Back in April, Adobe released a Lightroom 5 public beta, a preview version meant to iron out bugs. Today, Adobe brought the program out of beta testing and has officially launched it in its final form for both Windows and Mac systems.
NASA's Image of the Day today is a photograph showing one of the best photo op spots to be found on the International Space Station: the Cupola module. The image (shown above) shows astronaut and flight engineer Chris Cassidy pointing a Nikon DSLR and 400mm lens out one of the Cupola's windows to photograph some location on Earth 250 miles below him.
Photos of the clash between the Turkish government and the country's people have been trickling down from many sources. Even as news outlets are accused of remaining purposely ignorant of the matter, professional and amateur photographers alike have taken to Facebook and other social media sites to spread the word and show the world what is happening.
But one of those images -- one depicting a "lady in red" non-threateningly holding her ground as she gets blasted with pepper spray by a police officer -- has become more than a mere photo, rising to the status of "symbol."
Whether you are an amateur photographer or a professional photographer, there will come a time when you are simply burned out. Periods of your photographic life where just the idea of picking up your camera is exhausting.
Creatives of all types face these challenging times, and they can be both daunting and scary. It can feel like your passion may no longer be your passion or, for the professional photographer, it can impact your life in a financial or business manner.
For many years, Rick Guidotti was a jet-setting fashion photographer. When he stepped into the studio in Milan, Paris or New York, he was instantly in charge of taking a model -- already an example of what we as a society deem is beautiful -- and capturing his or her best side.
But fifteen years ago, while he was doing research for a shoot he had considered doing featuring a woman with albinism, he was taken aback by the in-humane photos he found in medical textbooks. Speaking with genetic counselors, he found out that many will cover up the photos on the informational pamphlets they give parents when delivering a diagnosis.
This video, put together as a personal project by Logan Kelsey of Vertical Online, tells the inspirational story of large format photographer Marty Knapp from the first time he ever picked up a camera to his current work capturing the landscapes of Northern California and the surrounding areas near Point Reyes.
A few weeks ago, I was perusing my Facebook newsfeed as I usually do first thing in the morning, a cup of hot coffee in one hand, a computer mouse in the other, when I happened upon a post that stopped me dead in my tracks.
"Hey, everyone! I need a photographer to take some professional photos of me. I won't pay you, but I have connections, so I'm a good person to have in your court, if you know what I mean. I could definitely open some doors for you."
You may never take local birds and weeds for granted again after spending some time with Meet Your Neighbors, a photo project aimed at documenting the huge variety of the biosphere one species at a time.
Earlier today, we shared the news that SnapChat may be on the way to a $1 billion valuation even as the company moves aggressively towards a monetization scheme. Now, it's Vine's turn to shine, as the 6-second video sharing app proves its worth by blowing past Instagram in total daily Twitter shares.
Street photographer Eric Kim recently found himself in New York, and on his last day there he visited Kane's Diner, a spot that all his NYC friends insisted he must go before he left. After a meal of steak, eggs and conversation with his friendly waiter, he decided he would get his courage up and ask the waiter if it would be ok to take his picture.
Fortunately for us, he was able to attach his GoPro to the hot shoe on his Ricoh GR and capture the entire experience -- from momentary hesitation through impromptu photo shoot -- in the above POV video.
Charles Emir Richards is only a part-time photographer, but in the industry of photojournalism, being in the right place at the right time can be almost as important as photographic skill. And it's this that Richards has in spades: the right place at the right time.
The protests currently going on in Turkey that have attracted national attention are happening right in Richards' backyard. And as he's amassed more and more photos of the clash between people and police, he's taken to Facebook to share those photos freely, allowing anyone to use them in the name of spreading the word.
Photographer Jeff Cable has come a long way from his first few gigs shooting Bar and Bat Mitzvahs in San Francisco. Mostly sports-related, his résumé now includes images from the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, a stint as the official Team USA Hockey photographer during the 2010 games in Vancouver and the Team USA Water Polo photographer during the 2012 games in London.
