After the highly anticipated Sony a9 began landing in the hands of photographers, there were some reports of the camera displaying its overheating indicator icon after short periods of use in ordinary environments. Israeli photographer Senya Alman came up with a clever way of keeping his own Sony camera cool: he built it a little hot shoe cover for portable shade.
If you're taking your light stands outside, then you'll probably be using sandbags to weigh them down. But they're clumsy, take up a lot of space, and can be messy if punctured accidentally. StandDaddy offers a new, innovative way to stop stands from blowing over in a compact, easy-to-use form.
I've been shooting tintypes for almost six years now and love to push the boundaries of what is possible with this slow and difficult photographic process. Taking a tintype from the air was an idea that, years ago, I had shelved as the technology wasn't there yet. Drones were pretty scarce and the ones I had seen were extremely limited in payload and stability. But this spring I decided to revisit the idea.
Nestled away in some of Europe's most culture-rich cities are libraries that have stood the test of time. They are filled from floor to ceiling with books of all sorts, but the architecture of these buildings often speaks volumes about the time periods they were built in.
When Kevin Scruggs's daughter Mackenzie started first grade 12 years ago, he decided to pull out his camera and shoot a short interview with the 6-year-old. He then did the same thing on her first day of school for the next 12 years, and this year he turned all the clips into this touching 3-minute video wishing Mackenzie a happy graduation from high school.
There is an extremely talented landscape photographer called Thomas Heaton whose YouTube videos I find very instructive and entertaining. Recently he featured a new product he was sent to try out: the Loupedeck, a physical console that lets you control Lightroom (the main software I use to sort, catalog and edit my photographs).
Photographer Karen Jerzyk turned abandoned spaces into dark fairy tales after the death of her father. After getting into trouble with that series, she created Colors, a series of fantasy scenes photographed in rooms dominated by a single color.
There are few things in life more frustrating than tangled cords and rope, and you may run into both during a photo shoot. In under 5 minutes, this video from PremiumBeat will teach you how to properly wrap your cables to keep them tidy and save time.
Watching old family photographs fading away in treasured photo albums is a sad reality. However, bringing the digital age to these old film photographs can deliver them back to life. Colorizing old black and white photos can immediately transform an aged, washed-out capture into an image full of realism.
Episode 184 of the PetaPixel Photography Podcast.
Download MP3 - Subscribe via iTunes, Google Play, email or RSS!
Featured: VR/AR expert, author and futurist, Robert Scoble
VSCO has just announced that it's releasing its popular mobile app photo filters on desktop. The filters are packaged in a pack called VSCO Mobile Presets 01 (MP1).
A little while back, I was working for a small local newspaper outside of Houston, Texas. I was working on a series about adrenaline junkies around the area. One article I really wanted to write was about skydiving at Spaceland Houston.
The photographers at Mango Street wanted to show that it generally takes more than "pro" camera gear to shoot "pro" photos, so they decided to do a shootout to test this.
I had just moved to the pretty, but constantly rainy, Portland, Oregon, and the weather was getting to me! After going through a hard period of homesickness and mild depression, following a friend’s advice, I got my very first DSLR camera. I liked the idea of registering anything I wanted, and by anything I mean everything: landscape, objects, wild life (as wild as downtown Portland can get!), you name it…
Off the top of your head, do you know how much more light f/2.8 lets in compared to f/5.6? Do you know the f-stop number that comes after 11? This 1.5-minute video reveals the simple pattern used by the scale.
Think San Francisco's "discrimination" against high-end camera gear is bad? Get this: the city of Laguna Beach, California, charges a minimum of $100 for a permit if you wish to take non-commercial photos in public places.
The Lydith 30mm f/3.5 lens was introduced in 1964, and grew a cult following due to its excellent sharpness, contrast and color fidelity. Meyer-Optik now plans to create a modernised version, and the Kickstarter project has already tripled its goal.
Strapping GoPro cameras to high-altitude weather balloons to shoot photos and videos of the edge of space has been growing in popularity, but on GoPro just captured something incredible that no GoPro had before: an extremely close flyby of a passenger airliner at 38,000 feet.
This incredibly creative ad from Gatorade uses a "liquid printer" and precision-timed strobe photography to create a stop-motion athlete from drops of water. What’s more, it was created entirely in-camera, according to the company.
Photographers have been targeted by a new "bad reviews" extortion scam in recent times. Here's a look at what it's like to be targeted by this type of nasty scam.
Sherpa is a free iOS app that turns top geotagged Instagram photos in to a travel guide and location scouting tool.
