Articles from Lee Morris

The Canon Pro-100 printer is on sale and it's so cheap it's worth buying even if you don't need a photo printer. The $455 package only costs $79.  

Although everyone has a different "favorite" lens, the 24-70mm 2.8 lens usually ends up being used the most. It's standard zoom range and fast 2.8 aperture makes it usable for almost any type of photography. Today, I'm comparing the three most popular 24-70mm lenses to determine which one is best.  

For the last seven years, our video tutorials have taught the Fstoppers community how to take better pictures. Our latest tutorial, Making Real Money: The Business Of Commercial Photography, is the opposite of that. In fact, there isn't a camera or lens in the entire 14-hours of video. But, I believe it's the most valuable tutorial we've ever made.  

The iPhone X is finally here. It's a pretty amazing smartphone, but today, I only care about one thing: how well can it shoot video and can it be used as a professional tool. 

We've finally done it: Fstoppers has moved over to a new 10 Gb/second network and server and it is incredibly fast. Let me show you what we did and how you can create your own 10 Gb/s network for a fraction of the price.  

A few months ago we released "Where Art Meets Architecture 3" with Mike Kelley, a photography tutorial that covers photographing hotels and resorts as well as the business of high-end architectural photography. For the past few months, we have also been releasing a behind-the-scenes series on the creation of this tutorial.

Normally, you get what you pay for. If you try to buy something that is less than half the price of its competitors, it's going to be bad. This is certainly what we expected when we compared four of the most popular carbon fiber tripods, but I'm shocked and excited to tell you we actually liked the most affordable model we tried the best. 

 A few months ago, Fstoppers reviewed a variety of gimbals and we picked our favorite one for the Panasonic GH5. Just after we published our comparison, the Moza Air 3 Axis Gimbal was released and they decided to send us one. The Zhiyun-Tech Crane is still amazing, but the Moza Air is now our favorite gimbal. 

Our newest photography tutorial with Elia Locardi, "Photographing the World 3," was released earlier this week and once again, we filmed a massive behind the scenes series on the creation of this tutorial. This season has 13 episodes and today we are releasing episode 1.  

Andrew Richardson has been an Fstoppers writer for over two years now, and he needs our help. Like thousands of other Texans, Andrew's house currently has several feet of water in it, but Andrew's story in particular is incredibly heartbreaking.  

A few weeks ago, I got an email from the website-building company, Wix, asking if anyone at Fstoppers wanted to be a part of a zero-gravity photoshoot. Um, yes please.  

Our Behind the Scenes series continues this week with Episode 7. In this episode, we continue filming WAMA 3 with Mike Kelley in Charleston, while I also teach him how to kiteboard.  

If you're a photographer or videographer you probably already have some sort of external storage. As your workload ramps up, it may become more convenient to house all of your files on and work from an external device like a NAS box (network attached storage).

Our behind-the-scenes series on the filming of "Where Art Meets Architecture 3" continues today with episode 6. In this episode, Mike Kelley flies to the Fstoppers office in Charleston to start working on the post-processing portion of this tutorial.  

A couple weeks ago I was contacted by a friend in Puerto Rico with an incredible story. She was walking through a gas station and noticed my face on a box. Without knowing, I had become the face of a brand.  

Microsoft just released an updated version of their Surface Pro laptop/tablet hybrid. It's not a total redesign but it's still a pretty unique product. Yes, there are other tablets on the market, but nothing that works quite like this.  

Last year, right around this time, Patrick and I booked a flight to Mexico to film Mike Kelley photographing the most expensive house ever sold in Playa Del Carmen. It certainly had the potential to be an incredible trip. The day before we were set to leave I decided to go out kiteboarding and I ended up breaking my tibia internally at my knee.

For the past few months I've been looking for a new laptop to edit videos on. As you probably know, I'm a Windows user, but because Apple just refreshed their MacBook Pro line two days ago, I decided to throw one into the mix as well. The results of my tests were both shocking and depressing.  

We recently released Where Art Meets Architecture 3 with Mike Kelley, our newest tutorial on photographing hotels and resorts. With this new tutorial comes a new behind the scenes series and in Episode 2, Mike reveals a lot of tips and tricks of the trade.  Each episode of our BTS series can be wildly different.

I've always been a Windows desktop user, but until this point I've never built my own desktop from scratch. I finally decided to teach myself how to build the ultimate PC for video and photo editing and I'm bringing you along for the ride.  

The Panasonic GH5 is my dream camera. It's like having a pro level video camera in the palm of your hand. It's almost perfect, but there are just a few strange quirks about this camera that could and should be fixed by Panasonic in the next firmware update.  

For years we wondered why external hard drives didn't come with multiple USB ports so that two or more computers could work off of the same drive at once. Sadly, there isn't a simple way to connect two computers to a single hard drive, but we've found a better solution.  

As you probably know, Fstoppers has recently switched over our video system from Nikon D750s to Panasonic GH5s. The GH5 is absolutely perfect for our style of shooting and I really don't have much to complain about... Except the lenses. Why do they cost so much? 

This Sony a9, which appears to be one of the most impressive cameras ever built, is now available for preorder at BH. If you want one of these when it's released on May 25th, you may want to preorder today.  

Last week we were filming the second video ever using our new GH5s, and one of the cameras ran out of batteries in the middle of a take. At the time, we didn't think anything of it and we simply replaced the battery and continued filming. When we transferred all of the footage after the shoot, one of the video clips was corrupt and we had to re-film the entire project.  

Although you may not be ready to admit it, the iPhone is a professional video camera for many shooters. We use ours with a handheld gimbal at almost every shoot to get super steady moving shots. Feiyu Tech recently sent us their SPG Plus two-handed gimbal, and I tested it out. 

Sony just announced its most impressive camera to date, the a9. If you've been thinking about making the switch from Canon or Nikon to Sony, this camera may make that decision easier.  

If you were on Fstoppers at all last week you probably read at least one of my articles about the Panasonic GH5 and the debate over its autofocus. Although we are no closer to a fix, this story keeps getting more entertaining. 

The Zhiyun-Tech Crane is our favorite gimbal for mirrorless cameras but it has one small problem: each time you remove the camera you'll have to balance the gimbal again and again. We've found a way around this by adding our own quick release plate.  

Here at Fstoppers we use exclusively Manfrotto tripod heads and in the past we used two different types of plates. For still photography we used the 200PL plate on ball heads and for our videos we used 500 plates on pan heads. I have always hated the longer 500 plates and today we are finally getting rid of them.

If you've ever thought about shooting a wedding, you have probably wondered: "How much should I charge to shoot a wedding?" In this free excerpt from the wedding photography tutorial, "How to Become a Professional Commercial Wedding Photographer," we are going to talk about pricing your wedding photography.

There are a lot of GH5 review videos currently online but most of them are pretty lacking. Youtuber iPhonedo, just released the most complete review I have seen and it's definitely worth watching whether you own the camera or not.  

Alex Cooke wrote a post last week about Pepsi's fiasco of a TV commercial. The ad seemed to offend the majority of people who watched it, causing Pepsi to quickly pull it. On Saturday SNL did their own skit on what they believe it was like on set seconds before they were ready to film.  

We recently got B&H to send us 6 of the most popular gimbals for mirrorless cameras. We spent hours figuring out all six and tediously balancing each of them multiple times so that you wouldn't have to. Luckily, there is a clear winner.  

A few days ago I wrote a post about the issues many GH5 users were having with continuous autofocus while recording video. Instead of trying to determine if there is in fact a problem or not, many photographers have simply chosen a "team" as they pick one of two sides; The GH5 is either the most incredible camera created by God himself, or it's total crap.