experiment

Shooting 10 Powerful Street Photos in One Ugly Location

When I started out in photography, I always thought: if I could shoot in New York City, Tokyo, Paris or Amsterdam, my street photos would be much better... But it turns out that it's all about your imagination, creativity, and patience.

This Experiment Shows How Negative Thoughts Can Impact Your Photos

As a photographer you're probably quite a creative person, and no doubt you are therefore critical of your own work. The 'inner critic' is that voice in your head, badgering you and questioning your decisions behind the camera. Canon Australia conducted an experiment to show the effect your inner critic can have when you allow it to take hold.

How an $80 1000mm Lens Performs on a $1,400 Sony a6500 Camera

Let's say you spent pretty much all of your camera budget on a shiny new $1,400 Sony a6500 mirrorless camera, yet you want a super telephoto lens for getting way up close to subjects. Here's a thrifty option you could consider: buy a cheapo 500mm lens, Sony adapter, and 2x teleconverter for just $80.

Shooting a 35-Year-Old Roll of Kodak Film

What do you do when you find a roll of film that expired 34 years ago? Shoot with it, of course! Colin Wirth of This Does Not Compute shares the results of a recent experiment in this 8-minute video in which he shoots with some ancient Kodak Plus-X black and white film.

I Got a Free Haircut Using My Camera

My name is Trey Cockrum, I am a wedding and portrait photographer based in Indiana. This is the story of how I recently traded my photography for a haircut.

Lensbaby Edge 50 Optic: This Is Not A Review

Before I bought the Edge 50 optic earlier this year I did a bit of online searching to find out how people were using it, what their thoughts were and what sort of images they were creating with it. I found a few “proper” reviews but struggled to find any “this is what I’m doing and how I’m feeling about it” sort of posts.

I Spent Two Years Botting on Instagram — Here’s What I Learned

In the world of Instagram, there is a practice known as botting -- and I hate it. For the uninitiated, botting is the process of tying your Instagram account to a wide variety of automation software, which charge users small sums of money to juice their profile. At the heart of it, it’s a pay-to-play relationship where you’re paying money to grow your following on Instagram.

Kodak Pranks Londoners, Pretends to Erase Their Phones and Photos

Kodak Moments UK pulled a cringe-worthy prank on a few Londoners recently. They attracted unsuspecting strangers to their display under the guise of a "custom-built, super-fast phone charger," and then promptly 'wiped' all of the data off of their smartphones... oops.

Using Dichroic Materials for Art Photo Shoots

I came across dichroic film years ago while researching materials for an art lighting business, Lightlink Lighting. The color changing properties of this material was so inspiring I ended up creating new lighting designs based on it.

A Selfie Stick for a 4×5″ Camera

When the selfie-stick craze began happening a couple of years ago, photographer and educator Russell Squires decided that he wanted to go beyond using "a lightweight flimsy stick" and a smartphone, so he decided to try shooting selfies with his 4x5" large format camera.

Creating a Color Street Photo Using Only Black-and-White Film

My name is Marius Hanzak, and I'm an experimental photography student currently studying at the Cleveland College of Art and Design in the UK. For one of my recent projects, titled RGB Church Street, I experimented with making color photos using black and white film.

Using Vintage Nikon Super-Telephoto Lenses on a Sony NEX-5

A rare Nikon 1200mm f/11 lens recently appeared on eBay. The earliest Nikon non-refractive long lenses were the Nikkor-Q 400mm f/4.5, Nikkor-P 600mm f/5.6, Nikkor-P 800mm f/8, and Nikkor-P 1200mm f/11. All of them were on the market around 1964 and withdrawn in the mid-1970. These lenses are actually lens heads and require a focus unit to be functional.

4K with a Lumia 950 Smartphone… and Nikon Lenses

Swedish photographer Mattias Burling recently decided to experiment with shooting 4K video with his Microsoft Lumia 950 smartphone... through his collection of Nikon SLR lenses. Using an old 35mm adapter, Burling put together a rig that lets him shoot with a Nikkor 25mm f/1.4, 50mm f/1.4, and 17-35mm f/2.8.

"This was a fun experiment taking advantage of the 4K video in the Lumia 950 and its awesome close focus distance," Burling says. "I used old Nikon glass and an old s35 adapter from the 'DV Days'."

Here’s What the GrammyCam Saw at the Grammys (Spoiler: It’s Disappointing)

Last week, we shared how this year's Grammy Awards would be the first to feature footage captured with the GrammyCam, a special Grammy trophy that has a built-in GoPro camera in its base. Well, the Grammys were last night, and the world's first GrammyCam videos are now available for the world to see.

The idea was interesting, but the results are far from spectacular.

Here’s a Crazy Comparison Between RAW and JPEG

When starting out in photography, a lot of beginners are confused about RAW and JPEG formats while shooting. There are plenty of explanations out there, but with us being photographers, it's easier for us to comprehend a visual reference.

I've had the option of shooting RAW since my Canon 20D over 10 years ago and even though I've never shot JPEG since then, I never actually compared a RAW with JPEG to see the data I would've been losing if I let the camera compress the files itself.

I Mounted an Anamorphic Projector Lens to My DSLR

I've recently become obsessed with the idea of shooting (something close to) true, 2.35:1 ratio CinemaScope anamorphic on my DSLR camera. This is pretty easily done if you can spend $1,000+ on an anamorphic lens made specifically for a DSLR camera... but I don't have that kind of cash, so I went another route.

After some research, I found that other DIY filmmakers are re-purposing old film projection lens, typically used in movie theaters, to "correct" the compressed anamorphic image into what we see on the screen as 2.35:1 CinemaScope.

Canon’s Latest Creative Experiment is… Weird

"The Lab" is a series of 6 creative experiments being conducted on photographers by Canon Australia. Early efforts were interesting: 6 photographers were asked to shoot portraits of the same subject while given different backstories, and then another 6 were asked to shoot photos of the same objects with no repeats.

Shooting with a 136-Year-Old Lens from 1880

For his latest Weird Lens Challenge experiment, French photographer Mathieu Stern found a 136-year-old lens and mounted it to his Sony a7 II mirrorless camera to see what the results would look like. You can see his test footage in the short video above.

How Memorable Are TIME’s Top 10 Photos of 2015… to a Computer?

The braniacs at MIT have created an algorithm to determine the “memorability” of a photograph. The deep learning-based technology “learned” what makes a photo memorable by evaluating the rankings from 5,000 human volunteers, and even indicates which portions of an image it considers to be memorable with a heatmap depiction. The algorithm is allegedly as good as a human in determining what makes a memorable photograph.

But ranking a photo based purely on aesthetics isn’t necessarily how humans associate photographs. Context matters. Where was I? What was I doing? What is this photo representative of? I decided to test the algorithm against TIME magazine’s top 10 photos of 2015.