Back when I was taking pictures just for the fun of it, I never once thought to optimize my preparation. There was no preparation -- no shot list, no scouting, no mood board. That all changed when making pictures became my job and my livelihood.
As a fashion photographer with a degree of online presence, it is only natural to get questions about gear every now and then in Instagram DMs and email. There is a universe of gear to choose from across many different brands. As a Canon shooter, you might think that I would recommend their entry-level cameras to beginners. However, I think the opposite.
You don’t need to have a portfolio of hundreds of thousands of images to rank on the first page of the most visited customer queries. In fact, we found that 83% of Shutterstock contributors that rank on the first page of top-500 customer queries have less than 10,000 images in their portfolio.
Ukumehame Beach is a small strip of sand on Maui’s west side. It has all the necessities of a good beach – soft sand, clear waters and a few special features to draw a photographer’s eye. It’s the kind of place that tourists overlook, which makes it all the more attractive to us locals.
I became interested in analog photography during high school. I later rediscovered the film process that I had taken for granted since I had spent my teenage years taking unlimited photos on my digital camera and smartphone.
The Digital Age has well and truly established itself and has transformed the photography industry in ways that seemed impossible just a few decades ago. Over the last several years, analog photography has been put on life support, only keeping a pulse thanks to a determined community of film lovers.
In 2020, the global camera industry sold roughly one-eighth the number of cameras it did at its peak in 2008: 15 million units for CIPA companies versus 120 million just 12 years earlier.
I analyzed the top 50 landscape photographers with accounts on the NFT auction platform Foundation, between July 5th and 9th to answer the following question: How much do landscape photographers earn from selling NFTs?
From my beginning days in photography, roughly 1969, I had the ambition to travel and make photographs. Somehow, I felt a great satisfaction in producing photographic art that came from within.
So, you just bought a fancy new telephoto or macro lens and can’t wait to get in super tight, frame-filling photos on a cool subject of animals or plants set off against a posterboard smooth background. After all, that’s why you spent lots of money on those lenses, right?
As a busy Dad of two young boys, life gets hectic quite often. I still do plenty of photography, but gone are the long days spent in a blind waiting for a bird to appear. Nevertheless, I've found other ways to fulfill my creative desires.
There is a purveying sentiment that cameras have only gotten more expensive over time. While there is certainly some validity in certain sectors of the market, the truth about camera prices over time is a bit more nuanced and complex than the average person makes it out to be. So, let’s take a look.
Picking the right light modifier is often crucial to the success of the image. With hundreds of different modifiers to choose from, there is really nothing you can’t do. However, a wide choice often ends up confusing or possibly scaring photographers.
Nikon's recently announced Z fc is a camera that shows how not only can the company learn from and fix past mistakes, but also illustrate how it plans to succeed today as well as where the company can move in the future.
It is rare that one brand of camera becomes seriously associated with a single celebrity as Academy Award-winning actor Jeff Bridges is with his Widelux panoramic camera.
Photographers have always endured an internal debate about the relative importance of learning either technical or artistic aspects. Most lean toward the technical, feeling they have a handle on the artistic side but lack the technical proficiency or expertise to produce really good photographs.
The Razer Blade 14 released just a few short weeks ago is aimed squarely at gamers. The headline on the Razer website is "the world's most powerful 14-inch gaming laptop." But don't be fooled by the glowing green logo and the RGB-backlit keyboard: with its AMD CPU, NVIDIA GPU, and color-accurate QHD display, the Blade 14 is an ideal choice for photo and video editors who are looking for a PC that's portable and powerful.
Last week, Associated Press photographer Emilio Morenatti delivered to a Spanish couple a framed copy of perhaps the most iconic photo of how the coronavirus pandemic has affected the elderly. In the photo, the two are seen embracing through a plastic sheet after 100 days of not seeing each other.
Photo organizing software Mylio (which stands for "My Life Organized") has re-emerged after nearly seven years thanks to a recent wave of updates and partnerships with influencers like iJustine. After a tepid launch back in 2014, is the service worth revisiting?
Like all major camera manufacturers, Nikon has different teams for different regions. As part of that, each gets its own budget to market new products, and comparing Nikon USA's choices versus that of Nikon Asia presents two wildly different approaches to selling the retro-inspired Z fc.
As someone who enjoys very high-quality images from my 42-megapixel full-frame Sony Alpha 7R III, I was wondering how good the pictures would be out of my new DJI Air 2S drone.
Photographer Dinda Avena wants to inspire those who have experienced and survived violence, feel unsafe in public, who are suffering due to sexual identity, for those whose land is being seized, and for all marginalized communities to not let their voices fade away.
As reported recently here on Petapixel, the FAA has rolled out a new testing program for recreational UAV (a.k.a., drone) users, created to “provide education and testing for recreational flyers on important safety and regulatory information.” As with many government-mandated programs, it provides neither education nor safety.
In 2003 my wife Ruth and I were photographing in Colorado and were returning to our campground after a rather uneventful day. Ruth was driving, as always, and I was still looking for a photograph, as always.
