July 2015

The prospect of cheaply and easily capturing photos and footage from the skies is one of the many aspects that makes camera drones so alluring. With Extreme Flier’s successful funding of the Micro Drone 3 on Indiegogo, it looks like technology that was once exclusive to those with deep pockets will soon be available for less than $200. Featuring computer assisted flying, still photos, live-streaming HD video, and a modular design, the Micro Drone 3 might truly be a drone for everyone to enjoy.

Sony's new flagship a7R II is a mirrorless camera designed to rule them all. In addition to packing the world's first backside-illuminated 42.4MP full-frame sensor and 4K video recording, the camera is also designed to be more stealthy than its predecessor.

People still aren't getting the message that taking selfies with wild animals can be a very bad idea. Yet another tourist was flipped by a bison in Yellowstone last week while shooting a selfie, but that pales in comparison to what happened to a San Diego man earlier this month: the guy tried to take a selfie with a rattlesnake, got bitten, and racked up a $153,000 hospital bill for his treatment.

Yet another tourist has been attacked by a bison while taking a selfie in Yellowstone National Park, prompting park officials to release another public warning against the practice.

Want to hear the story of how the iconic Afghan Girl photo was shot? NPR's All Things Considered interviewed renowned photojournalist Steve McCurry to find out the background behind the famous National Geographic cover picture.

How do go about making photos of big wave surfing even more extreme? Here's one way: add fire to the mix. Surfer Jamie O'Brien recently tackled some of the world's heaviest and dangerous waves while wearing a wetsuit that was set on fire. Photographer Tim McKenna was on hand to capture the stunt.

Panasonic has built a new 3D photo booth over in Japan that uses 120 Lumix GH4 cameras arranged around a circular room. The GH4 has a price tag of $1,500, so this new photo booth has a retail cost of $180,000 for just the cameras alone.

In our world of digital photography and high speed Internet, photojournalists can quickly and easily send large numbers of high-res photos to the other side of the globe. Things weren't always so convenient.

The United States has published a new collection of photographs taken in the aftermath of the September 11th, 2001, attacks by Dick Cheney's staff photographer. It's a set of images showing Cheney, George W. Bush, and other prominent officials in the President's Emergency Operations Center bunker.

The 21st century appears to be all about speed: order a pizza from your phone with a tap of your finger, dispense your favorite coffee with a push of a button, and now with a simple text message, you can order a customized photo book with all your favorite moments.

Photographer Andrew Fladeboe has spent years traveling to countries around the world with the goal of capturing the unique relationship between humans and dogs. His goal is to document the different ways cultures have come to rely on working dogs in shepherding livestock. The ongoing project is titled The Shepherd's Realm.

Adobe's new Dehaze slider has been wowing photographers since it was launched for Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW last month. We've seen what it can do for haze, rainy days, and blizzards, but there's yet another interesting application: enhancing photos of the starry night sky.

There are times when videographers capture views of our world that inspire a sense of awe and wonder. Immersive Media succeeds in doing that with this 4K, 360-degree trailer for Samsung's GearVR. Utilizing sophisticated in-house camera gear, the company takes us on an unforgettable 360° ride around the world.

Travel photographer Trey Ratcliff has millions of social media followers online, runs a famous travel photography blog called Stuck in Customs, designed a new camera bag that's blowing up on Kickstarter, and is about to embark on a nationwide bus tour of the US. Ratcliff recently gave a TEDx talk in Queenstown, New Zealand, in which he shares about his life and career journey that brought him to where he is today.

Artist Brian Kane recently purchased advertising time on digital billboards along interstate freeways in Massachusetts, but instead of putting up more ads to compete for commuter eyeballs, Kane decided to put up photographs of nature. The project is titled "Healing Tool."

At some early point in my 4-year stint as a film student at the University of Miami, in Florida, an advisor explained I’d have to dual-major in a field outside the school of communications. This seemed a perfectly reasonable request of the school to make; after all, the advisor said, as communication students we needed something to communicate about.

Photographer Nathan Bett has an unusual series of photos titled Learning to Disappear, which shows New Yorkers walking by in various parts of their city. What curious about the images, however, is that most of the passers-by in the frames are staring straight at Bett's camera.

It looks like the idea of sharing front- and rear-camera photos at the same time isn't lucrative enough to be big business. After raising a whopping $4 million from investors, the unusual photo-sharing app Frontback is now announcing that it will be shutting down on August 15th, 2015.

Any object can be seen as something else given the right perspective. In this instance, fairly common items have been used to create the effect of lava.

Photographer Clint Rivers recently spotted what may be the happiest little baby orca in all the ocean. The Victoria, British Columbia-based wildlife photographer was on a boat in the Salish Sea when they came across a pod of killer whales and a 6-month-old orca leaping over and over out of the water.

My day job has me using the new Panasonic GH4 for video. While Panasonic did include a 4K photo mode that can be used in a similar way with specific advantages (that’s another blog post), I wanted to test shooting for stills in regular 4K video mode. The main reason for this was to also have the actual video clip to use for other things if I wanted.

With the advent of consumer drones, governments are in the process of creating laws and regulations to keep both operators and bystanders safe. While some countries, such as the United States, haven’t made much headway, others have already established clear and concise rules for drone flying. The UK’s new ‘Dronecode’ initiative aims at communicating these regulations through brief bullet points and an animated video.

Less than a month after Union Pacific launched a public safety campaign that warns photographers against doing shoots on train tracks, another photographer has been killed doing just that.

It seems that when the Internet's most followed photographer designs a camera bag, the world of photography listens. Travel photographer Trey Ratcliff has teamed up with Peak Designs to create an ultimate camera bag for photographers, and the dynamic duo has just raised over $500,000 in its first day on Kickstarter to launch their creation.

