Since its birth a decade ago in 2006, the Chinese company DJI has rapidly grown into the world's leader in consumer camera drones. Now the company is soaring to new heights with the opening of its first shiny retail location where consumers can get their hands on the drones in person, directly from the company.
Back in July 2015, we reported that 500px had raised an additional $13 million in funding led by China's equivalent of Getty Images, the Visual China Group. The move suggested that 500px was working hard to offer its massive archive of 55 million images to photo buyers in Asia.
Today, 500px announced that it is officially expanding into China with the unveiling of a new website, 500px.me.
Want to shoot some abstract, eye-popping aerial footage? Just bring a camera drone to one of China's busiest roadways when there's a major traffic jam.
The video above shows drone footage and photos during an insane traffic jam outside Beijing, China, this past week.
I have a weakness for photography travel. My trips often start with a simple phone call or email from a friend checking to see if I might be interested in photographing somewhere. In the case of my recent visit to China, however, there was no message from a friend… just a single image from a place called “XiaPu” that I ran across and that really inspired me to travel there.
For the past 29 years I’ve been traveling to China for my day job as an industrial designer to manage the ramp-up of new products manufactured in China. I’ve discovered that it’s become a common career path for product designers to morph into Asian sourcing managers because of our background in product development. That’s exactly what happened in my career about 30 years ago, with the exception that I’ve remained active in product design plus I’ve become a street photographer in China over the course of the last 5 years.
Earlier this week, China's official state newspaper People's Daily published a story on its website about how a 3-month-old baby had been blinded in one eye by a camera flash. The report said that a family friend forgot to turn off the camera's flash before taking a picture from around 1 foot away from the baby's face, causing permanent blindness in his right eye and a loss of vision in his left.
Canon has long been rumored to have a small 4K camera up its sleeve, and now the world is getting its first glimpse of the new product. The company has unveiled the camera at a press event in China ahead of its rumored official launch in the United States at the NAB 2015 show in Las Vegas next month.
As China expands its anticorruption initiatives, quite a few government officials have met their political demise through being caught in a wide range of unethical behavior. One of them, a politician named Qin Yuhai, was busted under different circumstances than most: his corruption was related to his love for photography.
China is a country that's known to take the Olympics (the summer ones, at least) very seriously as the nation competes for a bigger presence on the world stage. Chinese gold medal winners become instant superstars and the role models for a generation of aspiring athletes.
It turns out photography is another field in which China is trying to become a world superpower, and its efforts are bearing fruit.
China's CCTV is reporting that more and more couples in Asia are flocking to South Korea in order to have their engagement photos captured on the sets of Korean drama TV shows. These shoots can cost upwards of $4,000 -- at least four times more than the shoots would cost in other countries.
Up until recently, Tao Liu was just an unknown water meter reader in China with an interest in photography. Then people started noticing his clever photos captured on sidewalks, and now Liu has become one of China's hottest street photographers.
Yunnan, China is home to some of the most beautiful rice paddy fields in the world. The traditional agriculture fields are sprawling in size and are often found built into slopes, creating mesmerizing patterns in the landscape. These fields are also rapidly disappearing due to urbanization.
With the risk of their extinction looming on the horizon, photographer Samuel Peck visited the region and captured a series of beautiful images to preserve their memory.
While covering the "re-occupation” protest in Mong Kok on Thursday night, an Apple Daily cameraman was arrested by police after he allegedly assaulted a police officer with his camera and then resisted arrest.
There's just one problem with this story, told to the press by police: it's not true. The video above captured by a South China Morning Post reporter paints a very different picture.
Beautiful Chemistry is a collaborative project that strives to bring the beauty of chemistry to the masses by using macro photography to capture chemical reactions as they happen. Shot in 4K using Panasonic’s GH4, these videos and stills bring to life a wondrous world invisible to the naked eye.
In the wake of the pro-democracy Occupy Central protests rocking Hong Kong, the Chinese government has tightened its already short censorship leash, adding photo sharing site Instagram to the list of sites now unusable in mainland China.
