Visitors to Google today are being treated to a Doodle logo replacement that pays tribute to photography pioneer Anna Atkins. Atkins was born 216 years ago today, and in her life she became one of the first -- if not the first -- women to create a photograph.
Photography is an analytic art form. We aim our lenses to specific parts of the world around us to pick a frame because, in our analysis, that particular frame presents the photograph we wish to take. We can certainly raise the camera, lower the camera, rotate it, pitch it, yaw it, aim at a different part and end up photographing something different.
Here's a great video on photographic composition, created by The Cooperative of Photography using tips and photographs by legendary photojournalist Steve McCurry. Each of the 9 composition tips is illustrated with examples from McCurry's impressive body of work.
Photoshop's Auto Color adjustment is a simple way to color correct a photo in just a couple of clicks, but it doesn't always produce the look you're going for. Here's a short tutorial on another easy way to do color correction that puts a little more control back in your hands without making things difficult.
It is often said that "luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." This photo may be a good example of that. It's a single long-exposure photo of mountains in South America with the stars properly exposed in the background and the landscape in the foreground illuminated by the rising moon.
When Israeli freelance artist Ynon Lan visited New York City earlier this year, he wanted to capture the things he saw in a way that conveyed the constant energy he felt as he walked around. He then came up with the idea of taking thousands of still photographs of particular themes and combine them afterward into a video as a flowing visual experience.
Israeli photographer Ronen Goldman was recently commissioned by UK-based premium luggage manufacturer Redland London to shoot a series of advertising photos promoting an upcoming line of luggage. The company wanted to show the durability of the product and how it helps you "be prepared for anything," so Goldman created a photo of a man protecting himself from a cloud of falling lemons. The video above is a behind-the-scenes glimpse into how the image was created.
Director David Robin created this humorous spoof of the TV show Shark Tank for the WPPI conference and expo that took place in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago. It features a number of well known photography industry figures (Roberto Valenzuela, Bambi Cantrell, Jerry Ghionis, Melissa Ghionis, and Gary Fong) as the investors and entrepreneurs.
This past Valentines day, photographer Kendrick Brinson was tasked with what she calls "the strangest assignment" of her career thus far. She was asked by OZY magazine with shooting as a fake paparazzi photographer, chasing after editor Sanjena Sathian as she walked the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard through crowds of tourists. Sathian later published an account of the experience in a story titled "Almost Famous."
Photographers Tony and Chelsea Northrup shot a hands on test video that pits the new Yongnuo 50mm f/1.8 against the pricier version by Canon. "Yongnuo recently released their first autofocus lens, and it's half the price of the Canon version," they write. "We test it to see if we can recommend it for beginning photographers who want an inexpensive, fast lens." …
Photographer Josh Cripps of Professional Photography Tips made this short and sweet introductory tutorial on how you can use 10-stop neutral density filters to capture long exposure photos in bright daylight. These filters drastically reduce the amount of light hitting your lens, allowing you to blur slow-moving things in your scene (e.g. clouds or streams).
Photography is one of the most popular hobbies on the planet, but you’d never know it by reading most photography blogs, podcasts, books, and tutorials. It’s treated as a profession, where the goal is making money, buying more expensive gear or getting your prints into galleries around the world. You’re being enticed to “Go Pro,” and that’s just not realistic for the vast majority of photographers. Most photographers could benefit from going amateur.
Photographer Thomas Blanchard just released this time-lapse video that took him 4 months to create. It shows 21 different kinds of flowers blooming, as seen in 9,624 individual RAW photos captured at 5K-equivalent resolution (5184x3456) with a Canon 550D and 24-105mm.
I was photographing families and toddlers in 2010 and 2011 and my work was a bit uninspiring. Then I saw American photographers creating these beautiful, arty, creative sleeping newborn photos and I wanted to do it too! …
I was working on a commissioned artwork in Photoshop today and I noticed something. I keep my left hand over the shift key pretty much the entire time I am working in PS. That little button does a LOT. So I thought I would take some time and show you guys what you have been missing out on if you haven’t taken advantage of shift key functionalities in PS before.