A Rapid Ascent Drone, or RAD, is basically an electric rocket ship. For now, they can be used to make unusual drone light shows that can replace fireworks and provide unique light painting opportunities, but the creator of the concept believes they may be able to eventually replace rocket ships.
Most people don’t actually know what it means when I say I’m a “travel photographer,” it is usually met with a confused look and followed up by some variation of the question, "do you mean you travel for free?” or “who even pays you to travel?”
If you are reading this, chances are you’re aware of NFTs -- non-fungible tokens that are bought, sold, and traded on a digital ledger known as the blockchain. But what are their costs, risks, and side effects?
As a landscape and nature photographer with a Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology, I often enjoy trying to blend the two disciplines to better understand the human experience as it relates to photography. One subject that particularly intrigues me is the impact of social media on photography and photographers.
I often come across people mixing up “blue hour photography” with “night photography”, but to me, those are distinctively different.
The $10,000 Fujifilm GFX 100 is probably the best medium format camera on the market right now. In almost every category the Fujifilm GFX 100 will outperform nearly every other medium format system.
I am a self-taught photographer. I don’t believe you can teach someone photography unless they have the heart for it and they are willing to do the work required. As Brett Weston famously said: “Beyond the rudiments, it is up to the artist to create art, not the camera."
With the increasing power of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence available on both phones and PCs, we have reached a point where it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between photography and composites.
Over the past few weeks, Gitzo has been in the hot seat over issues surrounding its Legende tripod -- namely linked to poor communication. As a company that had previously never worked directly with customers, the expectations of crowdfunding may have initially caught the manufacturer off guard, but it's actively working to fix that along with its Legende tripod's cosmetic issues.
On June 12th, I packed my new Fujifilm X-S10 with the standard zoom Canon 24–70 f/2.8L and my favorite reportage setup (a Canon 5D Mark III with a Canon 70–200mm f/2.8L telephoto lens) and drove to the Pirate Cove base on Lake Kruchok in Kyiv, Ukraine, to shoot some nice pictures at the all-Ukrainian wakeboard competition.
There’s an inherent freedom to photography as a creative outlet, especially when you’re capturing landscapes or urban environments. But the COVID era has seen many of us confined to our homes and cut off from the world around us.
The world clamors for our attention and technology demands our hard-earned money, but what has happened to the quality of the experience and the investment in ourselves? Our time is now owned by social media, competitions, and the need to prove how good and well-received our images are, usually to the detriment of the images and our self-confidence.
If you watched the news or were connected to the internet the first week of June, chances are good that you have seen a video of a drone crashing into an erupting volcano. Well, that drone was mine and it got completely disintegrated. In my latest video, I share what it is like to fly a drone around a volcano and what you have to look out for.
All of my recent motivation in photography has come from the desire to see actualized publications of my projects, in the wake of the wonderfully positive response to my recent Bulgaria zine and USA Digest.
Today marks three years since the world lost one of its most interesting and likable public personalities. Anthony Bourdain was one of those unique souls that found a way to inspire people from all walks of life: Foodies, filmmakers, photographers, and casual travelers alike.
As you may have read, my gear was stolen in broad daylight as the camera was rolling two weeks ago in a public San Francisco park. It may be getting worse out there: another photographer got hit this week looking at Golden Gate Bridge.
Photographer Baber Afzal created a surreal advertising campaign series titled "Reflections for Passion" for the luxury car brand Porsche using drones and light painting to create the futuristic visuals.
The development of personal vision in photography often gets mired in thoughts of what to avoid, the suppression of familiar ideas, and the desire to do something different.
Photographer Mylo Fowler was raised in a small home on the Navajo Reservation of Northern Arizona. In the latest film from director Chris Burkard, Fowler describes his upbringing as "growing up in a 600 square foot home with a 30 square mile backyard."
The NFT craze from earlier this year isn’t going away -- but perhaps has become even more mainstream in the last three months. It’s hard to name a celebrity, artist, or athlete who hasn’t cashed in on the explosive popularity of NFTs.
What are famous photographers doing right on their websites? Or better yet, what are they doing awfully wrong despite being successful? In this detailed research report, I thoroughly reviewed over 100 individual websites (from the most well-known photographers out there) to try to uncover all of that.
I started learning digital photography in 2016 with an old DSLR. It’s been a lot of fun, and I’ve taken quite a few pictures and timelapses I’m proud of, but until recently, I’d never considered the analog world.
I called the Google Photos photo sharing and management app the Turkey of the Year in my 2020 USA TODAY round-up of the apps and gadgets that screwed over consumers last year. Reason: Google Photos was free for all, but starting June 1st, it switches to a paid model after five years of bait and switch.
When difficulties due to local unrest as well as COVID-19 complications prevented my wife and me from being able to visit the Congo and photograph the local gorilla population, an unforeseen opportunity presented itself to go to Uganda instead, and I jumped at the chance.
Long before photography was even a dream, people were trying to document the beauty of landscapes in a two-dimensional medium. From romantic interpretations of natural beauty to the realistic and mystifying Hudson River School painters, there have always been trends in how we see the landscape.
As a photographer, when you produce a series of photos that goes viral and you close sales and license deals because of it, it is tempting to simply continue doing the same and hopefully keep receiving the attention you had in the first place.
