Christian Spencer became well-known for his stunning photos of hummingbirds that show rainbows in their wings, it's a specialized technique of shooting the amazing birds, one which Spencer pioneered.
After more than a decade of work by over 2,000 scientists from 300 institutes around the world, the European Space Agency (ESA) is mere hours away from launching its new space probe, Euclid, from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Researchers from the Université de Genève (UNIGE) in Switzerland have developed a novel method for testing Euler's and Einstein's famous theories for the accelerating expansion of the universe and the nature of dark matter.
Most digital cameras from the 2000s and 2010s are equipped with an optical element called an optical low-pass filter (OLPF), also known as an anti-aliasing (AA) or blur filter. As the name "filter" suggests, this optical element filters out some information coming from the imaged scene.
In recent years, some lens designers have updated their lenses with new lens coatings. For instance, Pentax's newest limited lenses feature an existing optical design with only a few improvements, including a better lens coating.
Think you know the inverse-square law? How much of a "law" is it actually in the practice of photography? We are taught that the inverse-square law is the holy grail of understanding the laws of light. Some condense all the wonderful knowledge about light concepts to the inverse square law only. In this article, I want to invite you to take a step back and see how the inverse square law is wrong. Sometimes.
Reflections are the sole reason we’re able to see objects. An object that absorbs 100% of the light is invisible. Fortunately, we don’t encounter these in our daily lives. Any lighting-conscious photographer would be aware of the fact that their light positioning directly influences reflection and hence the viewer experience.
What is light? This perhaps may be the most simple question with the most complex answer in photography. Light enables us to see, create, and most importantly convey meaning through our art. Light also gives us the oxygen we breathe (through plant photosynthesis).
The International System of Quantities defines seven base quantities in physics: length, mass, time, electric current, thermodynamic temperature, amount of substance, and luminous intensity. For his project Base Quantities, photographer Greg White set out to shoot 7 photos representing these 7 fundamental quantities.
An international team of scientists has developed an experimental camera system that can simultaneously capture five dimensions of information from a single snapshot. The concept works by combining two types of sensors together to gather a wealth of information all at the same time.
Photographs are omnipresent in our daily lives. From social media and advertising to family photos hanging on your wall. Images are used for identification and as evidence, as well as informing us at a cultural level about who we are.
Photographer Gavin Hoey recently produced a video for Adorama TV that tackles a critically important subject for photographers: light fall off. Mathematically captured by the so-called Inverse Square Law, it's vital that photographers understand this property of light, especially when working with strobes.
It's common knowledge that most lenses are at their best (i.e. sharpest) between f/5.6 and f/8, depending on the lens. But why is that? Why does stopping down further actually make the image softer? This is what YouTuber ZY Productions explains in the video above.
Photographer Matt Irwin recently took to his YouTube channel to share a theory—or maybe it's just a glimmer of hope—about Nikon's plans for the mirrorless Z mount. That theory is that Nikon wants to turn the Z-Mount into an all-encompassing system that includes APS-C, full-frame, and medium format cameras.
Engineer and YouTuber Ben Krasnow over at Applied Science has put together a fascinating little optical demonstration that explains the physics behind 'hypercentric' optics and how they allow you to see around and behind objects. He even shows you how to build your own.
Since I first started camera scanning, I've always advocated using the highest resolution camera you can get ahold of. (My first camera scans were with the 1.3-megapixel Nikon E2n, so it's been a long road.) That advice is changing.
Scientists have unveiled the first photograph ever captured of quantum entanglement, the physical phenomenon in which two or more "entangled" particles are connected via their quantum states, even across vast distances.
When you look through your viewfinder and things seem a little bit blurry or lacking definition, it's probably because you are using an “el cheapo” lens. So you read reviews and buy a much more expensive lens, and what do you do next?
Here's a 6-minute video by photographer Kelly Hofer of Theory of Curiosity on Background Oriented Schlieren (BOS), a technique that lets you shoot photos and videos of heat using an ordinary camera and Photoshop.
It’s September, which means another generation of Apple iPhones. This year, the iPhone XS (pronounced “ten ess”) adds a slightly larger sensor plus significantly more computing power via the A12 Bionic Chip to enhance the phone’s image signal processing.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and when it comes to “sunbursts” in photos – those points of light with rays streaking out of them – people often have polarizing views. Optical diffraction is the physical property that causes this effect. The appearance of sunbursts is more technically described as “diffraction spikes,” and it’s caused by the bending (sometimes referred to as spreading) of light around an object like the edges of your camera’s aperture.
