These days, most photographers spend way more time staring at a computer screen than peering through a viewfinder. Despite this, we sure do spend a lot more talking about lenses and cameras than widescreen monitors. Perhaps that's because editing tends to be the far more tedious part of the job. With a little investment though, you can make those late nights pouring over the day's images just a little bit more comfortable.
Be careful when photographing sculptures for commercial purposes -- you could quickly find yourself on the losing end of a copyright infringement case and being forced to pay a lot of money.
This happened back in 2011, when photographer Mike Hipple was forced to pay up after shooting stock photos of a public art installation in Seattle. Now it has happened again: a court has ordered the United States Postal Service to pay a whopping $684,844 to sculptor Frank Gaylord for using a photograph of the Korean War Veterans Memorial on a stamp.
Love photo sharing but wish you could tell more of the story behind each photo as you share it? Shadow Puppet is a new app that's designed to help you do just that. Rather than simply sharing photos by themselves or with text captions, the app lets you share sets of photographs while narrating what the recipient is seeing.
Stock photography heavyweight Getty Images is in some hot water after being sued by a model over the use of her portrait in an HIV-positive advertisement.
I originally saw the National Beard and Mustache Championships in the local news paper in Vegas, where I currently live. I had missed the 2012 Championships by one day and it was only a mile or two from my studio, so I was kicking myself in the ass for the missed opportunity. I tracked down the person responsible for organizing the "The Championships" and he put me in touch with the producer for the event.
Last month, we reported on a rumor that Nikon's upcoming D610 DSLR will simply be a D600 clone that fixes the sensor speck issue that some owners grumbled about a while back. Now, a newly leaked set of camera specs seems to confirm that initial report.
Want to see some mind-blowing research into photography (from the mid-2000s)? Check out the video above about "Dual Photography," a Stanford-developed technique that allows you to virtually swap the locations of a camera and a projector, allowing you to take pictures from the perspective of the light source instead of the camera sensor.
Any professional photographer who's been working long enough has experienced the humiliation of missing the big shot, so it wasn't that big a story when two sports photographers missed Ichiro Suzuki's landmark 4,000th base hit at a recent New York Yankees game.
It's what happened afterward, when USA Today Sports Images photographer Debby Wong passed off a photo of another Suzuki swing as the iconic moment, that turned the incident into a significant photojournalism ethics fail.
Collecting vintage equipment isn't an uncommon hobby among photography and camera enthusiasts, but it is one that has apparently gotten one Ukrainian man in trouble with the law. A well-known collector and dealer named Alexandr Komarov (seen above) was recently arrested for possessing decades-old Soviet spy cameras, and now faces up to 7 years in prison for the offense.
Nothing makes a bowl of soup, a cup of coffee, or in this case, a baked potato, look more warm and appetizing than a beautiful cloud of steam. Immediately, your taste buds think of a hot, comforting meal, and your nose can almost sniff the fresh-from-the-oven smell.
Back in June, New York City-based photographer Htet T San visited a number of beaches around The Big Apple, mainly on Coney Island and at Brighton Beach. Her goal was to capture the concept of "the complete nothingness" through reflections of beachgoers seen in the wet sands. The resulting images form a series she calls "The Frail Second."
Want to quickly make your digital photos look like analog ones without shelling out big bucks for paid software …
"The Falcon" is a creative little steampunk-style stop-motion film created by photographer and animator Scot Hampton. The style is unique in that the film is composed entirely of pieces of vintage cameras.
Don't want trouble with the US Government? Then you might want to reconsider photographing anything that might cause suspicion among law enforcement -- especially if you're Middle Eastern or a 'Chinese national.' A newly published document has revealed that government agencies have been compiling lists of "suspicious activity" reports, many of which contain records of photographers legally taking pictures of bridges, dams, courthouses, and post offices.
Engineers at Ohio State University have imitated aspects of human and insect eyes to create what may turn out to be the next big advance in camera lens technology.
Anyone interested in shooting photos or videos using continuous light without breaking the bank has likely looked at purchasing or building a lighting setup based around CFL bulbs. Earlier in the year, I decided to go this route myself because I film interviews and generally prefer the way that soft continuous light reacts with a subject's pupils and comfort levels for photography.
The concept for season three of Duck Dynasty was to take the Robertsons even MORE over the top than they already are and bring their outdoor ‘world of camo’ INDOORS! I worked very closely with Marissa Grasso, Meghan Kirsch, and Sarah Freed at A&E, set designer Nick Tortorici, and wardrobe stylist Ivy Jarrin to create the look of the campaign.
