Photo Accessory Reviews

You stumble into your favorite Starbucks half-awake as you do every morning and WHAM! There's Elvis standing at the end of the counter — fringed shirt, sequined guitar strap and all. You do a quick draw from your iPhone holster while The King patiently waits for his venti peanut butter banana flat white with an extra three pumps of funnel cake syrup, but — damn! — the battery is dead. What do you do? You're missing your chance to join the annals of consumer photojournalism and a shot at certain Instagram history. That's about a zillion Likes being blown to tarnation.

Most experienced photographers rarely shoot without a lens hood for several important reasons, whether they're photographing indoors or out. These affordable accessories not only protect the front element of a lens from damage, but they also improve image quality in a number of ways.

The Western Digital My Passport Ultra is exceptionally compact and offered in five capacities up to 6TB. Prices start at $69 and performance is superb. Everyone needs more hard drive space; here's yours.

Our new Choosing Wisely series aims to deliver concise, summarized information about products we think you'll like. You can read what Choosing Wisely wrote about this extraordinarily compact WD external hard drive here.

A 100mm f/2.8 full-frame lens that produces bokeh that looks like soap bubbles? Sign us up! But does the bokeh really look like suds?

The Domke PhoTOGS Vest is incredibly functional and versatile. It has room for just about anything you could possibly need on a photo trek (except a large tripod, of course). I'm talking lenses, backup compact camera, light meter, H₂O, lunch, bear spray, pens, business cards—more room than I have stuff.

Who can resist the sumptuous appeal of a finely-crafted, genuine leather bag? Combined with elegant styling and superb workmanship, the common camera sling can be elevated to an explicit work of art, an everlasting leather heirloom, even. GRAMS(28), a Hong Kong-based leather goods brand, offers the 172 Camera Sling, a gorgeous and roomy camera shoulder bag that delivers on these potentials. That said, some questionable construction decisions may mar its appeal to ardent photographers. Hear me out…

It's not often that you can learn five powerful pro tips for two genres of photography in barely four minutes, but that's exactly what you'll find in this tutorial from our friends at the B&H Photo Video instructional YouTube channel.