Several times a year, Portland-based photographer Duncan Davidson is called upon by TED to shoot portraits of the notable speakers while they're giving their presentations. Some months ago, Davidson himself stepped onto the stage and gave a talk at TEDxBeaconStreet about finding things to photograph right before your eyes.
If you're out shooting on a sunny day and suddenly find that you need to start a fire, your lens may be able to do the trick. The video above shows how a photographer named Mohammad recently used his Carl Zeiss 45mm f/2 lens to light his cigarette while out hiking with friends. You could also use this handy little trick to light a fire if you're out camping -- as long as you have some direct sunlight to focus to a point.
Photographer Robert Caplin of The Photo Brigade recently visited the White House and sat down with Pete Souza, President Obama's official White House photographer. The 50-minute interview, which can be viewed above, is a fascinating look into the life, work, and mind of the man who serves as the public's eye into the White House.
Facebook doesn't allow children under the age of 13 to sign up for the social network, which makes things trickier for parents who wish to organize photos of their kids with tags. Today Facebook launched a new feature called 'Scrapbook' that's designed specifically to allow parents to tag children who don't have their own accounts.
We reported over the weekend that Arkansas lawmakers had passed a privacy bill that could potentially kill street photography by requiring (in most cases) that photographers get written consent from strangers they photograph. Photographers who don't could get sued by their subjects.
One of the tricky things about online shopping is the price fluctuation that happens for products. The price you see today may not be around when you check again tomorrow. If you regularly shop for camera gear on Amazon, one website that you should bookmark and reference is CamelCamelCamel. It's a website that tracks the price history of Amazon's products, allowing you to time your purchases at historically low prices.
Tablet cameras are getting better and better, and more and more people are using their tablets as everyday snapshot cameras. So it only makes sense that tablets would eventually follow the smartphone into the world of selfie sticks as well.
One of the most widely shared photos on the Internet in the past week has been the picture above by Turkish photojournalist Osman Sağırlı. It's a portrait of a young Syrian girl he encountered back in 2014, who mistook his telephoto lens for a weapon and instinctively threw up her hands in surrender.
Google is planning to separate its photo services from Google+ to make it a standalone offering, and we're starting to see some shifts in service structuring.
I’ve always found photos of star trails -- the arcs the stars paint across the sky as the earth turns -- fascinating. They’re one of the things that we can “see” with a camera that we can’t see with our eyes. Technology has changed how we shoot star trails, making star trail shots in locations we previously thought impossible possible.
MELVILLE, N.Y., March 26, 2015 – A 37-year-old man has criticized Canon’s latest DSLR, the 5DS, for not having enough pixels, even though it has more pixels than any other DSLR in history and has not even been released yet.
Last week SpaceX posted its photos to Flickr and released them to the public domain. Unfortunately for the company, Flickr didn't have any public domain designation they could use, so even though SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the photos were public domain, the images were shared under a Creative Commons license that required attribution.
Update: Oops. It turns out the camera was already named and shown by Canon last month. Please see the update below.
Short-film makers Adrian Morphy and Marissa Bergougnou of Rhymes with Orange did an interesting little social experiment recently. They had a guy named Geoffrey Cork stand on a street and ask passersby to stop and pose for a selfie with him. It wasn't just a smartphone selfie, though, but also one shot with a bulky 16mm Bolex motion picture camera. The black-and-white cinematic selfies turned out pretty well.
Ryan McGinnis is a photographer and storm chaser whom we interviewed and featured back in 2011. After years of pointing his camera at newsworthy storms, McGinnis switched things up a bit in 2014 by introducing time-lapses into his repertoire. Although he was still learning, he did manage to capture quite a few amazing sequences showing powerful weather events.
Professional photographer Leif Norman recently gave a talk at TEDxManitoba titled "The Past and Future of Photography." Norman spent 18 minutes giving the audience a brief history of photography and sharing Gladys, a large format view camera he built to experiment with older processes.
A 87-year-old grandmother in Texas has sold a rare and valuable collection of more than 500 Civil War-era photographs to the Library of Congress after building her personal collection for four decades.
