Photo Accessory Reviews

Put light where you need it. BioLite headlamps are affordable, comfortable and extremely well-made. As a photographer you'll find them an indispensable nighttime companion. And it you ever have to change a tire on a dark road, search at midnight for a doggo that wandered off, or face any emergency that includes a loss of power, you need a headlamp.

You know a tool is hyper-useful when you recognize its potential with little or no explanation. Perception depends of frame of reference, and photographers are quick to imagine how certain items mesh with their image-making work habits. Foil windshield visors become ad hoc reflectors, for instance, wooden boxes become props and discarded sunglasses translate into creative filters.

Here's a trio of photo accessories that you may find indispensable once you comprehend the logic that conceived them.

You stumble into your favorite Starbucks half-awake as you do every morning and WHAM! There's Elvis standing at the end of the counter — fringed shirt, sequined guitar strap and all. You do a quick draw from your iPhone holster while The King patiently waits for his venti peanut butter banana flat white with an extra three pumps of funnel cake syrup, but — damn! — the battery is dead. What do you do? You're missing your chance to join the annals of consumer photojournalism and a shot at certain Instagram history. That's about a zillion Likes being blown to tarnation.

Most experienced photographers rarely shoot without a lens hood for several important reasons, whether they're photographing indoors or out. These affordable accessories not only protect the front element of a lens from damage, but they also improve image quality in a number of ways.

The Western Digital My Passport Ultra is exceptionally compact and offered in five capacities up to 6TB. Prices start at $69 and performance is superb. Everyone needs more hard drive space; here's yours.

Our new Choosing Wisely series aims to deliver concise, summarized information about products we think you'll like. You can read what Choosing Wisely wrote about this extraordinarily compact WD external hard drive here.

A 100mm f/2.8 full-frame lens that produces bokeh that looks like soap bubbles? Sign us up! But does the bokeh really look like suds?