In this B&H Event Space seminar, however, he's not going to just scroll through a bunch of pictures and talk about how he composed or shot them. Instead, he's sharing some thoughts on post-processing: specifically, the 15 features in Photoshop that he believes every photographer should know.
To say that SnapChat has taken off would be an understatement. When we first wrote about the app in December of last year, we were impressed that the (not entirely) self-destructing photo messaging app had managed to raise over $10 million at a $70 million valuation. Now, if we add a zero to each of those numbers we'd still fall short of what several sources are expecting from the SnapChat's latest round of funding.
When cutting edge technology translates into RAW video, 14fps burst capabilities and smartphone megapixel counts in the 40's, it's easy to take it for granted and forget where digital photography started.
So here's a little reminder of what digital photography looked like a couple of decades ago in the form of a Canon ad that boasts the capabilities of its still video systems, the digital camera before digital cameras.
Born in 1922, photographer and writer Art Shay has had a career that most creatives only dream of. Between Life, Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Forbes, Business Week, Parade, The New York Times Magazine and many more, Shay has shot about 1,100 magazine covers.
This video -- shot and produced by Bradley Rochford of Hanson Dodge Creative -- gives you a quick overview of the amazing life and work of this still-active 91-year-old photographer.
Photo memes don't have much of a shelf life these days. Case in point: the cat beard meme that we shared with you just a couple of weeks ago has already been replaced by the next photo fad to sweep the Instagram nation. This one's called Baby Mugging, and it involves using forced perspective photography to make it look like your baby or toddler is hanging out inside your coffee mug.
Tutorials are available for photographers of all levels, but many of the tutorials you'll find online have to do with grasping a basic technique or tackling an intermediate lighting scenario. The above tutorial falls much closer to the pro level.
Photographer Phillip McCordall -- an award-winning still life photographer -- put this tutorial together to show those interested in jewelry photography how to professionally photograph a highly reflective gold watch.
Here's a cool product that could help the car photographers out there leave a memorable impression and turn first-time clients into repeat customers. Made by Flashrods, these car-shaped hard drives and flash drives are the perfect way to deliver the final photos to your clients in style.
Here's a little dose of humor to brighten your Saturday. Back in the 90s, in a jab at both MTV and "avant-garde" photography, a young Louis CK put this funny little clip together. In it, his name is David Cross (perhaps another jab at his fellow comedian by the same name) and his specialty? Toilet photography.
Infrared imagery has shown its value in many different respects: from keeping an eye on photosynthesis to lending a new perspective on a decades-long humanitarian disaster. But did you know that the future of outer space imagery also lies in infrared technology?
The James Webb Space Telescope, which is set to launch in 2018, is an infrared telescope that is primed to see much further than even Hubble ever could, piercing into the furthest reaches of our cosmos and answering questions we may not have even thought to ask yet.
With a mechanical shutter and a 41-megapixel PureView sensor, the leaked pictures and video of the upcoming Nokia Lumia phone codename "EOS" have caused quite a stir.
Nokia, however, isn't the only one that knows how to spring a leak when it comes to high-end smartphone cameras. Samsung also has a high-level camera phone up its sleeve, called the Galaxy S4 Zoom, and yesterday marked its first significant leak.
Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde's photos of clouds hanging mysteriously in indoor locations have earned him a good bit of popularity. Created by using a smoke machine, precise atmospheric conditions and dramatic lighting, his Nimbus photos juxtapose the indoor and outdoor worlds.
In the short documentary video above, Smilde sat down with Avant/Garde Diaries and discussed his work, lending us some perspective on why he creates these photos and where he finds inspiration.
Since the outset of 2013, Dropbox has consistently sought to improve its ability to handle and share photos. Of course, a cloud storage provider isn't going to compete with the likes of Flickr, but the company still wants to make it extremely easy to store all of your photos.
Dropbox's most recent move in that direction is the announcement of a new beta that allows Mac users to import entire iPhoto libraries and all users to automatically backup and share screenshots.
