2013

For now, if you want to get your child's point of view on anything, the best approach is to mount a helmet cam to their noggin and hope they don't mind -- so far we've seen a few cute videos filmed this way. But in the near future, the best way to get your 2-year-old's point of view may be by handing them a pair of Google Glass glasses.

That's what developer Chris Angelini did when his 2-year-old came calling for juice. The results are pretty darn cute.

After two years of testing, renting, buying and selling just about every level of Nikon and Canon lenses and cameras, I have learned quite a bit about what works and what doesn’t. Pretty much you can’t go wrong with Canon or Nikon, and just about everything they make is top notch.

Most people in today's society have a mobile phone. Most mobile phones have cameras. Anyone and everyone has become an on-the-scene photojournalist, reporting on everything from major news events to the odd and crazy.

Some of these picture-worthy events take place on everyday flights. Shutter-happy passengers, snapping or even video recording the woman on the next aisle over acting unusual or a fellow passenger being disruptive. It's undeniable that we are curious beings, and want to document and share events we witness. But not everyone is pleased citizen photojournalists.

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.

Yet another prize winning photographer has been accused of visual deception. Subsequently, Paul Hansen’s World Press Photo of the Year passed the forensic review that was set up hurriedly -- by WPP -- to address the scandal, but it has become clear that the image was substantially “improved” in post-production.

A rather interesting submission by Apple to the United States Patent and Trademark office shows potential plans for a synchronized flash system by connecting iOS devices, which will allow a primary camera to snap an image of a subject whilst being lit by another iPhone, as an example.

Want to see how the prices of various compact and mirrorless cameras stack up against each other? 1001 Noisy Cameras created this handy chart showing the prices of RAW-capable compact cameras on the market.

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.

Photographer Arne Svenson lives on the second floor of an apartment building in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City. For his project "The Neighbors," he pointed his camera at a luxury apartment building across the street and secretly photographed its inhabitants through open windows.

Those photographs are now being sold for thousands of dollars at a gallery in NYC, but it turns out the subjects aren't very happy with having their images stealthily snapped and sold.

Here's a TEDx talk photographer Brandon Stanton gave at Columbia University last October about "how our worldview is negatively affected by good stories." Stanton is the photographer behind the website Humans of New York.

Take a look at photographer Jared Lim's portfolio, and many of his photographs might look to you like they're the product of liberal Photoshop Clones Stamp usage. They feature repeating shapes, colors, and patterns found in various cities' urban environments.

Last year one of my friends got married and I was so thrilled to be her photographer that day. What was even more amazing was that she had an “Unplugged Wedding” after seeing pictures and hearing my rants over the years about well-meaning guests whom have inadvertently (or heck, even completely on purpose) ruined images.

AlmapBBDO, the ad agency behind the touching Getty ad "From Love to Bingo," are at it again. Last time they spent six months picking 873 stock photos out of 5,000+ options to create an award-winning one minute video.

This time Getty asked them to do the same thing, only using the agency's massive video archive instead. The resulting video is, dare we say, even better than the "Love to Bingo" ad.

Redditor Steven Withey's grandfather Derek is an 87-year-old WWII veteran who served in the Royal Navy, and a little while back he showed his grandson a badly damaged Navy photo (of a photo) of himself as a 20-year-old.

He had showed him the photo in the hopes that his technologically savvy grandson could maybe touch it up a bit, but given the massive creases and tears he didn't have much hope. It turns out he needn't have worried, because in this particular case, Reddit came to the rescue.

I have been shooting photographs regularly for over 7 years now. I spent the first year shooting with a 2-megapixel phone camera. Since then, however, I’ve almost always had RAW capable cameras and shot RAW compulsively. And why not? I get 16x or 64x more colour depth than JPEGs. I don’t have to bother about setting the right white balance, contrast or sharpness. I don’t have to choose between monochrome and colour at the time of shooting. I can figure all of that out on the computer during RAW conversion and even try out different settings for the same picture at my leisure. Why would I give up all this and shoot JPEG?

"Your darkroom is now a datacenter." That's the thought and slogan behind a huge update that Google+ Photos is rolling out over the next week. Many people already considered Google+ the photographer's social network because of the many features Google has built into the system over the years -- this announcement is another giant leap in that direction.

500px is sponsoring us for the next week and a half to promote its new Portfolios, which we covered back in early April. As part of the partnership, we're running a photo contest for the next 10 days in which 10 people will have their accounts upgraded to the new portfolio system.

