February 2016

The inventor of the synchronized camera flash has died. Artur Fischer, a German inventor who registered more than 1,100 patents in his lifetime -- beating Thomas Edison -- passed away in Germany back on January 27th, 2016. He was 96 years old.

A group of 5 friends recently attached 5 cameras to a stratospheric weather balloon and launched it from the Presidio in San Francisco. The rig traveled to 91,470 above Northern California, popped, and then landed over 100 miles away.

I’m not ashamed to admit it. I regularly use my fancy camera to photograph my cats.

Ubersnap has launched a new GIF printing service that turns animated images into moving Harry Potter-style physical prints.

Deal alert: if you use Google's services for your photos, emails, or life in general, you can snag an extra 2GB of permanent storage space for free today. All you need to do complete Google's simple Security Checkup to verify that your account is secure -- it takes just a few clicks of your mouse.

As children, we often assume different roles while re-enacting grand fantasies. All hail to Cesar, riding atop a palanquin, or to the astronaut floating above the world looking down at it. The doctor saving lives, or the war photographer documenting the rawness of the human condition and the horrors of society as it fails. Then, we grow up. We settle into our role within our socio-cultural strata and send subtle ripples across the fabric of the society that surrounds us.

The 2016 Grammy Awards will be held in Los Angeles next week, and this year the awards handed out will have something special: there's a camera built into the base of each trophy.

As a staff photographer at the Los Angles Times, the majority of my assignments are celebrity portraits, often taken in non-descript hotel rooms during harried press junkets. Eight years of trying to photograph as many different looks as possible in the 5-to-10-minute windows we’re granted, usually without an assistant, have given me plenty of practice for the chaos that comes with a major film festival.

Founded in Manhattan in 1853, Steinway & Sons is widely considered to be one of the greatest piano makers in the world. Its grand pianos grace the world's grandest stages and are played by the best pianists.

Holly Andres is an American fine art and commercial photographer who has been creating dynamic and compelling images for over a decade. She started out shooting mostly fine art photography, but gradually branched into editorial assignments with the New York Times Magazine and many others. She continues to evolve and expand her art. For her fine art work, she is represented by the Robert Mann Gallery (New York City), Robert Koch Gallery (San Francisco), Jackson Fine Art (Atlanta), and Charles A.

"Run Baby Run" is a new video by artist Eran Amir that shows a baby running through all kinds of locations. It was entirely captured in camera with no green screen or digital manipulations.

UK-based photographer Marco Marques owns an impressive collection of around 50 vintage cameras. After his collection outgrew two glass display cabinets, Marques decided to have a custom shelving unit made to display his cameras on his office wall.

Want to see the inner workings of a Sony E-mount lens? Engineer Dave Jones of EEVblog was having problems with his $350 Sony 16-50mm f/3.5-5.6 OSS E-mount lens, so he decided to take it apart on camera to see what's inside. You can watch the teardown in the 26-minute video above.

Back in September 2015, we reported that selfies now cause more deaths worldwide than shark attacks. As people become more and more daring in their attempt to snap the perfect self-portrait to share online, there are more stories of those picture-takers getting seriously injured or killed.

Adobe has just announced version 6.2 of Adobe Bridge CC. It's an update that brings a small set of performance upgrades and features to the photo/asset management app.

One of my absolute favorite things to do in Photoshop is to play with lighting effects. Whether that be to make something glow, create a spotlight sort of effect, or set my hands on fire, I'm always so impressed with the many ways Photoshop allows you to alter lighting.

John Biever is one of only four photographers who has shot at every single Super Bowl over the past half century. In the 2-minute segment above, Biever talks to CBS News about his experiences and how the world has changed from when he shot Super Bowl I as a 15-year-old kid (his dad was the Green Bay Packers team photographer).

If you have two or more Instagram accounts -- perhaps one for personal and one for business -- Instagram has some great news for you this week: the company is finally rolling out multi-account support, which lets you log into multiple accounts in one app and quickly switch between them. This official announcement comes just weeks after some Android and iOS users began seeing the feature in their apps.

Apple loves promoting its iPhone camera quality by sharing beautiful photos shot around the world by iPhone owners. So it's curious that Apple CEO Tim Cook decided to share a blurry photo on Twitter while attending Super Bowl 50. And now the Internet isn't letting Cook live it down.

Washington DC is one of the most photographed places in the United States, with over 20 million tourists passing through in 2014.

If you ask a photographer if they can give you the entire set of unedited RAW photos from a shoot, there's a very good chance they're going to say no. No, it's not because they don't want you to have all your memories -- it's because they only want to deliver their very best finished work.

What if a spell turned some of the world's most famous car models into real women? What would they look like? That's what photographer Viktorija Pashuta decided to explore with her latest portrait project, titled "What if Cars Were SUPERMODELS?" …

Want a crash course on the history of photography? COOPH just published this info-packed 5-minute video on how photography developed from the early days of the camera obscura up to the emergence of smartphone cameras and online photo sharing. (Note: there's a bit of nudity.)

