2013

It’s that time of the year when we all take a moment to reflect back on the major events that will forever be remembered, the trends that changed our zeitgeist, and the pop culture phenomena that will soon be forgotten.

For the photo industry, this was the year that the word “selfie” was coined Webster’s Dictionary’s word of the year. In such a context and with so much of the conversation focused on the mobile photo taking frenzy, it almost started to get a little too easy to overlook the stories out there that, if not for the photograph, would not have been told nor raised in our collective social consciousness.

Every time we decide to post something about Instagram, we go through a bit of an internal dilemma. On the one hand, it's the most popular photo sharing app in the world, and many photographers have used it to great effect -- for those reasons alone we can't exactly ignore it. On the other hand, a solid percentage, perhaps even a majority, of you guys hate the app with a passion that defies our collective vocabulary to describe.

Because you asked, these are real letters I have sent to people found using my photographs inappropriately, ranging from "The standard DMCA takedown" to "The repeat commercial offender payment demand letter."

Michael Shainblum is a name that has come up a few times on PetaPixel, and it's always associated with a spectacular time-lapse that earns many a "beautifully done" and even the occasional "hot damn." And now, thanks to The Creators Project, we get to go behind the scenes with Shainblum as he creates one of his masterpieces.

Here is a good example why it is so important to work the scene to get the best results from …

Photoshop takes a lot of flack in this day and age, especially when it comes to the beauty and fashion industries that consistently publish overly manipulated imagery. Often that 'flack' doesn't give us much to laugh at, but a recent project by East Carolina University student Anna Hill does.

She put together four mock Photoshop ads that poke fun at just how far the beauty industry often takes photo manipulation.

Speed freaks (at least where lenses are concerned) who love their mirrorless camera get ready to celebrate, because there's a new super-fast lens on the market that is claiming the title of "fastest lens in the world for mirrorless systems" -- the Ibelux 40mm f/0.85.

Update: Looks like the discount is gone folks! This puppy is back up to $12,000.

Those looking to drop several grand on a 35mm film camera for your favorite purist this Holiday season need look no more. Introducing the Nikon FA Gold limited edition camera: a 24k gold-plated camera with lizard skin accents that is currently going on eBay for the relatively low price of $4,800.

To clarify, when we say "relatively low," we mean relative to what you would have spent on the same camera yesterday when it was listed for a whopping $12,000.

Born in Washington, D.C., visual artist Lauren Henkin graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in architecture from Washington University in St. Louis and now resides in New York City. He primary subject is the American landscape. Her most recent project, The Park, focuses on Central Park, the massive constructed urban space and how people engage it.

We love a good Mars panorama -- be it a this selfie panorama by Curiosity or this gorgeous mountain-top shot by Opportunity -- and now we have another one for you that is, arguably, the best of them.

What's that? The ZEISS 55mm f/1.4 Otus haunts your dreams when it's not keeping you up wondering how you're going to sell a kidney on the black market to afford it? Well then, you might want to ignore this post, because there's another Otus confirmed for 2014!

We love a good photo series that can put a smile on our faces, and when those photos are also being taken for a good cause, well, we really couldn't ask for more. Such is the case with the 2014 NYC Taxi Drivers Calendar.

It’s not motion blur, it’s Iceland spar! Every year, I can’t think of anything I want for Christmas. So this …

Today was the day of the mystery Instagram event that had many a tech site speculating about what the Facebook-owned image sharing giant would announce. A couple of sources were close, but there's no longer any need to speculate because Instagram has let the cat out of the bag, and that cat's name is Instagram Direct.

Already live as I write this, Instagram Direct is a new service that will allow users to send direct messages complete with text and either photos or videos to a select group of people, rather than sharing them with your entire follower base.

While cover a fast food workers strike at the National Air and Space Museum last week, photographer Kristoffer Tripplaar was forcefully brought down by no less than three security guards when he accidentally bumped into one of them in an attempt to protect his equipment.

Who says you need to travel to exotic locations to capture the aurora borealis in action? Sometimes, all you need is a window seat on a trans-Atlantic flight from London to NYC -- at least that's what happened for one lucky amateur photographer recently when he was treated to one heck of an 'in-flight movie' right outside his airplane window.

