Photography Life

10 stories

Photography LifeReviewsPhotography Lessons from Australian Birds: Part One Over the next few weeks, I’d like to share with you a series of short articles with quick photography lessons that I learned from photographing birds in Australia.

September 27

Photography LifeReviewsNikon Z5 IIC Announced: Full Frame Stripped Down Nikon just announced a new camera, the 24-megapixel Z5 IIC. It's billed as a Z5 II without the viewfinder, although it's trimmed down in a few other ways, too.

September 24

Photography LifeReviewsPhotography News: Canon EOS R8 Mark II, Canon and Fujifilm Sales We’ll open today’s Photography News with a little puzzle. While going through photographs from one of my now rather historic expeditions, I came across a pair of almost identical images.

September 21

Photography LifeReviewsTips and Tricks for Shooting with Fully Manual Lenses These days, when lenses come with lightning-fast autofocus, powerful image stabilization, aperture control from the camera body, transmission of aperture and focal-length information to the EXIF…

September 19

Photography LifeReviewsFrom the Galápagos: Photographing the Rarest Gull on Earth When I first visited the Galapagos, the Lava Gull (Leucophaeus fuliginosus) was one of my target bird species.

September 18

Photography LifeReviewsSony 400mm f/4.5 and 600mm f/6.3: I’m Jealous! For the longest time, Nikon has been the king of lightweight and relatively affordable supertelephoto primes. They were the only game in town at one point with the 500mm f/5.6 PF.

September 15

Photography LifeReviewsDJI Avata 360 Review: Seeing the Andes Through the Eyes of a Condor It’s just before five in the afternoon, and I’m hiking up a narrow trail toward the summit of one of the many hills surrounding Ecuadorian Mindo.

September 15

Photography LifeReviewsPhotography News: A New PEN, Rumored Sony Light Telephotos, Leica Deals Photography should bring joy from beginning to end. Whenever possible, it certainly shouldn’t end up as a fleeting collection of ones and zeros on a hard drive, but as a quality print hanging…

September 13

Photography LifeReviewsLightroom’s New “Render to DNG” Feature Is a Big Change Here's a story that may sound familiar to Lightroom users: You're editing a difficult photo, and the sliders, gradients, and brushes are adding up.

September 11

Photography LifeReviewsThe Sand Dunes of Florianópolis Gentle tendrils of vines surround the trunks of trees, trunks covered by mosses and lichens and ants. Sunlight filters weakly through the foliage and struggles to reach the forest floor.

September 10

The small bracket on top of every camera, from a phone rig to an ARRI.

The hot shoe is where the flash goes, and the microphone, and the monitor, and whatever the next decade bolts on. Every camera has one and nobody photographs it. This magazine is named after it because that is where the whole business meets: the body, the glass, the light, the sound, and the person holding it.

I shot news in Gothenburg for nine years and documentary for hire after that, then stopped taking assignments to write about the tools. Since 2021 I live in Tokyo, ten minutes from the used-camera shops of Shinjuku, which is not an accident: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Ricoh and Sigma make almost everything worth pointing at a subject, and their own press writes about it first, in Japanese. So this magazine reads it there, and in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and in English from the reviewers who actually put a card in the slot — around eighty sources and thirty channels, counted and plotted so you can see what is moving.

Bodies and lenses, cinema cameras and drones, film and the darkroom, firmware and the software that finishes the picture, the rumours before the launch and the reviews after it, and the photographers and shows the rest of it is for. I test what I write about on a job before a word goes down. I shoot film on Sundays and do not think that makes me interesting.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link to whoever reported it. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the photographer or the maker. A story written in Japanese appears in Japanese, as its author set it down; the link goes to the original.

— Mara Lindqvist, Tokyo