There are good Photoshop tutorials and there are bad Photoshop tutorials. Tom Trager and Or Paz of the sketch comedy group Sugar Zaza created this humorous 2-minute video that pokes fun at the latter group. We see a guy trying to learn a technique in Photoshop from a fictitious site called LearningPhotoshopIn-A-Breeze.com, but it's not as useful as he hoped.

Guess who was on the sidelines photographing Super Bowl 50 yesterday? Kevin Durant.

PetaPixel is a free-to-read blog, so we rely almost entirely on advertising to stay in business. In the past couple of weeks, however, readers have been reporting intrusive and annoying ads that redirect you to other websites while reading PetaPixel on mobile.

Melbourne, Australia-based photographer Alexander Chin recently completed an impressive project that deals with the passage of time. Over the course of 3 years between March 2013 and February 2016, he repeatedly visited iconic locations in Melbourne and captured a timelapse in each season of the year.

Bryan Carnathan is a photographer and the founder of The Digital Picture, one of the leading Canon DSLR gear review websites in the world. We had a chat with Carnathan to learn more about his popular site and his thoughts on the camera industry.

It was a beautiful day in Montreal. I was on a regular afternoon jog listening to a popular photography podcast. The topic of the episode was travel photography. The guests of the show were two professional photographers with the years of experience.

Groupon is being hit with a class action lawsuit that claims the deals company has repeatedly used Instagram photos without permission from the photographers.

Chris Payne is a architectural photographer who focuses his camera on design, assembly, and the built form. For his latest project, Textiles, Payne visited the color-, shape-, and pattern-filled worlds of textile mills in the American Northeast.

Photographer Cecil Williams of Orangeburg, South Carolina, wanted a faster way to digitize 2,000 of his negatives, so he invented a new system called the FilmToaster. It's a $1,699 box that lets you digitize most popular film formats using your digital camera.

Facebook ads are some of the best and cheapest sources for advertising a new wedding photography business.

On July 7th, 2015, wind speeds of over 120km per hour (~75mph) reached the Dutch coastal area. Winds were so extreme that restaurants along the beach were covered in a thick layer of sand, making them look like small sand dunes.

Nikon Singapore became the butt of many jokes last week after selecting a clearly Photoshopped photo as the winner of a small photo contest. After the story went viral and appeared in headlines around the world, Nikon and the photographer both apologized and took down the winning photo(shop job).

The Federal Aviation Administration announced this week that this year's Super Bowl this Sunday will come with a "No Drone Zone." All drones will be banned in a 32-mile radius around Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, during the football game.

Matrix-style "bullet time" is usually created using an array of cameras placed all around a subject. Swiss professional skier Nicolas Vuignier has been testing a new technique that only uses a single camera: he swings his iPhone 6 camera around using a long rope.

If you live in a cold area and have both a passion for photography and a knack for crocheting, here's a fun project for you: photography mittens. Carmen Jacob of Spindle Shuttle Needle has created stylish mittens that have special holes for your thumb and index finger to poke through, allowing you to operate your camera while keeping your hands warm and toasty.

In this video and post I’ll cover 28 great features, tricks, hacks, and more of Adobe Photoshop CC 2015. Some are simple, some are difficult, some are well known, and some are more like Easter eggs.

Photographer Dieter Schneider recently built a 4x5 large format camera for wet plate photography out of plywood using his Shapeoko 3 desktop CNC machine. Luckily for all of us, he also documented the entire process on camera.

Back in 2014, the foldable pop-up lightbox called the Foldio2 got over $500,000 of funding through Kickstarter to make product photos easier to shoot.

When starting out in photography, a lot of beginners are confused about RAW and JPEG formats while shooting. There are plenty of explanations out there, but with us being photographers, it's easier for us to comprehend a visual reference.

Photographer AnaHell has a curious and creative photo project titled Secret Friends. Each photo shows a strange creature with an egg-shaped head and torso. What you're actually seeing is a person bent over, face to their knees, with a face drawn onto their exposed back.

During a family game of hide-and-seek last year, Dan Iverson and his wife strapped a GoPro camera to their tiny toddler. They then hid themselves and watched the live stream on their phone while the toddler ran around looking for them. What resulted is the adorable 1-minute video above in which you see the world from the toddler's point of view, and in which you can see the gears turning in the kid's head as he thinks about where his parents could be hiding.

Here's a simple trick for landscape photos: when shooting a landscape photo that needs a hard edge graduated ND filter, you can use your hand. Yes your hand! It's a technique I've been using in my own work recently.

Want to shoot underwater photos with your Leica M camera but don't want to use those bulky underwater housings out there? Subal has a perfect, albeit pricey, solution for you.

Brides magazine recently published an article titled "Which Vendors Do You Have to Feed at Your Wedding?" In the piece, wedding planner Sandy Malone gives brides advice on which vendors they're responsible for feeding at a wedding, and which you can leave out of your plans.

GoPro just announced the financial results of its latest quarter, and things aren't looking very good for the flagging camera company. Investors were already bracing for the worst after GoPro slashed 7% of its workforce in January and announced a huge drop in camera sales.

If you have a mirrorless camera that lacks a viewfinder but has a tilting LCD screen, here's a neat "hack": you can give your camera a pseudo-viewfinder by mounting an old waist-level viewfinder to the screen.