The tech world is full of 'wars,' all of them over the attention of that flighty creature known as 'the consumer.' And one of the wars being raged most furiously is between the major social networks: the established behemoths Facebook, Instagram and Twitter; that stubborn network loved by photogs, Google+; and the new kid on the block that has everybody's undergarments in a bunch: Snapchat.

Well, Facebook has had its go at stealing some of Snapchat's market (both literally and through acquisition) and has been ultimately unsuccessful on all counts. Now it's Twitter's turn.

Light-painting, like time-lapse, is a genre of photography that is packed full of talent, making it really hard to pick quality work to feature (if you haven't already, check out this list of 10 amazing light-painting photogs you should follow right away).

We were thrilled, therefore, when we stumbled across Nicolas Rivals' series of steel wool light painting Rorschach tests dubbed, simply enough, Light Rorchach.

If you're shopping for a young person who'd benefit from learning a little more about the principles of photography, you may want to consider the LAST Camera: a build-it-yourself 35mm film camera that could well outfreak Lomography for quirky build and artfully distressed images.

If you've followed PetaPixel even just the last month, you might have noticed that Adobe extended its Photoshop Photography Program (also referred to as the Photography Bundle) to people regardless of whether or not they own a previous version of Photoshop not once, not twice, but three times.

That is: this special promotion that allowed everyone to sign up was supposed to end on the 2nd... then on the 8th... and now is extended all the way to the end of the year. And while our you guys have come up with all manner of reasons in the comments as to why Adobe might be doing this, a new survey reveals the real reason: it's working really well.

On Sunday I covered what was easily the hardest football game I’ve ever been asked to shoot. In turn it was the most fun I’ve ever had on an assignment.

Lenticular printing has been around for ages as a commercial gimmick, producing untold hordes of postcards, luggage tags and other novelties with images that seem to move when you jostle the shiny surface. (Also, the particularly hideous faux-3D cover for my 1978 high school yearbook.)

Here's something that both photographers and the typical millennial have to look forward to in old age: Your memory is going to suck because of all the photos you took when you should have been paying attention to what was happening around you.

That's the upshot of a new psychological study that finds you can have a good photographic record of an event or a good memory, but not both.

Those with delicate constitutions where the destruction of photography gear is concerned should look away or skip over this one. Whatever you do, don't press play on the video above... or if you do press play, don't watch past about the 3:50 mark, because that's when things get ugly.

A late-breaking holiday shopping tip: If someone offers you a screamingly good deal on a Leica Summilux-C movie lens, be very suspicious. That's because there's currently $500,000 worth of stolen gear floating around the black market -- including a $200K set of Summilux-C lenses -- that was taken off the set of a Los Angeles film shoot..

It's been a little while since we've seen fit to report on a rumor. Most of what has passed through the rumor mill of late has either not been significant enough, or only worth linking out to. This news, however, caught our eye: it seems Sony is working on a 'non-Bayer' sensor that might appear in cameras as early as late 2015.

GoPro cameras may be ready to migrate from helmets to film schools thanks to the Ribcage, an in-development assembly that allows the tiny action cams to be outfitted with interchangeable lenses.

Take a deep breath. Picture it in your mind. The world’s largest gathering of camels. Taking place at a tiny Rajasthani town filled with temples, narrow streets and a picturesque lake. Men in brightly coloured turbans as far as the eye can see. Enough dust and sand to make your nostril hairs work overtime. And hundreds of photographers in every nook and cranny, taking thousands of photographs of this annual event.

My experience at the Pushkar Mela earlier this month was definitely unexpected. In all honesty, I guess I should have known better. I went there with the expectation to capture a town lost in time, an event that would bring back memories of the old days gone by and boy, how wrong I was. The Mela turned out to be a hunting ground for photographers from all over the world.

Last week, a video showing how a hyper-realistic iPad finger-painting of Morgan Freeman (inspired by this portrait by photographer Scott Gries) came together made the viral rounds faster than most. It had already earned its first million hits in the first 12 hours, and currently sits at almost 11.25 million.

It seems the Nikon engineers had some tricks up their sleeves when they put the D4 sensor inside the new Nikon Df, because while the sensor earned identical scores to the D4 in almost every category when DxOMark put it through its paces, the Df actually BEAT the D4 in the "low-light ISO" category.

But more than that, it beat EVERYBODY in that category, narrowly edging out the previous champion D3s to claim the number one low-light spot among DxOMark's rankings.