2015

Shooting vertical video, the use of portrait orientation rather than landscape, is considered by many to be one of the scourges of the Web introduced by smartphone cameras. Google's camera app even warns you when you're in vertical orientation.

Photographer Pete Souza has a dream job as President Obama's official White House Photographer. Back in 2013, Souza launched an Instagram account to share his work.

One of the gripes Star Wars fans have about Episodes 1, 2, 3 is that George Lucas relied heavily on CGI rather than the brilliant practical effects that were found in the original trilogy. Many of the action scenes were simply actors waving light saber sticks around on giant green screen sets.

Camera drones got some bad press yesterday after one fell out of the sky and nearly smashed Marcel Hirscher, one of the top skiers in the world.

If you're a die hard fan of both Star Wars and photography, ThinkGeek is selling Star Wars camera bags with looks inspired by Darth Vader and Chewbacca.

France has passed a new law designed to combat anorexia in fashion modeling and unrealistic body images in fashion photography.

You've probably seen countless photos by now of astronauts working inside and outside the International Space Station, but sometimes it's hard to get a sense of scale when the photos don't show much of the station. If you'd like an idea of just how big the station is, check out this photo of American astronaut Kjell Lindgren working on it.

The essence of street photography is about documenting everyday life and society on the streets. You can find opportunities to practice street photography everywhere and you don't necessarily need to travel to capture great shots.

While photographing a Ontario Reign hockey game in the American Hockey League this past weekend, a sports photographer accidentally dropped his lens hood through a small cutout in the glass around the rink. As you can see in the short clip above, the hood fell onto the ice and was confused for a puck by the players. The game had the be stopped while the refs retrieved the hood and returned it to the embarrassed photographer. Oops.

A new patent granted to Twitter last week shows that the social networking service may be planning for Internet-connected camera drones that can share photos and be controlled by Twitter users.

Yesterday, SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket, delivered 11 satellites into orbit, turned it around, and safely landed the first stage booster back to the ground at Cape Canaveral, Florida. It's the first time this has been ever done with an orbit-capable rocket.

In cold enough temperatures, hot water tossed into the air instantly turns into ice. That's what's captured in this beautiful photo by photographer Michael Davies -- it shows his friend Markus Siivola tossing hot tea from a thermos into the -40°C air.

Here's a short and simple 45-second video tutorial by UK glamour photographer Markp, who shows a trick for quickly removing a patch of stubble from a portrait in just a few seconds. Instead of doing precise editing, you can select the area, set Feather to a suitable number, and then run Filter->Noise->Dust & Scratches. With a correct Radius and Threshold setting, the stubble disappears from the skin.

Just days after Tumblr announced support for Apple's Live Photos, Facebook is following suit. The social networking giant announced today that the official Facebook app on iOS can now lets you share and experience Apple's Live Photos.

The Revenant is an upcoming western thriller film that's inspired by the crazy life of explorer and fur trapper Hugh Glass. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Glass, the rugged and violent movie has one quality that may be of interest to photographers: it was shot nearly 100% with natural light.

Believe it or not, what you see here is the world's smallest color inkjet photo ever printed. It's so small that it's invisible to the naked eye: you'll need a microscope to see the shot, which shows clown fishes hanging around their sea anemone home.

How's this for a bizarre short film? Speed Motion Films decided to take a DJI Phantom camera drone and see how it performs as a food blender. They tossed various foods at the spinning propellers and filmed the carnage at 1,500 frames per second using a $60,000 Phantom Miro high speed camera.

T’was the night before Christmas, when all through the house.
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
in hopes that new photo gear soon would be there.

If you're a Mac user and are annoyed that OS X automatically launches Apple Photos every time you connect a device or insert a memory card, there's good news for you: you can disable the program from launching for all devices with a single command.

DCinematic of Hong Kong shot this 2-minute-long dance short film, titled "LUNA," using only the light of the moon for illumination. It was shot in 4K using the new Sony a7S II.

60 Minutes just aired a fascinating segment on Apple this past weekend, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the secretive and dominant company. Here's one of the crazy facts that was mentioned: Apple has 800 employees whose work is dedicated solely to the iPhone's camera.

Composition can make or break a photograph. This is why it's important to understand it and know how to effectively and creatively use it. In essence, composition describes the position of relative elements in a photograph. A strong composition will tend to have leading lines that draw attention to your subject: these can be horizontal, vertical or diagonal lines depending on the placement of your subject in the frame.

The anti-theft gear registry LensTag just provided us with this new look at how camera gear was stolen over the past year. As you can see from the pie chart above, car and home break ins are still the biggest way thieves are targeting cameras and lenses: they accounted for over half of all thefts reported to LensTag in 2015.

Since its birth a decade ago in 2006, the Chinese company DJI has rapidly grown into the world's leader in consumer camera drones. Now the company is soaring to new heights with the opening of its first shiny retail location where consumers can get their hands on the drones in person, directly from the company.

