March 2015

Several times a year, Portland-based photographer Duncan Davidson is called upon by …

If you’re out shooting on a sunny day and suddenly find that you need to start a fire, your …

Photographer Robert Caplin of The Photo Brigade …

Facebook doesn't allow children under the age of 13 to sign up for the social network, which makes things trickier for parents who wish to organize photos of their kids with tags. Today Facebook launched a new feature called 'Scrapbook' that's designed specifically to allow parents to tag children who don't have their own accounts.

We reported over the weekend that Arkansas lawmakers had passed a privacy bill that could potentially kill street photography by requiring (in most cases) that photographers get written consent from strangers they photograph. Photographers who don't could get sued by their subjects.

The photography world was in an uproar over the bill and worked hard to get it vetoed by the deadline at the end of the day today. There's now some great news: the bill has been vetoed by Governor Asa Hutchinson.

One of the tricky things about online shopping is the price fluctuation that happens for products. The price you see today may not be around when you check again tomorrow. If you regularly shop for camera gear on Amazon, one website that you should bookmark and reference is CamelCamelCamel. It's a website that tracks the price history of Amazon's products, allowing you to time your purchases at historically low prices.

Tablet cameras are getting better and better, and more and more people are using their tablets as everyday snapshot cameras. So it only makes sense that tablets would eventually follow the smartphone into the world of selfie sticks as well.

That has now happened. You can now buy a selfie stick that has a special attachment specifically for mounting your tablet as a camera.

One of the most widely shared photos on the Internet in the past week has been the picture above by Turkish photojournalist Osman Sağırlı. It's a portrait of a young Syrian girl he encountered back in 2014, who mistook his telephoto lens for a weapon and instinctively threw up her hands in surrender.

Google is planning to separate its photo services from Google+ to make it a standalone offering, and we're starting to see some shifts in service structuring.

The Mountain View-based company just announced that Google Drive users will be able to access their Google+ Photos images directly from inside Drive.

I’ve always found photos of star trails -- the arcs the stars paint across the sky as the earth turns -- fascinating. They’re one of the things that we can “see” with a camera that we can’t see with our eyes. Technology has changed how we shoot star trails, making star trail shots in locations we previously thought impossible possible.

MELVILLE, N.Y., March 26, 2015 – A 37-year-old man has criticized Canon’s latest DSLR, the 5DS, for not having enough pixels, even though it has more pixels than any other DSLR in history and has not even been released yet.

Last week SpaceX posted its photos to Flickr and released them to the public domain. Unfortunately for the company, Flickr didn't have any public domain designation they could use, so even though SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the photos were public domain, the images were shared under a Creative Commons license that required attribution.

That has now changed. Flickr announced yesterday that it has created two new options for members in the copyright dropdown panel: public domain and CC0, which allows users to release content to the public domain.

Update: Oops. It turns out the camera was already named and shown by Canon last month. Please see the update below.

CES 2015 came and went, and there is still no mention of the large-sensor, large-lens PowerShot camera that Canon started teasing late last year. However, a new photo put up on Canon Netherlands' PowerShot page appears to show a camera that doesn't officially exist yet -- could this be a first glimpse of the upcoming PowerShot for pros?

Short-film makers Adrian Morphy and Marissa Bergougnou of Rhymes with Orange did an …

Ryan McGinnis is a photographer and storm chaser whom we interviewed and featured back in 2011. After years of pointing his camera at newsworthy storms, McGinnis switched things up a bit in 2014 by introducing time-lapses into his repertoire. Although he was still learning, he did manage to capture quite a few amazing sequences showing powerful weather events.

The 4.5-minute video above, titled "2014 Stormlapses," is a highlight reel McGinnis put together to share his best time-lapse sequences.

Professional photographer Leif Norman recently gave a talk at …

A 87-year-old grandmother in Texas has sold a rare and valuable collection of more than 500 Civil War-era photographs to the Library of Congress after building her personal collection for four decades.

Photographer Calder Wilson recently did some experimentation by attaching fireworks to a drone and then flying it around in a long exposure photograph. The results are beautiful to look at.

In addition to its main photographer-oriented business, Phase One also develops camera gear under Phase One Industrial, a leading manufacturer of digital medium format cameras for aerial photography.

The latter brand has announced a new camera called the Phase One iXU 180: the world's smallest 80 megapixel medium format camera designed for drones.

Photographer CJ from substormflow is passionate about exploring sewer systems, and he wants to show the world the unique underground architecture that most people never get to see. The video above is a glimpse into the hidden system of old culverts and sewers beneath the bustling city of Manchester in England.

