Fstoppers

The Mania MFZ is a pinhole camera built from solid oak and magnets, with no lens, no viewfinder, and no shutter button, yet it shoots 120 film in several formats and at more than one focal length. A camera like this removes the automatic aids you lean on every day, which makes it a direct test of how well you can see a picture before it exists.

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Photoshop 2027 and the Camera Raw update that came with it add a long list of features, with more already waiting in the Photoshop beta, and many of them draw on Adobe's generative credits, so plenty of clicks now carry a cost on top of your subscription. Knowing which tools hold up at full resolution and which ones soften your files decides whether an update speeds up your editing or adds cleanup work.

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The desk I film at every day looks great. Professional lighting, professional audio, all of it. But that isn't where I actually work. My real desk was a cheap IKEA table with four aging Dell monitors that looked like they were about to give up. So I tore it all down and built a new workstation powered entirely by Apple's new touchscreen MacBook Pro. It took two full days and I trashed my office in the process, but I'm really happy with where it ended up.

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The Library of Congress holds a small color advertising card printed by the Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company at 20 and 22 Gold Street in New York. The front shows Oscar Wilde on a sofa with a closed book in one hand and his head resting on the other, and the back lists prices for hats and bonnets. Some 85,000 copies of it were sold or offered for sale, the photographer who made the picture sued, and that is how the Supreme Court came to decide whether a photograph can have an author at all.

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Photographers who have already reviewed the new Mandler 50mm f/1.4 Pre-A M-mount lens immediately compare its image quality to the Leica Summilux-M 50mm f/1.4 E46 pre-aspherical design. My attitude is, who cares!

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Few things slow down a real estate edit like opening Photoshop after an update and finding the panel you use on every listing has rearranged itself. When you turn around dozens of interiors a week, small interface changes in Photoshop and Premiere cost real time until your hands relearn where everything lives.

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Film costs real money per frame now, and that price changes how you work: you meter more carefully, you wait longer, and you think twice before pressing the shutter. A digital camera can imitate a lot of that discipline if you strip away its conveniences, which raises a fair question about what you actually love when you say you love film.

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ZWO now sells three versions of its Seestar S30 smart telescope, and the new S30 Plus lands between the original and the Pro in price and capability. If you want a complete deep-sky imaging system that fits in a small case, the differences between those three models decide how much of a galaxy or nebula you can actually get into one frame.

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Lightroom's Color Grading panel can change the mood of a photo with a few color wheels and a couple of sliders, yet a lot of edits come out heavy and unnatural because the colors were chosen at random. A small amount of color theory gives those wheels a direction, and that direction is what separates a deliberate look from a lucky accident.

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The FEI's veterinary rulebook contains one number that decides nothing at all. A temperature difference of more than two degrees Celsius between a horse's left and right lower limbs counts as a significant thermographic finding, and a significant thermographic finding eliminates nobody, fines nobody, and never becomes the result of record. Everything it can do, it does by handing two veterinarians a reason to keep working the leg with their hands.

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With a small flurry of compact film cameras launched in the last couple of years, I was hoping to fall in love with the Lomography MC-A. It’s beautiful and satisfying to use, but a couple of annoying flaws leave me both disappointed and frustrated. 

The Lomography MC-A launched last October, further heralding a renewed love of everything analog in the world of photography. This is a compact camera that arguably takes inspiration from Contax: small and packed with automation but with lots of manual control when you need it.

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Shots of shampoo bottles plunging into water, wrapped in bubbles and topped with a crown of splash, look like luck caught at the right instant. Most of that look comes from planning, and the planning behind it answers a question you run into across product work: how to keep a subject exactly where you want it while everything around it moves.

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You come home from a trip with hundreds of sharp, well-exposed frames of towers, smiling friends, and pretty streets, and almost none of them hold a stranger's attention for more than a second. The photos you remember from books and exhibitions share one trait that has little to do with gear or settings, and you can learn to build it into your own work.

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Shift lenses keep a building's verticals straight while the camera stays level, and they do it without the unpredictable cropping and resolution loss you take on when you fix perspective in software. Laowa's new 24mm f/2 Zero-D Tilt-Shift brings that to most mirrorless mounts and to medium format, at an aperture tilt-shift lenses almost never reach.

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A landscape photo can be sharp, well exposed, and carefully composed and still look like a flat print taped to a wall. Depth in a two-dimensional image comes from cues the eye reads instantly, such as where light falls, how contrast changes with distance, and how warm and cool tones sit against each other, and you can strengthen most of those cues in the edit.

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Two weeks ago I spent over $7,000 on Apple's new touchscreen MacBook Pro. It finally showed up, so I put it side by side with the M3 Max MacBook Pro I've been using for the last two years. To be perfectly honest, I'm on the fence about whether I even want to keep it. 

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Twenty-four college students watched the same mock police interrogation end in the same confession, and came away with three different opinions about how hard the suspect had been pushed. The only thing that differed between them was where the camera sat. Students who saw the version framed on the suspect judged the confession barely coerced, and students who saw the version framed on the detective judged it heavily coerced.

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You use a red headlamp when you're walking around. It preserves your night vision. But if there are other astro-landscape photographers nearby, you're likely ruining their shots. You were trying to do the right thing. But you weren't.

Most of us were taught that red light is the night photographer's best friend. It is, but only for your eyes. Cameras don't care what your eyes prefer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9rY7OYSpJ4

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Autumn on Iona brings low sun that can light the island for most of the day, but it also brings squalls that roll in off the Atlantic with little notice. You get minutes of good light at a time, so you have to decide on exposure, framing, and where to stand before the next band of rain hits.

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Two filmmakers who spent years running toward airstrikes in Aleppo now wake to a recorded voice telling them to remain calm and evacuate the building. The fire alarm in their London hotel for asylum seekers goes off so often that they joke about it. If it were real, one of them says, the authorities would be happy to have fewer asylum seekers. Their film is about the part of documentary work most people never see: the long stretch after the footage is shot, when the people who held the cameras have nothing left to do but wait.

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