Wedding photography, much like the entire business of weddings, is highly influenced by the ebb and flow of trends. They come, they go, and they’re cyclical. When I plunged into the business in early 2012, I committed myself to research the industry: what works, what’s popular, and what sells? I quickly discovered that there’s a common, predictable, and heavily relied upon set of post-processing trends in wedding photography.
Virtual reality is posed to become one of the next big things in the tech world, and YouTube is preparing itself for that future. The video hosting service announced today that it is starting to support 360-degree video uploads to allow for immersive video experiences.
Smartphones and social networks have made snapping and sharing photos extremely easy to do, allowing us to preserve our memories and broadcast our experiences. It's not all positive, though: there are downsides to our snap- and selfie-happy culture.
Here's a tutorial by New York City-based photographer Jeff Rojas that offers a crash course on how to use the Liquify Filter in Photoshop to make realistic retouches to your images.
It's the end of the road for the company behind Rolleiflex cameras. Just two months after Fujifilm put up one of its major film factories at auction, DHW Fototechnik is doing a liquidation auction of its own, selling off the massive amounts of equipment used in manufacturing twin-lens reflex cameras.
We recently shared an impressive demo of the 65x optical zoom lens on the Canon SX60. If you're a smartphone shooter who wants the same reach without having to buy a new camera, check out this ridiculous 80x lens for smartphones.
Less than a month after a photographer was knocked over by a horse and broke a collarbone at a race in Finland, a similar freak accident has just happened in England. A photographer broke his leg this past Wednesday after a horse knocked over the rail on the side of the track.
Load up the vehicle and check the essentials. Coffee. Jerky. Camera. All here. Exploring the Canadian Rockies. It never gets old.
Here's how much the average couple spent on wedding photography for their big day in 2014: $2,556. That's nearly a 5% increase from the average cost the previous year of $2,440.
A week after Los Angeles agreed to train its law enforcement that public photography is not a crime, a bill has been proposed in Texas that would make it a crime for citizens to photograph or film police from within 25 feet of where the are.
Want an easily digital way to keep track of your camera gear and all the documents associated with it? A new app called Zither wants to help. It's a stuff organization app that was developed by Marc Silber of Advancing Your Photography, so it's optimized for things like cameras, lenses, and accessories.
Alison Zavos of Feature Shoot recently had the opportunity to sit down with renowned portrait photographer Martin Schoeller to pick his brain. What resulted was this fantastic interview in which Schoeller shares his own journey in the photography industry and advice for aspiring photographers from the things he has learned and experienced.
Some street photographers like to operate stealthily, while others are bold and confrontational. Very few will look as strange as Nicholas Williams to the people they photograph. The Ann Arbor, Michican-based artist visited New York City last year and shot a series of photos using a strange-looking pinhole camera that he strapped to his face with twine.
Photoshop experts who teach the software for a living generally know it like the back of their hand. But how skilled would they be if they were forced to downgrade to the original version of the program, Photoshop 1.0? That's what CreativeLive set out to find out recently.
See this house? It languished on the Orlando, Florida, market for 224 days. It’s no wonder; with a photo like that who would want to come see it? A new realtor took over -- one who understands the importance of professional photography for his listings.
Eye-Fi has announced the new Mobi Pro, a 32GB WiFi SD card that the company is calling "the most powerful wireless SD card ever." As more and more cameras are being launched with built-in Wi-Fi functionality, Eyefi is rolling out improvements to its memory card offerings to try and keep up.
Bloomberg Politics is apologizing for a bad Photoshop job after readers noticed that a promo photo shared by the publication featured a strange-looking shot of Hillary Clinton.