Retouching gets a bad rap these days due to the way it can distort truth and cause unrealistic expectations …

I was in Cleveland photographing the Sweet 16 and the Elite 8 March Madness Rounds for USA Today. This was my 3rd basketball game I covered all season. I am not much of a fan of shooting basketball, but when it’s crunch time and the game is on the line, I love the hustle and determination players put in to try to win the game and move onto the next round.

The factory that manufactures Rolleiflex cameras is being liquidated in a bankruptcy auction, so there's a chance we may never see new Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex cameras produced ever again. As the fate of the brand is in limbo, 21 original Rolleiflex camera prototypes have appeared in an auction on eBay. For a cool $178,000, collectors can own a unique piece of photographic history.

Photographer Matthew Rycroft put together this video containing 13 strange, random, and mind-bending "facts" about photography. These are short and seemingly obvious statements that may make you stop and think.

Many photographers capture close-up photos of ocean waves, but photographer Ray Collins has a portfolio of wave shots that stands out. His images of "Seascapes" show waves frozen in time, captured to look like vast mountainous landscapes of solid rock and ice.

Animator and photography enthusiast Simon Taylor created this short animated film titled “Taking …

Here are some encouraging words from photographer and educator Mike Browne, who talks …

You know that girl in group photos who always wants to see the photo you capture and is never …

If you're a photographer who often shoots in very dark environments, would you want night vision eyedrops to help you see better without artificial illumination? It sounds like science fiction, but we're actually getting closer to having it be possible as an item for camera bags.

A team of "biohackers" have announced that they've figured out how to enhance human night vision by dripping a chemical onto eyeballs.

Want to give your photographs a “Hollywood movie” look? Here’s a fantastic 25-minute tutorial on how to do cinematic …

Prominent photography groups are sounding the alarm about a new bill that was just passed by the Arkansas Senate. SB-79, the "Personal Rights Protection Act," would require photographers to get written consent from a stranger to feature their likeness in a photograph for most purposes.

The law could have a huge implication on street photography, whose practitioners thrive on the ability to capture life and people on camera without having to constantly stop and ask for releases from the subjects.

We often get too set in our ways and our conversation remains in the same context, which can blind us to seeing the pitfalls we create for ourselves. In general, using other photographers’ aesthetics, judgements, and sensibilities should make us think twice, thrice, … Yet, in the rush of creating the next “noticeable” image on the Web, we use presets, filters, brushes, and a whole lot of them without thinking twice.

Instagram sparked controversy this week after deleting this photograph of a woman lying on a bed with menstruation blood seen on her clothing and on her sheets. She's now demanding to know why other more graphic or risqué photos are allowed on the service while images of a fully clothed woman on her period are not.

Photographer Marisha Camp and her brother Jessie were recently passing through West Virginia on a nationwide tour for a documentary series when they were reportedly confronted by "a hostile mob." The residents were suspicious of the photo taking and allegedly harassed and detained the duo until a trooper arrived and escorted the photographers from the scene.

If you're planning on buying or selling some camera gear with the help of Craigslist, here's a simple tip: the lobby of your local police station is a safe place to arrange the meeting with the stranger.

50 years ago, civil rights photographer Matt Herron documented the Selma to Montgomery marches that highlighted racial injustices in …

This 'Just the Lenses' article will take advantage of a Trioptics Imagemaster optical bench to compare lenses from different camera mounts with no camera involved. Why is that different? Because all other forms of testing (DxO, Imatest, or even photography) tests the camera-lens combination.

"Mirrored" is a photo project that was a collaboration between photographers Markus Andersen and Elif Suyabatmaz. It's a series of diptychs showing daily life on opposite ends of the globe: Andersen is based out of Sydney, Australia, and Suyabatmaz is based out of Istanbul, Turkey. In each pair of images, the selected photos "mirror each other in both obvious and subtle ways."

This is pretty impressive: photographer Pascal Kulcsar needed to digitize some old slide film left behind by his grandfather. Rather than purchase a film scanner, Kulcsar decided to combine his technical ingenuity and love for LEGOs to create a DIY slide film scanner using LEGO pieces.

Apple recently launched a global advertising campaign touting the camera quality of the iPhone 6. As part of the campaign, the company put up billboards all over the world with its favorite photos captured by iPhone 6 users with the phone.

Two pranksters from the advertising industry recently decided to poke fun at the billboards by putting up their own fake "Shot on iPhone 6" ads next to them.