anker Nano Power Strip (10-in-1, 70W, Clamp) clamps to your desk edge and swallows that knot whole, and after a month running my entire charging setup off it, I'm not going back. 

Photoshop's Camera Raw keeps getting features that Lightroom users have been waiting years for, and the gap between the two is worth watching. If you organize in one program and edit in another, the question of whether you should mix them has a clear answer. 

The pixel stretch effect looks like something out of a high-end ad campaign, yet it comes down to a handful of clicks in Photoshop. If you've ever wanted to add motion, energy, or a graphic edge to a portrait or product shot, this technique gets you there in minutes. 

Most photography advice tells you to learn more, shoot in manual, and chase the perfect trip. Doing the opposite of all three might improve your work faster than any tutorial ever could. 

A man with more than 100,000 Instagram followers who filmed himself lifting a stranger into the air outside a nightclub, exposing her underwear on camera, has been ordered to pay $20,000 for posting the footage without her consent. A B.C. tribunal decided the clips counted as intimate images even though the man said he was just chasing views.

Starting October 1, any company that lets New York City residents sign up for a subscription online will have to let them cancel it the same way. That covers streaming services, gym memberships, and the creative software many of you pay for every month.