In the camera world, real innovation is hard to come by and indeed more elusive than the camera manufacturers would like us to believe. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the field of professional sports, wedding, and action photography where Canon and Nikon’s hegemony has created a field of...
Photographing Wildlife with the Nikon 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 VR
In this article, I will approach the specific advantages and disadvantages of the older Nikon 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 VR lens when photographing wildlife. Photography Life already has an in-depth review on the lens by Nasim, as well as a review of the newer AF-P version as well. In the article below,...
Hiking the Laugavegur in Iceland: What Worked, What Didn’t
I've always preferred hiking more than any other method of finding landscapes to photograph. There's something to be said for stopping at any point you see something interesting, knowing that only a small percentage of other travelers have taken pictures at the same spot. I recently dragged that philosophy to...
Life After Being Discontinued
As many folks are already aware, Nikon has confirmed that the Nikon 1 system has been discontinued. This isn't the first time a camera line has been discontinued and it won't be the last, especially given the fact that the digital camera market continues to shrink in size. Whether you...
Visual Storytelling in Portraiture
If you feel that your portraits lack the "wow" factor or that your viewers don’t feel the excitement you felt while making the image, then you might be just showing a situation rather than telling a story. Showing something that happened might do the job for a news photographer. But...
Going Lightweight for Photography Expeditions
It’s the middle of the night and still bright outside. I’m in Iceland a few weeks after the summer solstice, and I just finished the longest hike of my life - a nine-day version of the Laugavegur. I'll have several photos and articles to publish now that it's done, including...
Sigma 85mm f/1.4 vs 105mm f/1.4 vs 135mm f/1.8 Art Comparison
Sigma has been challenging the competition with its Global vision line-up. The combination of "no compromise" image quality and fair price is exhibiting quite a bit of pressure on such brands as Canon and Nikon. And the recent launch of Sony E mount lenses will surely disturb Sony’s glass business...
11 Cityscape Photography Tips for Beginners
Roughly 80% of people in the United States live in metropolitan areas. This means that cityscape photography is one of the most accessible genres of photography. The shapes and intricate details seen in city skylines are attractive to humans because our brains recognize and think in terms of patterns. However,...
Photoshop’s Best Content-Aware Tools, Explained
In an ideal world we would all make our photos exactly the way we want them in camera. But in reality, we can't always avoid distractions and unwanted objects in our frame. Fortunately, Adobe Photoshop has some powerful tools for helping to remove those unavoidable distractions. Today we're going to...
Five Advanced Landscape Photography Tips
Often, landscape photography tips are meant for people who are just starting out and trying to get the hang of things. That's great in many ways, but it does carry a problem - it says to advanced photographers that there is nothing new to discover. But landscape photography is incredibly complex,...