In 2008, Hurricane Ike ripped through Texas leaving massive flooding and what turned out to be about $19.3 billion in damage. In Houston, the task of documenting the aftermath for the Houston Press fell to photographer Daniel Kramer.
And earlier this month, on the hurricane's 5-year anniversary, Kramer set out again to revisit the once-devastated locations he photographed in 2008 and put together a series of before-and-after shots to show how well the city has bounced back.
The popular mobile triggering solution Triggertrap just announced version 2.0 of its mobile application, complete with a visual overhaul and a total of 14 triggering options that promise to "make advanced photographic techniques available to everyone -- even photographic newbies."
In search of a difficult photo project? Try photographing airplanes passing in front of the sun and the moon. That's what French photographer Sebastien Lebrigand set out to do earlier this year, and his resulting photographs are incredible.
The splendor of the white snowy peaks of the Andes mountains is one of the reasons thousands of nature enthusiasts and outdoor adventurers flock to Peru every year. A front row seat to such stunning views aboard the cockpit of a C-130, at the age of eight, is an unforgettable memory that sparked my passion for planes.
Remember that $100 DIY sound blimp we told you about back in June? Well, the wedding photographers in this video might wish they had build one for themselves after the tongue lashing they received at the hands of an irate minister.
We told you yesterday to watch out for a "rugged" Nikon 1 announcement in the next 24-hours, and lo and behold, it happened. Introducing the Nikon 1 AW1, a camera Nikon is calling "the world's first waterproof and shockproof interchangeable lens camera," with a convenient asterisk added in for those of us who remember the Nikonos system.
Update: The Associated Press has re-released the photos, and is now confirming that they DO show scenes related to the Navy Yard shooting.
A widely distributed image used to illustrate stories about Monday's horrific shooting at the Washington Navy Yard likely had nothing to do with the tragedy, offering a cautious tale of modern media overreach.
Hey, not everybody wants a homemade gun. So how about using that 3D printer you've borrowed to make your own home-brew point-and-shoot digital camera?
DIY portal Instructables now has directions to do just that, thanks to creator Randy Sarafan's plans -- including a downloadable template to print the body -- and RadioShack's mighty JPEG Color Camera Board to go inside. The final product would make a fine companion to the OpenReflex 3D-printable film SLR for those ready to go digital.
In his photo series The Square, Korean artist Seokmin Ko throws a small glitch into reality. In every photo, someone can be seen holding a mirror that obscures everything but their hands wrapped around the edges, in a couple of cases blending them into the surroundings so well that it's hard to see were they are.
As copyright disputes go, this one sits squarely on the border between strange and stranger. We've seen plenty of people have their photography rights infringed upon, and it wasn't even that long ago we saw it happen over Instagram, but we've never seen the president of an entirely republic make that mistake.
The Bonzart Lit should look somewhat familiar since we shared its big brother, the Ampel, with you back in June. But even though the toy camera-style design is the same, the two cameras offer very different experiences.
The Ampel was a not-quite-toy camera with a tilt-shift lens built in, whereas the Lit is a very-much-toy camera that offers a fun and strictly non-professional photo experience on the cheap.
In addition to the Project Mighty and Napoleon announcement we told you about earlier, Adobe had a few more things up its sleeve yesterday. Key among them was the official release of the exciting $10/month photographer bundle along with some statistics that show how fast Creative Cloud is growing.
When it comes to high-speed liquid photography, you'd be hard-pressed to find more than one or two people the world over who can match illustrator Alberto Seveso. Last year we featured two of his projects: a surreal set of photos that mixed portraits with ink, and the awesome "Ink Riders" series of LEGO men surfing on ink.
The series Dropping continues down the same ink-inspired road, only this time, Seveso eschewed the water he typically uses and used oil instead.
Good or bad, photography as a medium is closely tied to the technological heritage of our cameras. As a result, technological developments often influence the type of gear we use and the type of photographs we take.
With that in mind, here are some areas of innovation that are likely to create even more change in the way we take pictures and the way manufacturers design cameras in the future.
Adobe made several announcements yesterday, and one of the most talked about revolved around projects Napoleon and Mighty, the digital ruler and pressure sensitive stylus the company debuted in early May.
Back then, both pieces of hardware were basically prototypes in the "technology exploration" phase, but now Adobe has announced that Mighty and Napoleon will be hitting store shelves in the first half of 2014, and they won't be alone. Two accompanying iOS apps -- Parallel and Contour -- are being designed as well.
