Florestine Perrault Collins Passed for White to Learn the Trade, Then Ran a Black Portrait Studio in New Orleans for Twenty-Nine Years
Florestine Perrault was fourteen when she started earning money in photography, hired as a clerk, photo finisher, stationery embosser, and developer by white-owned studios in New Orleans and by the Eastman Kodak Company. She got that work by letting her employers assume she was white. She was Creole of color, and in Jim Crow New Orleans, that fact would have kept her away from the picture-making end of the business.
SIRUI Unveils the Swift Series: Compact, All-Glass Full-Frame Autofocus Lenses
SIRUI has announced the launch of its new Swift series, a lineup of ultra-compact, full frame autofocus lenses tailored for photographers and content creators seeking lightweight glass without sacrificing optical integrity. This launch offers two lenses: a 20mm f/2.4 and a 40mm f/2.2.
Peakto Launches Version 3.0: A Media Manager That Can Handle Millions of Assets
Peakto has been around for several years. As a Mac-only media manager, it was one of the first to use AI for finding photographs. I've reviewed earlier versions and found it reliable and powerful.
Sirui Expands Its Full-Frame Aurora Lineup With Fast 15mm f/1.6 and 24mm f/1.4 Primes
Sirui just added two new additions to its full frame autofocus Aurora lens lineup: the Aurora 15mm f/1.6 ultra-wide lens and the Aurora 24mm f/1.4 wide angle lens. Living up to the Aurora foundation, both lenses combine bright maximum apertures, STM autofocus performance, and dedicated video-friendly ergonomics for hybrid creators.
How I Shot Three Completely Different Portraits With Profoto's Essential Hybrid Kit
A few weeks ago, Profoto challenged me to do a full photo shoot using their new Essential Hybrid Kit. I told them to send it over, and I would use it on a real shoot. In this article and the video above, I'm going to show you exactly how I used this kit and take you behind the scenes on how I mixed constant light with flash to create the final images.
Why Your Specialization Doesn’t Start With Camera Skills
Does dividing photographers into portrait, landscape, wedding photographers, and so on really describe professional specialization? Probably not. Specialization looks like a classification of photographic skills, but in fact it mixes personal traits, working conditions, and accumulated knowledge of the subject.
A Week of Street Photography in Porto and Lisbon With a Leica Q3 43
A week of travel built around the Leica Q3 43 and its fixed lens puts every framing decision on your feet and your patience. Porto and Lisbon push that setup hard, with steep streets, tiled facades, river light, and weather that can swing from blue sky to downpour within a day.
Why Good Lighting Can Still Be the Wrong Lighting
A matte black, ridged Tom Ford fragrance bottle and a Clinique moisturizer on pure white can both be lit cleanly and still fail if the light tells the wrong story about the product. Every lighting choice you make, from shadow density to color, pushes a viewer toward a feeling, whether you planned it or not.
5 Lenses That Get the Most Out of Nikon's Z APS-C Cameras
Nikon's Z DX bodies, such as the Z50II and Zfc, are small and affordable, yet Nikon makes only a short list of lenses designed specifically for them. Choosing glass for one of these cameras means doing crop math, sorting through third-party options, and deciding whether a single zoom can carry an entire day of shooting.
7 Everyday Habits That Quietly Damage Your Camera Gear
A shattered filter or a scratched front element rarely comes from a dramatic fall off a cliff, and more often traces back to a loose ball head, a lens swap in the wind, or a tripod slung over your shoulder on the walk to the next spot. Those small habits stack up over years of shooting, and changing them costs far less than replacing glass.
The Story of One of the Most Famous Photos Ever
In January 1996, Charles O'Rear pulled onto the shoulder of California State Route 121 in southern Sonoma County, pushed a Mamiya RZ67 through a wire fence, and made a few exposures of a bare green hill. The film in the back was Fujichrome Velvia, an ISO 50 transparency stock. Two years later, that frame was sitting on a Corbis stock catalog disc as image 71810, with a copyright bar across the bottom reading "©CHARLES O'REAR/Westlight 71810WL."
How to Build a 'Serious' Photo Series
In the first part of this series, I looked at why trying to define a heavy conceptual theme before taking a picture usually leads straight to creative paralysis. Holding onto a loose constraint or a wide idea gives you room to react in the field, but it leaves an obvious question: if you don’t define the story beforehand, how does a coherent series actually come together?
The Lightroom Slider That Fixes a Flat, Muddy Background
A sharp subject against a background that's one flat wash of brown can feel lifeless, even when the exposure is spot-on. Lightroom's Point Color tool includes a Variance slider that spreads or squeezes the range of colors in a selected area, and it gives you a fast way to put life back into a backdrop without opening Photoshop.
The $149 Sirui Swift 40mm f/2.2 vs. Three Pricier 40mm Primes
At $149, the Sirui Swift 40mm f/2.2 costs less than Sony's, Nikon's, and Viltrox's compact 40mm autofocus primes, and only Nikon's is brighter. If you've been eyeing a small prime as your first step up from a kit lens, the trade-offs at that price turn out to be modest: a little extra weight and some color fringing.
How to Fake a Sunset for Wedding Portraits on a Gray Day
Gray skies on a wedding day leave you with flat, shadowless light right when the couple expects their most romantic evening portraits. Faking a sunset with a single gelled flash is one of the few ways to rescue that hour without waiting for weather that may never show up.
Titanic Carried 15 Known Cameras, and 12 of Them Went Down With the Ship
Titanic is the most famous ship ever built, yet only a little over 400 photographs of her are known to exist, and that count grows only when an old album or a forgotten newspaper turns up.
Your Camera Stops Counting at 9,999 Because of a 1998 Filing Standard Written Around MS-DOS
Shoot past frame 9,999, and the camera does not run out of numbers. It closes the folder it has been writing to, opens the next one, and starts again at 0001, which is how two shoots two years apart both end up holding a file called IMG_0473.CR2. The 0001 to 9999 numbering space, the DCIM folder those files live in, and the four-letters-plus-four-digits name itself all come from one short specification a Japanese trade group published in 1998. The rollover is the manufacturer's own choice, made inside the room that specification built.
Think Tank’s Very Practical Sling, The PhotoCross V2, Is a Winner
Think Tank released two new slings earlier in the year that are perfect for street, urban, and travel photographers. Depending on your gear, there are 11L and 14L options to choose from. I got my hands on the 11L in a rather fetching Desert Sage, and have been using it for around four months on the streets…
The 3 Lenses One Pro Would Buy at $300, $750, and $1,500
A lens is usually the biggest purchase you make after the camera itself, and the spread runs from a $300 35mm prime to a Sony G Master zoom that costs well past $2,000. Spending more feels like the safe move, yet a pricier lens only earns its cost when you can name exactly what it's supposed to fix.
Why a Former Velvia Shooter Now Turns His Saturation Down
Camera makers, Fujifilm in particular, treat color science as a reason to buy into their systems, and plenty of people pick a brand on that point alone. If you shoot raw files of landscapes or travel scenes, it's fair to ask how much of that brand color makes it into your finished image before you consider switching.