2013

While finding it hard to hit the bars set by Lamar Odom and Kanye West, celebrities and wannabe famous people continue to pioneer new avenues for abusing photographers.

Mobile messaging service Just.me has released a new update (version 1.2) to their iOS application that brings the wonderful world of selfies and Instagram-like filters to the fingertips of its users.

Want to take better photographs using your mobile phone camera? It helps to know what you are working with. I'll assume you already know the basics for all kinds of photography (composition, exposure, focus and DOF, shutter speed, aperture, et cetera).

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.

In a move roundly criticized by the U.S. State Department, embattled Syrian Pres. Bashat Assad has taken to Instagram to promote jarringly bucolic images of life in the war-torn nation.

Annoyed at people who have a habit of snapping a quick food photo before every meal? There might be a scientific explanation for why some of them do so: scientists have found that that rituals such as snapping a quick food pic may actually help make eating more pleasurable for the eater.

How do us elders separate ourselves from those who only know what it means to upload? Here are 17 tools and toys you’ll immediately recognize if you still remember the heyday of Kodak. Bring on the nostalgia.

Here's a helpful safety tip for shooting action shots in or around water: if you're using your camera in a rough-and-tumbly environment, do your best to keep it at a safe distance from your face. If you don't, your face could end up looking like the one above.

Dominic Holden is the News Editor for the Seattle area newspaper The Stranger, and he was recently threatened with arrest and workplace harassment by some local police officers for standing on a public sidewalk and taking their picture.

I had the opportunity to photograph the newest dormitory on the Florida International University campus a couple of nights ago and I thought I would share a little insight on the process of lighting such a large structure.

Over the past week, we've had the opportunity to share stories that showed both the intersection of camera technology and sports, as well as camera technology and 3D modeling for video games. The video above has a little bit of both.

Canon has just very quietly released a new product that harkens back to the days of the Flip video camera. Like those camcorders, the brand new VIXIA mini is a pocket-sized video camera that gives you a higher-quality option when it comes to recording your daily life in full HD.

Take a look at that stock camera app on your iPhone. Does a fair job, doesn't it? Then SnappyCam Pro 3.0 lands on it and makes you realize how truly slow the stock app takes photos. For your reference, it's about 3-to-6 images per second at full resolution (assuming you're using an iPhone 5).

There are many cloud storage services out there, some offering a decent amount of space for very little in way of cash. Unfortunately, most aren't built with photographers and other visual junkies in mind. You can upload and store most file types, but viewing them is another matter.

Leather messenger bag-style camera bags don't come cheap. A cursory search on B&H Photo will reveal prices that often run in the $300+ range for something with decent storage space. Fortunately, Etsy seller LeftoverStudio offers a hand-crafted, high-quality alternative that will cost you half as much.

We've seen some pretty cool and trippy time-lapses before (the few "lyric lapse" videos we've shared immediately come to mind) but the Borrego Stardance above takes the cake. Mixing massive metal sculptures of dinosaurs, insects, mammoths and more with beautiful star trails and the milky way, the folks at Sunchaser Pictures have created a time-lapse truly worthy of the designation "trippy."

Panasonic has officially announced the GX7, a sleek new high-end mirrorless camera with some features that are being introduced for the first time in a Panasonic mirrorless camera, including in-body image stabilization and a tiltable electronic viewfinder.

The rumor was true -- kinda. Sigma today announced a new Mount Conversion Service for its Global Vision line of lenses that will allow photographers to convert their lens lineups to different mounts if they ever decide to change camera brands (e.g. Canon to Nikon and vice versa).

Norwegian photographer Arvid Strømnes learned a lesson earlier this week about why you shouldn't get too close to wild animals while trying to capture them on camera.

Dove Canada is getting serious about promoting Real Beauty by going after art directors, graphic designers and photo retouchers -- basically anyone who distorts body image in print. In order to fight those who they feel create an unrealistic representation of what the body actually looks like, they created a "Beautify" action that can be downloaded for free from popular editing sites. The action appears to add a "glowing skin" effect when in reality, it reverts the image back to its original, …

Every year, in the third week of July, over 100 silver bearded men descend upon the city of Key West, Florida. Their goal: to be declared the man who most resembles American writer Ernest Hemingway. The contest they participate in is put on by the Hemingway Look-Alike Society, and is the largest sanctioned look-alike competition in the world.

Remember that fake anime fighting photo fad that emerged from Japan earlier this year? Vancouver-based photographer Tanja learned recently that it sometimes doesn't mix well with wedding photography. After asking the groom and groomsmen to pose for an action-packed group shot, she snapped this memorable (and embarrassing) photo.

Being so close to the release of the 2013 Arizona State University Football campaign, I wanted to take an opportunity on to talk about an image that I created many years ago while still a student at ASU. When many people ask me where I believe I crossed the line from hobbyist to professional, I tell them of this campaign, and actually place the beginning on a single image. The fact that the image still lives on my website is a testament to how much I enjoy it and how much it means to me. It is …

A British group working to preserve the work of influential 19th-century photographer William Henry Fox Talbot has discovered previously unseen work by the innovator.

Do you remember the 320-gigapixel photo taken from atop the BT Tower in London? That 360° panorama, shot by Founder of 360-cities Jeffrey Martin, holds the title of world's largest photo. But just because you have the top spot, doesn't mean you have to stop.