The California government health agency First 5 was created to help "nurture and protect our most precious resource -- our children." As such, one of their programs aims to stop childhood obesity by reaching out to parents and educating them about proper nutrition.
The agency's recent poster meant to show the dangers of sugary drinks, however, seems to have gone a bit too far, using Photoshop to make a healthy child look obese and drawing the ire of the public in the process.
A mysterious tech blog called Vizileaks appeared on the web yesterday and stirred up some excitement in the tech world by claiming to have gotten its hands on a Nokia "EOS" smartphone. The site's "hands-on mini review" of the device features a number of photos and one video (shown above) that shows that the device features a mechanical shutter.
With the rise of digital photography, good old-fashioned film processing has, for the most part, become a thing of the past for many of us. But with a new app called Koloid, photography enthusiasts can play around with the look and feel of wet plate collodion photography while creating digital images with their iPhones and iOS devices.
Chicago Sun-Times photographers, who lost their jobs in a mass layoff last week, are not going quietly into oblivion.
Adobe recently came up with a clever and funny way of promoting its Adobe Creative Day event that'll be held next week. The company visited a bus stop in Sweden and pranked people by Photoshopping them in real time into a digital movie poster advertisement displayed next to the bench. The whole thing was documented with hidden cameras and shared in the video above.
Starting a global movement using a photography app is no small task, but that's what Jeff Kirschner has done this last year. Using the hashtag #litterati, he's managed to start a world-wide Instagram campaign that is helping to stop pollution and clean up the environment one piece of trash at a time.
Back in March, we shared about how realistic computer generated images has been encroaching on the commercial product photography industry and killing photography jobs. More and more of the product photos you see in advertisements and press releases these days did not involve an actual camera and photographer at all, but rather artist, a computer, and 3D rendering software.
For example, the Nikon D60 product "photo" seen above was created entirely in Keyshot, a powerful 3D rendering program.
Photo printing services are popping up all the time these days. This makes sense: as the number of photos we take increase exponentially, more and more companies are attempting to save them from falling unnoticed into digital oblivion.
One such company is Piccolo, a small two-employee start-up with an interesting premise: the photos you make an effort to share are the ones worth printing. And it's around this premise that Piccolo has built its fully-automatic service.
Remember that crazy rooftopping photograph captured by photographer Joe McNally from the top of the tallest building in the world? The video above is an interesting 4.5-minute-long behind-the-scenes look at how McNally ascended the tower and held a photo shoot at the very top.
Mikki the chimpanzee is now the de facto king of the ape photography world. A selection of photographs by (and of) him fetched a whopping £50,000 (~$78,000) at auction this past week at Sotheby’s Auction House in London.
Phoenix-based photographer Dan Tabár sometimes shoots on sound stages, sets, and quiet studios -- locations where a loud camera would either cause problems or cause angry glares and murderous thoughts. Needing a way to surpress the shutter sound of his Nikon D800 -- he says the "quiet mode is a joke" -- Tabár decided to create his own DIY sound blimp.
QT Luong is typically a large-format photographer who travels the U.S. photographing the beauty of its national parks. When he decided to go to Hawaii's Volcanoes National Park, however, he chose to go digital and create the above time-lapse -- according to Luong, "the first time-lapse to survey Hawaii Volcanoes National Park from sea to summit."
For a while now, Canon has offered online resources to available teach those who may be unfamiliar with, well, taking photos. In what could be called a welcome addition to already-available resources, the company has launched what they call 'Canon EOS 101: Photography and Videography Basics'.
(Today is National Doughnut Day. I am of the opinion it should be a National Holiday, but other people in my studio don't share the belief. They would be wrong.)
(The DH stands for "darling husband," although in light of the following conversation that took place upon entering the studio this morning, I am doing away with that adjective.)
DH: "Hey, last minute change this afternoon. Got a shoot for two bodybuilders, so I need your help."
