Photographer, weird lens expert, and friend of PetaPixel Mathieu Stern created this very simple and straightforward Photoshop tutorial for anybody out there who wishes they were a Jedi and wants to impress their friends.
Five years ago I was somewhere in the wilds of central Vietnam, about to click upload on my first ever video project. If you had told me then that, in just a handful of years, I would be contributing to one of the entertainment world’s most prestigious and popular wildlife documentaries — BBC’s Planet Earth II — I think I’d have had trouble keeping a straight face. But that was before I witnessed firsthand the power of the Internet and a good idea.
Curved sensor mania first took over the blogosphere back in 2014 thanks to Sony and their curved creation. But while that sensor never really came to anything worthwhile—although it was used in a "camera"—two Canon patents are sparking interest in this technology once again.
This is an older video (2014… practically prehistoric in social media terms), but if you’re looking for a totally …
In 2015, Hugo Cardoso embarked on an interesting experiment: built a 35mm slit-scan film camera. That experiment was a big success, which left Cardoso only one choice going forward... go bigger! So he hunkered down at his work bench and set about creating a medium format version.
Photographer John Kraus has brought rocket launch photography back into the mainstream. His photos regularly go viral online, and we've shared several of them here on PetaPixel as well. But these incredible shots come at a price, as he showed us yesterday.
The kind of photography I do begins as a moment of theft. Finding the scene, finding your angle, and stealing the moment for yourself. Some photographers are creators. They build a scene, a still life, or arrange their models and angle their lights and create an image from nothing. I’m not one of those photographers. I’m a thief.
Photo editing startup Polarr has launched a new app for iOS called Picky. Using artificial intelligence, Picky not only selects your best iPhone photos, but it'll automatically touch them up for you too.
Fotodiox sells a wide range of adapters for using lenses and cameras of different mounts, but one particular adapter is causing a major headache for both photographers and the company. At least two photographers are claiming that their Sony mirrorless camera was ruined by the Fotodiox Fusion SmartAF Nikon to Sony adapter.
Liberia-born and Los Angeles-based fashion model Deddeh Howard wants to promote more racial diversity in fashion advertising. For her new photo project, titled Black Mirror, Howard faithfully recreated major ad photos from top brands with herself as the model.
In addition to announcing Lightroom CC 2015.8 today, Adobe also launched version 2.6 of Lightroom for iOS. The new app update overhauls the editing interface, making it easier for photographers to edit RAW files on a phone.
The Chinese gear manufacturer Yongnuo made a splash a couple of years ago by launching a thrifty clone of the Canon 50mm f/1.4. After some more Canon lenses, this year they expanded into Nikon with a 50mm f/1.8 and a 35mm f/2. Today we have a sneak peek at an upcoming 85mm f/1.8 lens for Nikon shooters.
Affinity Photo version 1.5 has just been released. It's the single biggest app update to the Photoshop competitor since it was released for Mac in 2015. And in addition to a host of new features, the app is also officially launching for Windows today as well.
"Yet to an obsessive his obsession always seems to be of the nature of things and so is not recognized by what it is." Those words, written by art critic John Berger in his book Ways of Seeing, annotate one part of his understanding of the history of oil paintings: it’s obsessive tendencies toward showmanship of what one has, and the relationship between property and art.
Adobe just announced its latest update to Lightroom CC. Aside from new camera support and performance improvements, the main feature found in version 2015.8 is the introduction of the new Reference View.
TIME magazine revealed this week that President-elect Donald Trump has been selected as its Person of the Year. After seeing the cover design, people immediately began to point out that the "M" in the TIME logo appears to form horns on Trump's head.
Episode 131 of the PetaPixel Photography Podcast.
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Featured: Robin Layton, Nikon Ambassador
Light—the makers of the 16-module L16 camera that purports to put 52-megapixel DSLR quality in your pocket—get a lot of questions about how exactly their wonder-cam will work. So they made a video that explains it in plain English.
One of my passions in life is travel. I love to travel, experience new cultures, try new foods, meet new people and, of course, take photos while I’m traveling.
Don't let the Photoshopped facades fool you, creatives of all stripes deal with depression. That's the topic of this short-but-important video by Rob of Rob & Jonas' Filmmaking Tips. Rob is a filmmaker, but many photographers will instantly relate to the thoughts he shares in this video.
A lot of the time when we're shooting with flash photography in a big white studio, our portrait images can appear a little stark or cold. This quick fix in Photoshop takes less than two minutes to do but can add a lot of warmth and life back to our models skin.
Photographer Tyson Haslam recently built himself a giant do-it-yourself camera for shooting large format photos on X-Ray film.
When we've shared Michael Shainblum's work in the past, it's usually been a timelapse or tutorial. But the photographer and filmmakers has continued to evolve creatively, and RISE is his debut into the world of aerial videography. The subject: Oregon.
Today's RAW support update from VSCO isn't the only thing the film emulation and photography presets company had up their sleeve. They also debuted something called VSCO X.
Every photographer should photograph a cancer patient at some point in his/her life. It teaches you how little of a person you are and how you’re but one character in the story of life. That’s what I learned at least when I had the privilege of photographing the double mastectomy of my friend, Diana Sheldon, 38, last fall.
