Critique the Community: Unique Edit
Welcome to the November installment of the Critique the Community! This month's critique theme is going to be "Unique Edit," and we want to see your best photographs that were brought to life with a new or unique editing style or specific editing software.
In 2013, Researchers Pulled Recognizable Faces of Bystanders Out of the Eye Reflections in a Portrait
An anonymous peer reviewer worked through a manuscript, looked at one of its figures, and recognized one of the authors. The face was a reflection in another person's eye. Across the study's bystanders, those extracted faces ran 27 to 36 pixels wide and covered roughly 322 pixels apiece, and that accidental recognition became the paper's second experiment.
The Luminar Fall Update Has Some Powerful New Tools
Luminar has released a solid fall update with some new features and some enhancements. The update is free to current owners and can, of course, be purchased by photographers who are interested.
This new update is version 1.29.0. The update should appear automatically, or you can click "Check for Updates" in the Luminar dropdown menu.
Can’t Afford a Leica? Buy One of These Instead
If you’re pondering a Leica rangefinder film camera but can’t bring yourself to spend a crazy amount of money, maybe give this a go.
Having reimmersed myself back into the wonderful world of analog about five years ago, my collection of film cameras has slowly been growing. And like many analog enthusiasts, there’s one camera that has a certain allure, especially as all the cool kids on YouTube seem to own one: the Leica M6.
Chasing a Vivid Fog Bow and a Golden Gate Bridge Shot Years in the Making
Fog in the San Francisco Bay Area can bury a scene in seconds and hand it back a minute later with trees, towers, and light arranged in ways you won't see again. Shooting it well means working quickly, reading the direction of the light, and resisting the urge to stick with the first composition that looks good.
The Viltrox AF 35mm f/1.4 Pro Is Sharp in the Corners Wide Open
The Viltrox AF 35mm f/1.4 Pro sells for $829, and it brings a metal body, weather-sealing, and a clicked aperture ring at that price. Few focal lengths stay on a camera as long as a 35mm does, so how a lens like this behaves wide open, in the corners, and while tracking a moving subject affects a big share of everything you shoot.
The Case for Photographing the Place You Already Know
The places you see every week are the ones you're least likely to photograph, since they feel too familiar to bother with. Familiar doesn't last, and the village fair or street corner you skip this year is exactly what someone will want to see decades from now.
Why You Don't Need Focus Stacking for Every Landscape
Focus stacking has become close to a default step in landscape work, with plenty of people blending 20 or even 50 frames so every rock and grass blade is sharp from front to back. Whether that effort shows up in the final image, or whether a single frame focused at the hyperfocal distance would look the same, decides how much of your time goes into focus while the light keeps changing.
DoorDash Will Photograph Your Menu Free, Claim a 44% Sales Lift, and Bar the Pictures From Uber Eats
DoorDash's help center lays the deal out in plain language: a professional photographer comes to your restaurant for a 1.5-hour session, shoots up to 20 menu items plus one header image, and DoorDash pays the photographer. You pay for the food and the labor to plate it. Then comes footnote three, which reads, "Photos provided by DoorDash may not be used on other third-party delivery platforms."
The One Thing I Want Most for My Nikon Zf
In today’s article, I am going to shamelessly beg Nikon to add one very specific feature to what is already my favorite camera body.
Why a Silver Card Fixed a Reflection That White Paper Couldn't
Acrylic rods under studio light look a lot like smooth, healthy hair, which makes them a smart prop for photographing a Total Results haircare bottle. The problem is that a glossy bottle behaves like a mirror, and every rod you bring into the set wants to show up across the label.
How to Shoot and Edit a Giant Moonrise Behind a Landmark
Getting the moon to rise behind a specific building means planning for a moment that lasts only a few minutes, then shooting it in fading light with a very long lens. Even with the time and direction worked out ahead, you can still find yourself in the wrong spot when it finally breaks the horizon.
4 Questions to Ask Before You Choose a Lens
Most people learn lenses as a set of assignments: wide angle for landscapes, telephoto for portraits, a 50mm for everything in between. Those assignments are easy to memorize, and they quietly limit how many different photographs you can pull out of a single scene.
A 4-Shot System for Better Travel Photos
You can spend months planning a trip around one famous view and still come home with a memory card that feels thin. The pictures that bring a place back years later are rarely the ones you saw online before you left.
The Fake Photo That Helped Sink a U.S. Senator
In the last stretch of the 1950 Maryland Senate race, roughly 300,000 copies of a four-page tabloid called From the Record went out across the state, and inside was a picture of Senator Millard Tydings standing close beside Earl Browder, the former head of the American Communist Party. The two men had never posed together, and the caption underneath called the picture a composite. Tydings lost by more than 43,000 votes.
Fstoppers Photographer of the Month (October 2026): Dave G
The Fstoppers community is brimming with creative vision and talent. Every day, we comb through your work, looking for images to feature as the Photo of the Day or simply to admire your creativity and technical prowess. In 2026, we're featuring a new photographer every month, whose portfolio represents both stellar photographic achievement and a high level of involvement within the Fstoppers community.
Is It Legal to Clone Photoshop With AI?
A small team has released PhotoCraft, a free, open-source stand-in for Photoshop built with heavy help from AI, and it's designed so anyone fluent in Adobe's menus and shortcuts can sit down and start working. If you pay for Creative Cloud every month, whether a project like this can legally exist shapes how many real alternatives you end up with.
You Don't Need a Fast Lens to Blur the Background
Aperture, shutter speed, and ISO are the first three settings anyone learns, and each comes with rules repeated so often they start to sound like law. Knowing which of those rules hold up, and when breaking them gets you a better frame, decides whether the camera works with you or against you.
Is the $1,900 Canon EOS R8 Mark II Worth It Over the Original?
The Canon EOS R8 Mark II sells for $1,899, which puts it $250 above the original R8 and $400 below the larger EOS R6 Mark II. That narrow spread makes choosing between Canon's compact full frame bodies harder than it has been in years, especially if one camera has to handle both your stills and your video.
What Separates a Natural Wildlife Edit From an Overcooked One
Wildlife files need more editing than most genres because they come from long lenses at high ISOs, subjects that won't pose, and backgrounds you couldn't choose. The edits that rescue those frames, such as cropping, noise reduction, and masked brightening, are the same ones that most often push a photo past the point where it looks natural.