Fstoppers
Photography News and Community for Creative Professionals
I want to start by defending the thing this article might look like it is against. Static posing in wedding and portrait photography is the backbone of every couples session I shoot. The five foundations I teach are all static positions, and they are static for good reasons. They are fast. They are repeatable. They are flattering on almost everybody. When you have ninety seconds before the coordinator waves you off, you reach for a static pose, and you should.
A shelf full of older camera bodies brings its own kind of guilt: they still work, they still make good pictures, and they almost never leave the house. Choosing whether to keep shooting a camera like the Fujifilm X-H1 or sell it for something faster affects your wallet, your hit rate, and how much you enjoy the time you spend shooting.
Finding a photograph inside a crowded street or a wide-open landscape is the part of the craft that decides whether you come home with a handful of keepers or a card full of near misses. Settings and gear can be learned in a weekend, while knowing where to point the camera takes years, and few people explain how to practice it.
Two hours of loading sheet film at camp after a long day in the field can make large format feel like a job. How you handle the dull, repetitive parts of photography shapes how much you enjoy the rest of it, and often how the pictures turn out.
Flat window light or a harsh shadow across a face used to mean a reshoot or an evening of dodging and burning. Photoshop's new Relight feature, currently in the beta, lets you reposition, soften, and recolor the light in a finished image with a handful of sliders.
A 24mm lens at f/8 has an opening 3.00 mm across. A 600mm lens at f/8 has one 75 mm across, 25 times wider, and it draws a diffraction pattern on the sky 25 times finer. Both land a blur spot on your sensor exactly 10.7 microns wide.
Every other limit in photography has a price attached. Aberrations yield to better glass, noise yields to a bigger sensor, flare yields to better coatings. Diffraction yields to nothing, because it is not a property of your lens at all.