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If you feel like you've been lacking for inspiration lately, you're about to strike the photographic gold mine. In celebration of their 125th anniversary, National Geographic is launching PROOF, a photography blog all their own that is already full of great content -- and it's only been running for 2 days.
If you've turned on the news over the past couple of days, the name Costa Concordia probably came up a time or two. The massive 114,500-ton luxury liner crashed into the reef off the coast of Tuscany in January of 2012, where it has been sitting on its side ever since.
Yesterday, a group of 500 engineers were given the O.K. to finally begin righting the ship, and what followed was an incredible 19-hour salvage operation that the BBC was kind enough to capture in time-lapse.
After a runner taking a selfie caused a "pile-up" at this year's Hong Kong Marathon in February, the marathon's organizers aren't taking any chances. Starting early so as to get the word out, the marathon is banning selfies and urging runners to leave the smartphones on the sidelines.
What happens when you give a bunch of skaters, some photographers and a light painter free reign to create a Street View tour of a French concert venue/cultural hotspot? We'll give you a hint, it's similar to what a French ski shop did for its virtual tour.
In conjunction with the iPhone 5S debut, Apple also announced that the phone -- or more importantly, it's camera -- would be put to the test at luxury fashion house Burberry's London fashion show. And now that the show is over, the duo is sharing photos and videos taken with the phone to whet your appetite for the September 20th release.
Short and sweet, the video above is also impressive. Although it might seem banal enough -- what's so special about a video of the moon going through a full rotation? -- what you're looking at is a super-high resolution time-lapse that shows all of the Moon, including the part that's never visible from Earth. And it was all made possible by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Not everybody can afford to drop the cash required to get a Leica, but that doesn't mean you can't still rep the brand. Check out these new, official Leica T-shirts that have started showing up in authorized Leica camera shops all over the US.
Fujifilm has some very capable X-Mount shooters in its repertoire, and today that repertoire grows with the addition of the X-A1 entry-level X-Mount interchangeable lens camera. After months of rumors and photo leaks, the official camera is finally here.
The thinking behind the new Android and iOS app Chirp is that if animals in nature communicate through sound, machines should too. And so, the four person Animal Systems team created an app that does just that: no bluetooth, no email, no 'bumping' -- images and other files are sent using only 2-second sound clips.
Then-and-now photos are always fascinating to see. Historical scenes come to life when blended into or placed side-by-side with modern-day photographs of cities we all know very well. Be it Paris, New York or San Francisco, most of the best-known cities have gotten the then-and-now treatment to great effect by many a photographer.
The most recent Then and Now series we've run across, however, isn't just meant to show how the scenery has changed. When photographer and historian Marc A. Hermann created the images, he purposely used only vintage (Note: and sometimes gruesome) crime scene photos to fill in the "then" part.
Of all the items that can be destroyed in a disaster, few are as valuable or hard to replace as family photo collections. Photographer Brian Peterson saw that first-hand while living and working in Japan two years ago, when an earthquake and even more devastating tsunami swept away everything many families owned.
Sensing that photography could be a way to help them heal, Peterson started the organization Photohoku (named for the Tohoku region devastated by the tsunami) to help families rebuild their photo albums.
For you and me, RGB color spaces may just be an obscure but important mechanism towards achieving properly color-balanced photos. For a certain group of image nerds, however, it's the whole enchilada.
It's rare that we get to report happy news from the intellectual property side of the photography business, so let's take heart from a win-win settlement achieved between a wronged photographer and viral media site BuzzFeed.
You probably already know this if you have older siblings, but a new British study has confirmed it: the first child gets all the camera attention from Mom and Dad.
For those people who are fed up with constantly wiping water drops off of their lens when shooting in rainy weather, Tokina has a pretty ingenious solution for you: a hydrophilic "rain dispersion filter."
If you like using your smartphone to do any kind of photography or videography, a great mount can go a long way in making your life easier. eleMount is just that, except that it offers so much more. Eye-catching and incredibly practical all at the same time, the little flat surface and tripod mount has taken the Internet by storm.
French photographer Julien Coquentin's series Please Draw Me a Wall is a curious combination of street art and photography. By having his subjects (sometimes himself) interact with wall art as if it were real, he creates fantasy worlds using only a few props and drawings that some call art and others defacement.
We told you about it in March of 2012, but the Digital Bolex D16 Cinema RAW camera only just made it into a few choice cinematographers hands this month, giving them a chance to put together sample footage that'll make the videographers out there salivate.