Photographer Calder Wilson recently did some experimentation by attaching fireworks to a drone and then flying it around in a long exposure photograph. The results are beautiful to look at.
In addition to its main photographer-oriented business, Phase One also develops camera gear under Phase One Industrial, a leading manufacturer of digital medium format cameras for aerial photography.
Photographer CJ from substormflow is passionate about exploring sewer systems, and he wants to show the world the unique underground architecture that most people never get to see. The video above is a glimpse into the hidden system of old culverts and sewers beneath the bustling city of Manchester in England.
Retouching gets a bad rap these days due to the way it can distort truth and cause unrealistic expectations of human beauty, but retoucher Becci Manson is working to change that. The 12-minute profile above offers a look at how Manson works and how she is trying to make a difference, both in the retouching industry and outside the creative world.
I was in Cleveland photographing the Sweet 16 and the Elite 8 March Madness Rounds for USA Today. This was my 3rd basketball game I covered all season. I am not much of a fan of shooting basketball, but when it’s crunch time and the game is on the line, I love the hustle and determination players put in to try to win the game and move onto the next round.
The factory that manufactures Rolleiflex cameras is being liquidated in a bankruptcy auction, so there's a chance we may never see new Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex cameras produced ever again. As the fate of the brand is in limbo, 21 original Rolleiflex camera prototypes have appeared in an auction on eBay. For a cool $178,000, collectors can own a unique piece of photographic history.
Photographer Matthew Rycroft put together this video containing 13 strange, random, and mind-bending "facts" about photography. These are short and seemingly obvious statements that may make you stop and think.
Many photographers capture close-up photos of ocean waves, but photographer Ray Collins has a portfolio of wave shots that stands out. His images of "Seascapes" show waves frozen in time, captured to look like vast mountainous landscapes of solid rock and ice.
Animator and photography enthusiast Simon Taylor created this short animated film titled "Taking Pictures." It's a cute little story of two photographers who meet while taking pictures in a park and connect over their love for photography. You can find a behind-the-scene video showing how one particular scene was created here.
Here are some encouraging words from photographer and educator Mike Browne, who talks about one of the biggest obstacles some photographers face: the feature of failure and getting it "wrong." …
You know that girl in group photos who always wants to see the photo you capture and is never satisfied with the way she turns out? The short sketch above is an exaggerated tongue-in-cheek sketch about what "Take Another Photo girl" sounds like to photographers.
"Weird" humor channel CH2, which made the video, writes: "That’s what you sound like. Stop asking." …
If you're a photographer who often shoots in very dark environments, would you want night vision eyedrops to help you see better without artificial illumination? It sounds like science fiction, but we're actually getting closer to having it be possible as an item for camera bags.
Want to give your photographs a "Hollywood movie" look? Here's a fantastic 25-minute tutorial on how to do cinematic color grading on your photographs using Photoshop. The technique involves using the Curves tool to create a teal-orange look, a color scheme that is very prevalent in movies released in recent years.
Prominent photography groups are sounding the alarm about a new bill that was just passed by the Arkansas Senate. SB-79, the "Personal Rights Protection Act," would require photographers to get written consent from a stranger to feature their likeness in a photograph for most purposes.
We often get too set in our ways and our conversation remains in the same context, which can blind us to seeing the pitfalls we create for ourselves. In general, using other photographers’ aesthetics, judgements, and sensibilities should make us think twice, thrice, … Yet, in the rush of creating the next “noticeable” image on the Web, we use presets, filters, brushes, and a whole lot of them without thinking twice.
Instagram sparked controversy this week after deleting this photograph of a woman lying on a bed with menstruation blood seen on her clothing and on her sheets. She's now demanding to know why other more graphic or risqué photos are allowed on the service while images of a fully clothed woman on her period are not.
Photographer Marisha Camp and her brother Jessie were recently passing through West Virginia on a nationwide tour for a documentary series when they were reportedly confronted by "a hostile mob." The residents were suspicious of the photo taking and allegedly harassed and detained the duo until a trooper arrived and escorted the photographers from the scene.
