Scanning Film at Home Made Simple: Fstoppers Reviews the Valoi Easy35
Digitizing film at home has always been a fiddly, annoying, time-consuming process, so discovering a system that makes it simpler has been a breath of fresh air.
The VALOI easy35 v2 is a system that simplifies the process of digitizing slides and negatives at home using your existing digital camera.
What Happens When You Jump From 4x5 to 8x10 Film
Jumping from 4x5 to 8x10 film means bigger negatives, longer focal lengths, slower shutters, and a bill that climbs fast with every accessory. Anyone weighing whether the leap is worth it will recognize the mix of excitement and sticker shock that comes with building a fresh large format kit from scratch.
Looking for Landscapes That Don't Want to Be Photographed
After about 40 years of photography, the biggest change in my work has nothing to do with cameras, lenses, or the transition from film to digital. It’s what I look for when I’m out with my camera.
Canon's R8 Mark II Finally Adds the One Feature the Original Was Missing
The Canon R8 Mark II adds in-body stabilization, the single feature its predecessor left out, and packages it into a 24.2-megapixel full frame body aimed at people making their first jump up from crop sensors. That one change reshapes who this camera is for.
Manual Focus, No Autofocus, No Regrets: A Leica M10-R Story
Limits can do more for your photography than any spec sheet, and a manual-focus rangefinder forces those limits on you in a way autofocus never will. That tension sits at the heart of one photographer's decision to bring a Leica to a job it had no business being at.
Viltrox Brings Four Air Series Primes to L-Mount, Starting at $168
Viltrox has announced four full frame autofocus primes for L-mount, the AF 14mm f/4 Air L, AF 20mm f/2.8 Air L, AF 40mm f/2.5 Air L, and AF 50mm f/2 Air L, all of which go on sale today at prices from $168 to $199. The heaviest of the four weighs 205 g.
We Review L-Mount Latest Budget-Friendly Ultra-Wide Angle Lens: Viltrox AF 14mm f/4 L
Since the inception of the L-Mount Alliance, there has been a gap in the market for affordable ultra-wide angle lenses. With the available options, you could either purchase an affordable lens that completely lacked autofocus or invest in an autofocus lens that was decidedly not cheap. The launch of the Viltrox AF 14mm f/4 for L-Mount drastically changes that landscape. This pocket-sized ultra-wide opens up an incredibly lightweight, budget-friendly autofocus option for Panasonic Lumix, Sigma, and Leica shooters.
We Review the Latest Viltrox Air Series Lens Af 40mm f/2.5 L: An Exceptional Lightweight Everyday Carry Lens
The long-awaited expansion of the Viltrox Air series lenses has finally arrived for L-Mount users. Marketed on the promise of "Lightweight & Masterful Image Quality," the Air series has already built a solid reputation in the photography community. I know at least a few photographers in my local network who are massive fans of these lenses, primarily because of how exceptionally light and portable they are without compromising on the delivery of solid final images.
Why This Tiny APS-C Camera Got a Dust Spot After 1,200 Shots
The Ricoh GR IV earns constant recommendations as the everyday-carry camera, small enough to slip into a pocket, with an APS-C sensor packed into a body most compacts can't match. After roughly five months of real use, that pocket promise turned out to be the exact spot where things fell apart.
ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2027 Keeps Most of Its AI on Your Own Machine
ACD Systems has released ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2027, and the pitch is less about what the AI can do than about where it runs. Face detection, keywording, masking, super-resolution, and image similarity all process on your computer, with no images or facial data leaving it. The four new generative tools do reach for the cloud, and the company says those requests travel through servers it controls and are wiped a week later.
Eight Legendary Darkroom Tools Most Photographers Under 40 Have Never Seen
Making a single black-and-white print used to take a locked room, a red bulb, and roughly eight specialized tools that have almost no equivalent on a modern desk. If you started shooting after the smartphone, there is a good chance you have never touched any of them, or seen them work.
None of these were quaint accessories. Each one solved a real problem in the gap between the negative and the finished photograph, and together they formed a workflow that was slow, physical, and unforgiving. A print was something you built by hand, in the dark, one timed exposure at a time.
The Night I Hiked Three Miles in the Dark to Find Joshua Tree's Hidden Treasure
Some of the best photography locations don't have a trailhead. Samuelson's Rocks—seven massive boulders bearing eight philosophical inscriptions deep in Joshua Tree National Park—is one of them. No trail, no signs, just open desert, a Milky Way overhead, and one of the most unusual night photography subjects in the American Southwest. Here's how I made the hike and created the shot, complete with a Perseid meteor for good measure.
Every Composition Rule Ranked, Plus the One to Skip Entirely
Every photographer learns the rule of thirds early, then spends years collecting other guidelines that promise a more balanced frame. The question worth sitting with is which one actually deserves top billing, and whether the real answer is a technique at all.
Nine Landscape Photography Myths You've Probably Repeated
Landscape photography carries a stack of advice so old and so repeated that most of it goes unquestioned, and a good portion of it falls apart the moment you test it in the field. Sorting the useful guidance from the myths changes how you spend your time, your money, and your mornings.
Mac mini M5 Pro Review: A Fast, Silent Desktop for Photo and Video Work
The Mac mini with M5 Pro chews through 4K footage and reads from its SSD in an instant, from a silver box 5 inches square that never once became audible on my desk. It is the fastest small desktop Apple has built, and for photo and video work, it is the best value in the entire Mac lineup.
Apple sent me the following configuration: an 18-core CPU with a 20-core GPU, 48 GB of unified memory, and a 1 TB SSD. I spent a week running the work photographers and filmmakers actually do on it, including raw batches, 4K transcodes, a Resolve project, and hours of pinned all-core load.
Chasing Fog in Galicia: How to Work a Single Tree
Fog changes a landscape into something you can actually shoot, but the fog alone won't hand you a photo. You still have to find a subject worth pointing the camera at, and then you have to work it.
Does Documenting an Event Still Need Photography?
A phone video shows more of an event than any photograph. But a photograph is what stays with us, and that says something about what photography has always been for.
Documenting reality today increasingly happens without photographs: video has become a more suitable medium for showing what is happening. The question is not new, but it is worth asking again now, when there is too much of everything to look at and a growing share of it was generated rather than recorded. Shouldn't the documentary function of photography now be discussed in direct comparison with video?
How to Expose Birds When the Light Won't Cooperate
Underexposing to save your highlights sounds like the safe move, but it drags your entire image down with it. Darker files, harder tracking, more editing, and photos you don't enjoy looking at all come from overcorrecting a problem that has a much better fix.
You Can Find Emperor Penguin Colonies From Space by Their Poop
The satellites that first mapped emperor penguins could not see a single one of them. Landsat records the surface at 30 meters per pixel, and a four-foot bird disappears long before that. What those satellites could see was the mess. Emperor penguins spend the winter packed shoulder to shoulder on the sea ice, and they leave behind a reddish-brown smear of guano so large it registers from orbit as a stain on an otherwise blank white continent. Roughly half of the emperor penguin colonies we know about were found not by spotting the birds, but by spotting their poop.
Insta360 Mic Pro Review: A Serious Wireless Mic For Creators
When it comes to wireless microphones, there are already some very strong options available, so when a new system comes along, it needs to offer something more than simply being another wireless microphone. The Insta360 Mic Pro is entering a market where DJI and Rode are already well established, so the question for me isn't really whether it works, because most modern wireless microphone systems work pretty well. The more important question is whether the Mic Pro actually gives you something that makes it worth choosing over the competition.