VSCO's app for iOS is a go-to for many mobile photographers, and this week it's getting an important update: RAW support. But not just RAW support for your iPhone photos, VSCO's mobile app can edit RAW photos from your phone and DSLR.
My name is Jeff Cable, and I'm a photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. I previously spent many years of my life as Director of Marketing at Lexar dealing with the ins and outs of the memory card business. And in all that time, I have never written about the do's and don'ts of memory cards. Now that I am not on that side of the business any more, I feel that I can write this objective piece for you without any conflict of interest.
This sweet photo shoot might not seem like anything special on the surface, but these wedding photos are actually 70 years in the making.
If you've got some cash to burn and you're looking for the ultimate photo editing monitor, BenQ's got a great new gadget for you to consider. It's called the SW320, and it's 31.5-inches of 4K, HRD, IPS, Adobe RGB color space goodness.
As photographers, whether consciously or not, I think we’re all trying to capture moments in the way that we would like our own moments to be captured. What then are we supposed to do when it’s our turn to be the subject? This question troubled me as my wedding day drew closer. Who does the wedding photographer choose to photograph his own wedding?
Social media have so thoroughly infused our everyday lives that calling them “ubiquitous” seems inadequate. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and others take up an astonishing amount of our time, bandwidth, and attention, and have become indispensable business and marketing tools as well.
The 50mm lens has been the 'standard' for street photographers for ages, but is it the best option available? Maybe not. Kai wanted to find out, so he pit the 50mm against a 35mm and 28mm, and went out shooting to find out which he liked best and why.
When Sony released the A7s, they did something strange. While everyone else was adding megapixels, they took them away for the sake of low light capability. Well... Casio just took that strategy to the extreme with their new 1.9MP EX-FR110H action camera.
The iPhone 7 Plus—and many other high end smartphone cameras these days—can capture some really impressive photos and video. If you were doubting that, just watch this comparison by Parker Walbeck of Fulltime Filmmaker. He compared the iPhone 7 Plus against his $50K RED Weapon, and was "blown away" by the results.
Then-and-now photo recreations have become extremely popular online over the past several years. Especially with rephotographed family photos from decades past, the concept offers a fascinating look at how people have changed over the years.
One of the ongoing pain points of being a photographer is the time we spend editing. Don’t get me wrong, I love turning a flat image into something breathtaking, but it does take a while to get through a batch of 1000+ photos from a wedding or concert.
Since elementary school, I've been told that things had to match. If I wore Sean John pants, then I had to wear a Sean John shirt. If I wore anything Nike, then I had to have the matching shoes to correspond. This was a mindset that I held throughout most of my life.
Ricoh wants to play with the big boys. In a surprising move for the company, Ricoh today unveiled Keenai (get it, "keen eye" but with AI?), an intelligent photo storage and management service that wants to bring all of your digital photos under one easy-to-organize umbrella.
Simon Roberts, a London-based animator and designer, has created a great photography resource for beginners that is both simple and useful. It's called Photography Mapped, and it allows you to play around with and better understand the manual settings you'll find on a DSLR.
When veteran SI photographer Michael J. LeBrecht II got an email from a DOP at Sports Illustrated offering him the chance to shoot "an A-List Celebrity," he immediately said yes. It wasn't until a later, on the phone, that he hear the catch: "we would like you to try and shoot the cover with a Smartphone."
Asian cultures have ways of giving thanks that may seem unusual to those living in the Western world. At one photography school in Thailand, there's an annual tradition of giving thanks with an impressive altar of DSLR camera gear.
Instagram today announced a slew of new features built to "keep Instagram safe," including the ability to like comments, disable comments on photos as you post, boot followers from a private account, and more.
Another year is coming to a close, and the data crunching team at Flickr has just uncovered the top photos, cameras, and tags in the Flickr community in 2016.
When was the last time you saw a round photo? It's probably been a while. The world is ruled by squares and rectangles. It's almost as if there's no place for circles, but I have come round to thinking that maybe those ancient mathematicians were onto something when they got all excited by circles, maybe you can have your pi and eat it too.
I entered the world of photography when digital cameras where already on the rise, and as a result, I learned photography on digital. That being said, I am a sucker for anything analog... the sensation of using real organic materials to produce photographs excites me.
"A cry against the terror of perfection and youth." That's how photographer Peter Lindbergh describes the 2017 Pirelli calendar he was asked to create. Once synonymous with nude supermodels, the 2017 calendar instead oozes class, raw emotion, and women's empowerment.
One of the most amazing camera shops in all of the world is London's Grays of Westminster. The place is absolutely iconic—it has its own coat of arms for crying out loud! It also houses one of the most incredible collections of rare Nikon gear in the world. Now you get to see it up close.
It started with a Facebook message.
Mr. Ghoorchian, I just found some pictures online of you practicing horseback archery and I was wondering if you were willing to teach me your techniques.Kind regards,Anna
I've been doing this long enough that I honestly can't remember why or how I started. I mean, I remember my origin story... but as an adult I also know that is probably a distillation and summary of what exactly went on. There are no easy lessons now.
December 3rd, 2015 was the day I bought my first camera. I carefully chose one body and one lens: a Nikon D5300 and a 50mm prime lens. Here are a few of the things I've learned throughout my journey