May 2015

Fotodiox has announced a new product called the EyeVenger Eyecup Kit that gives photographers a custom viewfinder eyepiece for left and right eyes that blocks out unwanted light.

Freelensing is the use of a lens decoupled from your camera, manual orienting the lens on various angles to tilt and shift the lens to alter the focal plane. Freelensing is a great method of isolating your subject or creating interest in an otherwise flat or busy scene. This technique has been around for ages but helps achieve a similar look to that created by a tilt-shift lens used often in wedding photography.

Most photocopiers (AKA Xerox machines) these days use a technology called xerography, which is also known as electrophotography. While it's almost always used as a means to create copies of documents, electrophotography can also be used as a photo process for making prints.

Here's an interesting side effect of Facebook's popularity in photo sharing: printed Facebook photo screenshots. Reddit user OutbackBrah was recently taking a look at some photos his aunt printed at Walmart and was surprised to find that they were screenshots taken inside Facebook's mobile app.

Warning: This post contains photos of injured veterans that are difficult to view.

Since 2012, photographer Kenneth Brandon has regularly ventured into the great outdoors at night to shoot time-lapse photos of the dark sky. He recently began to wonder what a time-lapse would look like from a point-of-view on his telescope rather than through it, so he attached a DSLR to the outside on a recent shoot in Panamint Valley, California. The video above is what resulted.

Here's a new 1-minute commercial that's one part poignant and one part humor, going to great lengths to preach the simple message that real moments in life deserve real photographers to capture them. The company behind the spot is the stock photography service Latinstock Brazil.

Finnish photographer Tiina Törmänen wanted to capture how small and fragile humans are in the unfathomable expanse of space, so she shot a series of stunning self-portraits showing her silhouette dwarfed by a backdrop of stars and the Northern Lights. The series is titled "Wanderer."

Need to do a quick tracking shot on a table but don't have any dedicated camera equipment for doing so? A book and some fine powder can be a cheap and easy way to get the shot in a pinch.

OldSF and OldNYC are two websites created by software engineer Dan Vanderkam, who gathered tens of thousands of historical photos of San Francisco and New York City and plotted them on city maps.

Want an incredible dose of photographic inspiration? Check out this newly-released 2-minute trailer for the new TV series Tales by Light, a new TV series that follows 5 top photographers as they take their cameras to the ends of the Earth -- photographers who have an unquenchable desire to capture and share the wonders of this world with the rest of us.

The Dallas Police Department has officially released a new general order that's meant to inform officers on photographers' rights. The document, titled "Public Recording of Official Acts," warns officers that they cannot interfere with a person photographing or filming their activities as long as the recording is being done in an appropriate way.

Google is reportedly set to launch a standalone Photos service separate from Google+ in the very near future, and one of the things we'll be seeing through the transition is a revamped Photos app for Google's Android. If you're curious as to what the upcoming smartphone app will be like, there are new leaked screenshots that give us a taste of its features and functionality.

Say hello to the new largest photo in the world. An international team led by photographer Filippo Blengini has published a gigantic panoramic photograph of Mont Blanc, Europe's highest mountain. This new record-holding image weighs in at a staggering 365 gigapixels.

Back in 2010, San Francisco-based photographer Christopher Michel received a once-in-a-lifetime photo assignment from the US Navel Institute: to ride in the back seat of a U-2 spy plane at the "edge of space." At the plane's cruising and intelligence-gathering altitude of 70,000 feet above the ground, temperatures outside the plane fall to 70 degrees below zero.

Robert De Niro was recently invited to give the graduation speech to the 2015 class at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts -- a large audience that included photography students. What he had to say has caused quite a stir.

The 2015 French Open is underway in the tennis world, and one of the big news stories of the first round doesn't even have to do with tennis. After tennis superstar Roger Federer easily won his first round match today, a young fan sprinted onto the tennis court and attempted to take a selfie with Federer.

