2015

In 2013, a century-old notebook was found in the summer belt at Cape Evans, Antarctica. It belonged to George Murray Levick, who photographed Robert Falcon Scott's last expedition to the continent from 1910 to 1913. Restored by the Antarctic Heritage Trust, the notebook was titled "Welcome Photographic Exposure Record and Diary 1910" and contained pages of Levick's notes, including dates, descriptions, and exposure times.

Seok Li and Danbi Shin are an couple who create art together as Shinliart. A while back, their relationship turned into a long-distance one: Shin is currently living in New York City and Li lives in Seoul, South Korea.

What do the things we touch over the course of a day say about us? That's the question artist Paula Zuccotti asks through her project Every Thing We Touch. Traveling the world, she asks people to document every single small object they come in contact with over the course of 24 hours -- excluding large and/or fixed things.

New York City-based editorial and commercial portrait photographer Felix Kunze says that the number one question he gets asked by people is how he makes his V-Flats for studio portraiture. He answers that question in the 8.5-minute video above, a step-by-step walkthrough of his build process.

Starting in late 2014, COOPH (The Cooperative of Photography) began selling multi-functional clothing items designed with photographers in mind. One of the products is the Gray Chart Cap, a series of caps that have gray undersides that help with light metering.

In 2011, a modern-day treasure hunter was browsing through an antique shop in Fresno, California. Flipping through boxes, he came across an old photograph. An unsmiling group of men, 19th century Americans it seemed, were playing croquet in front of a wooden building in a rural setting. It was an interesting photograph. He paid $2 for it and walked out.

Police in body armor showed up at an office building in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, yesterday after someone called 911 to report a gunman holding a machine gun. Turns out it was a photographer holding a tripod.

Venues around the world have banned selfie sticks due to concerns about them being used as weapons. If you think that's a ridiculous reason, get this: a martial arts center in Moscow, Russia, has launched a new course on how to use a selfie stick as a weapon for self defense.

Rumors about Samsung's camera business struggling and closing down have been swirling around for months now, and today we may be seeing yet another proverbial nail in the coffin. Samsung is officially saying that it's exiting the German photography market.

Leica today unveiled the new Leica M (Typ 262), the fourth model in the Leica M lineup alongside the Leica M (Typ 240), Leica M-P (Typ 240), and the Leica M Monochrom (Typ 246). The new Leica M (Typ 262) is a stripped-down camera that "focuses on the essentials of M rangefinder photography."

So you're getting ready to photograph your first concert? That's awesome. Chances are, it’s a less-than-perfect venue -- that's usually how it works out. It’s kind of like getting your first car. You don’t start out with a Jaguar. You get a baby blue minivan with doors that don’t shut in the winter…

User interface designer Brad Colbow has sparked a conversation about Adobe's mobile app lineup with the 5-minute video critique above. It's titled "Dear Adobe, Your Mobile Apps Are a Mess."

The New York Times recently published this 6-minute Op-Doc ("opinion documentary") about the work of urbex ("urban exploration") photographer Vic Invades (real name Victor Thomas).

DJI has just announced a new geofencing system that will prevent pilots of camera drones from flying over restricted or unsafe airspace. The information will be continually updated so that authorities can restrict drone flights in response to major events.

Tested recently put on a show at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. One of the presentations was by local photographer Michael Shindler, who specializes in wet plate collodion photography.

Reuters has implemented a new worldwide policy for freelance photographers that bans photos that were processed from RAW files. Photographers must now only send photos that were originally saved to their cameras as JPEGs.

Here's a tutorial on how you can create fake depth of field blur in the background of photos using something known as "Z-Depth Pass." I'm not saying that this technique is better than other methods -- because it has some problems -- but it's quite different, and some of you may learn something new.

Nikon officially announced today that it's developing the Nikon D5 DSLR... and that's about it.

LifePrint is a new portable photo printer that aims to change the way photos are experienced. Instead of printing static photos that capture a single moment in time, LifePrint uses augmented reality to let you embed a video inside a printed photograph. The video can be watched by pointing a smartphone camera at the print.

David Beckham is one of the most recognizable names in the world of soccer, but it doesn't look like his 16-year-old son is planning to continue his dad's legacy. Brooklyn Beckham is actually an aspiring photographer.

Over in Japan, a guy named Mansun has invented an arm-extension selfie stick. Instead of being a stick that you hold, it's shaped like an extra long arm.

There will always be photo shoots that test your creativity, and sometimes there are campaigns that seem to just give you incredible images. Deadliest Catch is definitely a campaign that lends its hand to stunning visuals… at the cost of your comfort.

Adobe today released Lightroom CC 2015.3 and 6.3. As was promised last month, this latest update restores the old Lightroom Import experience that was found in Lightroom prior to the tumultuous 6.2 update, which Adobe ended up apologizing for.

My name is Fernando Krasovitzky, and I'm a nature and landscape photographer based in Miami, Florida. My story is one of tragedy followed by good fortune. It is the story of death giving birth to life and of the power of photography to make it happen.

With 2016 just around the corner, many photographers will be dusting off the cameras they've been neglecting and making New Year's resolutions in an attempt to rekindle their creativity. If you're looking for ideas and inspiration, here's a good one: do a OCOLOY project. It requires using just One Camera and One Lens for One Year.

Time-lapse photographer Patrick Cheung of PowerUpMotion created this short film titled "Time." It shows a blood moon rising over Hong Kong, with many of the scenes bouncing between day and night in sync with the music.

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.