Here's a 15-minute video by Filmmaker IQ about exactly what forced perspective is and how it works in photography.
Here's a 2.5-minute video recorded by a GoPro Session action camera that was given a trip through an electron beam irradiator.
Have you ever wondered what a gale-force sneeze would look like if you could see air currents, temperature gradients, and differences in pressure and composition of the air? Or, less disgustingly, the strike of a match? This fascinating 6-minute video demonstrates Schlieren photography, which makes the invisible visible.
On April 26th, NASA's Cassini spacecraft took its long-awaited first dive in between Saturn's rings, bringing it closer to the planet than ever before. And if you were on the spacecraft looking at Saturn's north pole with your own eyes as it flew by, this is what you would have seen.
You would think the physics of lenses and light are pretty set in stone—and yet, somehow, people still get really twisted around when it comes to things like crop factor, depth of field, and speed boosters. Hoping to end (or at least quiet) this debate, photographer Jimmi Kai created this very informative, easy-to-understand video.
A common rule of thumb to figure out your maximum shutter speed for sharp stars at night is to divide 500 by your focal length. Sometimes it's called the 600 Rule or the 400 Rule or several other numbers that can be used depending on your sensor size. Unfortunately, it's a a very inaccurate rule today.
There is a lot of misunderstanding and confusion on the subjects of depth of field, the difference between full-frame and crop sensors, and the ‘crop factor.’
CMYK—which stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (or Black)—is the color model used in most printing. It's called a subtractive color model, and if you don't understand what that means or how it works, this brilliant little demo should help.
The above photo is taken at 28mm at f/11 on an ancient Minolta 28-85mm lens, the focus was set to about 2.5 meters and according to the depth of field scales everything should be in focus... but it isn’t.
While embedded with troops in Afghanistan in the late 2000s, war photographer and writer Michael Yon captured numerous photos of the sparkling halo that can appear when a helicopter's rotors hit sand and dust. Upon finding that the particular phenomenon didn't have a name, Yon gave it one that honors two fallen soldiers: the Kopp-Etchells Effect.
Here’s a great 13-minute video in which John Hess of Filmmaker IQ teaches …
Every day about 200 million photographs get uploaded to Facebook. That’s almost double the number of all the books that have ever been published in human history. And that’s just Facebook, I’m not even mentioning Instagram, Snapchat, or just the photos everybody takes and doesn’t even post online.
While taking all those pictures, most people don’t really think about what they’re actually doing, or how the process works. But if they did think about it, I guess their reasoning for that process would be somewhat like this...
A team of researchers at Harvard are trying to revolutionize the world of optical lenses. Instead of traditional curved lenses that suffer from various optical flaws, they are working on a completely flat and ultra-thin lens that overcomes age-old problems and pushes optical quality to the limits of the laws of nature.
Lovers of light painting photography, large format photography, symmetry and physics each have a distinct reason to enjoy photographer Paul Wainwright's Pendulum Project.
Created in the pitch blackness of his barn at night, Wainwright shoots these beautiful light paintings with the help of a massive Blackburn pendulum he built himself and a large format camera packing 4x5 sheet film.
If the term "inverse square law of light" immediately sets you to hyperventilating as flashbacks of college physics begin playing in your mind's eye, take a few breaths into that paper bag, calm down, and click play on the video above.
In 6 minutes, Karl Taylor will explain this law and how it affects you specifically as a photographer without overwhelming you in the process.
Lytro came into the photography world not only to create a novelty product, but to fundamentally change how we approach image capture. Because despite light field photography being around for over a century, it’s only with the latest technology that the company is able to exploit what it is a camera is truly capable of doing.
We recently spoke with Lytro about its upcoming Illum camera a bit, diving into the technology behind the specs and revealing how Lytro's approach is allowing the company to not only step, but leap into the future.
Back in April, we shared the first of cinematographer Mark Vargo's informative series of videos on different photographic concepts. The videos are meant to educate photographers and videographers alike on these concepts so that they might "unleash their creative potential."
The first video was on the types and uses of light meters, and now Vargo has finally released the second video in the series, dubbed "Let There Be Light."
At a public lecture in Pittsburgh in 1934, four hundred lucky students were privy to a lecture by Albert Einstein, in which the great man mathematically derived his famous mass-energy equivalence equation: E=mc2. What you see above is a photo from that lecture, and what is thought to be the only surviving photo that shows Einstein working on that derivation.
Caleb Charland is a Maine-based photographer who combines a love of scientific experiments and photographs into wonderful and amazing photographs.