Amiens Cathedral
The Versatility of Prime Lenses

Zoom lenses are convenient, as everyone knows. I’d imagine that the vast majority of us started our photography with a simple 18-55 kit lens – […]

Horse Head
Astrophotography Tutorial

Astrophotography is a hobby rapidly gaining popularity thanks to the fast advancing CMOS sensor technology. Over a decade ago, the light recording material employed in […]

Sony A7 II
Sony A7 II Review

An in-depth review of the new Sony A7 II mirrorless camera with image samples and comparisons by Nasim Mansurov

Verm-arches-moab-3806
Why 16 Megapixels, When I Could Have 50?

If there was a 100 MP DSLR announced tomorrow, I would pre-order it, then spend many sleepless nights waiting for it to arrive. I’d suffer […]

Image Resolution Comparison
Camera Resolution Explained

Although the megapixel race has been going on since digital cameras had been invented, the last few years in particular have seen a huge increase […]

How Taking a Step Back Adds Story to Photography

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Take a Step Back-2

We all have our strengths and weaknesses, as well as ways to deal with the latter. And it is only natural for us to sort of… drift towards our strengths. Hold on to them, practice as often as we can and, by doing so, get even better at them. And so, before I inevitably talk about close-up portraits (which I am not very good at), I thought I’d first discuss much more loosely composed photography (which, though far from having mastered, I dare say I am rather better at).

My word. This is such a relief to write about.

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Think Tank Airport Roller Derby Review

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Think Tank Airport Roller Derby Camera Bag-10

This is a review of the Think Tank Airport Roller Derby rolling camera bag. When I first saw that Think Tank had released a new 4 wheel camera bag, I was immediately curious. I had been using the Airport 4-Sight since it first came out and was very happy with it, but had filled it with as much gear as could fit in it and simply needed more room. The Roller Derby is a larger bag that looks like it has a few improvements over the 4-Sight. Could it become my new camera bag?

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Outex vs Shape Wave Waterproof DSLR Housings

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D_KISH_Clint_Silver-Grotto_Grand-Canyon_DSC_9600

We’re pleased to have one of Arizona’s top professional photographers, Dawn Kish, share her experience field testing two waterproof DSLR housings on a Grand Canyon raft adventure. Dawn is not only a regular shooter for magazines such as National Geographic Adventure and Arizona Highways, but a former river guide as well. For a quick one-minute video review of these two housings in action, scroll to the bottom of this post. For the more detailed analysis, read on.

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Film Considerations for Landscape Photography

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Photographing Landscapes with Film (11)

When I submitted my photos of Acadia National Park as a guest submission on Photography Life, I was amazed at the response, especially on the fact that the majority of photos were shot using a Nikon F100 with Fuji Velvia 50. Nasim contacted me to do an article on film considerations for landscape photography as a follow up. So this is my stab at it.

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Sony A7 II Announced in Japan

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Sony A7 II

Sony is very, very serious about the full-frame mirrorless cameras and would seem they plans no break for the competition. The Japanese giant has just announced a replacement for the first and (currently) cheapest full-frame compact system camera, the A7. Dubbed the A7 II, it brings, more than anything, refinement to what is essentially the same core feature set. Mind you, so far it has only been announced in Japan. It is still interesting to see where the manufacturer is going with all the full-frame offerings.

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Adobe’s Software Bloating, Performance Issues and Bugs

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Adobe Lightroom 5.7 Crash

I will be honest, I am not a fan of Adobe as a company. I never liked their business model: their practice of gobbling up competition (sometimes out of fear), their Creative Cloud extortion and their sleazy management that only cares about their next quarter revenues. But most of all, I never liked Adobe’s poor software development practices. In my past tech life, Adobe products were always a big pain due to numerous security holes and huge, frequent updates. In fact, Adobe has been notoriously bad with releasing poorly tested software with too many security holes. In 2011, Adobe dominated Kaspersky Lab’s top ten PC vulnerabilities list, with “extremely critical” security vulnerabilities that allowed attackers to gain access to computer systems and execute arbitrary code. These security vulnerabilities spanned several Adobe products, which most PCs had at the time and even today: Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash Player. No wonder Apple did not want to support flash in its iOS (which thankfully resulted in the slow demise of the Adobe Flash), since Flash was a very badly written, resource intensive platform to begin with. Although Steve Jobs mostly blamed Adobe Flash for being a PC-era platform, two of the biggest reasons why Flash support was excluded from iOS were in fact related to security and stability concerns.

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Lightroom 5.7 and Camera RAW 8.7 Update

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Lightroom 5

If you have been waiting for Adobe to release full RAW support for the new Nikon D750 (see our detailed Nikon D750 review), for the new Canon 7D Mark II (see our first impressions preview), or for a number of other new cameras from Fuji, Leica, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Samsung and Sony, you will be happy to know that Adobe has just delivered the final production version of Lightroom 5.7 and Camera RAW 8.7 that not only provide the RAW support, but also come with a huge list of newly supported lenses. Along with these updates, Adobe also delivered some updates to the Synced Collections in Lightroom, integrated a utility to import images from Apple Aperture and Apple iPhoto Libraries, enabled support for HiDPI displays in ACR 8.7 and provided a number of bug fixes for both Lightroom and ACR. For those who like to shoot tethered, both the Nikon D4s and the D810 are now fully supported. Another huge news is for Nikon D810 owners – the color profiles have now been finally fixed, so you will not see any banding issues when using Nikon camera profiles anymore!

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Big Site Changes and New Hosting

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Photography Life

If you have been checking our site during the past week, you’ve probably noticed that we had a few outages and changes. We have been working hard on migrating the site to a new hosting platform, so we decided to make a few changes while at it. The first major change is security – the site is now fully secured through 2048 bit SSL encryption! If you look at the URL, you will notice that it now starts with “https://”, whether you are looking at an article, or logged into the site with your account. We want to encourage our readers to register and participate in our forums and articles, so we want to make sure that your information is protected. In addition, we want to host a few contests (more on this later) and we want to be prepared!

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Feisol Tournament Tripod and CB-50D Ballhead Review

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Feisol Tournament Tripod and CB-50D Ballhead

When I first received the box with my Feisol Tournament Tripod and CB-50D head, it was unbelievably light. I almost wondered if they forgot something in the shipment. When I opened the box I found a very nice looking carbon fiber tripod and ballhead, but how would this super light combo perform in the field? In this review, I will be going over my personal experience with the Feisol system and compare it to my Manfrotto setup that I have been using for several years.

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