Here's a 5-minute video in which photographer Jon Legge shows how you can put together a tabletop studio for well-lit product photos. It'll cost you just 10 to 15 minutes and about £25 (~$40) in materials.
Starting in late 2014, COOPH (The Cooperative of Photography) began selling multi-functional clothing items designed with photographers in mind. One of the products is the Gray Chart Cap, a series of caps that have gray undersides that help with light metering.
There are a number of products out there, from grid patterns to cute creatures, that are designed to make babies look at your camera while you're photographing them. Pooch Selfie is that same idea, except designed for dogs.
The product, which just hit Kickstarter, is a simple plastic accessory that lets you attach a tennis ball to the top of your smartphone, making it much easier to attract the attention of man's best friend.
Remember that strange vacuum cleaner lens we featured last year? A new version has been unveiled, and this one sucks even more than the original.
The Fujin Mark II looks like a Canon prime lens, but it's actually a small vacuum cleaner that's designed to remove dust and other particles from inside your DSLR.
Here's your "weird photo product o' the day": the cereal brand Cinnamon Toast Crunch has announced a new product called the Selfie Spoon. It's a selfie stick with a spoon for a handle that's designed to help you take pictures of yourself while eating food (and especially cereal).
If you've been looking for a way to download, organize, edit, and share your photos and videos on the go without having to use a laptop, GNARBOX is a new product you should look into. It's a new mobile solution that aims to replace your bulky laptop by putting everything you need inside a small, durable device and a smartphone app.
I just installed an ANKR in my camera bag. Over the past 10 years I’ve had this reoccurring dream about my camera gear and my backpack being stolen. I’ve actually had two cameras stolen over the years, unfortunately.
Some lenses have tabs on their focus rings that allow photographers to precisely control focus with a push or pull of their finger. For those that don't, TAAB is here to help. It's a universal tab that can be used on most lenses, giving photographers greater manual focus control than simple focus rings.
Memory Clock is an interesting new concept design that combines the world of clocks with the world of digital photo frames. It's a clock that helps you relive memories by showing you photos from the past.
If you're already turned off by the idea of ordinary selfie sticks, you might not want to read on. The "Selfie Arm" is a new selfie stick design that adds an arm to your self-portraits, making them look like photos of you taken by someone who loves you.
This is quite a bit out in left field, but check out this pasta limiter that's currently one of the hot new releases over on Amazon. It's essentially an aperture that's designed for pasta rather than light.
If you want photobooth-style prints of your pics, one way to get them is through Social Print Studio's Photostrips printing service. If you want to super-size your order, there's now an option for that too. The company has announced a new product called Giant Photostrips. It allows you to turn your photos into giant photobooth-style strips.
London-based interdisciplinary photographer Sean Tucker has created a helpful three-part video tutorial that teaches the basics of shooting larger products in a studio in front of a white background.
Wilson Tse and Craig Hansen of British Columbia want to make it easier for photographers to switch their cameras between accessories such as straps and tripods. The duo has created a new universal camera mount system called the Monkey Latch that aims to tackle this issue.
It's a quick release system that lets you move your camera from one accessory to another in just seconds with one click.
Competition in the DSLR attachment space is heating up. Joining the likes of TriggerTrap and CASE Remote is a new product called CamsFormer, a single DSLR attachment that adds wireless camera control, time-lapse, high speed triggering, and motorized pan/tilt/zoom.
Want to decorate your wall with a collage of your photos, but don't want to spend the time, energy, and money required to make it happen? CollageMo can help. It's an app that does for photo collages what Mosaic does for photo books.
As more and more cameras make their way into smartcamera territory, there are countless DSLRs that could very easily get left in the dust.
But that won’t be the case if Lumera Labs has its way, thanks to Lumera, a clever little device that connects your DSLR to your phone to give it connectivity and better features.
As much as wireless technology has all but taken over, there are still times when wires are unavoidable. And when it comes time to tape those cords down, you’re stuck wrangling them up, straightening them, initially securing them, then finally overlaying the tape.
The GaffGun is here to make that process approximately 29x faster – at least according to one of their demonstrations.
Photographer Jason D. Page has been capturing light painting photography for years, and over the past 3 years he has also been working on a new project for the light painting community. It's called Light Painting Brushes.
Just launched today, Light Painting Brushes is a set of light tools that aims to give lightpainters a standard set of brushes to "paint" with.
The FlashDisc by Fstoppers is a portable softbox that can fit into your pocket when its not in use, thanks to a design that allows it to fold up in a manner similar to portable light reflectors. It allows photographers to achieve soft directional light in situations where larger softboxes are impractical.
Canon's 100D (aka SL1) is the world's smallest and lightest DSLR, and one that's marketed heavily towards women. In what is perhaps another bid to appeal to the female demographic, Canon UK is launching a limited edition camera bag that's designed specifically for the Canon 100D White.
Since its launch in October of 2010, Instagram has inspired many a product meant to help you print, use and interact with the photos you take on the service. And one of the newer, cooler Instagram-related products we recently ran across is Cubee: an illuminating Instagram photo cube.
Looking for a fashionable way to always have a Lightning or MicroUSB charging cable at hand? Look no further than this sleek tassel -- it's actually a compact charging cable in disguise!
