Most photographers rely heavily on the capabilities of autofocus systems in DSLR cameras, but knowing how they actually work is something that even experienced photographers may not have learned. Here's a 4-minute video by ZY Productions that helps decode the mystery of DSLR autofocus by explaining the technical details behind it.
Brooklyn-based photographer and graphic designer Alfra Martini has been taking famous album covers and recreating them with cats instead of humans. She calls the project The Kitten Covers.
Photographers Jessica Kobeissi, Rachel Gulotta, and Daniel Inskeep decided to approach strangers in downtown Los Angeles and offer free portraits. The 11-minute video above shows what happened.
Memistore is a new camera accessory that claims to be the world's first SD card holder that attaches directly to your camera.
National Geographic has announced the winning photos of its prestigious 2017 National Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year contest. The grand prize winner, selected from over 11,000 entries, is the photo above by Jayaprakash Joghee Bojan showing a male orangutan peering from behind a tree while crossing a river in Borneo, Indonesia.
Adventure photographer Jesper Gronnemark recently did an impressive skydiving photo shoot using flashes and other studio equipment in midair while free-falling at 125 mph (~200 km/h).
It’s not surprising when camera companies hire photographers to pitch their products. But photographers have also been enlisted to sell other types of products -- the result of Madison Avenue trying to romanticize the occupation, even though the reality often fails to meet the expectation. Nowadays photographers are more likely to spend the majority of their time sitting at a desk in post-processing or trying to collect on invoices that are 6 months past due.
In the relatively warm winter between 2014 and 2015, common starlings were found staying in the Netherlands instead of migrating to the south. Photographer and filmmaker Jan van IJken took his camera out and shot this beautiful short film titled "The Art of Flying." It shows thousands upon thousands of birds flying in eye-popping swarms (known as murmurations).
I spent close to a decade of my life as a sports photographer and during this time it never crossed my mind to shoot dance. My dance photography all began when I was asked by a friend who was auditioning for a dance program to help with her audition photos.
NiSi has announced a new variable ND filter called the Pro Nano 1.5-5-stop Enhance ND-Vario. One of the filter's features is that it says has no dreaded X-effect.
If you've ever worked in retail at a camera store, perhaps this sketch will tickle your funny bone... or bring back bad memories. At 5:30 in this episode of the comedy show Rostered On is an interaction between a store employee and a customer asking to return a "broken" camera.
Back in May, a US federal court ruled that personal drones don't need to be registered as part of the FAA's mandatory drone registration program. That just changed: President Trump just signed a defense policy bill that restores the requirement that all recreational drone owners register their aircraft with the government.
Toshiba has just announced the world's first 14TB Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) hard drive. The new drive is part of Toshiba's MG07ACA enterprise series.
After photographing the solar eclipse in Idaho, I couldn't resist continuing my "long-service leave" and returning to Canada's Yukon Territory for some early season aurora hunting in September 2017. I had just two and half weeks (one New Moon cycle) based with my friends and supporters Andrea and Florian Lemphers at Shallow Bay, north of the capital Whitehorse.
Google has created a trio of apps that utilize experimental technology in a bid to push forward the possibilities of smartphone photography and videography. The apps — Storyboard, Selfissmo!, and Scrubbies — use techniques like smart object recognition and person segmentation algorithms similar to Portrait Mode to enable creative editing of images and video.
Want to be inspired by the great American photographer Ansel Adams? Here's a fantastic 80-minute documentary film that PBS aired back in 2002. Titled Ansel Adams: A Documentary Film, it's an in-depth study of Adams' life and work.
A month after the feature was seen being tested in the wild, Instagram has just announced that users can now follow hashtags.
There's major consolidation going on in the US camera gear rental industry. Lumoid, a camera and tech gear rental startup, has announced that it's closing up shop, less than half a year after signing a deal with Best Buy to offer gear rentals through the giant retailer.
A well-known Chinese 'rooftopping' photographer fell to his death from the top of a 62-story skyscraper after the stunt he was attempting went horribly wrong. The incident was caught on camera.
Adobe just announced a new wave of updates to the entire Lightroom CC ecosystem, from Lightroom CC and Classic CC on desktop to the mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Want to learn how to predict and photograph a moonrise or moonset? Here's a helpful 5-minute video on just that by photographer Matthew Saville of Nature TTL.
Dual cameras have become ubiquitous in the smartphone world, and with them has emerged a new technique for simulating a shallow depth of field -- the feature commonly called ‘Portrait Mode’. This 10-minute video from Marques Brownlee explains how it works, and it also pits Portrait Mode on an iPhone X, Note 8, and Pixel 2 against the $8,000 medium format camera Hasselblad X1D.
I can't remember seeing so much snow in our Dutch capital city of Amsterdam before. Yesterday afternoon, snow started falling out of the sky for hours and hours without stopping. Since I was already in Amsterdam, I took the opportunity of trying to document the atmosphere. The scene lasted for only a few hours before it started to rain in the evening.