The tumult surrounding the World Press Photo awards for the last couple of weeks has been quite earth-shaking. An Italian photographer, who had been awarded for “Contemporary Issues” was, finally, disqualified for having mis-labelled where a picture was shot (not in the town of Charleroi which was listed on the entry but 30 miles away in Bruxelles.)
For the past couple of years, photographer Navid Baraty has been experimenting with the idea of creating photographs of the universe without having to leave his home... and without having to point a camera up at the sky. His WANDER Space Probe series of images may resemble photos captured by NASA using its Hubble telescope camera, but the photos were actually created by putting ordinary kitchen items on an Epson flatbed scanner.
Light field photo studios are now a thing. This morning Lytro launched the world's first light field imaging studio in Tokyo, Japan.
Photographer Justin Majeczky wanted to test the 4K low-light capabilities of the Sony A7s for a short film he's planning to shoot this summer, so he took the camera and an Atomos Shogun out to the Big Sur coastline of California in the dead of night to see what the camera could do under moonlight. The video above was captured at ISO 40,000.
VSCO helps photographers easily add the look of film to their images. Lens Distortions does the same thing, except with out of focus glass shards. The service provides a Photoshop Action pack that lets you add an out-of-focus object between you and your subject.
What if I told you that it's not the industry, the bad economy, where you live, what camera you shoot with, how many lights you have or how small your Facebook following is that is holding you back. None of those are truly capable of stopping you, they are only challenges for you to meet -- the same challenges everyone who creates art or starts a business has to meet and beat.
Photographer Vanessa Hicks is fighting back today after being chastised and harassed online for using an American flag as a prop during a baby photo shoot. It was a simple Facebook share that has gotten quite a bit of national attention.
Hang Son Doong is a cave in Vietnam that's currently the largest known cave in the world. Inside is a vast green jungle-like world and underground river that looks like something out of the movie Avatar.
Children's book author Josh Gottsegen says he taught his 3-year-old labrador Olive to smile for the camera on command. Olive has been learning tricks since she was a puppy, and this is an "ultimate dog trick," he says.
When Japan was devastated by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011, countless families lost precious photos in their homes that washed away. In response, many organizations sprung up to recover, restore, and reunite photos with their owners.
Conflict photographer Lynsey Addario has gotten quite a bit of attention lately after publishing a memoir about her life and work. The book has since made it onto the New York Times bestseller list and will be made into a major film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Jennifer Lawrence as Addario.
Bear with me now. I promise there are photos after all this preamble. I’m going to try to keep the camera talk to a dull roar on this post even though it is principally about lenses.
Olympus is getting more serious with its S series of compact cameras. Today the company announced the SH-2, a successor to the SH-1 that is mostly the same camera except for one very important difference: it can capture RAW photos.
Capturing clear and up-close photos of a mountain lion family is difficult for a photographer to do, and that's where remote cameras can come in and help. The National Park Service recently captured a beautiful set of photos in the Santa Monica Mountains showing a mother and two kittens.
An apartment complex near Orlando, Florida, is receiving a torrent of bad publicity after one of its tenant contracts was published online. The document forces tenants to agree to a $10,000 fine if they post a bad review of the complex online, and it claims copyright to all photographs taken by tenants in the complex.
Have you ever seen your parents' or grandparents' wedding photos? Chances are they were printed on photographic paper either as individual prints or presented in a wedding album. They're priceless family heirlooms and they'll likely outlast much of today's wedding photography.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a much-debated method of obtaining oil or gas from the Earth that involves injective a chemical cocktail at high pressure through deep rock formations in order to create cracks through which things can flow. Artist Grayson Cooke recently came up with his own spin on the subject through a project called "Virtual Fracking." …
There have been a number of cases in recent years of people getting struck and killed by trains after doing photo or film shoots on train tracks. One of the cases last year involved the filming of a movie titled "Midnight Rider." While filming on a narrow trestle bridge, a train passed through and killed one of the crew members.
