Critique the Community
Modern Photos
Justify Your Gear, Show Us Your Best Modern Photographs
Congratulations to the winners!
Do new cameras actually produce better photos? Watch our full critique of images taken with modern gear.
Winners
3rd place, and then winner of a free tutorial from the Fstoppers Store:
2nd place, and then winner of a free tutorial from the Fstoppers Store:
1st place, and the winner of the entire Roadrunner collection of bags by Polar Pro:
Please send me a private message and I will get your prizes mailed out ASAP.
Reminder: you can join the next critique for free right now, and every Fstoppers tutorial is currently on sale. The more you buy the more you save, but you must add the tutorials to your cart to see the discount.
Rules & Prizes
You've spent thousands on photography equipment. Justify your purchase by showing us your recent images that were made possible with modern gear and cutting-edge features.
In February, we asked to see your best images taken with older cameras to prove that good photographs don't require the newest, most expensive equipment. For our May contest, we want the opposite. We want to see images taken with modern equipment that would not have been possible to capture with older gear.
Maybe your 100mp sensor allowed you to crop in to the perfect composition or your 120fps camera allowed you to capture the perfect moment. Maybe modern autofocus allowed you to capture a fast-moving subject, or your camera's incredible ISO performance allowed you to capture an image in almost total darkness. Perhaps the editing software you used allowed you to save an image by upscalling it, removing noise, or extending the frame. We want to see images that would not have been possible to capture just a few years ago.
Prizes
1st Prize
For this contest, the first-place winner will receive the entire "Road Runner" Collection of bags by Polar Pro. These lightweight bags have been designed by professionals to meet the most demanding needs of traveling photographers and videographers. These bags come in five different sizes but the winner won't have to choose between them because they'll get them all. Due to shipping costs and trade wars, these bags must be mailed within the United States.
2nd and 3rd Prize
For this contest, the 2nd and 3rd place winner will get their choice of any tutorial in the Fstoppers Store.
Rules
Each photographer is allowed to upload up to three different images. We will choose 10 images to feature in our critique based on the description the photographer uploads and how relevant the image and story is to the theme of "modern photography." Obviously, images without a description will be disqualified, but images with poor descriptions will also be ignored. Community ratings will not affect our choice in any way so your score doesn't matter, so it's not worth complaining about.
Extra Deal
For all of May, we are discounting our tutorial with Pye Jirsa titled Master Adobe Lightroom to just $49. If you're looking to not only master post processing, but learn to do it as quickly as possible, in a single piece of affordable software, this is the tutorial for you. Obviously Lightroom is the first choice of volume photographers everywhere, but this tutorial will open the eyes of even the most casual shooters.
As with all of our tutorials, if you don't like it, just let us know and we will give you all of your money back. You have absolutely nothing to lose.
Fri, 05/30/2025 - 01:00
This contest has ended.
142 people have cast a total of 5,877 votes on 220 entries from 123 participants
Contest Submissions
Click on the thumbnails below to comment and rate each image.
Click here to learn about the Fstoppers rating system and what each star value means.
46 Comments
These things and the appurtenant critiques are interesting. We shouldn't let the unsolicited critiques matter too much. I was in a print critique one time and some ne-er-do-well had snuck an Ansel Adams print in. And it was not an unknown image. The print judges scored it as a 65 out of a possible 100. 95.9% of the time the ones doing the critique are just loudmouths with an opinion.
I did the Midjourney submission that you critiqued. You guys both had me laughing with the critiques, in a good way. I'm a street mostly portrait photographer who has been playing with a for a couple years nowi, but for sure not to make my work look photo-realistic. Just the opposite. When I see photo-realistic ai it makes me cringe and ask why not learn photography. I'm glad you could tell it was edited in MidJ.
Thanks for the chuckle guys.
Good Critique!
Let me guess, the critique on the Ansel Adams print was, "Trying to be too much like Ansel Adams?" Lol
I don't recall the critique, only the score. But probably.