When it comes to creating quality time-lapse videos, many photographers relish having a serious amount of control over their result. But if you're the kind of person who isn't into intervalometers or messing with rail systems, and you're looking for something that's more of a "set it and forget it" system, Brinno's new TLC200 Pro may fit the bill just right.

Space collisions are massive, unbelievably powerful events. When two galaxies collide -- that is, when their gravitational fields start interacting with one another -- the resulting billion-year-long process contorts and twists the galaxies into the fascinating shapes we've seen in photographs taken by powerful space telescopes.

The above video is a supercomputer simulation of two galaxies going through a many-hundred-million-year-long collision. As the galaxies merge into the known stages of collision that have been photographed by Hubble, the video is paused and replaced with a photograph of that stage taken IRL.

We first shared photographer Chris McCaw's unique "sunburned" photos all the way back in 2010. A happy accident led to the creation of a burned, reverse-tone, solarized photo, and from then on he has used that technique to create more and more unique exposures dubbed "groundbreaking" by many museums.

In the video above he explains his process and shares his excitement for analog photography, a medium he believes is entering an era of unprecedented exploration now that digital photography has, in a sense, set it free.

Having photographs sell for more than $100,000 at a world famous auction house is no small feat, and it's one that will likely soon be accomplished by a photographer who gives new meaning to the term "chimping" every time he snaps a frame. The photographer is Mikki, a chimpanzee.

When it comes to solar eclipses, the total eclipse is king. We recently shared some unbelievable composite shots taken by Czech photographer Miloslav Druckmüller that showed one of those in a way you've probably never seen before. But when you don't have a total eclipse at hand, arguably your best option is an annular eclipse.

That's what photographer Colin Legg had to work with five days ago, and he made the absolute best of it, putting together this incredible video that combines time-lapse footage shot by three separate Canon 5D Mk IIs and 4K video taken with a Canon 1DC.

Photographer Clement Celma has an entire section of his site dedicated to photographing the architecture of Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí. And when it comes to the architecture of Gaudí, nothing is quite as stunning as the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família.

For his series of photos entitled Gaudí Architecture, Celma went to La Sagrada Família with his camera and snapped some breathtaking wide-angle photos of the architecture inside.

With over 2 million weddings taking place each year nationwide, there are over 2 million opportunities to make mistakes-countless pitfalls just waiting for the unsuspecting wedding photographer to stumble into. Sure, they seem harmless, until you realize the danger they impart to you and your business. I don't want you to be just another wedding photographer statistic, so, I've compiled a list of my top ten things a photographer should never do while photographing a wedding. If you recognize yourself in any of these, don't beat yourself up. Remember, it hurts to grow. Now, let's begin...

Yesterday we shared some photos of the Sun Halo that kept New Yorkers pointing their cameras skyward most of the day. That phenomenon is both harmless and cool to look at. Unfortunately, the recent ice heaves -- glacier-like lake ice that is pushed inland by strong winds -- in Minnesota only fall into the second of those categories..

Late last year, we introduced you to NYC-based photographer Jordan Matter's viral photo series Dancers Among Us, a set of photos that depicted professional dancers performing difficult dance moves in everyday life situations.

Many people fell in love with that photo series, and two of those people are college sweethearts Betsy and Peter, the latter of which recently put together an awesome Dancers Among Us proposal with some help from Matter himself.

Coffee is a wonderful thing. Early in the morning, there are few things that can put you at ease like a steaming cup of hot coffee warming your hands and firing up your brain. But have you ever wondered how those coffee advertisements manage to get the perfect shot of a coffee cup, steam and all?

Well, in the tutorial above, commercial photographer Robert Grant of LearnMyShot shows you how to compose and capture the perfect picture of a steaming cup o' joe that will have you craving your morning caffeine fix.

Earlier today, residents of New York and the surrounding area were privy to a really amazing celestial treat; it's called a Sun Halo, and one spent some time today hovering over The Big Apple and making people wonder if Martians were finally invading.

Fortunately (or not, depending on how you feel about it), there were no Martians, just a cool and somewhat rare phenomenon that had people and photographers turning cameras to the sky all day. One such photographer was Richard Silver, who was kind enough to shoot us an e-mail and offer to let us display the photos he had taken.

Nikon 1 photographers have a decent selection of eight lenses for their mirrorless camera, and now we can add one more choice to that list: the super-fast medium-telephoto 32mm f/1.2. The lens was announced earlier today, and promises "Superior Resolution and Incredible Depth of Field" for Nikon 1 shooters.

Last month, the Library of Congress finally finished a project they started all the way back in 2008: they finished digitizing an archive of 467 panoramic postcards from the early 1900's. All of these postcards are now available online for interested folks to peruse through, learn from and enjoy.