As a SWAT officer, Hou Weilin needs to be constantly prepared for any situation that may arise. Thus, when his fiancée, Li Jinyang, wanted to get engagement photographs, he was unable to do so in a studio setting, where he’d be too far distanced from his equipment and gear, should a situation arise.
As a compromise, Weilin and his fiancée used his workplace to their advantage to create some crazy, cinematic engagement photos.
Recent reports claim that, in an effort to increase censorship, China has blocked Yahoo! photo sharing site Flickr alongside a number of other social media services. According to Greatfire.org, a group dedicated to keeping the Internet open for all, the site has been down since July 1st.
Pushing the boundaries on where you should and shouldn't use a drone is scary enough in most situations. But "most situations" don't seem to be daring enough for noted travel photographer Trey Ratcliff.
Detailing his experience over on his blog, Stuck In Customs, Ratcliff tells the tale of how his endeavors to use a drone in the Forbidden City of Beijing earned him some time with Chinese authorities in a detention center.
Nikon has probably had just about enough when it comes to the D600 and its sensor dust/oil issues. It started with user complaints, evolved to class action lawsuits from a number of different sources, and has now escalated to a full-on order by the Chinese government to stop D600 sales in China after a state-run television show featured a scathing exposé about the issue.
Every so often, something comes across our desks that makes us do a bit of a double-take. This was one of those moments.
What you see above is a building shaped like a compact camera. What is the building used for? That's where it gets interesting. It's not a camera store or an electronics repair shop, it's a public restroom... seriously.
This is, as they say, an oldie but goodie. Put together all the way back in 2009, this self-portrait time-lapse chronicles one man's journey walking almost all the way across China on his way to Germany. A journey as much about the physical challenge as it was about self-discovery.
After experiencing one too many embarrassing, high-profile Photoshop disasters, China is turning its research focus on image-editing software, although not in the way you might think.
If you're looking to make an argument for the inherent superiority of Western-style capitalism, consider how difficult it apparently is to find a competent Photoshop jockey in the Communist world.
The latest example comes from the Eastern provinces of China, where what was supposed to be a heartwarming record of regional officials honoring the elderly turned into an internationally recognized example of how not to doctor a photograph.
Hong Kong's tourism industry brings in about $37 billion in revenue for the city each year, and many of the tourists who contribute want to get a picture with the beautiful Hong Kong skyline and Victoria Harbor in the background while they're there.
But what are they supposed to do if their only chance to get that shot is on a hazy/smoggy day in Hong Kong? The government has the answer: giant fake skyline banners.
If you think your SLR camera is capable of taking high-resolution photos, the folks over at the Institute of Optics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences are about to put your gear to shame.
That's because they claim to have developed a 100-megapixel camera that captures 10,240 x 10,240 images, thanks to its square-format sensor. That's a whole lotta megapixels (though we fear in a number of years we'll look back at our marveling of this and laugh, whilst holding our gigapixel cameras). In fact, it's the highest megapixel camera in China, at the moment.
Photographer Christopher Domakis has photographed both sides of the urban coin in China. Through two unrelated photo series, Hutong and Microcosm, he has managed to juxtapose the quiet closeness of the narrow Hutong alley neighborhoods of Beijing with the hustle and bustle of the rapidly growing urban developments in many of China's biggest cities.
Rumors of a high-megapixel Canon DSLR have been floating around for quite some time now, but the photo above might be the first time a photograph of the actual camera has leaked onto the Web.
Yesterday was the 24th anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square -- an event that has been immortalized in history by AP photographer Jeff Widener’s famous “Tank Man” photo we shared earlier today. What you may not know is that, in China, the government still does everything it can to keep the event shrouded in mystery, pretending it never happened.
The Internet, however, is having none of it, as memes depicting the tank man photo in ways that might avoid censorship nets spring up all over the place. One of the most viral is the photo you see above.
A neat way to capture the passage of time is to photograph one scene multiple times throughout a day, slice up the resulting photos, and then combine them into a single composite image showing all the different hours as slices. In the past we've shown examples of this technique done in cities and with sunsets.
