Hey everyone! I’m really excited to share a personal story with you all. This past weekend I asked my partner to marry me. After weeks of planning, the time had come to decide how I was going to capture the moment.

Unfortunately some of my colleague photographers were unavailable and so the thought of doing it myself crossed my mind. I felt ready for the challenge: photographing my own proposal! (As if it wasn’t enough to plan for the actual proposal, I now had to plan on how to capture it.)
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Want to experience what it’s like to shoot a live concert? Montreal, Canada-based concert photographer Pierre Bourgault wants to show you. When he recently had the opportunity to photograph a performance by the band Dead To Me, Bourgault decided to strap a Gopro camera to the top of his DSLR. The video above is what resulted.
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The announcement of the PhaseOne IQ2 series introduced a clear functionality based stratification of the IQ line up of digital backs. The PhaseOne IQ280 still reigns supreme providing the highest resolution single capture of the bunch. The bigger and more interesting changes however, are within the IQ260 “series” of backs. Now there are two different versions of a 60MP full-frame medium format digital sensor; both of these two versions offer their own vastly different “skill sets” for different types of photography.
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Lately I’ve been looking for ways to photograph people besides just my friends and family. I was super inspired after reading photographer Peter Waterman’s account of photographing 80 people in 1 day. I’m a hobbyist just looking to improve my skills and have fun. I like to get the best bang for the buck with my equipment purchases and keep my gear budget contained.

I checked my town’s local event website and noticed there was a 10K run scheduled for the upcoming weekend. I had never shot a sporting event before; I usually just shoot portraits and travel. The race map showed the course went right by my house so I had a perfect opportunity to take some pictures.
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Here’s a question I get asked about 15 times a week: “How can I get the dust out of my lens?” The right answer is you don’t. All lenses have dust in them and it doesn’t affect the images at all 99% of the time. Even if you clean it all out, it will be back after you use the lens a few times.

There are occasionally times that large dust specs very near the rear element are visible in an image, though. There also is the very real issue of resale value; a dusty lens tends to bring a lower price than one without much dust. The right answer in these cases is “send it in for factory service, they’ll disassemble it and clean it.” Doing it yourself is risky.
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Earlier this week, Sony announced its new Xperia ZR waterproof smartphone that can double as an everyday underwater camera. After we reported on the story, we were contacted by reader Jeffery Richt, who shot the marketing photographs for Sony. The video above is a behind-the-scenes video showing how the underwater shoot went down.
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A trendy project in the photo world these days is collecting portraits of people of different ages. Photographers have photographed people of ages 0 through 100 based on location and gender, and some are doing the same project with short video portraits.

Seattle, Washington-based portrait photographer Chamonix Thurston-Rattue recently decided to start her own age collection project titled “100 Years of Beauty.” Her goal is to create a portrait of a woman for each age between 0 and 100.
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Patriots Day. This Massachusetts holiday celebrates the battles of Lexington and Concord, which were the first battles of the American Revolutionary War in 1775. The day always begins with battle re-enactments. Then the Red Sox play an 11AM game, and during and after the game there is the running of the Boston Marathon, a race that first ran in 1897.
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The National Socialist Movement held their 2013 national convention in Atlanta, Georgia, protesting undocumented immigration and contemporary political policies. The NSM boasts of being the nation’s largest “white civil rights groups” and aligns itself with other like-minded individuals across the nation. Spanning across the majority of the 50 states, the NSM retains its presence through regional and local leaders.

Here’s a look at the convention and how I documented it through photographs earlier this year.
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You know those iconic minimalist product photos for Apple gadgets? Have you ever wondered about how they’re shot and who shoots them?

One of the people behind the photos is San Francisco-based photographer Peter Belanger. The video above is a behind-the-scenes look into how Belanger photographed the iPhone 3GS for a 2009 issue of Macworld magazine.
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