There are many reason high-quality lenses cost as much as they do (and in some cases that is quite a lot), and one of them is that high-end lenses use many specially-designed elements that are perfectly-positioned to counteract aberrations and distortions.
It's time like these that hashtags like #facepalm were invented for. Thanks to a reader, we recently stumbled across a "Wedding Photographer Wanted" ad on Craigslist that we sincerely hope is fake. Then again, given previous experience, it's probably not.
With Google+ constantly working on making things better for photographers -- most recently by incorporating better RAW-to-JPEG conversion -- the other social networks are trying to do their part to entice the photo community as well. For Twitter, that means revamping embedded tweets so that photos are more prominent.
It wouldn't be the weekend without a little bit of time-lapse inspiration. So as you're getting ready to enjoy another Sunday packed with football and fun, check out this epic NYC time-lapse and hyperlapse compilation put together by the guys over at The Seventh Movement.
I suppose we all owe a small cultural debt to this anonymous older lady at a recent Colorado Rockies game. Thanks to her, we now know what the exact opposite of a photobomb looks like.
It's been 10 months since Toshiba was said to have been developing a tiny camera module that would bring Lytro-style refocusing to smartphones and tablets, but the company only just announced something official.
We've seen a few interesting twists on the typical photo booth, from the funny and popular slow-motion booth to the Instagram-inspired DIY version. The Thermobooth is yet another take on the old classic, and the twist here is that it won't take your picture until you and the other people in the frame touch.
Some would say that the Olympus accounting scandal is officially over, insofar as jail sentences (or, rather, the lack thereof) have been doled out by the Japanese justice system. Even the company's stock has rebounded and is currently sitting about 25% higher than it was before the dive it took when the company's seedy business dealings came to light.
Here's a whimsical way to start off your weekend. In a followup to a similar video he created a couple of years ago, Peter Simon (better known as Petey Boy) has put together a stop motion film in which his willing model is treated to all manner of hairdo, beard and mustache combinations courtesy of a stylus pen.
Before today, if you were to ask me who would win in a fight, an eagle or a deer, I would probably have bet on the deer given the obvious size advantage. But recently released shots from a wildlife camera set up in a remote corner of Siberia show how wrong I would be.
British photographer Jason Sheldon has won a settlement of £20,000 (about $32,300 US) over a stolen image of his (seen above), after initially being offered less than one percent of that.
Researchers at the University of California-San Diego are fine-tuning some new tiny camera technology that could dramatically boost the detail and field of view of smartphone cameras. Joseph Ford, a professor in the university's Jacob School of Engineering, describes the system in a paper to be presented next week at the Optical Society of America's annual meeting.
Each year, the WestLicht Photographica auction house puts some incredible historic cameras on the block and lets us mere mortals "oh" and "ah" at them before some collector with deep pockets plunks down hundreds of thousands of dollars to take them home (where they will, of course, be used daily right?...).
So far, the title of world's smallest interchangeable lens camera fell (for the most part) to the cameras in the Pentax Q-series -- starting with the Q, then the Q10 and finally the most recent Q7. But that title won't be held by Pentax (or is it RICOH?) for much longer. If rumors are to be believed, October will see the release of the Panasonic GM1, which will claim the title for itself.
Here's a DIY project for infrared photography enthusiasts who have a few hundred dollars and some time to spend this weekend. Instead of taking the typical routes when it comes to taking IR photos -- i.e. using an IR lens filter or making the magic happen in post -- why not DIY a dedicated IR camera of your own?
Wedding photography can be a rough business. And although the photographers have plenty to worry about (i.e. irate ministers and getting your gear stolen), clients would do well to be careful too, lest they get duped by con artists like New Jersey's Michael De Rubeis.
Few people without PhDs ever set foot inside CERN's (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) lab in Geneva, Switzerland, home of the Large Hadron Collider. And although we have had the opportunity to share some stunning pics of the world's largest particle accelerator before, Google is one-upping us (go figure) by letting you take a virtual stroll with Street View.
We hate to contribute in any small way to the Miley Cyrus hoopla/shenanigans/ruckus (pick your poison) but when an old 35mm SLR that would normally go for about $60 starts bidding at almost $100,000 we can't help but take notice.
Too many of our recent posts regarding photography competitions have been about fraud or controversy, so here's to an international photography competition with some honest to goodness winners that will absolutely blow your mind.
It's hardly news that Google+ is doing its damnedest to secure itself as the social network of choice for the photographic community. And the network's ability to handle full-size RAW uploads, in addition to the easy-to-manage system and powerful new in-browser editing tools, in many ways already makes it a shoo-in for that title.
Now that Eastman Kodak's bankruptcy woes are over and the company has switched its focus primarily to commercial printing, its name probably won't show up here as often as it once did. But that doesn't mean that the Kodak photographic legacy is dead.
Yesterday, our own Alan Steadman shared some advice. He told you to go out and explore, to travel, to see the world and meet new people so that those experiences could inform the stories you tell when you're working behind the camera.
When Eleanor Macnair made her first Play-Doh re-creation of a famous photo, she had no idea how big her little project would hit it. But only a little over a month after launching a Tumblr to display her work, she's gotten more publicity than she could have expected.
One month ago today, the Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera -- a camera that TIME's own Harry McCracken called "the greatest gadget of all time" -- celebrated its 41st birthday. When it came out it was absolutely revolutionary, and to get the word out, Polaroid put together a few ads to show off the instant shooter.
Art directors Andrew MacPhee and Bart Batchelor are intimately familiar with Getty Images' massive stock photo library. Over the course of their careers, they've had to dig through tens of thousands of photos to find ones that would do for whatever campaign they were working on.
