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.
What does a day of covering one of the biggest events in soccer look like? Chief photographer Joel Marklund of the Swedish photo agency Bildbyrån recently photographed the 2015 Champions League final match between powerhouses Barcelona and Juventus. In addition to shooting with his DSLRs, Marklund used a small action camera to document his day from waking up at 3:55am to catch a flight to getting in a car to leave Berlin the next morning.
Photography has always served as a way to preserve family memories; now, Shutterfly wants to make them easy to turn into travel albums. Using your iPhone and the company’s new service, TripPix, users can design full-featured albums, which include 15-30 photographs, on their iOS devices and then print them for only $20. Anyone can easily convert their collection of digital photos into beautiful travel books in just a few minutes.
I've been blogging about testing and taking apart camera equipment for almost a decade. My company, LensRentals, has many thousand of lenses these days, and they all get used frequently. When you have lots of lenses and they get used frequently, stuff gets inside them.
Camera dollies can add beautiful and fluid movement to your videos, but they tend to be both bulky and difficult to travel with for extended periods. Edelkrone is here to try and fix that problem with the PocketSkater2, a product they are calling “the world’s most flexible fully featured camera skater that can fit in your pocket.” With an extensive collection of mini-dollies already available, what does the PocketSkater2 bring to the party?
Here's a tongue-in-cheek infomercial by CollegeHumor for a revolutionary new product called Friend. It's a selfie-stick alternative that lets you pose for pictures "confidently and comfortably knowing that you don't look like the world's saddest wizard." A Friend lets you "take selfies so good they're just called 'pictures'," the description says.
Ann S. Moore is one of the most powerful women in the world according to Forbes and Fortune Magazine. Graduating from Vanderbilt University in 1978, Moore climbed the career ladder leading exciting positions including being the publisher of Sports Illustrated for Kids and People Magazine. She was crowned People Magazine’s president in 1993 and become the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Time Inc. in 2002.
In addition to unleashing the monster that is the a7R II, Sony today also announced two new cameras for its Cyber-shot RX lineup. The RX100 IV and RX10 II are new followup cameras that feature fresh technological innovations; both cameras boast stacked 1-inch sensors and 4K video recording.
Sony has just unleashed its new a7R II mirrorless camera, a followup to the highly-regarded a7R. The new camera features the world's first back-illuminated full frame CMOS sensor, which shoots 42.4 megapixel photos at up to ISO 102400.
