November 2013

A few days ago, we shared photographer Sasha Leahovcenco's inspirational project in which he photographed people in Siberia who had never had their photo taken. Photographer Jimmy Nelson's series/book Before They Pass Away is similar in that he, too, is probably photographing people who have never seen a camera.

But the project takes on a deeper, more tragic meaning as well. You see, as the name suggests, Before They Pass Away is about capturing photographs of ancient tribes and cultures that, before long, may no longer exist to be photographed.

Self-promotion is a tricky thing. We all know that marketing is probably more than half the battle when it comes to getting great clients (after all, no matter how good you are, they can't hire you if they don't know you exist) these days.

And now, as the photography market is becoming more and more saturated, the name of the game is "make an impression." There are tens if not hundreds of photographers available pitching your client... how are you going to stand out?

Working in concert with publisher Xavier Barral and writer/scientist Dr. Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu, photographer Patrick Gries has put together a book/photo series packed full of striking black and white photographs of vertebrate skeletons -- from tiny creatures to massive elephants, his book Evolution covers a vast swath of vertebrate natural history.

First, I'd like to start this article off with a little bit of a warning. This post is primarily aimed at people just starting to get into photography or people just beginning to make the jump from hobbyist to professional. That said, hopefully there's something below that can be appreciated by photographers of all levels.

Now, lets talk about style a little bit.

This one is just too silly not to share. While browsing through Walmart's website looking for deals to share with their readers, the folks over at 1001 Noisy Cameras ran across a strange warning.

Deb Schwedhelm is a wife, mother, former nurse in the US Air Force and professional photographer who specializes in shooting underwater. Her photographs have been exhibited widely and featured in numerous publications throughout the world. Visit her website here.

PetaPixel: First off, tell us a little bit about yourself and your background. You were a nurse in the Air Force before becoming a photographer, right?

Deb Schwedhelm: I grew up in Detroit, Michigan. After two years of nursing school, I decided to enlist in the Army Reserves. After boot camp and Advanced Individual Training (to become a Unit Supply Specialist), I returned to college and finished my Bachelors in Nursing. I then decided to become an Active Duty Registered Nurse, which I continued to do for 10 years. In 2003, I separated from the military in order to pursue a cochlear implant for my hearing-impaired daughter. In 2006, I purchases a DSLR and begin teaching myself photography -- a longtime dream of mine (more on that below).

When engineers Calvin and Ashish got in touch with us to tell us about their upcoming Palette interface, we immediately got excited. That's because a lot of people have thought up ways to speed up your post-processing workflow with everything from video game controllers to MIDI controllers, but none of them hold a candle to Palette's potential.

National Geographic photographer Steve Winter is a big on the big cats. After all, he was willing to spend 12 months chasing after the perfect mountain lion shot. In the video above, he didn't have to exhibit that sort of patience, instead he had to control a finicky robotic camera rig as best he could and try to snap some awesome photos of a curious tiger.

Parents Refe and Susan Tuma aren't big on Movember, at their house November is reserved for a different tradition: Dinovember. Documented in photos on the project's Facebook page, the Tumas spend November keeping their kids' imaginations alive by convincing them that every night, their dinosaur toys come to life and get into all sorts of trouble.

Yesterday, Windows Phone shutterbugs found reason to rejoice when news came down the pipeline that Instagram had finally arrived on their platform. But that happiness quickly turned to grumbling (or in some case downright outrage) when they found that the Windows Phone version of Instagram was woefully under-featured compared to its Android and iOS brethren.

Back in February of 2012, portraitist Peter Hurley shared an awesome tutorial that showed how to accentuate your subject's jawline in portraits and instantly make them look much more photogenic. That video went insanely viral amongst photographers, and now, Hurley has finally released a followup in which he shares what he calls "his most incredible tip for looking photogenic."

If you love everything about your GoPro camera except the anemic battery life and minimalist portability, say hello to the CagePro: a new system that allows you to attach a Canon SLR battery to your GoPro.

When Adobe officially announced its special Creative Cloud plan/bundle for photographers, there was a catch: you had to own Photoshop CS3 or above in order to qualify for the special $10/month pricing. Well, no more. For a limited time, Adobe is lifting that restriction and making the special bundle available for everyone.

Twice, once in 2011 and once earlier this very year, photographer Sasha Leahovcenco packed his bags and travelled to the ends of the Earth to bring photography to those who have never had their photos taken. As you might imagine, the experience left Leahovcenco a changed man, and when you look through the photos he came back with, you begin to understand why.

Just in time for the Holidays, Yahoo! is introducing a new service for printing custom photo books through Flickr, touting automatic features and a "clean, stunning design" that the company hopes will encourage Flickr users to take advantage of the new feature instead of going elsewhere for their photo book needs.

Once in a while we peer into the heavens and show you a photograph that even the richest and most gifted of photographers can't match. And that's the case today, because what you see above is a photo of the Messier 15 (or M15) cluster of stars taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

A few weeks ago, I found myself wandering around a local career fair -- the type of event I normally find pretty loathsome, or at least overcrowded an unhelpful. This time though, a fun surprise: representatives from Snapchat and Shutterfly stood at booths right next to each other.

Oh boy! I couldn't turn down the chance to chat with some folks more or less connected to the photo industry.

It seems like we just got done with a round of leaks and rumor frenzy that had everyone in speculation overload, but now we have something coming out of the Nikon camp -- or rather leaking out of the Nikon camp: the first photos (if legit) of the Nikon D3300.

We first shared the jaw-dropping fairytale photographs that make up Kirsty Mitchell's Wonderland series in May of 2012, some three years after she began her journey and just as her work was going so viral online that her reply to our request to feature her work was a "yes" followed by a "thank goodness I upgraded my servers!"

