photographylife.com, as data

Sony just unveiled a new lightweight telephoto zoom: the FE 100-400mm f/5.6-8 OSS. It’s portable and well-priced, coming in at just 654 grams and $850. Sony clearly sees it as a budget alternative to their higher-end telephotos, and that’s reflected in the lack of “G” designation. Here’s what we know so far.If I could speak to my beginner self, I would skip the technical side of photography and focus on more important blind spots that cost me years of wasted effort. Technical guides are everywhere, but understanding why you pick up the camera in the first place is much harder. Today,...The idea of using a portrait lens for bird photography was born in my mind the day Nikon unveiled the Plena 135mm f/1.8. It took quite a while, though—two years, nine months, and ten days, to be exact—before I finally managed to turn that idea into reality.Until recently, I was convinced that I was a thoroughly patient person. As a wildlife photographer, for example, I’m a champion at staring at a bare, moss-covered branch or an empty stretch of water for hours on end. I can even accept it if it all leads nowhere. It wasn’t...I’ve just finished one of the last steps in the journey of setting up our printer: calibrating homemade color profiles for our papers! Maybe it sounds a bit boring, but this is the difference between using generic color profiles versus profiles tailored to our specific printer. Ultimately, it means better color.RAW processing software offers various ways to adjust contrast, with three popular tools being the Contrast slider, Levels, and Curves. As I’ll demonstrate below, these tools don’t simply adjust contrast but also impact color fidelity. Today, I’ll compare them and show why I often prefer using Curves.Before my trip to Nepal earlier this year, I decided to replace my aging Anker power bank with something a little lighter and more modern. I wasn’t expecting anything special – if you’ve seen one battery pack, I thought you’d seen them all – but the $37 Orfeika Power Bank changed my mind.Do you know which Nikon telephoto wildlife photographer takes on a family vacation? Are you guessing the wonderfully lightweight 400mm f/4.5, or perhaps the 600mm f/6.3? If you noticed the word “family” in the question, you probably figured out the correct answer: nothing.