Articles from Alex Cooke

Look at the top of your camera. Somewhere on the body, probably on a physical dial, you will find a cluster of letters that might as well be hieroglyphics if nobody has ever explained them: P, A (or Av on Canon), S (or Tv on Canon), and M. Nikon, Sony, and OM System use P/A/S/M. Pentax mirrors Canon's labeling with Av and Tv. Some cameras throw in a green rectangle, a handful of icons depicting tiny people or mountains. Here's what they all mean.

The Sigma 16mm f/1.4 has been the bestselling APS-C mirrorless lens of all time, and Sigma just replaced it with something smaller, sharper, and better built. Whether the new Sigma 15mm f/1.4 is actually worth picking over the Sony or the budget Viltrox is a more complicated question than it might look.

If you've never opened Photoshop before, the interface can feel like a wall of buttons with no clear entry point. Knowing where to start, what to ignore, and how the core pieces fit together makes the difference between actually learning the software and giving up in the first ten minutes.

Most people assume that turning a passion into a career is the ultimate goal. For photography specifically, that assumption can cost you more than you realize, and not just financially.

Shooting through a creative slump is one of the harder parts of photography that nobody talks about honestly. Kodak Vision3 500T's tungsten-balanced sibling, Cinestill 800T, is one of the few film stocks that can pull you back in almost by itself.

Every camera you have ever used, from a disposable Kodak to a $6,000 mirrorless body, does exactly one thing: it controls how much light hits a sensor. That is it. Everything else, the tracking autofocus, the computational wizardry, the menus nested seven layers deep, is in service of that one job. The three tools your camera uses to manage light are ISO, aperture, and shutter speed, and the relationship between them is called the exposure triangle.

Getting skin tones right in post-processing is one of those things that separates a good portrait from a great one. The difference usually comes down to a handful of specific adjustments most people skip.

Picking the right Sony body right now is genuinely complicated. The Sony a7 V sits under $3,000, yet this video argues it beats the Sony a1.

Shooting with a digital camera after years of film can be a humbling experience. The gap between snapping shots and actually making photographs is wider than most people realize, and Steve O'Nions found that out the hard way on a street photography day in Liverpool.

Outdoor portraits in flat, lifeless light are one of the most common problems to solve, and a speedlight is often all it takes to fix them.

Every profession has its unresolvable debates. Chefs argue about whether a hot dog is a sandwich. Musicians argue about whether music theory stifles creativity. Photographers have their own collection of eternal conflicts, and what makes them special is that nobody has ever won any of them. Not once. Not in forums, not in comment sections, not at workshops, and not at the bar after a shoot. Here are the ten battles that will outlive us all.

Getting that soft, misty look in your landscape and travel photos isn't about one secret trick. It's a combination of shooting conditions, light direction, and a handful of specific editing moves that most people either skip or don't know to try.

Getting a genuine portrait of a stranger is one of the hardest things to pull off in travel photography. The second someone knows a camera is pointed at them, they stop being themselves, and whatever drew you to them in the first place vanishes.

Mini sessions are one of the most common strategies portrait photographers use to fill their calendars, but the math behind them rarely adds up. When you account for travel, setup, shooting, editing, delivery, and client communication, you're often looking at a pittance even before taxes, equipment costs, or software subscriptions.

Shooting with a snoot or projector attachment unlocks a level of light control most setups simply can't match. Mark Wallace puts that to the test in a recent studio session, building off a lighting guide created by his colleague and then pushing into entirely original territory.

March 2026 was one of those months where every corner of the photography world seemed to shift at once. From semiconductor crises driven by AI infrastructure to the Supreme Court declining to touch a pivotal AI copyright case, from the biggest camera trade show on the planet delivering almost no new cameras to Kodak rewriting the names of its most beloved film stocks, this was a month that will be remembered as a turning point. These ten stories captured the month.

The Fstoppers community is brimming with creative vision and talent. Every day, we comb through your work, looking for images to feature as the Photo of the Day or simply to admire your creativity and technical prowess.