In some cases, it seems like the stars align, the sea parts and the universe itself conspires to help you get the perfect shot. That's sort of what happened to photographer Richard Crawley when he attended a Rolling Stones concert in the 1970s and wound up with the most famous shot he would ever take.
Did you know that all of the properties in the Monopoly board game, from Baltic to Boardwalk, were named after real streets in Atlantic City, New Jersey? The names have been used since the 1930s, and a recent fit of curiosity mixed with nostalgia sent Nick Carr of Scouting NY out into the world to photograph these properties in real life.
There are many reasons why "photographer" and "photojournalist" ranked so low on last year's "best and worst jobs" list, but according to a paper released by The Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology at Oxford University, the threat of computerization isn't one of them.
I've met a lot of bitter photographers over the years, especially as high-end cameras have become cheaper and more accessible. They complain that Photographer A gets more work than Photographer B even though Photographer B's work is clearly better; or that Photographer C doesn't get any work even though their work is the best of the three (Side Note: often times the photographer complaining IS Photographer C).
Back in July, Chinese electronics company OPPO confirmed that it was working on an "N-Lens" line of camera-centric devices that would be the "most important flagship series for OPPO going forward." …
Boy, is Kanye West going to feel like a wuss when he hears about this. Turns out that if you're really serious about putting paparazzi in their place, nothing short of homicide will do anymore.
For most photographers, names like "Yosemite" and "Yellowstone" likely conjure impeccably detailed images in the Ansel Adams tradition. San Francisco photographer Ashley Erin Somers, however, thinks there's something to be said for a more low-fi aesthetic.
Although the pixel war probably isn't ending anytime soon, a new sensor technology from Samsung shows how yet another company is focusing on improving the tech instead of stacking the spec sheet.
Sometimes photo projects take days. Sometimes they take months. In photographer and filmmaker Gioacchino Petronicce's case, his project "PICTURES" took years. Three years and 80,000 photos that eventually turned into the elegant cinematic stop motion video you see above.
It's one thing to swipe a photo and slap it on your website, and quite another to enter that stolen image into a high-profile photo contest passed off as your own work.
On June 7th, 2007, a Delta II rocket blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, California, carrying with it the Italian Thales Alenia-Space COSMO-SkyMed Satellite. And while the rocket was careening towards space, Staff Sgt. Eric Thompson (who was moving in the decidedly opposite direction) managed to snap this amazing photo.
High resolution, super slow-motion video is usually reserved for movie studios or individuals with very deep pockets. Once the frame rate capabilities reach into the thousands, the price range often hits the tens of thousands.
This year I was presented with the unexpected opportunity to take a short trip to Afghanistan, and was able to take my camera gear with me. I had wanted to shoot portraits of deployed Marines being, well ... themselves for quite some time now.
In early August, the New York Times ran an article on New York City window cleaner Brent Weingard alongside some footage that showed the man scrubbing and squeegee-ing away at massive apartment windows in the West Village.
Ever wonder why people in old paintings and photographs generally don't have smiles on their faces? We explored this subject a little back in November 2012, and found that reasons may have included technical limitations, oral hygiene, and the seriousness of formal occasions.
Photographer Daniel Shea recently penned an op/ed on sexism in editorial photography that generated an important discussion about women in photography. It is a topic that I've thought about for a while now, especially as it relates to the diversity (or lack thereof) of the photographers who are most often promoted by the industry at large, whether by the photo media or the companies that produce the equipment and gear that we all use.
Hyperlapse photography is an increasingly popular technique in which standard timelapse imagery is brought to life with camera movement. Rather than move the camera with a slider or with a crane, hyperlapse shots move the camera across very long distances.
North Webster, Indiana-based photographer and videographer Justin Fredrick Clark recently shared this awesome behind-the-scenes video showing how he and some other guys at his church built a rotating room for just $350 (granted, they already had access to some pretty serious equipment) for a creative work project.
These days, most photographers spend way more time staring at a computer screen than peering through a viewfinder. Despite this, we sure do spend a lot more talking about lenses and cameras than widescreen monitors. Perhaps that's because editing tends to be the far more tedious part of the job. With a little investment though, you can make those late nights pouring over the day's images just a little bit more comfortable.
Be careful when photographing sculptures for commercial purposes -- you could quickly find yourself on the losing end of a copyright infringement case and being forced to pay a lot of money.
Love photo sharing but wish you could tell more of the story behind each photo as you share it? Shadow Puppet is a new app that's designed to help you do just that. Rather than simply sharing photos by themselves or with text captions, the app lets you share sets of photographs while narrating what the recipient is seeing.
Stock photography heavyweight Getty Images is in some hot water after being sued by a model over the use of her portrait in an HIV-positive advertisement.
I originally saw the National Beard and Mustache Championships in the local news paper in Vegas, where I currently live. I had missed the 2012 Championships by one day and it was only a mile or two from my studio, so I was kicking myself in the ass for the missed opportunity. I tracked down the person responsible for organizing the "The Championships" and he put me in touch with the producer for the event.
Last month, we reported on a rumor that Nikon's upcoming D610 DSLR will simply be a D600 clone that fixes the sensor speck issue that some owners grumbled about a while back. Now, a newly leaked set of camera specs seems to confirm that initial report.
Want to see some mind-blowing research into photography (from the mid-2000s)? Check out the video above about "Dual Photography," a Stanford-developed technique that allows you to virtually swap the locations of a camera and a projector, allowing you to take pictures from the perspective of the light source instead of the camera sensor.