Image stabilization is a tricky business. There are a plethora of ways to do it: optical image stabilization, algorithmic stabilization and, more recently, hybrid options that combine the best of analogue and digital input.
A great example is Instagram’s new Hyperlapse app, which gathers data from the accelerometer built into your iPhone and uses that data to digitally correct for camera shake and give you smooth footage.
And now, an upcoming product called SteadXP wants to do the same thing for your DSLR or GoPro.
As light painting photography is becoming more popular and common, photographers are coming up with better and better ways of bringing the technique to events. The Lightomatic is a fancy solution by Dazler, a collective of light painters based out of Lyon, France.
From the outside it looks like your average high-end photo booth, but it's one that allows users to make a creative light painting self-portrait print on the spot.
If you’re looking for a dead-simple product shot setup that will yield impressive results, this two minute tutorial is just what you’re needing.
Want a blurry background for your portraits on-demand, whether or not you're using a fast lens? Or maybe you are using a fast portrait lens, but you want to shoot with it stopped down to the sharpest possible aperture without sacrificing that beautiful bokeh you're going for.
Well now you can now do that without having to put serious distance between your background and subject. Just pop up one of Lastolite's new Out of Focus Backgrounds.
ONA products are best known for their fashion-savvy looks and impressive build quality, but their latest product takes it one step further by doing some good while looking good. It’s called the Sahel, and it's the result of a partnership between ONE and charity: water that will net the charity 'part' of the proceeds.
Besides the dreaded vertical video, the worst thing about capturing video on a smartphone is camera shake, which leaves your video looking rather jerky and chaotic at times. Most stabilization rigs are built with much larger cameras in mind, but ADPLUS Co. is looking to change that with their ‘ultra-small’ Elephant Steady stabilizer for the iPhone.
Light-painting started out as a very DIY genre of photography. Using flashlights, steel wool, sparks, LEDs, rope lights and many amalgamations of all of the above, photographers have created some interesting contraptions to spice up their work.
And now, well-known Montreal-base light painter Patrick Rochon (who we've featured a number of times) has set out to create a contraption of his very own.
When it comes to product photography, the smallest changes in lighting and setup can completely alter the final image, for better or worse. This applies doubly to objects like perfume bottles where you have both transparent and reflective surfaces to deal with.
Here to help with a rather simple fix for making sure photographing these products stays as hassle-free and gorgeous as possible is photographer Andrew Boey, who gives us a rundown on how to make use of a simple piece of 'hybrid' gear to get "clinique" quality product shots.
Last week we shared a video that got both incredibly popular and controversial. It was put together by Photigy's Alex Koloskov, and showed how he created nearly-identical product shots of a glass of whisky using an iPhone and a Hasselblad.
Now he's back to answer some of the concerns that readers brought up after watching that video, specifically regarding how much post-processing went into the image and if it would be printable on the large scale.
We all know that almost any smartphone nowadays can hold its own against a proper camera when given to a real photographer with the proper setup. But is it possible for a smartphone to go head-to-head with the likes of a Hasselblad?
When it comes to taking product shots of glossy items, one of the most difficult aspects is getting the correct amount of diffusion when using softboxes. When the incorrect amount of diffusion is applied (or the right amount is applied incorrectly) this can lead to harsh reflections and minimal gradients, which isn't usually the look you're trying to achieve.
Light painting is something that takes a lot of time and patience. Even after many trial and error attempts, nailing the exact look you're going for can be a challenge. pixelstick is a crazy new tool that aims to change all that, making mind-blowing light paintings something even artistically challenged photographers can create.
A basic description of it is: it's a stick-like device that lets you print digital images into long exposure photos.
Enfojer is a new darkroom kit that mixes age-old analog photography processes with digital smartphone photography. It's a simple and portable photographic enlarger that's designed specifically to turn your smartphone photographs into physical prints created with chemicals.
When I first heard of the CamRanger in October of 2012 in New York City at PhotoPlus Expo I was immediately intrigued.
I don’t actually own a laptop, so tethering to an iPad tablet has been a long awaited process with trial and error. My first experience was with the Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card; a memory card you place in your camera, the card transmits a wireless signal and supposedly you connect to that signal source, boom, you're tethered. Except it didn’t really work.
Are you sick and tired of switching between a video LED light and flash? Folks, it just may be that LightRight is the product for you.
Designed by ColorRight (a family owned business that specializes in lighting for photographers and videographers), LightRight is the LED panel and flash diffuser combo you've potentially waited for you're entire life. It's not out yet, but there's an Indiegogo campaign going on right now to get this thing on sale near you.
Stefaan duPont and his girlfriend set out to travel the world for a year in March 2012, taking their cameras with them and leaving their careers as designers behind. That year served only to intensify duPont's love of photography, and when he returned, he mixed that love with another of his passions: taking stuff apart.
What resulted was a series of one-of-a-kind vintage camera lens bracelets created using old aperture and focus rings -- first made as gifts for family and friends, and now available to purchase.
If you're the type of person who prefers umbrellas to rain ponchos, you might prefer the Brolly rain umbrella to rain covers when using your camera in wet weather. It features a special finger hole grip handle that frees up the fingers that would otherwise be clutching the umbrella, allowing you to use your cameras more naturally without getting wet.