Buy a new photo printer, and the next temptation is a shopping cart full of baryta, cotton rag, and sampler packs of photo paper from every maker you've heard of. Paper shapes how a print looks, but telling which paper suits your images depends on a skill you can only build by printing a lot.

Nearly everything you learn about focus points in one direction: keep the subject sharp and let the background fall apart. Reversing that, so the person in front of the lens goes soft while the scene behind them stays crisp, is one of the simplest ways to make an image feel dreamy and a little unreal.

Every small camera between $500 and $1,500 gives something up, whether that's stabilization, battery life, a viewfinder, or a mechanical shutter, and the Sony ZV-E10, Fujifilm X-M5, Lumix S9, and Lumix L10 each make a different sacrifice. Picking the one whose weakness you rarely run into is what separates a camera you carry every day from one you regret buying.

Landscape photography can settle into a loop: scout a spot, wait for light, take the frame, go home, and do it again next weekend. That routine produces some beautiful single images, but a hard drive full of unrelated pictures rarely adds up to a body of work you can show someone.

The working dose Samuel Sheppard wrote into his patent was 2 to 3 grains of thiosinamine per 100 pounds of dry gelatin, which works out to roughly three or four parts per million. Added to a gelatin stripped of its natural sensitizer, that trace could raise the emulsion's sensitivity by a factor of ten or twenty. Nudge it upward and the film fogged.

Almost every camera strap on the market from a couple dozen brands right now makes use of links that make it a lot easier to connect the camera to the straps. This smart yet simple solution made straps a lot more efficient, and WANDRD's take on the quick-release camera strap has a few extra features that make it better.

Finding the perfect camera that will fit every job is the dream. But sometimes, it’s more effective to build a team than rely on the power of one. 

The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is the first Mac laptop with a tandem OLED panel, and after two days with the 16-inch M5 Max I keep coming back to the same thought: Apple did not just bolt a nicer screen onto last year's computer. This is a major step forward all around.  

You drive out to a waterfall the day after a downpour, expecting a torrent, and find the creek almost dry. A blown plan like that tests how quickly you can switch to a backup spot, and how much you can pull out of an ordinary forest scene later with focus stacking in Photoshop and some careful masking in Lightroom.

Today I’m going to examine the benefits of using a tilt-shift lens with the help of the brand-new Laowa 24mm f/2 Zero-D Tilt-Shift. 

Nikon's Z 120-300mm f/2.8 TC VR S is up for preorder at $13,996, and for that money, you get a constant f/2.8 zoom with a 1.4x teleconverter built into the barrel.

A standard prime is often the second lens people buy, and on Nikon Z, the inexpensive autofocus options have long trailed what Sony E shooters can pick from. SG-image, a brand mostly known for small pancake lenses, now offers a 55mm f/1.8 autofocus prime with a metal body and a look that suits retro-styled cameras.

Almost every Photoshop edit beyond a global adjustment starts with telling the software which pixels to touch. Get that step wrong, and every brightening pass, color shift, and composite you build on top of it shows its seams.

In the last week of December 2010, a railroad worker named Jim DeNike drove from Arkansas to Parsons, Kansas, and loaded a dozen boxes holding nearly 50,000 slides into an old maroon Pontiac. He had sent Dwayne's Photo 1,580 rolls of Kodachrome and paid $15,798 to have them developed, borrowing against his father's retirement account to cover it.

Every camera owner has their own list of things they wish their camera could do—features that seem easily achievable with a simple software update. Normally, that list dies quietly the moment a camera leaves the manufacturer's support cycle.

Rangefinders like Leica's M bodies and compacts like Fujifilm's X100 line have pulled a lot of people back toward on-camera flash, and finding a speedlight that fits those small bodies without overwhelming them has never been simple.

Doritos once got more than 30,000 Super Bowl commercials made by fans, and most of the people who made them got nothing. If a client has ever asked you for a free test edit, a sample shoot, or a quick concept before they commit, you've been offered a smaller version of the same deal.

Panasonic, TTArtisan, and Viltrox all make a compact 40mm autofocus prime for full frame L-mount cameras, and one of them costs noticeably more than the other two. When three lenses share a focal length and a mount, the choice comes down to build, rendering, and how much each extra dollar changes what ends up in your files.

Shoot a flash portrait at f/1.2 in midday sun and you run into a wall fast: most cameras stop syncing with a flash somewhere around 1/160 to 1/250 s, and anything faster leaves dark bands across the frame. Sony's a9 III and its global shutter offer a way past that wall, which puts high-speed sync, the usual workaround, in an interesting spot.

Hannibal Goodwin's application for a photographic pellicle reached the Patent Office on May 2, 1887, and stayed there for eleven years and four months while a succession of five examiners rejected it. George Eastman's chemist filed his own flexible film application on April 9, 1889, and had a granted patent eight months later.

There is a tendency in photography to believe that if we want to photograph a particular subject, we need to buy the equipment designed specifically for it. Want to photograph wildlife? You need a long telephoto lens. Want to photograph the night sky? You need a fast wide angle lens. Want to photograph mushrooms? You need a macro lens.

But do you really? 

The OM System M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100mm f/4 IS PRO covers the same range as a 24-200mm zoom on full frame, so it raises an obvious question if you hike long distances with a camera: can one lens stand in for the three you usually carry?

A storm that cancels an event usually sends everyone home, camera included. On a long trip, the days that fall apart often produce the frames you end up keeping, and with film you won't know which ones worked until the rolls come back.

The Panasonic Lumix S1RII pairs a 44-megapixel full frame sensor with 8K video for about $3,300, and that sensor isn't stacked, so it reads out slowly. If you shoot both stills and video, that one design choice shapes nearly everything about how the camera behaves in your hands.