FStoppers

Gear advice gets loud when landscapes get quiet, and the loudest claim is that a superzoom can’t handle “serious” work. That idea pushes you into swapping lenses, second-guessing focal lengths, and leaving shots behind when the weather turns awkward.

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Wireless charging usually involves a trade-off. You get the convenience of simply dropping your phone onto a pad, but you sacrifice speed. MagSafe made things better with magnetic alignment, but even at 15 W, it felt like a compromise compared to plugging in a cable. The new Qi2.2 standard changes that equation, and Anker's Prime Wireless Charging Station represents one of the most compelling implementations I've used. At $149.99, this isn't an impulse purchase. But after a week of daily use charging my iPhone 17 Pro Max, AirPods Pro, and Apple Watch Ultra 3, I'm convinced the price is justified for anyone who values both speed and portability in their charging setup.

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When I first heard about the Dwarf Mini Smart Telescope, I have to admit I was skeptical. A smart telescope you can carry in a pocket (albeit a large pocket like a photographer's vest), plop down, and produce decent astrophotos seemed like a stretch. Smart telescopes have certainly evolved over the last few years, and I've reviewed a few of them.

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Photography increasingly measures its progress through internal states rather than visible change. The language of self-care feels ethical and mature, but it quietly removes the ability to tell whether the work itself is improving.

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Highlight control in Lightroom is where a clean edit either holds together or falls apart. If skies keep turning chalky or faces get shiny fast, the fix is often less about contrast and more about what you do with the brightest tones.

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Bad habits don’t always ruin your photos in the moment. They ruin your time, your storage, and your willingness to pick up the camera tomorrow. If you shoot regularly, these patterns creep in fast, and plenty of photographers don’t notice until the backlog feels unmanageable.

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Your camera probably isn’t the reason your color looks dull. This video makes the case that the real gains come from how you handle light, exposure, and a few choices you lock in while you shoot.

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Here's a scenario most photographers will recognize: you come home from a portrait session or family event with 800 frames on your memory card, feeling like you absolutely nailed it. Three hours of culling later, you've exported maybe 15 images worth keeping. The math on that works out to under 2%, which isn't a success rate so much as it is a coin flip repeated until something lands.

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Adobe Lightroom Classic still scares people off in 2026, mostly because the first 10 minutes feel like a wall of buttons and empty panels. If you shoot a lot, you need a setup that keeps files predictable and edits reversible, not a messy pile of “final_final_2” exports.

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As a seasoned portrait photographer, stepping into the world of 14mm shooting was new territory, but it also served as a great opportunity to put the Viltrox AF 14mm f/4.0 Air Z through its paces. This ultra-wide prime autofocus lens encouraged me to see new places and familiar faces with fresh eyes, revealing perspectives and compositions I wouldn’t normally explore.

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A 50mm and an 85mm can both make strong portraits, but they push you into different decisions the moment you pick one. This video puts the Viltrox AF 50mm f/1.4 Pro FE and Viltrox AF 85mm f/1.4 Pro FE in the same real location so you can see what changes when you use both.

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You can spend a whole year chasing the next trip and still miss what actually moved your work forward. This recap is built around that tension: the gear and locations change, but the real lesson is how you respond when the day refuses to match the plan.

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Instagram is changing what “good” looks like, and it’s not the kind of change you can fix with a new lens or cleaner color. If you keep posting work that looks polished and still get silence, this video lays out a reason that’s hard to ignore.

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January opens the year with CES and closes before the spring photography-focused trade shows like CP+ and NAB. It is often treated as a transitional month, but 2026 proved anything but routine. Between major gear launches, regulatory crackdowns on AI tools, a prestigious engineering award for the inventor behind every camera sensor on the planet, and the continued evolution of what photographers and audiences consider "authentic," the first month of 2026 delivered stories that will shape the industry for the rest of the year. Here are the ten developments that mattered most.

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The Fstoppers community is brimming with creative vision and talent. Every day, we comb through your work, looking for images to feature as the Photo of the Day or simply to admire your creativity and technical prowess. In 2026, we're featuring a new photographer every month, whose portfolio represents both stellar photographic achievement and a high level of involvement within the Fstoppers community.

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“Wow, what an amazing photograph. What camera do you use?” “I really love your photographs; you must have a very expensive camera.” “Gee, thanks. I use a very old, outdated camera system that’s not very expensive at all.” Let's talk about gear and how it doesn't make you a better photographer.

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Buying a first camera can feel like a test you have to pass before you even take a photo. This video is about avoiding the early traps that waste money, kill momentum, and make you second-guess every click.

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Lightroom Classic can either become the place where your landscape work stays alive for years, or the thing you install after you have already lost track of it. The video lays out a few mistakes that feel small in the moment, then show up later as missing files, wasted trips, and slow progress.

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Dark under-eye bags can wreck an otherwise strong portrait, and heavy-handed fixes usually leave that telltale “plastic” skin. In this video, the focus is removing extreme eye bags in Photoshop while keeping texture believable at 100%.

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A sub-$500 autofocus f/1.2 prime sounds like a pricing error, especially in Canon RF. The real question is what you give up to get that bright aperture in a lens that stays small.

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