Photograph a brick wall with a 20mm lens, and one mortar line can bend two different directions inside the same frame, bowing one way through the middle of the picture and then hooking back the other way as it runs into the corner. That double bend is mustache distortion, and it is why a correction that straightens the middle of your frame pushes the corners out of true.

If you've shot professionally for years, you probably own a heavy tripod you trust completely, and it's the last thing you want to drag on vacation or to smaller productions. Here, I use the new K&F CONCEPT TA02 as an example of why a lightweight second tripod is worth owning.

Wildfire smoke covered much of central and eastern Washington in August, and air quality in many towns stayed in hazardous territory for weeks. If you shoot small towns, farmland, and roadside history, smoke like that changes your light, flattens your color, and limits how long you can stay outside to make a picture.

If you've opened a Lightroom catalog nearly every day for a decade, canceling your Adobe subscription can feel like moving out of a house you've lived in for years. More people are weighing that move now. Rising plan prices, a 2024 federal lawsuit over Adobe's cancellation practices, and a growing stack of generative AI tools in Photoshop and Lightroom have all added to the pressure.

Most gear budgets get shaped by an urge to buy the best version of everything, and that urge rarely lines up with what improves your pictures. Knowing which purchases change your results and which only change your bank balance can free up hundreds or even thousands of dollars for the items that protect your work.

Soft light gets most of the credit in portrait work, yet a single snooted or bare strobe can give you crisp shadows, graphic shapes, and a sense of depth that a big softbox tends to smooth away. If you're working with one strobe and a white wall, hard light is one of the quickest ways to make a small setup look deliberate and layered.

The fire that made the Cuyahoga River famous started just before noon on Sunday, June 22, 1969, under two railroad trestles southeast of downtown Cleveland, and it was under control inside half an hour. It warped some railroad ties, cost about $50,000, and earned a five-paragraph story on page 11-C of the next morning's Plain Dealer.

From estimate to final retouch: how we planned, lit, and photographed 25 Tempur-Pedic and Tempur Sealy products for Walmart and Wayfair in 11 production days.

The Olympus 17mm f/2.8 pancake is old, slower than most modern primes, and easy to find used for very little money. On Micro Four Thirds, where much of the appeal is keeping the camera small, that raises a fair question about whether a lens this modest still deserves a place on a current body.

Your photos come out soft, noisy, or flatter than you hoped, and a new camera body looks like the obvious fix. A body and a lens solve different problems, and spending on the wrong one can leave the original issue sitting right where it was.

The Mania MFZ is a pinhole camera built from solid oak and magnets, with no lens, no viewfinder, and no shutter button, yet it shoots 120 film in several formats and at more than one focal length. A camera like this removes the automatic aids you lean on every day, which makes it a direct test of how well you can see a picture before it exists.

Photoshop 2027 and the Camera Raw update that came with it add a long list of features, with more already waiting in the Photoshop beta, and many of them draw on Adobe's generative credits, so plenty of clicks now carry a cost on top of your subscription.

The desk I film at every day looks great. Professional lighting, professional audio, all of it. But that isn't where I actually work. My real desk was a cheap IKEA table with four aging Dell monitors that looked like they were about to give up. So I tore it all down and built a new workstation powered entirely by Apple's new touchscreen MacBook Pro.

The Library of Congress holds a small color advertising card printed by the Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company at 20 and 22 Gold Street in New York. The front shows Oscar Wilde on a sofa with a closed book in one hand and his head resting on the other, and the back lists prices for hats and bonnets.

Photographers who have already reviewed the new Mandler 50mm f/1.4 Pre-A M-mount lens immediately compare its image quality to the Leica Summilux-M 50mm f/1.4 E46 pre-aspherical design. My attitude is, who cares!

Few things slow down a real estate edit like opening Photoshop after an update and finding the panel you use on every listing has rearranged itself. When you turn around dozens of interiors a week, small interface changes in Photoshop and Premiere cost real time until your hands relearn where everything lives.

Film costs real money per frame now, and that price changes how you work: you meter more carefully, you wait longer, and you think twice before pressing the shutter. A digital camera can imitate a lot of that discipline if you strip away its conveniences, which raises a fair question about what you actually love when you say you love film.

ZWO now sells three versions of its Seestar S30 smart telescope, and the new S30 Plus lands between the original and the Pro in price and capability. If you want a complete deep-sky imaging system that fits in a small case, the differences between those three models decide how much of a galaxy or nebula you can actually get into one frame.

Lightroom's Color Grading panel can change the mood of a photo with a few color wheels and a couple of sliders, yet a lot of edits come out heavy and unnatural because the colors were chosen at random. A small amount of color theory gives those wheels a direction, and that direction is what separates a deliberate look from a lucky accident.

The FEI's veterinary rulebook contains one number that decides nothing at all. A temperature difference of more than two degrees Celsius between a horse's left and right lower limbs counts as a significant thermographic finding, and a significant thermographic finding eliminates nobody, fines nobody, and never becomes the result of record.

With a small flurry of compact film cameras launched in the last couple of years, I was hoping to fall in love with the Lomography MC-A. It’s beautiful and satisfying to use, but a couple of annoying flaws leave me both disappointed and frustrated. 

Shots of shampoo bottles plunging into water, wrapped in bubbles and topped with a crown of splash, look like luck caught at the right instant. Most of that look comes from planning, and the planning behind it answers a question you run into across product work: how to keep a subject exactly where you want it while everything around it moves.

You come home from a trip with hundreds of sharp, well-exposed frames of towers, smiling friends, and pretty streets, and almost none of them hold a stranger's attention for more than a second. The photos you remember from books and exhibitions share one trait that has little to do with gear or settings, and you can learn to build it into your own work.

Shift lenses keep a building's verticals straight while the camera stays level, and they do it without the unpredictable cropping and resolution loss you take on when you fix perspective in software. Laowa's new 24mm f/2 Zero-D Tilt-Shift brings that to most mirrorless mounts and to medium format, at an aperture tilt-shift lenses almost never reach.

A landscape photo can be sharp, well exposed, and carefully composed and still look like a flat print taped to a wall. Depth in a two-dimensional image comes from cues the eye reads instantly, such as where light falls, how contrast changes with distance, and how warm and cool tones sit against each other, and you can strengthen most of those cues in the edit.