Now, four and a half years after she began Wonderland as a tribute to her mother who had recently passed away, she has officially embarked on what she is calling the final chapter in her Wonderland series.

I’ve been shooting photos for 20 years. I’ve made my living in the profession for the last 15. I can count on one hand the number of times that everything lined up perfectly and a truly rare image was created.

The host of a Minnesota-based hunting show recently found herself in hot water with animal lovers everywhere after she posted a photo of herself posing with a lion she had just killed to her Facebook.

Google has agreed to replace a Google Maps satellite image of a Richmond, California railroad yard that may show the body of a murdered teenager.

Well, this news will probably either make you shake your head or cringe, but there's no avoiding it: Selfie has officially been named the Oxford Dictionaries' "Word of the Year 2013" thanks to the ridiculous surge in popularity the word has enjoyed over the past year.

UK motion graphics artist and Make Productions founder Joe Fellows specializes in bringing stills to life. Using a series of steps in Photoshop and then After Effects, Fellows is able to transform photos into '2.5D' animated sequences that look like slow motion footage shot with a video camera.

After all the videos and examples posted online of everything from RED EPICs to 5D Mark IIs being fried by lasers, you'd think just about everybody in the photo community would know to keep their cameras safely stowed during a show where lasers are at play.

Instagram may be home to a wealth of aesthetic and legal offenses, but it can also be a tool for promoting our better instincts, as a recent movement involving relief for victims of typhoon Haiyan attests to.

The Google Street View team went amphibious for its latest mission: a 360-degree capture of the canals, streets and piazzas of Venice -- the city many view as the most romantic on Earth Venice.

A photographer at French newspaper Libération is currently fighting for his life after being shot Monday as part of a gunman's extended rampage through the French capital of Paris.

Each year, UK retailer John Lewis releases a touching, moving and otherwise awesome Christmas advertisement that manages to moisten our eyes and get us in the Holiday spirit like none other.

Doing this requires that they constantly re-evaluate their approach and come up with new and creative ways to inspire and endear viewers to their message, and this year, that meant taking a step back and using animation techniques that'll hit you right in the nostalgia bone: hand drawing and stop-motion.

I’m probably setting myself up for a replay of the Exo Tria Arxidia scene, but my friend Bernhard introduced me to the German term scharf the other day. It can mean both sharp and hot (as in spicy, or as in, you know, hot). After testing our first copies of the Zeiss 55mm f/1.4 Otus lens I felt the term scharf was just perfect to describe this lens.

Romanian bothers Toma and Paul Alexandru were trying to think of a creative surprise for their mother Simona's 55th birthday when it dawned on them that she might enjoy seeing her favorite photos of the pair... shall we say... updated.

So, 20 years later, they set out to all the old holiday locations to re-shoot all of their mom's favorite photos again, leading to a surprise that was equal parts funny and touching.

Given the incredibly positive response Nokia got from the photo community when it announced that Lumia phones would soon be able to capture images in DNG RAW, it makes sense that operating systems other than Windows Phone would soon follow suit. Lo and behold, it seems Google is on the cusp of just such an announcement itself.

A couple of days ago we shared a video/story that has since gone viral across the Internet. The video showed photographer James York getting into a bit of a headbutting match with a young bull elk who took an interest in his gear before getting aggressive.

Today we've found out that the elk in question has since been put down by Rangers at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, leaving much of the internet and York himself saddened and speechless.

The idea isn't entirely new. At one point, photographer Allen Murabayashi experimented with re-imagining famous photos as if they had been taken with Instagram to dispel the thought that filters and a square crop often somehow "improve" a photo.

The website Histagrams is similar, only it takes it a step further and lends a comedic edge to the whole experiment. Site creators Gusto NYC and Gavin Alaoen imagine how historically significant moments might have been shared if the people behind them had had Instagram at their disposal.

Photographer Pelle Cass is fond of composites. The set of so-called 'single frame time-lapses' he put together for his Selected People series has gone quite viral.

But his fondness for composite photography doesn't stop at creating overcrowded scenes, he applied the same approach to taking portraits, creating a bizarre (and perhaps a little unsettling) series of portraits called Strangers in the process.

This tattered old photo album containing a fascinating collection of some 1,500 mugshots taken over one hundred years was recently sold by the Swann Galleries auction house in New York for $10,000.

Victoria's Secret model, mother, and wife to Hollywood star Orlando Bloom (for now... I'm still hopeful) Miranda Kerr landed in some seriously hot water with the Internet-at-large recently after posting a clearly Photoshopped photograph of herself to her Instagram account.

One of the things big time photographers are phenomenal at is getting their subjects to trust their judgement implicitly. Of course, how far does that trust really go? Well, in the case of celebrity photog Tyler Shields and actor Zachary Quinto, that trust meant Quinto being willing to be dragged behind a car at 40mph.

Yesterday a young boy named Miles, better known now as Batkid, inspired the world and probably became the most photographed child on Earth, if only for a day. You see 5-year-old Miles has been battling Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia since he was 20 months old, and when the Make-a-Wish foundation asked him what his wish was, he said he wanted to be Batman.

Well, you don't tell a 5-year-old no, and so the Bay Area Make-a-Wish foundation and 12,000 volunteers set to work turning San Francisco into Gotham city, and making sure that everyone who ran across this story today would break down into uncontrollable tears of joy...

Alright folks, we don't often post about deals but this is a great one and it's only available through midnight tonight (Eastern Standard Time). If you're in the US and you're okay with buying some refurbished Canon gear instead of brand new, today only, you can get $20 off a purchase of $100 or more, $50 off of $250 or more and $125 off $500 or more.