Histograms are the solution to a fundamental problem in photography: Our eyes don’t always tell the truth. Have you ever been in a dark room, turned on your phone, and felt it blind you like nobody’s business? The same thing can happen in photography. Several times, I’ve taken pictures at night, and they look great on my camera’s LCD — until I open them the next day on my computer and realize they’re all hopelessly underexposed. Enter the histogram. This…
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Is Fuji X-T2 and XF 100-400mm Ready for Bird Photography?
When I decided to sell my professional Nikon cameras and glass and make the switch to Fujifilm, the question I had was “will I still be able to photograph birds?” During spring migration last year, I was fortunate enough to be able to get a hold of the Fujifilm XF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR lens. In this article, I will let you know how the X-T2 and XF 100-400mm combo stacked up for bird photography.
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Nikon 180-400mm f/4E TC1.4 FL ED VR Announcement
Nikon is under a lot of pressure in 2018, because this is the year that the public is anticipating hot new products from the company, especially the highly anticipated full-frame mirrorless camera that the company is currently working on. The very first product that Nikon has launched in 2018 is a lens – it is the Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 180-400mm f/4E TC1.4 FL ED VR – a beast of a lens targeted specifically at sports and wildlife photographers and videographers.…
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What to Photograph in the Canary Islands
In this series of articles, I would like to give a few concrete tips on when, where and how to photograph in the Canary Islands. The Canary Islands belong to Spain and hence to Europe, geographically however this archipelago is adjacent to Africa (west of Morocco). It offers a great diversity of different types of landscapes. You can find all sorts of beaches, volcanoes, sand dunes, interesting cities and villages, deep valleys, rugged coast line and much more. Within one…
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How Light Creates Emotion in Photography
At the end of the day, there’s only one reason why people like good photos. It’s a simple concept, really, but it also forms the foundation for all of photography. Emotion. For a photo to succeed, it has to resonate with your viewer. That could happen for a number of reasons, ranging from your subject to your composition. But the strongest tool to capture emotion is far more fundamental than that — it is, quite simply, your light.
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How to Buy an Apple MacBook for Photography
We are continuing our series on how to choose and buy computer hardware for photography needs and today we will be providing suggestions on what Apple laptops are worth looking into. First, we will do a quick overview of the Apple line of MacBooks, then we will provide our top recommendations for doing post-processing work. This article has been written in collaboration with our team members who use Apple’s MacBook products exclusively and extensively for their photography work.
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What is GPU Accelerated in Lightroom?
A while ago, Adobe finally added Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Acceleration to its Lightroom post-processing software. It was exciting news, as many photographers could not wait to take advantage of their fast GPU cards in order to speed up Lightroom, which was getting painfully slower with each new release. Unfortunately, GPU acceleration turned out to be a painful feature for many Lightroom users overtime, because they either saw no benefit at all, or saw very few improvements of it in…
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Concerns with Quality of Fujifilm GF Lenses
Thanks to the recent Fujifilm rebates, I have been able to expand my lens line-up for the Fuji GFX 50S that I have had the pleasure of shooting with ever since it came out. I am very impressed by the Fuji medium format system, especially its lens line-up, and I consider it to be ahead of its competition in a number of ways, as highlighted in my review. However, having gone through multiple lens samples of different lenses (which I…
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Microsoft Surface Book 2 vs Apple MacBook Pro
I have to admit, ever since Microsoft released the Surface Pro laptops, I have been a fan of these travel-friendly and light two-in-one machines. I have written about my experience with the Surface Pro 2 from a photographer’s perspective a while back, then we wrote a detailed Surface Pro 3 review and my experience with the first generation Surface Book pretty much sealed it for me as a very desirable machine for working on the go, thanks to its excellent…
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Amazon Gift Card Pop-Ups – We Have NOT Been Hacked!
