We won't deny it: we love a good lost and found story. When a camera goes drifting out to sea or is lost in an earthquake, only to turn up months or even years later with the photos still intact, we can't help but smile and share the story.
The Reportage Festival in Sydney, Australia is a well-known Vivid exhibition that displays the powerful work of some of the world's best photojournalists and documentary photographers. But this year, the New South Wales government has gotten involved by telling the curators what they can and cannot display, stirring up many photographers and anti-censorship advocates in the process.
Animals love cameras. It seems we can infer that much from videos and stories we've shared in the past. From Lions to Bears, it seems that animals are often as interesting in camera gear as they are in a free meal.
A week and a half ago, we launched a photo contest with 500px to give away 10 free upgrades to the company's revamped Portfolios feature. The contest has come to an end, and here's a look at the 10 winning photographs.
Australian engineer turned photographer Steve Back has been working for several years to put together the completely un-edited images you see here. Although they may seem like abstract art you might find on a museum wall, they're actually aerial photos of Kalbarri, Western Australia's Hutt Lagoon, the world's largest Beta Carotene farm.
Astrophotography, especially the type taken by $10 billion telescopes floating around in outer space, is both fascinating and beautiful. The photos offer so much, both from an artistic and scientific standpoint. Awe-inspiring glimpses into the great void are now widely available, making these unbelievably distant galaxies seem almost touchable.
What you see above is a "map" of Paris created by collaging thousands of photographs shot in the city. It's just one of the amazing pieces in Japanese photographer Sohei Nishino's Diorama Map project. The series contains maps of many of the world's most famous cities, and all of them are photographed and collaged by hand.
Want to have some fun as you're learning how to use Photoshop for image editing? Try creating a "Photoshop Chimera." In Greek mythology, the Chimera was a monstrous creature composed of three different animals: the lion, snake, and goat. The term "chimera" has since come to describe any imaginary creature that's the mashup of two or more real animals.
Want to see what lava from a volcano looks like up close? Photographer Daniel Fox has spent a number of weeks this year photographing lava near Kalapana on the Big Island of Hawaii. Rather than photograph the lava in the context of its surroundings, he decided to get in close and create abstract images showing its intensity.
We all know by now how Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer unleashed the collective fury of photographers and the creative community during her presentation of the new Flickr with a few poorly chosen words. She has since clarified her statement, but the real issue is that the distinction between photographer and professional photographer is fuzzy at best in the minds of most people, particularly those that know little about the world of photography.
We've featured quite a few "bullet time" projects in the past that involve freezing time using rigs of tens or hundreds of cameras, but have you ever seen the technique done with pinhole cameras? That's what you'll see in the music video shown above. It's for the song "Wasting My Young Years" by London Grammar.
Photographer Joshua Lambus has put together a beautiful series of photographs showing luminous creatures of the deep glowing with light against a pitch-black background. The project is titled "Blackwater."
I came into still photography by way of video. Throughout my younger years I was always playing with video cameras, and when I graduated college I set out to buy one of my own.
This guide is what I do during wedding days, and I typically photograph the cake right when I enter the reception location. Overall, I take 4 shots of the cake: 1 vertical, 1 horizontal, 1 detail of topper, and 1 detail of the base or whatever is the most interesting on the cake.
Claudia Nallely Agres works as a bridal model for a living, but she hasn't yet had the joy of being a bride in a wedding of her own. Wedding photographer Ryan Brenizer wanted to change that, so he recently held a special photo shoot for Agres that resulted in some beautiful and unusual bridal portraits.
When Flickr launched its site-wide redesign this past week, one of the things that saw a quiet revamp was the default user avatar. The company hired Greek designer Charis Tsevis to upgrade the original default icon -- an expressionless gray and black square face -- to something more colorful.
I recently began contributing to Stocksy United (AKA Stocksy), the new(ish) stock photography agency that is headed up by Bruce Livingstone of iStockPhoto notoriety fame.
After Moore, Oklahoma was struck by a deadly tornado earlier this week, photographs quickly emerged showing what the storm looked like from space and what the destruction was like on the ground.
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.
About a month ago, we shared a Kickstarter for something called the Fusion Plate. The product made it easy to go from using a sling-style strap -- something many photographers prefer to the traditional -- to using a tripod without having to mess with screwing anything in.
Asking a stranger to snap a photograph of you is a risky proposition. If the person has no concept of basic photography concepts and techniques, the resulting photographs may be completely different than what you had hoped for -- and you're too embarrassed to ask for another photo (so you wait for that person to leave and for a new one to walk by).
It's always a good idea to get to know your neighbors. Case in point: photographer David Vincent Wolf recently found himself directing a mind-bending music video for the band Portugal. The Man, and all because his neighbor Rich Holtzman happens to be both the manager of the band and the father of his daughter's preschool classmate.
In 1951, a diesel-powered US Navy submarine called the U.S.S. Catfish passed under the Golden Gate Bridge and did a short tour of San Francisco Bay. While there, the crew decided to snap some photographs of San Francisco... through its periscope.
Dear (new’ish) Model, …
Google Glass is set to arrive in the hands of the general public later this year. There are already apps that can trigger the shutter by detecting winks, and some people are already thinking of how the wearable camera can be useful for various photographic applications.
Google I/O brought with it a lot of exciting updates for Google+, not the least of which were a slew of automatic improvements to Google+ Photos including Auto Highlight, Auto Enhance and Auto Awesome. But the updates didn't stop when I/O ended last Friday.