Something just happened that shocked the hell out of me. I made my first sale on Adobe Stock and was notified that I earned a commission of 18 cents.
If you easily get motion sickness, you may want to stay away from this short film. Visual storyteller Tim Sessler recently spent 48 hours shooting in New York City with an iPhone 8 and the new Freefly Movi cinematic robotic gimbal. What resulted is Vortex, this 1.5-minute short film in which the world continually turns.
Queens of the Stone Age musician Josh Homme is at the center of controversy this week after he was caught on camera kicking a female photographer in the face in the middle of a concert in Los Angeles this weekend.
Episode 236 of the PetaPixel Photography Podcast.
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Featured: Photographer and educator, Zach Sutton
My name is James D. Lee, and I'm a photographer based in Oakland. I recently got around to posting four years worth of selected photos shot in and around the San Francisco Bay area strictly on tilt-shift lenses. I completed this project while working full-time marketing/photography positions.
National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen was visiting the Baffin Islands in Canada this summer when he came across a heartbreaking sight: a starving polar bear on an iceless land.
Camera companies usually limit their repair services to newer camera and lens models that have plenty of replacement parts in stock, but Nikon is doing something different over in Japan: for a limited time, the company is offering to service your vintage, discontinued manual focus cameras and lenses.
Some people run away to Cuba for the sunshine. Some people run away to Cuba for the rum. And some just run away with the circus.
Here's a 24-minute tutorial by photographer Ian Norman of Lonely Speck that looks at how you can stack and stitch panoramas of the night sky. Norman says these are his two favorite techniques for maximizing the image quality of astrophotos.
Need a laugh? The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards has announced its finalists for 2017. The contest injects humor into the world of wildlife photography by searching for the funniest photos of animals captured around the world.
The popular photo editing software Aurora HDR just reached lofty new heights: Apple has selected Aurora HDR 2018 as the Best Mac App of the Year for 2017.
On Oct 8, 2015, a completely unknown company announced a new camera which promised to change how we think about photography: "The L16 combines breakthrough optics design with never-before-seen imaging technology to bring you the camera of the future."
"You're My Music in This Silence" is a new short film by videographer Erick Flores Garnelo of Guadalajara, México. The 3.5-minute visual experience consists entirely of cinemagraphs.
Photographer and visual artist Antti Karppinen dodges and burns his photos using a single 50% natural gray layer in Overlay blending mode. By sharing these gray "dodge and burn layers" separately, Karppinen can easily show exactly what he did to each of his photos.
Trying to think of a photography-related present for a photography-obsessed person in your life? Here's a 4-minute video by COOPH that features 10 great DIY gift idea for this this holiday season.
When I picked up my new $3,200 Sony a7R III camera from B&H Photo at UPS on Monday morning, I was surprised at how it was packed, because it was a box inside a box. This never happens, so imagine my surprise when I opened this rather large second box to find two cameras inside.
The rise of smartphone photography just hit another milestone: for the first time in Flickr's history, half of all photos being uploaded to the photo-sharing service were shot with a smartphone in 2017.
Samsung smartphone are about to get a lot more internal storage. Samsung has announced that it has begun mass production of a 512GB embedded Universal Flash Storage solution that will appear in the next generation of smartphones from the South Korean giant.
As 2017 comes to a close, Flickr has been doing some data crunching on the billions of photos uploaded during the year by photographers around the world. Today the photo-sharing service revealed the most popular pictures of the year.
Adobe just released this helpful 2-minute video that shares 10 handy shortcuts you can use in Photoshop when working with layers.
When we finished our teardown of the a7R III, we didn’t anticipate just how badly people wanted to see the new camera body’s weather sealing.
One of the windiest nights I’ve ever taken pictures turned into perhaps the single most rewarding — and frightening — landscape photography experience of my life. I was on the Mesquite Sand Dunes in Death Valley, a place I had visited twice in the past, though under much tamer conditions.
Researchers from the University of Illinois have managed to create a new camera called the Mantis Cam that can see polarized light. This technology provides possible solutions for everything from unlocking the mysteries of the underwater world to early cancer detection.
Episode 235 of the PetaPixel Photography Podcast.
Download MP3 - Subscribe via iTunes, Google Play, email or RSS!
Featured: Photographer, author and educator, Glyn Dewis
Here's a tip for the digital age: if you're commissioned with $15,000 to create a public art installation in a large city, don't steal photos from the Internet and pretend they're your own. That's the mistake one well-known artist in Canada recently made, sparking a good deal of controversy and embarrassment.
It started full of hope and possibilities: In 2011, Lytro promised a camera that could change photography forever with its light-field technology, which allowed photographers to refocus after the shot. But having already announced a change in the company's direction towards video rather than consumer still cameras, Lytro has now shut down its online sharing platform for light-field still images. pictures.lytro.com is no more.
Throughout the years, I noticed that I visit the same locations around my house many times to see how they look during different seasons and different times of the day. Sometimes the area where you live may not motivate you very much to photograph because you see the same things every day. However, when I started photography, I began to see the world (and my home area) in a different way.