Once readily available, direct positive photo paper has near seemingly disappeared from the market. Ilford recently resurrected their Harman Direct positive paper with plans for it to be available throughout the world this August. Now, another competitor, Galaxy Company, is working to bring their own positive photo paper to life. And Galaxy has a unique feature on their side, which they are calling ‘Hyper Speed.'

Drone manufacturers don’t seem to be in short supply, particularly with new ‘revolutionary’ prototypes showing up on Kickstarter almost every other month. GoPro has announced plans to launch its own camera drone by next year. Now Sony wants a piece of the action. The company's mobile division today announced plans to create “autonomous aerial vehicles for image capture combined with cloud-based data processing.”

Camera drones have opened a whole new world of possibilities for photographers looking for a way to capture aerial images, but the meteoric rise in drone adoption has also opened up Pandora's box as well. Now a new industry is emerging alongside the booming drone industry: anti-drone defense systems.

Forever 21 has unveiled what it calls the F21 Thread Screen. It's a 2,000-pound contraption that can display any Instagram photo using 6,400 mechanical spools of thread.

Established in 1994, VICE Media is an agency focused on covering the arts, modern culture, and recent events of our world. This month, the media company has released their yearly photo issue (Volume #22 Issue #7) in collaboration with Magnum Photos and Magnum Foundation. Featuring a number of thrilling photo essays, VICE explores the heart of a crumbled Gaza, a world of poverty and drugs in South Africa, life after the infamous Killing Fields, and much more. Best of all, the pieces are …

Jacob Nachumi is a documentary photographer based in Israel. As an Orthodox Jew, Nachumi has spent six years pointing his camera lens at the rituals, customs, and culture of his community.

Flickr is bringing back Pro memberships. Today the photo sharing service announced that paid subscription plans are returning for both existing and new members. This change is in response to "a high amount of requests" from photographers in the Flickr community.

Scouting the world to find the perfect shot is one of photography’s pure joys. You discover the perfect moment, carefully frame your viewfinder, and press the shutter button. Within a fraction of a second, the world is seemingly pulled in through your lens: striking your film or sensor to create an everlasting impression.

Note: I don’t name names in this article, but if you’ve been in the wedding industry for while, you will know who I am referring to. If not, you really do need to read this.

GoPro has reason to celebrate, as shares of the company’s stock rose 1.23% and revenue for their second fiscal quarter increased by 72%. The company is looking to build upon this momentum with ambitious new initiatives: GoPro has a mobile video editing app in the pipeline, and it's also launching a content licensing portal that helps GoPro users monetize the content they create.

Freelance camera operator Harrisen Howes lost a small camera drone two months ago after his roommate "drunkenly" crashed it onto a neighbors roof high overhead. After recently purchasing a larger, camera-equipped drone, Howes decided to try and rescue his old drone with his new one using some rope and hooks fashioned from coat hangers.

Warsaw-based creative agency Ars Thanea recently created a photograph called "The Ash," which shows a bouquet of charred roses sitting amidst glowing embers. While the same photo could be created through Photoshop manipulation, the agency decided to go a more "real" route with the project.

Photographer Jeff Boyce of Negative Tilt recently took an epic photography journey across the United States, shooting 70,000 photos across 15 states with 20,000 miles of driving. He then turned those frames into "Edge of Stability," the time-lapse video above that "highlights some of the most unique, awe-inspiring, and incredibly strange sights on the planet."

If you want to be a wedding photographer, you need to stop and think about your life.

You've probably seen many examples of Photoshop being used to make a portrait subject look younger, but have you seen the same type of age-reduction retouching in real-time video? …

A 16-year-old boy has caused a stir after releasing a video showing himself being denied the right to film a checkpoint pat-down -- something the TSA officially allows.

The Associated Press today announced that it will be uploading more than 550,000 historical video clips to YouTube, giving the public access to more than 1 million minutes of digitized film footage of notable events.

As a chiropractor, I’m always looking for improved biomechanics that reduce injury and fatigue. Proper camera technique increases stability, improves capture quality and protects your joints from repetitive microtrauma.

There have been several incidents recently of camera drones getting in the way of firefighting efforts in California, including a case last week of firefighters being hindered in saving burning cars from a wildfire. Now lawmakers are taking action to deal with this problem.

If you've ever had the misfortune of having your Instagram account deleted... this article is for you.

This music video, titled "ShotBySound," is the world's first music-video-and-fashion-shoot hybrid in which a band takes pictures of models by triggering cameras with their musical instruments.

Yash Bhardwaj of Jugaad Posters created this humorous little illustration showing what everyone who works with Photoshop's .PSD files experiences at one time or another. Is this the versioning system you use when trying to finish up a project? …

Taylor Swift's concert photography contract recently came under fire for being overreaching and for threatening to destroy photographers' equipment, leading some publications to boycott the contract and obtain photos by other means.

Lomography began as an art movement in the early 1990s after a group of Viennese students discovered the LC-A, a camera manufactured by Russian imaging company LOMO. The fixed lens 32mm f/2.8 compact camera produced unique images that were off-color, vibrant, and soft. On a mission to advocate the use of these creative cameras and experimental film, photographers quickly formed the Lomographic Society International in 1992.

Back in April, the Chinese camera gear maker Venus announced its new KX800 macro twin flash, which looks like an external flash unit with three tentacles bursting forth from the top.

NASA's new Deep Space Climate Observatory Satellite (DSCOVR) has captured its first photo (shown above) of our planet from one million miles away. By comparison, the similar and iconic Blue Marble photo captured by the crew of the Apollo 17 was just 28,000 miles away when that picture was snapped in 1972.