When you hear the words "retro camera," you probably think of some kind of silver or black camera crafted decades ago out of solid chunks of metal. But what would a retro camera look like if you kept the design the same but replaced its metal body with wood? …

Here's one to put a smile on your face. Roman Atwood has made a name for himself on YouTube by pulling off creative and often downright hilarious pranks. For his most recent prank, he teamed up with buddy Dennis Roady and went photographic. Or at the very least they pretended to.

Quite a few years ago I took a solo trip down to Key West, FL. It was the first time I had gone on a vacation by myself, and since I was free of the distraction of friends and family, I decided it would make a great opportunity to expand upon my photography skills.

GoPro just released a new version of its app that has users everywhere excited at the possibilities. Everything from a live feed, to total control over settings, to social sharing capabilities have been built right in to really enhance the GoPro Hero experience.

Professional food photography is a legitimate pursuit that takes some serious skill. It's done in a studio, with professional lighting and often enlists the help of a professional food stylist to get the shot just right.

The launch of Android 4.2 in October of last year brought with it the ability to create special 360° panoramas called "Photo Spheres." But as cool as these panoramas were, there was no real way to share them with the exception of a widget Google released a few months back.

There's something to say about the curious nature of journalists. Some spend all of their hours researching a particular subject, others go out into the field to experience first-hand, and some others quit their job and take up coding classes.

Canon made a bit of a splash when it released the 70D, touting lightning fast live view and movie mode auto focus that would put the previous system to shame. The tech is called "Dual Pixel," and now we have a few clips that show you just how fast the system works while filming in movie mode.

A photo of sweet justice or a picture of cruel gloating? That's the debate raging on Facebook after a Philadelphia antique store posted a hard-hitting photo of a young man being arrested last week after being caught in the act of robbing the store.

Sigma has been on a tear as of late. Since late 2012, the company has put out a highly regarded 35mm f/1.4 lens, a novel USB dock that lets you calibrate lenses at home, and a revolutionary 18-35mm lens with a constant f/1.8 aperture (shown above).

This is awesome: someone over at the Chicago Tribune made a hilarious mistake this morning, accidentally publishing a placeholder photograph of a random cat on the newspaper website's front page. For 16 glorious minutes, visitors to the site were greeted with what's seen in the screenshot above as the featured headline story.

Italian photography company Ferrania is ready to start making film again, years after giving up its primary business as a lost cause.

Want to see some action-packed photographs on a really small scale? Look no further than photographer Alex Wild's collection of photos titled "Ants Fighting." It's a series of macro photographs showing various species of ants engaged in intense battles to the death.

According to a report in today's Wall Street Journal, the market is not looking great for digital cameras. The report states that as the popularity of smartphones has increased, sales of digital cameras have decreased.

It would appear as if popular photo sharing service Instagram is potentially blocking the uploading of images through third-party app clients, such as Instance for Windows Phone 8, according to reports surfacing on the web.

As higher resolution photography (and photography in general) has become ubiquitous, photo sharing and storage websites have had to adjust to keep up. From increasing storage capacity and file-size limitations to launching "spectacular" redesigns that offer beautiful browsing experiences, everybody is adjusting in their own way.

It's not uncommon these days for photographers to want to add a photo booth option to their offerings. In the past, we've seen everything from an awesome VW Photo Bus, to a portable battery-powered option, to an Instagram-inspired DIY project.

While photographer Richard Renadli was in the midst of his 2003 project, See America By Bus, where he was photographing groupings of strangers waiting in Greyhound bus stations, he began to think about exploring the idea of expanding on his group portraitures of strangers concept.  “To create spontaneous and fleeting relationships between complete strangers,” as he as stated.

While smartphones have, especially of late, taken to blurring the lines between camera and phone, "smartcameras" like Samsung's Galaxy Camera flipped the idea on its head by putting a phone's operating system on a camera rather than the other way around.

When Yahoo! launched the new Flickr at the end of May, not every part of the website got the "spectacular" treatment. One of the sections of the site that has been lagging behind the rest were the Groups pages, and Flickr has finally decided to bring them up to speed.

A couple of days ago, we shared the news that NBC's Sunday Night Football was going to show you pro football like you've never seen it before: in bullet time. Details were a bit thin, but it looked like a 24-camera bullet time rig would be installed in each end zone, providing Matrix-like replays that would do their best to blow your mind.

A few months ago, an Apple commercial touted the iPhone as "the world's most popular camera." Nokia's new ad for the Lumia 1020 takes a less statistical approach: the company is admitting that the 41-megapixel behemoth is first a camera, and then a phone.

Panasonic is having a hard time keeping a lid on its upcoming rangefinder-styled GX7 Micro Four Thirds mirrorless camera. Just last week, the first images and a list of specs leaked through an online photo magazine, and now we have a full set of specs and product shots to look at.

You know those shooting gallery games you find at carnivals? The kind in which you try to win prizes by hitting targets with a rifle? Sometimes the gun and target systems use light rather than air or pellets -- if the target detects a specific flash of light emitted by the gun, it will count as a "hit." …

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have come up with an inexpensive way to boost the resolution of common microscopes by a factor of 100, allowing medical clinics in developing countries to conduct complex tests with existing equipment.