November 2015

John Green of vlogbrothers made this interesting 2-minute video in which he talks about his favorite photo: a picture titled "Young Farmers" by German photographer August Sander. Upon first glance, it may look like a simple snapshot of three nicely dressed men walking along a road, but there's so much you can learn about the photo by examining it closely and by looking at the cultural context.

The Tamrac brand of camera bags has been around for nearly 4 decades now, and it looks like it will continue to live on much longer. Gura Gear, on the other hand, ends here.

Did you know that your brain can be tricked into seeing a black-and-white photo in full color? The 1-minute BBC clip above shows an example of this, and you can try it out for yourself.

If you have a telescope or lens that's powerful enough, you can watch the moon transit the sky through the live view on your DSLR's LCD screen.

Here's an inspiring 16-minute short by SmugMug Films that shows how photographer Tim Kemple recently visited Iceland with two world-class climbers (Klemen Premrl and Rahel Schelb) to explore and photograph Iceland in fresh new ways.

Yikes. Someone Photoshopped a selfie by a Sikh man to look like a terrorist from the Paris attacks, the fake photo went viral, and news organizations around the world have used it to misidentify the man as one of the suspected terrorists.

Renowned "Afghan Girl" photojournalist Steve McCurry was at Ground Zero in New York City on September 11th, 2001, and he was also in the Stade de France last Friday when the terrorist attacks were being carried out in Paris. In the interview with CBS above, McCurry shares some photos of the chaos and describes how he thought he was going to die.

You may have the eye, the talent, and all of the other necessary hard skills to make it in the commercial world. The only thing you lack is a portfolio relevant to the stuff you want to get paid to shoot. It’s a classic chicken and egg problem.

After using a vintage 1910 lens on a modern Sony a7II, Paris-based photographer Mathieu Stern is back again with another interesting lens experiment.

After publishing a viral series of cinematic portraits of first responders in 2013, photographer Brandon Cawood is back again with another creative portrait project for a good cause.

Here's a portrait of Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko posing with Nikon DSLR gear on the International Space Station on October 6th, 2015. Tens of thousands of dollars in camera equipment is stored on the walls of Zvezda, the Russian service module in the ISS. As you can see, there are lens mounts fixed to the walls of the module for storing the collection of glass.

My name is Will McGugan, and I'm a photography enthusiast living in London. This year I spent my birthday in a forest in Finland with no company other than about dozen wild Eurasian brown bears and more mosquitoes than I care to count.

When Evan Griffin's dad visited Las Vegas recently, he borrowed his son's GoPro camera to capture memories of the things he saw there.

The camera market has been struggling in recent years, with Canon, Nikon, and Sony all recently reporting drops in camera demand from a year ago. But there may be a sliver of positive news for camera makers: sales appear to be stabilizing a bit after a few years of huge drops.

Want to get a taste of what it's like to climb Mount Everest without the risk of dying in the process? High-res photography and virtual reality will soon make it possible.

If you've ever photographed spinning airplane propeller or helicopter rotor blades with your smartphone, you may have found that the spinning blades were turned into bizarre shapes in the resulting photo. What you're seeing is distortion caused by a rolling shutter, when a CMOS sensor captures a scene by scanning across it very quickly rather than capturing the entire frame at once.

Selfless acts of kindness are sometimes rewarded in a big way, and that's what photographer Dana Gruszynski has been learning lately.

Here's another story that illustrates why the US government is racing to create a national drone registry that attaches each drone to a name: on Wednesday, someone apparently tried to fly their DJI Phantom drone through the Seattle Great Wheel and failed, causing the drone to plummet to the ground and smash a basketball-sized hole in a plastic dining table.

Ansel Adams is best known for his breathtaking landscape photos, but he photographed much more than nature during his decades-long career. In 1943, already the best-known American photographer, Adams visited the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California, one of the relocation camps the US gathered Japanese-Americans into during World War II.

Here's a 4-minute-long point-of-view video showing how top China-based wedding photographer Sails Chong recently shot a series of urban wedding portraits using the Hasselblad H5D-50c, the medium format DSLR that currently costs a cool $27,500 for the body only. We get to see how the editorial wedding shoot was done through the camera's eyes, along with the finished photos that resulted.

Photographer Geoff Tompkinson has been working on a new time-lapse technique that he calls the "HyperZoom." By matching up shots from camera zooms and pans, Tompkinson takes us on seamless journeys through locations that look like one long continuous shot.

My name is David Anderson and I'm a photographer from Scotland. I recently decided to take a different direction in life: I quit my job, bought a camera, and started traveling to places in Europe I had always dreamed of visiting and photographing.

Back in September, Adobe ate some crow after showing off the new Photoshop Fix, a mobile app that has many of the powerful retouching features of Photoshop. In the demo, an image of a model was used to demonstrate the new “Smile” feature, whereby the user can manipulate the strength of a smile by simply dragging a finger.

Modelsbelike created this 5-minute comedy sketch about the different types of fashion photographers models will encounter in the studio.

