Fstoppers

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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Platon has photographed presidents, dictators, and pop stars, sometimes with 30 seconds and a single frame, using the same Hasselblad, the same white seamless, and the same apple box for decades. How he works inside those short windows explains why a portrait session can fall apart the moment your attention drifts from the person to the gear.

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Lightroom Classic 16 arrived with Adobe MAX, bringing a native glow effect, depth masks that no longer depend on special camera files, color grading inside masks, and automatic blemish removal. Several of these used to require a trip to Photoshop, a plugin, or a phone that recorded depth data.

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I'm spending today and tomorrow at Adobe MAX, a three-day creative conference held in Miami and attended by over 10,000 creatives. Adobe’s goal for the event is to share its latest innovations so that this creative community can best utilize these new tools. One theme apparent at this year’s MAX is removing the barriers caused by complex software interfaces. Adobe’s stated mission is to empower everyone to create, and the widespread implementation of AI across the Creative Cloud suite appears well-suited to that purpose.

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In Miami in May 2023, Marvin Joseph asked Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova to put their heads together and lean on each other, and he made a portrait of two old rivals bound again by cancer. Joseph said it took off in a way he had not expected, pulling traffic and new subscriptions behind it. On February 4, 2026, The Washington Post eliminated the job that produced it, along with every other staff photographer position at the paper.

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At some point, many photographers encounter the pressure to make work that feels meaningful. It usually starts with an innocent realization that when you look at your catalog, it’s full of disconnected single frames. You have good photos, maybe even great ones, but none form a cohesive story. If you look online, the advice from the broader photo community typically offers a seemingly straightforward solution. Instead of taking one-off images, find a theme and shoot a project around it.

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Street photography runs on moments nobody schedules, which makes it hard to plan for and impossible to fake. How you think about luck shapes where you walk, how long you stay out, and whether you lift the camera when something small happens in front of you.

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Plenty of the scenes worth photographing on any given day slide past your car window at highway speed, and you get a couple of seconds to decide whether to pull over. Most people decide not to, and that small decision repeated over years adds up to a lot of missing frames.

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Sony's a7R VI pairs a 67-megapixel stacked sensor with 30 fps blackout-free shooting and 8K video, yet a lot of the early talk has centered on its readout speed trailing Sony's dedicated speed bodies. If you shoot detailed work but also need a camera that holds up when things move fast, whether that gap ever shows up in your actual photos decides which body goes in your bag.

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Zoner Studio's Fall Update replaces most of the editor's presets with 37 new ones built to be layered. You pick a color grade, add a texture or glow look on top, fix the light, and finish with sharpening or grain, and each step adds to the one before it instead of overwriting it. The update, free for subscribers, also brings an experimental AI Lab with generative tools and finer control over masking, tone curves, and split toning.

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