If you're planning on buying or selling some camera gear with the help of Craigslist, here's a simple tip: the lobby of your local police station is a safe place to arrange the meeting with the stranger.
50 years ago, civil rights photographer Matt Herron documented the Selma to Montgomery marches that highlighted racial injustices in the American South and helped to pass the Voting Rights Act that year. He ended up capturing one of the iconic photographs of the marches that remains recognizable to this day.
This 'Just the Lenses' article will take advantage of a Trioptics Imagemaster optical bench to compare lenses from different camera mounts with no camera involved. Why is that different? Because all other forms of testing (DxO, Imatest, or even photography) tests the camera-lens combination.
"Mirrored" is a photo project that was a collaboration between photographers Markus Andersen and Elif Suyabatmaz. It's a series of diptychs showing daily life on opposite ends of the globe: Andersen is based out of Sydney, Australia, and Suyabatmaz is based out of Istanbul, Turkey. In each pair of images, the selected photos "mirror each other in both obvious and subtle ways."
This is pretty impressive: photographer Pascal Kulcsar needed to digitize some old slide film left behind by his grandfather. Rather than purchase a film scanner, Kulcsar decided to combine his technical ingenuity and love for LEGOs to create a DIY slide film scanner using LEGO pieces.
Apple recently launched a global advertising campaign touting the camera quality of the iPhone 6. As part of the campaign, the company put up billboards all over the world with its favorite photos captured by iPhone 6 users with the phone.
Somalia is a country that doesn't often get good press. Most headlines about it seem to focus on things like pirates, violence, and political unrest. With media organizations largely ignoring the happier aspects of the country, one woman is taking it upon herself to do so, becoming something of an Instagram celebrity along the way.
Photographers who are out and about often have thousands of dollars in camera gear kept inside a camera bag, and keeping an eye on your bag at all times can be taxing and sometimes impossible. KitSentry is a new product that's designed to keep an eye on your gear so you don't have to, giving you peace of mind to help you focus on making photos.
If you're a fan of both retro cameras and instant photos, you may be delighted to learn of a new camera called the InstantFlex TL70. It's designed to look like a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera, but it's a fully functional instant camera that takes Fujifilm Instax film.
DigitalRev TV, the Top Gear of photography, is the latest to do a hands-on comparison of the classic Canon 50mm f/1.8 II lens against its new copycat competitor, the YongNuo 50mm f/1.8. In DigitalRev's typical fashion, Kai offers a humorous yet insightful look at how the two products compare against one another in performance and build. (Note: there's a bit of strong language).
One of the many amazing photographs that emerged after the recent total solar eclipse was this epic shot of stunt biker Danny MacAskill soaring down a hill with the moon eclipsing the sun in the background. Many on the Internet immediately called the shot a "fake," but it's far from it.
Moscow-based artist Dmitry Morozov has created a strange DIY camera unlike any we've seen before. It's an 8-bit instant photo shooter created with an old Game Boy, a camera, a thermal printer, an Arduino board, and a gun.
A photographer named Andy Davidhazy hiked the 2,600 miles from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail. It was both a physical endeavor and a photographic one: every mile he traveled, Davidhazy stopped and took a single selfie. The video above is the time-lapse that he created after his epic journey.
I received a Rosco Gel kit a week ago, and after a few tests I can say I really love using all the awesome colors for my photography.
The kit includes 20 individual 30x48cm square sheets for color corrections (e.g. CTO, CTB, ND) and a range of different colors, all of them contained in a protected and resealable packaging.
Earlier this month, we shared a video showing the incredible reach of the Canon SX60, a superzoom compact camera with a 65x lens. If you thought that video was crazy, check out this one featuring the new Nikon P900, which packs an even longer 83x optical zoom lens -- the equivalent of a 24-2000mm lens in 35mm terms.
Back in 2013, Vadym Chalenko successfully raised nearly $40,000 to launch a product called the Beastgrip, the first universal lens adapter and camera rig for smartphones. Now, two years later, he's refreshing the Beastgrip with a new version that's even more versatile and powerful. It's called the Beastgrip Pro.
