Every company that makes lenses usually designs a few that are ideal for portraiture. The trend these days for studio and boudoir portraits is toward fast prime lenses, while zooms remain popular for location and wedding photography. Wide-angle lenses may get you closer to the subject but perspective distortion exaggerates a subject’s nose and ears.
One of the hallmarks of fine art photography is the production of archival prints. Which begs the question, does the social media generation care about a print’s longevity or photographic prints at all? Maybe that changes when you drop five figures on a fine art print or hire a high-end photographer to create a portrait you expect to last as long as a traditional silver-based print.
“Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance.”—W. Eugene Smith
In contemporary lighting equipment there are trends and there are fads with some gear seemingly having equal parts of both. And they just aren’t boxes of light anymore; they are lightsabers, small studio lights with big output, and everywhere you look it’s LED lighting in every size, shape, and price.
The following is something people tell me when I suggest using a plug-in or specialized software for enhancing or retouching portraits: “But you can do that in Photoshop!” That’s because when it comes to software for wedding, portrait, and boudoir photographs, everyone has an opinion—sometimes a strong one—even if they’re wrong.
We all have photography gear that we love to bring with us, whether we’re traveling around the world taking pictures, or going for a stroll in our backyard for a couple of local landscape shots. The following is the gear I find to be my essential “traveling companions” for trips both long and short.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officially refers to quadcopters as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) but they obviously have more in common with the kind of hobbyist’s radio-controlled aircraft that have been around since I was a member of the Poly Aeroneers in high school. Yet tech blogs and social media endlessly refer to quadcopters as “drones” when the only thing a General Atomics MQ-1 Predator and a DJI Phantom 1 have in common is that they’re capable of flight. But they’re not without some controversy.
When shopping for a wide-angle lens, presented for your approval, is a collection of our favorite (mostly) zoom lenses to expand your view of the world.