When the Calbuco volcano in southern Chile erupted back in April, one photographer captured footage from the moment of explosion and another one managed to shoot a short time-lapse sequence of the plumes. German time-lapse photographer Martin Heck of Timestorm Films just released an amazing video of his own.
If quadcopters haven’t yet caught your interest then maybe the B-Unstoppable hybrid drone will be the first. A Kickstarter project created by a company named ‘B’ aims to introduce the first commercially available hybrid tank-quadcopter to market. With the flip of a switch, your drone can transform from a dirt-barreling tank into a sky-flying aircraft while capturing footage the entire time via an optional 720p HD camera.
Finding the perfect photograph to use can be a challenge. Most photographers seek to copyright their work giving them the exclusive rights to its use and distribution. When you simply want to use a photo for a school presentation or your personal blog, navigating the legal landscape can be a nightmare. Luckily, the folks over at Creative Commons have created an Android app to allow you to find quickly and request images that you can legally use.
Want an ultimate single-page cheat sheet for looking up keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC? The design team over at setupablogtoday have created just that: massive sheets that you can study and explore to your hearts content.
Adobe announced a major update to its Creative Cloud subscription service today, bringing a large number of improvements to the entire Adobe family of 15 CC desktop apps. Here's a look at what's new for photographers in Creative Cloud 2015.
New York-based photographer Chris Buck is known for his celebrity portraits and magazine cover photos (two of his TIME covers here and here), but recently he's been working on a rather unusual personal project -- one that involves his iPhone and a realistic miniature 3D-printed figurine of himself.
There are a limited number of backpacks that we would recommend taking on a journey if you decided to head to the Arctic circle or the Amazon rainforest. The range of available camera bags from f-stop seem to be designed for the pure purpose of rough adventuring, and it may just be a contender. We received a chance to test out their latest Mountain Series bag, the Ajna, and we had quite a journey.
Here's a tip for if you're planning on visiting royal residences in the United Kingdom: be aware of your surroundings and don't get in the way of the Queen's Guard. A man named Steven Macaulay just posted this video of a photographer who accidentally stood in the path of the soldiers during a march.
COOPH just released this short 3-minute video in which adventure photographer Ray Demski shares a number of helpful tips for travel photography. It covers everything from the preparation stage (e.g. making your camera look nasty and putting your contact info on it) to shooting (e.g. looking for cool natural frames) to making sure your data is safe.
Our buddies over at DigitalRev TV made this humorous nature documentary parody about 9 species of amateur photographer you find out in the wild. From the Streetus Togus to the Gear Whore-us, these are relatively common types that you'll see in abundance when on a photog watching expedition.
Adobe today announced Adobe Stock, a new stock content service that's directly integrated into creative workflows that involve Adobe applications.
Like everybody else, we at LensRentals were pretty excited to get our hands on Canon's new 5DS and 5DS R. There are already a lot of hands-on articles about the cameras that probably have told you more than you need to know to make your purchase decision. Of course, for most of the Canon shooters who read this blog, the purchase decision was just which place you want to buy it from.
That Dehaze feature that Adobe teased last month is now official for Photoshop's Adobe Camera RAW and Lightroom in a major new Creative Cloud update. The feature helps eliminate fog and haze from photos to create "startlingly clear images."
Facebook today launched a new standalone app called Moments that's designed to help friends build collaborative photo albums for easy sharing of memories.
Camera gear rental company LensProToGo just had its headquarters broken into, and as much as $500,000 in equipment may have been stolen by burglars.
Canon may be planning to create one of the world's widest non-fisheye prime lenses. A new patent shows the internal design of a 10mm f/2.8 lens for full frame sensors.
Remember that photo of a weasel riding on a woodpeckers back that went viral earlier this year? A similarly strange wildlife shot has emerged, and this one is making the rounds on the Web as well. It's a bizarre photo of a raccoon riding on the back of an alligator in a river.
