When we think of a duck, most of us probably imagine a stocky bird with a flat beak, cruising across calm, mirror-like water. And indeed, of the 165 species of ducks known today, the vast majority fit this description. But there are four species that have chosen a very different...
New Online Workshop: Secrets of Professional Photographers
Today I’m excited to announce the release of our newest Online Workshop: Secrets of Professional Photographers with Libor Vaicenbacher! This 2 hour, 41 minute course takes you behind the scenes with two eminent Czech photographers, Ondře Prosický and Magdaléna Straková, revealing their secrets in two in-depth interviews.
Video Gimbals vs Video Tripod Heads
If you like shooting video, you might be wondering how to make your footage more stable. The in-body image stabilization of modern cameras is great, but it's really tuned for photography rather than videography. To go beyond IBIS when you're filming videos, the two main options for enthusiasts are video...
Photography News: Venus 17mm f/4 Tilt-Shift Announced, Fast Canon Zoom Rumor
Why should a tiny bird like a Thorntail—barely two grams in weight—take up such an enormous amount of space on my hard drive? It seems the folks at DxO may have heard my quiet complaint. Instead of the usual gigantic 150MB DNG files, the recently introduced DxO PureRAW 6 can...
Viltrox AF 50mm f/1.4 Pro Field Review
When we talk about a "kit lens" these days, we usually mean a zoom covering focal lengths from wide-angle to short telephoto. But back when my beard was still chestnut-colored (or didn’t exist at all), cameras were commonly sold with a fixed 50mm lens. If you want a 50mm lens...
The Real-Life Sharpness of Nikon Telephoto Lenses
During a recent dive into the depths of my wildlife catalog, I realized that quite a number of telephoto lenses have taken turns on my Nikon Z9—starting with the Nikon AF-S 200-500mm f/5.6E ED VR and ending with beasts like the Nikon Z 600mm f/4 TC VR S. We've already...
Photography News: New Apple MacBooks, Nikon and Canon Sales
I think it would be worth remeasuring after all these years whether a day still lasts 24 hours and a year 365 days. I'm starting to seriously doubt it. Personally, I suspect we’re living on the lamplighter’s planet from The Little Prince, where the rotation keeps speeding up faster and...
Viltrox AF 14mm f/4 Air Review
We’ve updated our review of the Viltrox 14mm f/4 Air with detailed tests from our lab showing distortion, chromatic aberration, vignetting, and sharpness! How does it perform in the lab and in the field? Find out today in our review.
Muscle Memory and Quick Decisions in Wildlife Photography
The idea for this article was born high in the mountains, while chatting with other photographers about what we had managed to capture during the fleeting appearance of a Bearded Vulture (which I wrote about in this article). Some of us nailed the shots in the few available seconds, and...
Which Lens for Photographing People: Prime or Zoom?
Not so long ago, my answer to the title question would have come out almost automatically: a prime lens, of course! Just a few decades ago, zoom lenses suffered from a whole range of optical compromises that made their use for portraiture and documentary photography somewhat questionable. But today? If...
