I credit Instagram for inspiring me to find landscape photography and push myself to travel. In 2014, Instagram started to shift from an app people used to add filters to their smart phone photos to a social platform where photographers dominated. This was the era when the chronological feed was still alive and before the algorithms changed everything. A place that platformed travel photography, grand landscapes to the masses, and inspired me to leave my home town to explore the world.

This started the golden era of Instagram for photographers… but golden eras don’t last forever.

Whether you’re a photographer or someone’s grandma (or both), you can identify “phone” photos. These are the photos that have no shadows or highlights, overly sharpened gritty details, and always make colors a bit more saturated than they are. For the masses, phone photos are great. They allow us to capture snapshots and memories with all the details we want, like our silly faces regardless if we are shooting directly into the light or not. The problem is, these photos suck for photography.

Is it possible to get photos straight from your phone that don’t look anything like “phone” photos?

The Nikon Zf firmware 2.0 update is quite literally why I bought my own Nikon Zf. If you’re unfamiliar, firmware 2.0 is what introduced what we now refer to as Nikon recipes. This opened up the camera to essentially be able to create imaging profiles similar to Fujifilm’s film simulations or recipes.

Film grain was the last separation between Fujifilm’s offering and what Nikon Recipes were capable of. In this article we’ll cover how the film grain is implemented, if it works with recipes or not, how pleasing the results are, and why I think it might be better than Fujifilm.

For most of my photography career, I’ve only ever owned between 16-35mm and 70-200+mm. In the past year I’ve been dabbling in the world of more portable cameras utilizing prime lenses, typically between 35mm and 40mm. When I decided to go on a photography trip with only a single camera and lens, I really wanted a bit more versatility than the Fujifilm XF 23mm f2.8 that came with the Fujifilm X-E5. Thus I hesitantly picked up the Fujifilm XF 16-55mm f2.8 II, my first ever mid-range lens for photography. These are my first impressions with the lens.

Photography isn’t really known for being an inexpensive hobby or profession. Sometimes that can be a huge barrier to entry for anyone looking at picking up their first camera to start learning photography. As of writing this, the least expensive new camera and lens (that’s been released in the last 5 years) is the Canon R100 which costs over $600. While that camera is mostly capable, we can stretch a lot less money for even better results.

As technology has improved over the years, it means there are actually quite a lot of very sufficient cameras out there collecting dust. Everyone has moved to mirrorless technology which leaves used DSLR cameras and lenses sinking lower and lower in price. Simply put: there has never been a cheaper and easier time to start photography.