Was This Compact Tripod Just Years Ahead of the Trend?
When this tripod came out years ago, so many of us wanted it to the point that a lot of us forced it to be useful in situations where it wasn’t the best fit. Now that we’ve seen the brand’s other tripod offerings, where it fits best is more obvious.
What It's Like to Shoot Stills With the Nikon ZR
The Nikon ZR puts RED's raw video format, 32-bit float audio, and a 4-inch screen into a body with no viewfinder, so most of the conversation around it stays on codecs and cinema workflows. If you shoot both stills and video, the more useful question is whether it's a camera you'd pick up on a day when there's nothing to film.
Wide, Medium, Close: A Filmmaker's Trick for Landscape Photography
You get to a beach at sunrise, the light finally shows up, and nearly every frame you take is the widest view your lens allows. That habit leaves most of a location unphotographed, and it pins the whole morning on one composition and one patch of sky.
Nikon's Low-Light Trinity, Tested After Dark
Nikon now has three autofocus f/1.2 primes for its Z mount, a 35mm, a 50mm, and an 85mm, and each one weighs more than a kilogram. If you shoot for yourself instead of for clients, you have to decide whether any of them earns a place in a bag you actually carry every day.
Should Wedding Photographers Post Their Prices Online?
A couple finds your portfolio, likes what they see, fills out your contact form, and then waits to hear whether you're free on their date and what you charge. Every hour of that wait gives them time to open another tab, and most wedding inquiry setups make some kind of wait unavoidable.
Critique the Community: Scary
Welcome to the October installment of the Critique the Community! This month's critique theme is going to be "Scary," and we want to see your best photographs that scared you in some way. Maybe the image was scary to take, maybe it is scary to look at, or maybe it is scary for you to look back on now.
When Photography Was Illegal: A History of Camera Bans, From Trains to Courtrooms
At a fashionable beach resort in the 1890s, a posted notice reportedly warned bathers about a brand-new menace with blunt words: "PEOPLE ARE FORBIDDEN TO USE THEIR KODAKS ON THE BEACH." Around the same stretch of years, hand cameras were barred for a time from the Washington Monument. The thing you now do a hundred times a day without a second thought spent much of its first century as behavior that respectable people wanted stopped, fined, or outright banned.
The Camera Strap Everyone Else Has to Beat? Peak Design Slide Lite
A camera strap is just a camera strap. Right? Peak Design changed that with a Kickstarter back in 2014, and having only undergone one or two subtle changes over the years, it still sets the standard.
A Look at Laowa's New 35mm Macro Lens
Laowa's ACRIS 35mm f/2.8 1X Macro APO reaches 1:1 magnification at a focal length that keeps the background, the sky, and the setting in the frame while your subject fills the foreground. Wide angle macro is a small niche, and the lenses built for it often ask you to accept unusual compromises in exchange for that perspective.
How Sharp Is the Thypoch Simera 75mm f/1.4 Wide Open?
A 75mm f/1.4 is a short telephoto that isolates a subject without forcing you to back across the room, and the Thypoch Simera 75mm f/1.4 brings that focal length to Leica M mount in an all-metal body. Because it's a manual focus rangefinder lens, plenty of people will adapt it to mirrorless cameras, which raises fair questions about how much performance survives the trip.
How Sony's New 600mm f/6.3 Handles Fast Birds in Flight
A 600mm prime that weighs about 1 kg and costs $3,698 reads like a list of compromises, and Sony's new 600mm f/6.3 asks you to give up aperture in exchange for a lens you can carry without a second thought. If you shoot birds or wildlife handheld, the gap between a lens you can hold for five minutes and one you can hold all morning decides how many chances you actually get.
Can a Single Prime Lens Really Cover a Whole Trip?
Packing for a trip usually turns into a negotiation between the 35mm, the 50mm, and the zoom, and plenty of people settle it by bringing all three. Whether that extra glass earns its place in the bag affects how you shoot, how much you carry, and how many moments you actually catch.
Rosie the Riveter Was the Wrong Woman for Thirty Years, and a Caption Glued to the Back of a Press Print Fixed It
In March 1942, the Acme photo agency sent a photographer to Naval Air Station Alameda for a story about what women should and should not wear around machinery. On March 24, he made a frame of a 20-year-old machine shop worker bent over a lathe, her hair tied back in a polka-dot bandanna. Somebody then typed a caption with her name in it, glued the slip to the back of the print, and shipped it out to newspapers.