What makes one smartphone camera good and another one bad? YouTube tech video star Marques Brownlee of MKBHD just posted this easy-to-understand 5-minute-long explanation of smartphone camera quality.

In September, the animal rights group PETA filed a lawsuit against photographer David Slater, arguing that the monkey who took a series of viral selfies with Slater's camera in 2011 should be the rightful copyright owner.

The first time I witnessed a camera detect a face to aid the autofocus system, I was amazed. In part because the technology seemed magical and the highlighted rectangle tracking faces seemed like science fiction, and in part because I seem to possess a talent for taking out-of-focus photos.

Here's a crazy Animal Planet clip in which wildlife photographer "Mad Mike" Penman demonstrates how he sneaks up to wild lions for the perfect shot with only some toilet paper as a last measure of defense. Needless to say, you shouldn't ever try this yourself.

Restrictive concert photography contracts have been a big story in the photo world over the past several months. Taylor Swift, the Foo Fighters, Dweezil Zappa, and Janet Jackson have all made headlines for their extremely strict -- and often rights-grabbing -- contracts that photographers and reporters must sign before covering a concert.

German photographer Kilian Schönberger recently shot a series of photos showing one of the most unusual forests in the world. Located near the city of Gryfino in West Poland, the so-called "Crooked Forest" has a grove of pine trees that are curved at the base.

If you have the app "InstaAgent" on your phone to track the people who visit your Instagram account, you might want to delete it now. The app has been banned by Apple and Google from their app stores after it was discovered that the app steals account passwords and posts ads without permission to people's photo feeds.

Eyefi is best known for its Wi-Fi-capable memory cards that allow photos to be beamed to computers and mobile devices directly from cameras. Wi-Fi is appearing as a built-in feature in more and more cameras, though, and Eyefi has been pivoting its business in recent days.

Back in February, time-lapse photographer Rob Whitworth captured the world's imagination with his insane "Dubai Flow Motion" project, which took the concept of the hyperlapse to a whole new level.

How small can you go when it comes to wet plate collodion photography? Photographer Anton Orlov of The Photo Palace recently experimented with this question by shooting thumbnail-sized 8x11mm tintypes using an old Minox subminiature camera -- a model A III from the 1950s.

Want to see what "bridge" cameras were like before the days of digital? EEVBlog got its hands on a Chinon Genesis II 35mm from 1989 and recorded the 18-minute teardown above to show us the guts. The Genesis II was marketed as a "Zoom Lens Reflex" (ZLR) bridge camera because it was more advanced than a point-and-shoot and easier-to-use than an single-lens reflex.

In 2012, 35 years after its launch in 1977, NASA's Voyager 1 space probe left the Solar System and became the first human-man object to enter interstellar space. On board is a Golden Record with sounds and images that show life on Earth. 116 images were selected for inclusion by a committee led by Carl Sagan.

"How do you give a second life to an old film camera?," asks the French ad agency Maison Carnot. They had an old and non-functional Fujica ST 705 camera on their hands, so they decided to create a stop-motion video and a piece of art with it. It took the team a day to disassemble the camera into its basic pieces, select some choice components, and then arrange them neatly in a frame for display. The 2-minute video above is titled "DISASSEMBLY."

Rumors have been swirling around in the photo industry the past couple of months about Samsung pulling out of the camera industry. Samsung hasn't announced anything new in recent times, and its camera division has reportedly been bleeding money every year since the NX system was announced in 2010.

Back in 2011, photographers Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck helped coin and popularize the "cinemagraph," an animated GIF showing a mostly static photo with certain elements moving and looping.

Photographer Antoine Geiger has put together a strange photo series titled SUR-FAKE. Each Photoshopped image shows people in public having their faces sucked into the screens they're staring at.

Want to set a new Guinness world record with a stunt explosion in your next photo or video shoot? You're going to have to beat the explosion in the video above.

My name is Louis Amore, and I'm a 42-year-old photographer based in London, England. I have been a professional photographer for the past 6 years, but I have studied photography since a young age... since the days of film and developing in my bedroom.

Want to see what Photoshop's adjustment layers are actually doing to your photos in terms of curves? There's an easy new way to do so.

In a Nutshell created this 5-minute video that offers a simple explanation of the problem of "freebooting" on Facebook, when copyrighted videos are ripped from other sources (mostly YouTube) and uploaded to the service without permission. The videos then go viral, gaining attention for the uploader and ad views for Facebook, but leaving the original content creator out in the cold.

Earlier today, we shared a viral video of student photojournalist Tim Tai being confronted by activists while photographing the ongoing University of Missouri protests. One of the main people under fire for their actions in the video is Melissa Click, an assistant professor of mass media.

The developers behind the popular Android camera app Camera51 have just announced a new app for helping people shoot the photos they need. This time the startup has targeted the online seller community with Product Camera, which lets you easily shoot product photos by automatically masking out the background behind objects.

A photojournalist has withdrawn his entry from Australia's most prestigious press photography contest after it was discovered that he had cloned out a piece of distracting straw from one of his pictures.

Leica today announced the 0.95 Collection, a new sub-brand for high-end accessories. No, not camera accessories... luxury lifestyle accessories.