The Canon RF 16-28mm f/2.8 STM is one of the more interesting ultra-wide angle zoom lenses Canon has released in recent years, sitting at a price point that's hard to categorize. It's not cheap, but it's marketed as the budget option in Canon's lineup, which raises an obvious question: what exactly are you giving up?

Choosing a specialty in portrait photography isn't just a stylistic preference. It's a business decision. The photographers who build sustainable careers aren't necessarily the most technically gifted; they're the ones who commit to a recognizable style and understand the world around their images, not just the camera settings.

AI-generated real estate listing photos are showing up on major property websites, and buyers have no way to tell they're fake. In California, a law requiring disclosure already exists, and agents are still ignoring it.

Shooting film in an era of instant digital feedback isn't a step backward; it's a deliberate choice that exposes real differences in how generations approach the craft. Understanding those differences can sharpen how you think about your own photography, regardless of which tools you use.

Lightroom is the most widely used photo editing application in the world, and for good reason. It is powerful, nondestructive, and flexible enough to handle everything from a casual vacation gallery to a professional wedding shoot. But that flexibility comes with a cost: there are dozens of ways to make your images look worse instead of better, and most of them feel like improvements while you are doing them.

The Nikon Z5 II sits at the entry-level end of Nikon's full frame mirrorless lineup, but calling it "entry-level" undersells it fast. This camera carries specs that would have turned heads on a flagship body just a few years ago, and at its price point, it's hard to ignore.

Picking the wrong film stock can ruin an entire roll before you ever press the shutter. ISO, light conditions, and your specific camera's limitations all play into which film actually makes sense for a given shoot, and getting this wrong costs you both money and photos.

Lighting is one of those skills that separates snapshots from professional-looking images. Whether you're working in a studio or improvising at home, understanding these four classic lighting patterns gives you a repeatable, reliable system for flattering almost any subject.

The Fujifilm X100VI has become one of the most talked-about compact cameras in recent years, and for good reason. It fits in your pocket, goes anywhere, and produces files that can genuinely be pushed toward a 35mm film aesthetic without much fighting.

Slow load times. No clear pricing page. A portfolio organized by date instead of genre. These are the silent killers that drive potential bookings away before a visitor ever reaches your contact form. Your website might be gorgeous to you, but if it's not converting visitors into inquiries, something is broken, and it's probably one of these things.

The Sony C200X is a 4-megapixel digital camera from 2004 that almost nobody outside of a post office or print shop has ever touched. It was built for one job: taking passport photos, and it did that job well enough that some of these are still in active use today.

Slowing down and making a single print from start to finish is one of the hardest things to do when you shoot a lot. Most people never get there, not because they lack the skill, but because the habit of moving on to the next shot is almost impossible to break.

Knowing what makes a photograph good is harder than knowing how to take one. Most advice focuses on technique, gear, or composition rules, but those things can all be present in a photo that still says absolutely nothing.

Fuel costs are pushing a lot of people to rethink how far they drive just to take photos, and that pressure might actually improve your photography. Finding compelling images close to home is a skill, and most people haven't developed it because they've never had a reason to try.

Every camera ships with default settings designed for the broadest possible audience. Those defaults are tuned for safety, not precision. They prioritize avoiding catastrophic failure over delivering optimal results, which is fine if you're handing the camera to a tourist but actively counterproductive if you're trying to produce professional work.

Picking the sharpest 35mm lens for a full frame camera is harder than it sounds, especially now that the market has more serious contenders than ever. Frost has tested over 50 of them across the past four years, and the field has changed enough that his original rankings no longer tell the whole story.

Most people who pick up a camera hit a wall. The early momentum fades, improvement slows, and you find yourself stuck somewhere between beginner and advanced, good enough to know what a great shot looks like but not consistent enough to make them reliably. That gap has a name, and knowing how to navigate it makes the difference between photographers who grow and ones who quit.

Hyperspectral satellites are rewriting what "seeing from space" means. Instead of the three color channels your eyes use, a new generation of satellites captures hundreds of color bands per pixel, and the implications stretch from farming to military surveillance.