Want to understand the math and science behind how JPEG files store your digital photographs? The YouTube channel Computerphile has a new series of videos on the JPEG. They're a bit long and heady, but you may find them interesting if you've ever wondered about the technical details behind one of the world's most popular image compression methods.

France's Ministry of Culture and Communication has published a new report on the state of the photography industry in the country. The study contains numbers that offer an idea of how professional photography has changed over recent years.

Having had a few weeks now to spend significant time exploring Flickr 4.0, I thought I’d write up a detailed post about my ongoing thoughts on the recent update by Flickr.

The 2014 wedding season was very unique for me. It wasn't just that I participated on it from “the other side” -- I myself became a happy husband -- I was also a part of one particularly unconventional wedding photo shoot.

After issuing a warning earlier this month that a DNG file bug with its new Monochrom (Typ 246) camera could cause the annihilation of photographers' Apple Photos libraries, Leica has just issued an updated statement.

Here's a photo shoot idea that you probably shouldn't try yourself. Photographer Jake Harsh recently did a wild photo shoot with the electro-pop band Hand of Hearts that involved 18 pounds of fireworks exploding around the three band members. The short behind-the-scenes video above shows what the intense shoot was like.

"All Our Suns" is a new project by NYC telecommunications grad student Michelle Chandra that visualizes the snapping of sunset and sunrise photos around the world using Instagram data.

If you thought the Selfie Arm was a strange idea, check this out: the SelfiePICTEE is a T-shirt that has a fold-down bounce reflector on the front that provides a quick fix for the harsh shadows on your face when snapping a selfie.

MyAlbum is a new service (currently in beta) that lets you transform a set of photographs into beautiful photo essays that you can share with a simple link.

In the age of digital photography, many of us turn to online cloud solutions to help us backup our precious moments. However, the question that many of us want to know is what permissions a perspective service has with our content. With a form of hysteria sweeping the Web, we have decided to take a look at the industry’s top storage solutions and what their terms of service say about the files you upload. By using any of these solutions, you are automatically accepting their terms.

Last year we reported that Yongnuo is planning to expand its third party lens lineup to include Nikon lenses by the end of 2015. If you've been eagerly waiting to get your hands on a cheap (and possibly look-alike) Nikon lens, your wait will soon be over. The company is planning to launch 50mm and 35mm lenses for Nikon cameras in the coming months.

Ever since I photographed basketball in Rwanda, I have been fascinated and almost obsessed with ways sport and fitness can improve culture and society. In particular, my fascination has revolved around impoverished regions. Last June, in Rwanda, where genocide, poverty, and disease devastated the small country and, a few months ago, in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester.

Someone, somewhere, recently decided to bid a fond farewell to one of the most legendary telephoto lenses ever made, the Canon EF 1200mm f/5.6 L USM. Now that it is at the B&H SuperStore, a group of photographers from B&H were given the opportunity to take this optical giant out for a unique shooting experience.

After photographing a number of US cities at night through the open door of a helicopter, photographer Vincent Laforet has taken his Air project across the pond to shoot aerial shots of European cities. His first stop: London.

After a three year run, Adobe is retiring Photoshop Touch, its current horse in the mobile photo editing race. The company announced today that the iOS and Android app will be removed from app stores on May 28th. The software will still be usable on your device if you've downloaded it already, of course, but there will be no further updates.

Carter Warden is a photographer very similar to the rest of us; he captures the world with a lens to his eye because it is a hobby that brings him joy. However, Warden had a bit of a surprise recently when he discovered that National Geographic was interested in paying for and publishing two of his underwater photographs.

Adobe wants to be the 800 pound gorilla of mobile photo editing. Today the company released the 2-minute sneak peek video above showing off some mobile retouching features its currently developing. In the clip, Photoshop product manager Bryan O'Neil Hughes shows how effortlessly photographers will be able to edit 50.3 megapixel Canon 5DS photos in the app.