It's always neat when photographers and film directors opt for creative and ambitious physical sets and effects rather than relying primarily on computer generated imagery. One interesting recent example is the mind-bending tesseract scene in the hit movie Interstellar. Rather than portray time as a dimension using CGI, director Christopher Nolan and his crew built a giant and complex physical set.
It’d be easy to dismiss the new Canon 5DS and 5DS R as 5D Mark III DSLRs with 50 megapixel sensors, but that’s exactly what they are.
Photography enthusiast Jason Dorn of Calgary, Alberta, has been creating a series of illustrations of well-known vintage film cameras. The artworks show the forms of iconic cameras in front of simple, colored backgrounds.
Celebrities now have another reason to shy away from paparazzi photographers. Scientists have created a new technique for creating controllable digital versions of celebrities using only a set of paparazzi photos to reconstruct faces and create convincing expressions.
This past weekend, we wrote about how one photographer received a counterfeit memory card from eBay and lost a number of important photos when the card got corrupted during the first use. Afterward, we had an interesting email exchange with the eBay seller that shed some new light on this story.
Russian urban exploration photographer Ralph Mirebs recently paid a visit to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, where inside a giant abandoned hangar are decaying remnants of prototypes from the Soviet space shuttle program.
Here's one way to identify a pricey lens: it comes with a dedicated luxury humidor for humidity control. Back in 2008, as Leica was ending a manufacturing run of its Noctilux 50mm f/1 lens, the company decided to release the last 100 units as a special edition. Each of the lenses was shipped with a special humidity control box crafted in Paris, France, by Elie Bleu, which makes high-end humidors for cigar aficionados.
Always buy your memory cards from reputable sources. Go for a "sweet deal" through a place like eBay, and you could be in for a lot of pain and embarrassment.
Hasselblad's luxury rebrands of Sony cameras may elicit jeers from the photography community, but it seems that sales are doing well enough for Hasselblad to keep doing more of the same. New photos show that Hasselblad is on the verge of launching yet another line: the Lusso. Based on specs, it appears this camera will be a rebranded version of the popular Sony a7R.
This is impressive: photographer and aspiring astronaut Trevor Mahlmann was sitting in the seat of an airplane at 40,000 feet this past Tuesday when he managed to plan and shoot this stacked long-exposure photo showing the International Space Station whizzing by.
Here's a behind-the-scenes look at how Japanese lens maker Kowa creates its Prominar line of lenses for Micro Four Thirds cameras. The 3-minute "how it's made" video above steps through each of the stages of manufacturing, from designing the lenses on a computer to putting the components together into a final product and testing its optical qualities.
Here's a quick look at how I created some homemade "petzval swirl" bokeh that mimics photos taken with the new Petzval 58 Bokeh Control Art lens.
I wish I hadn’t, but the other day I stumbled across an essay on PetaPixel entitled 12 Reasons Photographers Still Choose to Shoot Film over Digital. Bravely, the writer had polled his associates who shoot film and culled their responses down to a dandy dozen. I shook my head sadly, because I’d heard them all many times before.
When Seth McMurry proposed to his girlfriend Cymber recently, he partnered up with his brother Andrew to capture the whole thing in a creative and unusual way. Instead of settling for a standard hide-in-the-bushes photo or video, Andrew convinced Cymber that he was shooting an action movie and needed her and Seth to help out as actors.
Sigma's dp3 Quattro compact camera is a very different piece of photographic equipment. From the unit’s elongated body shape to its internal Foveon image sensor, it is a mini technological and design wonder. However, just because a piece of tech is fascinating does not mean it will be suitable for its craft. The Sigma dp3 Quattro may be mesmerizing, but is it worth the $1000 price tag?
When signing up for virtually every photo sharing service, you'll be asked to agree to a lengthy terms of service document that's filled with legalese. If you're confused by the text and want that agreement spelled out for you in simpler terms, check out Terms of Service; Didn't Read (TOSDR), a new site that's dedicated to explaining terms and giving out report cards based on the conditions.