High-end DSLRs by major camera manufacturers are made to be durable. After all, photographers find themselves in all kinds of environments documenting all kinds of subjects, so their cameras need to have serious protection against accidents and the elements.
Last month we shared some photo illustrations by science artist Ron Miller that showed what the night sky would look like if other planets in our solar system replaced the moon. Now Miller is back again with an equally interesting concept: what would landscape photos look like if Earth had a ring like Saturn's?
Remember that 50-gigapixel camera being developed by Duke University scientists? Since we reported on the project last year, researchers have created a spin-off company called Aqueti for bringing the technology "into the world for everyone to experience." The camera they've developed will soon be making public tours, and we're starting to get a peek at what it's capable of.
There's no shortage of interesting work coming from Shin Seung Back and Kim Yong Hun of Seoul, South Korea. Yesterday we posted an interesting body of work that employed the use of computer algorithms to detect facial structures in the clouds above. The duo has another project that caught our eye: one that shares a representation of the four seasons -- with a twist.
I am a former kid. I have lived through the trauma of bad photos taken of me by my father. I was not photogenic, and admittedly he had a cheap camera. He had a knack for catching the incredibly awkward moments of childhood in a way that now makes me cringe. If I could go back in time and give my 1970′s dad a few tips on how to take better pictures of me I would.
Photographer Rob Whitworth has created a number of beautiful time-lapse videos that have received huge numbers of views online. This past April, Whitworth had the opportunity to take his skills to the city of Da Nang, Vietnam to document the Danang International Fireworks Competition 2013, one of the world's "biggest and best" firework contests.
What's cooler than a multi-cell pinhole camera? How about a multi-cell pinhole camera upgraded to a lensed version? That's exactly what James Guerin has put together as a follow-up to a previous lens-less camera experiment.
The iPad mini and the Mac mini. Those are two "minified" products Apple has released to give its customers a choice for products that are cheaper and more portable. It appears Leica is planning to take a page from Apple's playbook.
Want to see what the camera arsenal of a world famous photographer looks like? A photographer whose work fetches millions of dollars at auction? …
As humans, it's only natural to take a look at the sky and perceive to see an object, a face, an animal. Computers, too, are capable of this perception. However, they may be capable of finding things that the human eye can't, or just might not notice.
Need a chuckle? Look no further than the latest bizarre photo fad to sweep across the Internet. Called "Cat Beard," the meme involves shooting a self-portrait with your face above a cat's head. If you can nail the right perspective, you get a humorous photograph that looks like you have a strange beard covering your face (and a frown as well).
Using discarded tin cans found on the hot Arizona desert ground, David Emitt Adams has created timeless pieces he calls Conversations with History. The cans are branded with tintype pictures, reflecting ties to the very locations the cans -- some of which have been sitting out in the sun for over forty years -- were found.
This appears to be a big week for Yahoo! with their $1 billion Tumblr acquisition announcement followed by a number of changes to their Flickr service. Exciting stuff in the tech world. However, amid the Yahoo! hoopla, CEO Marissa Mayer managed to insult the entire professional photography community with her comments, being widely interpreted as “there’s no such thing as professional photographers” anymore.
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.
We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson …
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer found herself in the spotlight earlier this week following a controversial statement made at Flickr's NYC press event regarding pro photographers: …
We are at about that point in the year when Apple holds its ever-popular WWDC (Worldwide Developer's Conference) in California. The company's keynote is expected to include the unveiling of iOS 7, and the word on the grapevine indicates the next iteration of the mobile operating system could include deep integration with social networks outside of Twitter and Facebook.
NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover has sent down a constant stream of images from the Red Planet. Ever since it landed on August 8th, 2012, it's spent every spare moment snapping selfies, panoramas and surveillance footage, and sending it back home from between 33.9 and 250 million miles away (depending on the relative positions of Mars and Earth).
Here's an interesting concept! Jiho Jang, a student, has come up with Polaroid-like instant camera, dubbed GIFTY, that captures short clips and prints them out. According to Jang, it was put together as part of his college thesis.
Flickr's recent transition to a "spectacular" new design and account structure has been anything but "spectacular" thus far. While some photographers have come out in support of the new design, reaction from the photographic community seems to be more negative than positive.
When the 2013 Moore tornado struck Oklahoma on May 20th, 2013, Charles Gafford III took refuge in a storm shelter. Once inside, he noticed that there was a small gap in the shelter that he could stick his smartphone through. He did, and ended up capturing the footage above that shows what it's like to have an EF5 tornado -- the strongest strength rating assigned -- pass almost directly overhead.
In Oklahoma, tornados are a common thing. Every spring they occur and every Oklahoman grows up knowing what they are and the damage they can cause. As a native Oklahoman, I've only seen two tornados in person after chasing them down. Most of the time they do little damage and dissipate fairly quickly. People are usually more worried about damage that comes from the gigantic-sized hail than from tornados.
For many user who use Adobe's Photoshop software, the "Content Aware Fill" tool has been a welcome addition in their arsenals of retouching tools. And while the vast majority of Photoshop users are editing 2D imagery, a partnership between Adobe and Brigham Young University has produced algorithms that'll do with 3D images what Content Aware Fill does with 2D images.
Before running out for Botox or for a fancy photographer, here are 10 quick and easy things you can do to improve how you look in photos: …
