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For this assignment, we were looking for your best wedding, portrait, and boudoir images and while Shutterbug readers submitted many good wedding and boudoir shots, it was the portraits that really stood out. Overall, we were looking for interesting angles on these popular photography genres and we got them. We didn’t want those standard “grip and grin” group shots from your Aunt Sally’s wedding reception and we weren’t seeking cheesy boudoir images that look like they should be on the cover of a romance novel from the 1960s.

We were getting ready to post our review of Nikon’s new AF-S Nikkor 200-500mm f/5.6E ED VR telephoto zoom when we came across an image of an even bigger lens spotted in use in the wild.

Photographing people for a living can prove intimidating for many photographers. Now add “celebrity” to that and you may find you have to step up your game several notches to stand on equal footing with your subject. You can’t afford to be intimidated and you certainly can’t afford to appear unsure of yourself or to question your decisions. You have to enter the picture with a game plan and be decisive, know which lens you’ll be using, what lights, and where to place those lights. But you also have to be prepared for the unexpected. That’s why they give these jobs to photographers such as Victoria Will.

Tokyo-based street shooter Bellamy Hunt (AKA Japan Camera Hunter) has just announced his very own brand of black-and-white film. He decided he wanted “something bold, slightly grainy and with strong contrast.” Hence, the birth of JCH StreetPan 400.

Claims about inkjet print permanence have been bandied about for years and while there have not been (and certainly cannot be) “real world” tests without the use of a time machine, it’s generally accepted that “accelerated” aging tests are a good indication of when a paper/ink combination will start to lose color fidelity/density, or even when the paper base and coating itself will cause problems. Indeed, this discussion can be as contentious as it is competitive, such as what happened six years ago when Epson properly threw down the gauntlet to Kodak, whose in-house test methodology and claims for their papers were subject to dispute.

We wrap up our video coverage of the WPPI show in Las Vegas last week with this hands-on look at the new Nikon D500, a relatively compact APS-C sensor-based DSLR aimed at photo enthusiasts and aspiring pros.

The first thing I thought when I saw this new update to PortraitPro was “What happened to Versions 13 and 14? I’m still on Version 12 and never saw anything about any other updates.” That’s because there aren’t any. Maybe Anthropics Software is superstitious about the number 13 and just decided to skip 14 as well. Who knows! We’re on to PortraitPro 15 now.