Photographers need clients, and clients need photographers (even if they don't always think they do). The issue is that most clients have no idea how to find good quality local photographers; they have no place where they can find reviews, look through work and pricing, and compare photogs side-by-side. In lieu of other options, many amateurs in particular get work through a quality website, cold calls and word of mouth.
Photographer, developer and Google+ founding member Chris Chabot is trying to streamline this process with his new website Snapsation: an online marketplace where clients and the photographers they need can do business.
Visual Supply Co has been teasing the release of its new VSCO Cam and Grid apps for a couple of weeks now, and the wait is finally over. Released yesterday as an entirely new (and entirely free) app, VSCO claims that the new iOS camera app yields images more "elegant" and "stunning" than have ever been possible out of a mobile platform before.
Check out this mind-bending video that talks about the "Hubble Ultra Deep Field" image captured by NASA astronomers nearly a decade ago -- a photograph that some call "the most important image ever taken."
There was a great deal of excitement when Canon entered the mirrorless camera market with the EOS M last year, but much of the buzz evaporated when people began putting the camera through its paces. Although the camera features impressive image quality, one of the biggest issues is the sluggish autofocus that often gets in the way of capturing "decisive moments."
If you're the not-so-proud owner of a EOS M who constantly grumbles about the AF, here's some news that'll be music to your ears: your camera is set to receive a major AF speed boost by way of a firmware update.
When it comes to viewing and editing RAW photos, many photographers turn to editing software such as Adobe Lightroom or Apple's Aperture. But one developer hopes to harness the power behind web browsers to view -- and potentially edit -- RAW image files.
In 1996, a palm tree was introduced to a suburb in Cape Town Africa. The tree appeared almost overnight, and it wasn't an ordinary tree: it was one of the world's first (if not the first) disguised cell phone towers. Rather than have unnatural and unattractive metal towers jutting out of the ground, companies began working to make the towers blend in with the natural environment. This fake tree concept soon spread across Cape Town, across South Africa, and finally across the world.
In response to the spread of these fake trees, photographer Dillon Marsh decided to shoot a series of photos to document the trend. The series is titled, "Invasive Species."
Check out this photo of a gigantic Canon 9.3-930mm broadcast lens mounted to a tiny Panasonic GH2 mirrorless camera. The size difference is so great that it might be more accurate to say that the camera is mounted to the lens.
In an all-too-clear display of how journalistic carelessness can lead to big legal troubles, the two "Bag Men" who were shown on the front page of the New York Post following the Boston Marathon bombings have filed a defamation lawsuit against the paper on Wednesday of this week.
When the Canon 50D camera made its debut in August 2008, video capture wasn't one of the listed features available to buyers. Today, that's a different story, thanks to the Magic Lantern RAW hack that has brought video recording to the now 5-year-old camera.
Shane Lavalette is an American photographer who currently lives in Upstate New York. He is the founding publisher and editor of the independent publisher Lay Flat, and is the new director of Light Work, an influential non-profit photo organization.
PetaPixel: First, please tell us a bit about yourself and your background in photography.
Shane Lavalette: I’ve been interested in photography since I was a child but I got serious about it as art as a teenager, starting in the black and white darkroom.
HDR (high-dyanamic-range) video is no new concept. In fact, Magic Lantern has offered a way to shoot HDR footage utilizing Canon DSLRs since 2011. It's even become a feature of some mobile phones. But capturing and displaying HDR video in real-time? Well, that's another story.
What you see above is an ultra-high resolution aerial photograph of San Francisco as it looked in 1938. The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection put the image together using 164 large format black-and-white photos of SF that were shot in 1938. When viewed through a zoomable image viewer, the composite photo is pretty much a 1938 version of Google Earth's satellite view.
Leaked images from GSM Arena and a Twitter user of what could very well be Nokia's next flagship mobile phone reveal yet another camera-centric device with a high-capacity sensor.
That device, the Nokia EOS, is purportedly sporting a PureView image sensor, xenon flash unit, and Carl Zeiss optics.