Dear readers, it looks like some of you might have been subjected to seeing spam pop-ups that congratulate you of winning an Amazon gift card. Please note that this pop-up ad does NOT come from us and it has nothing to do with Photography Life! The source is banner ads, specifically, those that run on the iPhone when using the Safari browser. Please note that although we are trying to eliminate this advertiser from being able to run ads on…
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How to Buy an Apple iMac for Photography
In this article, I want to focus on purchasing an iMac for photography needs and what types of considerations one has to keep in mind when selecting one. I have had quite a few requests from our readers on this topic and many wonder what type of an iMac would suffice for photography work without breaking the bank. After doing quite a bit of research before purchasing my iMac and consulting with other Mac experts, I believe I found a…
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Nikon 1 eBook Published
We are pleased to announce that our Nikon 1 eBook, The Little Camera That Could, has been published and is now available online. This 210-page eBook chronicles my journey with the Nikon 1 camera system and features over 450 original images. I suppose one of the first questions that many Photography Life readers may be asking themselves is, “Why would anyone write a book about Nikon 1?” Well, the answer is pretty simple. First, it was a fun and enjoyable…
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Introducing the New Search Feature
While we are working hard on creating lots of very useful and informative content for our readers at Photography Life, I have to admit that we have not been doing a great job when it comes to keeping information sorted and easy to access. Well, that’s about to change in the upcoming year, as we will be making lots of changes to the site layout and work on creating pages that will be easy to follow. For now, we have…
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PL Landscape Photography Video Course Is Here!
Our team at Photography Life would like to begin by wishing Happy Holidays to our readers all around the world! Thank you for all your support, and we are excited to say that we have a huge announcement today, which many people have been asking us about for months. With festivities in the air, we are happy to announce that our first “Level 3” video tutorial — the Landscape Photography Course — is now available! If the end of the year is…
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How to Get Precise Exposure for Your Shots
Practically every day, one can see threads on photographic forums where members discuss the various different modes of automatic exposure, trying to find the right one. As a rule, these discussions result in the same question – what compensation to automatic metering ought one set to get consistently good exposure? It turns out that no autoexposure mode universally guarantees good out-of-box results.
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Switching From Lightroom to Capture One Pro
It seems only a short while ago when I was undecided on the RAW processing software that would replace Lightroom. I shortlisted several potential alternatives – Capture One Pro, RawTherapee, DxO Optics and Darktable among others – but was able to try out only Capture One Pro properly. A demo version 10 of Capture One gave me 30 days to test it, after which I was able to continue evaluation by signing up for a beta copy of version 11.…
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Christmas City Gothenburg
I know I’ve sent you postcards from this city before but I thought I would use this post as an excuse to wish everyone some seasonal cheer from a city that loves Christmas. I already live in the greatest city in the greatest country in the history of the world and like a swallow to Capistrano it’s where I always return. But an invitation from a beautiful woman is always hard to resist and a short hop over the North…
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Understanding Composition: Beyond the Rule of Thirds
Composition is critical. If you want to take powerful photos, it’s one of the most important parts of photography. Still, a lot of photographers start out only hearing about the rule of thirds, and they never go more in depth on how to compose better photos. The good news is that you can learn more about composition — and you should. It’s a deep topic, and there’s no way to cover everything in just one article, but I’ll do my…
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Everything Aperture Does to Your Photos
Have you ever wanted to learn everything about aperture? Not just the basics — every single effect aperture has on your photos? Although you can find that sort of information scattered across a handful of sources online, I don’t know of any resource that combines everything into one single place. That can make things difficult if you’re trying to get the big picture of how aperture works. So, here, we’ll explain everything aperture does to your photos, from sharpness to…
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How to Take Sharp Landscape Photos
It’s something we all care about, right? Sharpness. As a landscape photographer, with very few exceptions, taking sharp photos will be an important part of your work. That’s why you’ve spent so much time learning about the technical side of photography — and so much money buying high-quality camera equipment. This article covers everything that matters if you want your landscape photos to have as much sharpness and detail as possible, including the 15 most important tips to keep in…
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