There are a great number of storage options out there for your photographs, but a new app called Bundle believes they can bring something to the table that others cannot. Using advanced machine learning algorithms, the service helps to easily arrange your images into ‘bundles’ and then upload them to the cloud for safe backup from both Android and iOS devices.

Zuckerim Inc. has launched a Kickstarted campaign to fund their new product, the GekkoPod. Modeling its design off of gekko feet, the GekkoPod aims to be a flexible phone and camera mount for all of your favorite devices. Similar to JOBY’s GorillaPod, the GekkoPod serves as a nifty little solution for photographers on the move. However, Zuckerim’s product may have a few advantages over the competition.

As me and my team left for Vietnam this January, we had a goal: to make an interactive reportage about the world’s largest cave for National Geographic. This included several things no one had ever attempted before: lighting up and capturing the largest caverns that exist on this Earth. In 360 degrees.

Nikon has just released a new firmware update for the D750. The download is version C:1.02 and is designed to make your D750 "more reliable." …

Comedian Norm Macdonald paid a visit to the Late Show on May 15th to perform a short stand-up routine. Among the many jokes delivered during the 8-minute were a couple about where photography has been and where it's going. You can hear them starting at 1.5 minutes in the clip above.

Imagine assembling a portfolio of over 4,000 photographs and then being forced to make it disappear or face life-altering consequences; that's the situation sophomore Anthony Mazur is currently facing at Flower Mound High School in his Texas hometown. After discovering the love of sports photography, the Lewisville Independent School District is now claiming that Anthony’s photographs are theirs and that he has no right to use them.

I think, as an industry, photographers talk about inspiration a lot. We are either trying to find it, discover it or attempting to evoke it. I’ve recently found inspiration in the last place I would expect it: in my own work. More than the work, actually, the inspiration is from the subjects. And the inspiration that affected me has nothing to do with photography. Over the last two years, I’ve stumbled into photographing more athletes and fitness enthusiasts, and it has, in great part, …

Artist Richard Prince is notorious in the art world for taking other people's work, "appropriating" them as his own with various changes, and then selling them for large amounts of dough. His latest endeavor is once again raising eyebrows: Prince is selling other people's Instagram photos for up to $100,000 each.

Last September, we featured Lumy, an elegant iPhone app that's designed to help photographers track golden hour and other times of the day with ideal natural light. Today, the company released an update that brings the app to the new Apple Watch, allowing photographers to be reminded of certain lighting conditions with notifications on their wrist.

One of the most important aspects of fine art macro photography is capturing a non-distracting background so your subject stands out. I tend to like clean and colorful backgrounds, but there are situations where dark backgrounds may be desirable. This article will showcase one method of how to capture black backgrounds in macro photography. We’ll take a look at using flash falloff.

My name is Kyle Hart, and I'm the founder of Rhino Camera Gear. In this post, I'll be sharing an easy technique for combining a real-time camera move with a time-lapse to create a simple composite without doing any rotoscoping.

When Panasonic unveiled its new Lumix G7 camera this past Monday, the company also gave a glimpse into where it's going with its camera technologies.

The Bank of England is looking for a historical visual artist to feature on the latest £20 note, and the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) wants to make sure the winner is someone connected with photography.

Flickr has caused some unexpected controversy with the auto-tagging feature it launched earlier this month. The "advanced image recognition" system has been found to make some pretty embarrassing and offensive mistakes, including tagging a portrait of a black man with the word "ape."

In today’s society, it seems that no knowledge is more prudent for photographers to learn than the rights of themselves and their photographs. Here at PetaPixel, we wanted to create a comprehensive one-stop guide to your constitutional rights to capture the world around you and what you are permitted to do with those photos.

Popularized by the likes of Instagram, photo filters are divisive in the world of photography: some people love using and viewing them, while others hate what they've done to the medium. No matter which side of the aisle you find yourself on, one thing is clear: filters can have a big impact these days on how popular your shared images are.