Viltrox Completes Its f/1.4 Pro Trio With a 35mm for Sony E and Nikon Z
Viltrox has announced the AF 35mm f/1.4 Pro, a weather-sealed full frame prime for Sony E and Nikon Z with a 16-element optical design and voice coil autofocus. It costs $829 and joins the 50mm and 85mm f/1.4 Pro lenses, which gives Viltrox a set of three fast primes that comes in under $2,000 combined.
How Two Fluke Photos Revealed a Humpback Had Crossed the World
On July 10, 2013, Natalia Botero-Acosta photographed a humpback whale's tail going down in the Gulf of Tribugá, on Colombia's Pacific coast. On August 22, 2022, Ekaterina Kalashnikova photographed a fluke off Fumba, in the Zanzibar channel, on the far side of the planet. The two frames belong to the same animal, and the two sighting points sit 13,046 kilometers apart.
The Best Premium Compact Cameras to Gift This Holiday Season, and Why Buying Used From MPB Makes Sense
You’ve heard it before: the best camera is the one you have with you, and premium compact cameras are what you should be carrying.
Sometimes you want the power of a mirrorless camera or your DSLR, but they're too big to carry regularly. You don’t need to sacrifice by leaving a camera at home. A premium compact camera solves your problem. Well, one other thing. For many, these cameras are usually out of budget, but as always, there is a solution. Buying a new camera these days is a challenge in itself. They are either out of stock or overpriced, but MPB has them.
Can the Fujifilm X100VI Handle a Rainy Night in London?
The Fujifilm X100VI is the kind of camera people buy to carry everywhere, and that only works if it keeps delivering once the light fades and the rain starts. A fixed 23mm lens and a body small enough for a coat pocket come with real limits compared with a larger interchangeable lens kit.
The Client Who Told a Photographer She Was Charging Too Little
When you teach yourself photography in a city where you don't speak the language, you make every pricing call, portfolio choice, and client pitch without a second opinion. Mistakes made that way can go unnoticed until a client points them out.
Making Intimate Landscapes Around Clear-Cuts and Power Lines
You can drive half a day to reach peak autumn color and find the hillside carved up by a clear-cut, a power line, and a thicket of saplings. Pulling a clean, deliberate frame out of a compromised scene is a skill you'll use far more often than you'll stumble onto a perfect location.
Settings Are Easy to Teach, but Taste Is Another Story
You can learn the settings that keep a photograph sharp in a single afternoon, yet nobody has a reliable formula for the quality that makes someone stop and look at it. That gap between technique and taste is the hardest part of photography to teach.
Nikon Announces New NIKKOR Z 120-300mm f/2.8 TC VR S
Top sports and wildlife photography shooters, this one is for you. Today, Nikon announced a new telephoto lens that focuses on getting you close to the action: the NIKKOR Z 120-300mm f/2.8 TC VR S.
There are cool tools, and then there are professional precision tools that don’t cut any corners in giving you the highest level of optical performance a brand can offer. The NIKKOR Z 120-300mm f/2.8 TC VR S promises to be this lens for professional sports and wildlife photographers.
Hands-On With Apple's OLED MacBook Pro: Its Screen Is Stunning in Person
I'm at Apple's launch event at Columbia Square in Hollywood, and I just spent time hands-on with the new 16-inch MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display. I'm a huge display snob, and its tandem OLED screen is just stunning in person.
The Night Sky Is Getting 9.6 Percent Brighter Every Year, and 51,351 Naked-Eye Observations Say So
At 19,262 places around the world where people walked outside and counted stars, the satellite that maps Earth at night recorded the ground below getting slightly darker. Across North America, upward radiance measured at those exact sites by the VIIRS Day/Night Band fell 0.80 percent a year. Over those same locations, artificial sky brightness was rising 10.4 percent a year.
The New MacBook Pro Gets a Stunning OLED Display and Touch
Apple's new MacBook Pro has a tandem OLED display that reaches 2,000 nits, holds a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio, and covers Adobe RGB as well as P3. For the first time on a Mac, you can also touch the screen. Apple calls it the PROLED XDR display, and it comes in 14-inch and 16-inch models with M5 Pro or M5 Max chips, with preorders open today, October 28, and availability starting Friday, November 6.
How to Use a Tripod Like a Pro: Field-Tested Tips From a Night Photographer
Here are several easy tips so you can use your tripod like a pro. You'll get the most from your tripod this way, with lessons drawn from professional night photographers who use tripods in genuinely challenging conditions.
First… Get a Quality Tripod
Pros use quality tripods. They know better.
If you are bothering to set your camera up on a tripod, you clearly want sharp photos. You also want your tripod to not vibrate. You want stability. You want it to set up smoothly and easily.
Can a Four-Ink EcoTank Make Prints Worth Framing?
A four-ink EcoTank with dye-based color and a single matte black is about the last printer most people would pick for fine art prints. Its refillable tanks make ink cheap, though, so if the prints hold up, it becomes an inexpensive way to experiment with papers and profiles at home.
Should You Convert an Old Camera to Infrared or Buy a Filter?
If you've wanted to try infrared, you have two choices: screw a filter onto the camera you already own, or send a body off to be permanently converted. The two routes differ a lot in cost, commitment, and how much patience each shot demands.
How a Pro Rescued a Barber Shoot After His First Idea Failed
A concept that looks great in your head can fall apart the minute your subject steps onto the set, and the clock doesn't stop while you work out why. Knowing when to drop an idea and how to build a new one under pressure is one of the hardest parts of client work, especially when the client needs one specific thing from the images.
How a Moon-Mapping Lens Ended Up in an 18th-Century Drama
Stanley Kubrick shot entire rooms in "Barry Lyndon" by candlelight in 1975, something that had never been done before in color. The way he did it comes down to a chain of decisions, most of them driven by hard numbers about how much light a film camera actually needs.
How the 'Blue Marble' Became One of the Most Reproduced Photographs in History
One of the most reproduced photographs of Earth ever made was shot upside down. When an Apollo 17 astronaut framed the fully lit planet through a Hasselblad on December 7, 1972, the South Pole sat at the top and Africa ran sideways, exactly as the crew saw it on the way to the Moon. The version fixed in your memory has been turned a half circle from the original frame.
The 14-Inch MacBook Pro and iMac Get Apple's New M6 Chip
Apple's new M6 chip arrived on Tuesday in two Macs at once, the 14-inch MacBook Pro and the 24-inch iMac, with two more CPU cores and two more GPU cores than before. Both pick up Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and both open for preorder on Wednesday, October 28, ahead of a November 6 release.
Apple's Creator Studio Update Brings Generate Fill to Pixelmator Pro
Pixelmator Pro is getting Generate Fill, which lets you circle part of a photo, type the change you want, and have the app rebuild that area to match the light, perspective, and texture around it. It arrives in November as part of a free update to Apple Creator Studio, alongside built-in MotionVFX effects in Final Cut Pro and new AI assistants in Logic Pro, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers.
Why I Chose The Blackmagic Design URSA Cine 12K LF For My Latest Film
For my latest film, The Love Nest, I opted to shoot using the Blackmagic Design URSA Cine 12K LF. Here's a little of what went into the decision, as well as some of the results.