A high-quality lens is an investment. If you are looking for cheaper, yet unique optics, a solution for you may be an older, manual lens. While you’ll have to give up the luxury of autofocus and flawless detail, you’ll get photographs with a lovely, vintage feel. Read about the advantages of older lenses and how to mount them on modern digital cameras.

Just a camera and a lens won’t be enough for your sports photography. And if you’re serious about this genre, you’ll quickly learn that just an memory card or two won’t suffice either. Here’s some advice on useful accessories you can choose for sports photography. It can help you avoid problems with bad or absent gear in the situations where you’ll need it the most.

Looking for a universal zoom lens for your Sony A7 or A7R system compact? The Sony FE 70-200 f/4 G OSS may be the answer. It’s the first premium telezoom for Sony Alpha full-frame system compacts. We’ll be taking a in-depth look here at this must-have lens. Read and see how it held up for us in practice.

Last time around, we discussed what to focus on when choosing a camera for your sports photography. Now that you know how to choose the camera, let’s talk about choosing the lens. A good lens for sports photography is one that’s inexpensive if possible, that’s universal, and that has decent parameters. What lenses meet these requirements, and what should you base your decision on? You’ll learn all this in today’s article.

In today’s review, we’ll be looking at the carbon tripod from the Italian manufacturer Manfrotto. They praise its collapsibility, its low weight, and the built-in 90° column mechanism for macro photography in its top casting. We’ve test-driven it for you and come back with an evaluation and a verdict. Read up on how the Manfrotto BeFree GT XPRO stood up in our testing.

Sports photography is one discipline that places some heavy requirements on your gear. Besides the right lens, you need the right camera as well. What should be the foundation for your choice here? There are countless cameras on the market, but not all of them are suitable for sports photography. Based on my practical experience, I’ve written up some criteria that you should follow if you don’t want to make a misstep.

Permanent lights for photography come in a variety of colors and shapes. Among the more exotic of these lights are LED ring lights. And we were interested in seeing what all you can conjure up with ring lights, so we gave one of them a thorough test run. Naturally we didn’t keep the results just for ourselves. We were surprised to see how much this light could do—the effects it produces are attractive, and it’s easy to work with. But we won’t stick to just theory; we’ll also show you how to work with ring lights in practice.

In this article I’ll be taking an in-depth look at one specific type of permanent photographic light—the Yongnuo YN360 RGB LED light stick. Let’s go through a few examples to see what light sticks are useful for and how they can make your work easier. As you’ll see for yourself, they’re a truly practical and creative bit of gear.

Every photographer will have zoom and portrait lenses in their kit. But sometimes it pays to take yet another point of view. A fisheye lens is one way to do that. In this review, we’ll take a look at the Nikon 10.5mm f/2.8, a truly fascinating lens that was lent to us by Foto Škoda.

In this part of our series on photography gear, we’ll be looking at the ideal kit for photographing landscapes. We’ll show you what kind of combination of body, lens, and accessories to choose to get the best results. We’ll also advise you on which gear to choose and what’s good to keep in mind.