Chinese photographer Wei Yao of Reuters used this same concept, but instead of shooting photos over a number of hours, his image spans days. Instead of focusing on the passage of time, his image highlights Beijing's serious pollution problem.
In 2007, Lindsay Scallan of Newnan, Georgia took her camera -- complete with underwater housing -- on a trip to Hawaii. It was on that trip, during a nighttime scuba dive in Kaanapali, that Scallan lost her camera to the deep blue. Understandably, she didn't expect she would ever see it again.
But as we've seen in the past, the rule is "never say never" when it comes to finding long-lost photographs. Six years later, the Canon Powershot washed up 6,200 miles away on the beaches of Taiwan where a China Airlines employee picked it up, and began searching for the owner.
For his most recent project, French photography collector and editor Thomas Sauvin has been spending his time digging though illegal silver recycling centers in Beijing. He's doing this because buried within piles of X-Rays and CD-ROMs are hidden millions of discarded film negatives that Sauvin is intent on preserving.
Tom Carter may have seen more of China, its lands, and its people than any other Westerner on record. The American photographer spent two years backpacking across all 33 provinces of China, traveling over 35,000 miles, seeing 56 different cultures, and shooting over 10,000 portraits of the people he met.
Over the last couple of months, a political skirmish between Japan and China over the ownership of a set of islands has caused anti-Japanese protests all across China, affecting many of the Japanese manufacturing facilities. Some companies -- most notably Panasonic and Canon -- were forced to shut down operations and evacuate their premises as a result of the violent protests. Things got so bad that Chinese photographers had to camouflage their Japanese-brand cameras with red tape and Chinese flags.
Despite the political atmosphere in the world's most populous nation, Canon has China squarely in its sights as it plans its next moves for international expansion.
Back in October, we shared some photos taken inside a small Chinese studio lighting maker named NiceFoto. Now we have a look at what operations look like at a much larger manufacturer: Godox. It's reportedly the second largest studio lighting producer in all of China.
Product photos for clothing lines typically feature generic, attractive models, since the point of the images is to make the clothes accessible and desirable to consumers. Yuekou, an online clothing store in China, has found great success by using a different approach: its photos for teen girl outfits feature a 72-year-old man.
Want to see how studio lighting equipment is made? David Selby of Lighting Rumors was recently invited to tour the Shenzhen factory of a Chinese lighting company called NiceFoto, which sells gear both under its own brand name and to various international distributors under different marques. He snapped a number of photographs showing various workspaces where equipment is assembled.
Photographer Michael Wolf began his career as a photojournalist in Hong Kong working for a German magazine. In the early 2000s, he turned to non-editorial photography with an unusual project called Bastard Chairs. Wolf had noticed that all over China, there were makeshift chairs that had been put together using whatever materials the owners could get their hands on. He began documenting these strange pieces of furniture, showing the creative ideas people in China had for sitting down.
Over the past month, there have been violent anti-Japanese protests across China over disputed islands between the two nations. Japanese businesses and manufacturing plants have been besieged, leading companies like Canon and Panasonic to suspend their operations and evacuate their premises.
In the midst of all this chaos, a tricky problem presents itself: how does a Chinese photographer go about documenting the rioting? As you know, Japan is the motherland of most major digital camera companies, while China doesn't have much of a role in this industry besides manufacturing the cameras at the request of those corporations. The answer: flags and tape.
Earlier this year, we featured a project by photographer Sannah Kvist that showed portraits of urban young people posing next to a pile of all their worldly possessions. Jiadang (Family Stuff) by Chinese photographer Huang Qingjun is similar in concept, but very different in content. He has spent nearly a decade traveling around to various rural communities in China, asking families to take everything they owned and carefully arrange them outdoors for a picture.
There's a huge wave of anti-Japanese sentiment sweeping across China, with violent protests popping up all over the country in response to the ongoing dispute over islands in the East China Sea. Amidst the public anger, Japanese brands are taking a hit... literally.