Photographer Jimmy Nelson spent three years between 2010 and 2013 visiting some of the indigenous cultures found in the furthest corners of our planet. His goal was to capture portraits of the disappearing people groups and to preserve glimpses of their rites, customs, and traditions -- photos that he hopes will remain even if these cultures fade away.
Austrian portrait photographer Gerd Tschebular recently did an outdoor fashion shoot and filmed the whole thing from his camera's perspective. The 2-minute video above offers a behind-the-scenes look at how the different shots were lit and put together.
Underwater photographer Karim Iliya was shooting in the ocean off the coast of the island of Vava'u last August when he had a magical (but scary) encounter with humpback whales. After jumping into the water, Iliya found himself in the midst of a battle between four humpback males that were fighting for one lone female.
Economist Films just published this 12-minute mini documentary that puts the spotlight on "drone pilots making the world a better place," from those helping to stop illegal poaching in Africa to those providing an eye in the sky during disaster response operations.
One of the fixtures of NBA games is the row of photographers and cameraman sitting under the hoop near the baseline -- something the players have complained about for years. That debate was reignited during Game 4 of the NBA Finals last night when LeBron fell into the row of cameras and slammed his head straight into the lens of a heavy broadcast camera.
Zack says he was filming a wedding with a drone this past weekend when he captured this example of "beautiful aerial wedding photography." He was shooting with a DJI Phantom 2 with a GoPro attached.
Gimbal stabilizers can be used to help produce smooth, high-quality video. However, inexpensive gimbals typically use heavy counterweights for stabilization, making them difficult to carry around, while more expensive models utilize precision electronics. A happy medium may soon be on the market; the California-based company, Neuvison, has announced their Kickstarter for the AutoSteady, an affordable electronic 3-axis gimbal stabilizer.
YouTube celebrity Casey Neistat made the photography world cringe and groan today after publishing a new vlog titled "Quitter," which includes a particularly painful-to-watch case of violence against cameras. After repeatedly experiencing an error on his Canon 70D that caused him to lose footage, Neistat took an ax and destroyed both the camera and lens.
If you shoot film, you know how difficult it can be to properly organize your photographs once they have been digitized to your computer. Modern digital cameras allow easy organization with built in metadata that provides every bit of information you could ever need; however, digitally scanned photos contain no such data. Promote Systems has introduced the Meta35, a device to easily import and sync your film camera’s metadata.
The short film above, titled "Denali," is photographer Ben Moon's beautiful and touching tribute to his dog Denali, who passed away last year at the age of 14. It's a story of love and friendship, creatively told from Denali's perspective.
A Florida-based photographer and his model were seriously injured on Tuesday after a freak explosion during a photo shoot in a junk yard.
In the digital age, there is a demand for instant gratification; however, is it possible that the perfect solution for the modern individual is an analog one? Instant film was a product introduced during the late 1940s and remains a popular option for instant physical prints to this day. Hold up your camera, press a button, and minutes later you have a fully processed physical image. And to think that it all started with a little girl’s simple question…
Photographer Mason Resnick created this humorous (but perhaps painfully true?) graphic about how photography has changed since the days of 12-exposure rolls of 120 film.
If you use the Camera app on an Android phone, you may soon be getting a fancy new feature called Smart Burst, which will let you capture a rapid-fire sequence of frames and then have the best one selected for you as the keeper.
Tired of having to memorize new keyboard shortcuts for every application you use? Want to see every Photoshop tool icon right under your fingertips? Sonder is a new customizable keyboard that can help you navigate shortcuts. Each of the main keys features an E Ink display that can be customized with different icons for different programs.
It appears Apple is planning to greatly improve the quality of iPhone selfies. Code found in iOS 9 suggests that the next iPhone may offer a much more powerful front-facing camera -- one that features 1080p video, 240fps slow-mo, and a flash/light.
Editor's note: This DIY tutorial uses a specific product called Compound 9, but you could use the same ideas/concepts with different materials and/or objects.