If you are the owner of a camera drone and are big on privacy, this news may be concerning to you: the mandatory drone registry that's being launched by the FAA will make your name and address available to the public.

NASA just released an amazing new high-resolution photo of the Earth "rising" above the horizon of the Moon. It was captured by the camera onboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from its orbit around the moon.

As my startup gear brand Eupidere grows, we face more and more photographic challenges in shooting thrifty product photos. Recently, I had just minutes to come up with an image that is a) eye catching, and b) Christmas related. There are lots of Christmas decorations around right now and the little guy above, wearing striped pajamas, is one of them. We decided to put him into a winter scenery and wish everyone Merry Christmas.

If you shoot with a DSLR, you might take for granted that the mirror inside your camera swings out of the way to allow light to hit the sensor. There's actually quite a bit of precise engineering behind those seemingly simple flips.

Back in 2011, we shared how the original Star Wars lightsaber was created from camera parts using the handle from a Graflex flashgun. Joey Shanks of Shanks FX just released this 6-minute video tutorial on how you can recreate the original lightsaber on camera yourself.

Since May of 2015, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been beta testing a new smartphone app called B4UFLY (pronounced "before you fly"). It's a portable resource that helps aerial photographers and other drone pilots stay up to date on where it's safe and legal to fly.

StikBox is a new iPhone case that's designed to make your selfie sticks unnecessary: it has a collapsible stick built right into the back.

Photographer Jay P. Morgan of The Slanted Lens made this helpful 7-minute video tutorial that provides a crash course on the different types of clamps used by photographers during shoots.

Long-time film photographer Timothy Gilbert was frustrated with existing options for processing 4x5 large format sheet film at home, so, as an engineer, he decided to create an easy-to-use and affordable system himself.

Flickr recently gathered up photo and camera data to review the past year, and now the company is doing some number crunching to reveal major trends in the cameras used by the photographer community.

Here's a short behind-the-scenes video showing how fashion photographer Yu Tsai recently photographed tennis superstar Serena Williams for Sports Illustrated magazine. Williams was featured in the cover story after being selected as the publication's Sportsperson of the Year, the first time an individual woman has taken the award in over 3 decades.

The braniacs at MIT have created an algorithm to determine the “memorability” of a photograph. The deep learning-based technology “learned” what makes a photo memorable by evaluating the rankings from 5,000 human volunteers, and even indicates which portions of an image it considers to be memorable with a heatmap depiction. The algorithm is allegedly as good as a human in determining what makes a memorable photograph.

When the first Nikon D5 photos leaked out earlier this week, sharp-eyed commenters noticed that the viewfinder appears to have little release buttons on the side, suggesting that the camera will have a larger interchangeable viewfinder piece.

Photographer Karl Taylor just released this humorous video titled: "Studio Wars, Episode XXI: Dissatisfaction Arises." It's a look at why Darth Vader is any photographer's worst client.

Sony just launched a new PlayMemories app called Sky HDR. It's designed to replace the graduated neutral density filters in Sony photographers' camera bags by making it easy to capture correct exposures for a bright sky in the background and a darker landscape in the foreground, all in one shot.

Some photographs have the power to burn themselves into our memories for a long time, while others are easily forgettable after they're seen. Scientists are MIT have been researching the science behind memorable images, and now they've created a web app called LaMem that can analyze any photo and assign it a memorability score.

The next time you are frustrated, having a bad day or negativity is simply surrounding you, break the cycle and turn everything around with your photography. It always amazes me how incredibly powerful photography is in bringing light into the darkness of life. While most of the things don’t have this almost magical power, your photography has. It’s one of the most positive things you could do, especially in moments when you need it the most.

Photographer Steve Mandel just returned from Antarctica, where he made photos of icebergs using an underwater camera, a surface camera, and a drone.

German drone manufacturer Ascending Technologies is celebrating Christmas season this year by doing some light painting photography. Each of the photos they've made was painted by an automated drone that was programmed to follow waypoints in the sky.

Louisiana-based photographer Hannah Hawkes is taking heat this week over a family portrait she shot and shared on her Facebook page. The Christmas photo shows the father holding a sign that reads "Peace on Earth" while the mother and two daughters are gagged with green tape and bound with Christmas lights.

Are you improving at photography? We probably all ask ourselves the question, yet often we don’t know how to find the answer in any meaningful way. It is something that has nagged me for years, so I finally decided to find out if I really have been improving. Here is how I did it.

This delightful photo of a hamster by Austrian photographer Julian Rad was recently selected and announced as this year's winner of the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards, which honors hilarious animal pictures captured by wildlife photographers around the world.

Canon's Japanese store recently began offering a miniature 5DS replica camera with two L lens flash drives. This is an official Canon product, unlike some DSLR flash drives we've seen. We shared earlier this month that Canon appears to have made a 1D X version as well.

Back in July 2013, we shared how major filmmakers had banded together to rescue Kodak by committing to purchasing film from the company. One of the big names was J.J. Abrams, the director of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which opens this week.