Sony has just released a wave of new firmware updates for its mirrorless cameras. Found among the various fixes and improvements are solutions to the a9 overheating warning issue and the "star eater" issue reported by astrophotographers.
In Phase One’s recent update to Capture One Pro 10, it added a new Styles & Presets tool for applying presets to images. The company has now begun selling presets in Style Packs, each containing 15 to 18 Styles.
Photographer Jessica Kobeissi is back again with another portrait challenge, and this time she invited photographers Brandon Woelfel, Jerry Maestas, and Derrick Freske to participate. For the latest challenge, they pointed their lenses at model Tashi Rodriguez.
Amazon is tightening its belt when it comes to its cloud data storage services. The company has just announced that its $60 a year plan for unlimited data storage is being abruptly discontinued. For that same rate, you'll now only be able to store 1TB of data.
Google has been steadily adding features to their Google Photos app since I/O 2017. The new archive feature isn’t the most exciting of them, but it has an interesting trick up its sleeve.
In the fall of 2008, Barack Obama had just become the Democratic candidate and was heavily favored to win the White House to become the first African American President of the United States. His popularity created media frenzy as the world was thirsty to learn more about the young Senator from Illinois. Because Obama was a presidential candidate, a media corps began to follow and report on Obama’s every move.
Here's a 5-minute video by Tony & Chelsea Northrup that will teach you how to use Photoshop to stack multiple exposures of a moving silhouetted subject. The end result is a unique effect that conveys motion in an otherwise still image.
A couple of photojournalists in the UK covering the general election today accidentally made the news when another camera caught them fighting for position.
National Geographic photojournalist Paul Nicklen has spent decades documenting the Earth’s poles. In this 45-minute interview with NPR, he discusses the dangers of his work and the impact of climate change on the fragile, icy ecosystems that he photographs.
The Fujifilm GFX 50S's ISO invariance makes it so easy to shoot the Milky Way that it's not even funny. I was able to take an "impossible" shot, capturing the Milky Way in the middle of Sydney, during a light festival, without bracketing on the Milky Way. The sensor captured so much info on the highlights that this was possible.
Canon's amazing new ME20 camera can shoot at a whopping ISO 4,560,000 and can capture incredible views of stargazers under the Milky Way. Now the short video above shows what the camera can do underwater -- Canon and a team of researchers recently used the camera to shoot bio fluorescent turtles.
Zwelethu Mthethwa, a well-known South African photographer, has been sentenced to 18 years in jail after being found guilty of the 2013 murder of a sex worker in Cape Town.
When packing your gear bag for a two-week street photography trip, the last thing you might think to bring is an underwater housing. Most of the time you would be completely right to leave that item at home. But if your trip happens to be going to India during the celebration of Holi, an underwater housing may just be the protection you need.
Following the winding down of its business, Triggertrap has followed through on its promise to open-source its mobile apps and hardware. This could mean that the product will live on, despite Triggertrap’s demise.
It looks like there are many photographers who want an intelligent camera assistant that helps determine optimal camera settings. Arsenal, the camera add-on that promises to offer just that, has just blown past the $1 million mark in crowdfunding on Kickstarter.
Canon have added 5 new videos to their Explorers of Light showcase series, in which members of their pro team discuss their careers and their passion for photography.
Episode 183 of the PetaPixel Photography Podcast.
Download MP3 - Subscribe via iTunes, Google Play, email or RSS!
Featured: Arsenal AI photography assistant creator, Ryan Stout
Noted music photographer Danny Clinch, who took photos of Tupac for Rolling Stone, is suing Forever 21 and Urban Outfitters for copyright infringement after they allegedly used his photographs on their merchandise.
This isn't a joke. Despite plenty of people not believing that it's real, what you're looking at is a genuine Instagram Likes vending machine, spotted in a mall in Moscow and tweeted out by Russian journalist Alexey Kovalev.
Pixilation is stop-motion created using real people, and this quirky dance video from animation studio Frame Order is a brilliant example of the technique. Now, the studio has released a behind-the-scenes video, giving us a look at how the creative video was shot.
In this critical look at photographer Ryan McGinley’s recent photo shoot with Brad Pitt, photographer Ian Wong examines why he believes McGinley’s style is just not suited to celebrity portraiture work—an insightful look at what works (and what doesn't) in pop culture photography.
If you've been holding out on purchasing a serious digital medium format camera, Hasselblad just gave you 8,000 new reasons to pull the trigger. As of today, the price of the flagship H6D-50c has been dropped from $26,000 to $18,000—a price drop of $8,000, or nearly 31%.
Talented photographer and retoucher Karen Alsop recently decided to have some Photoshop fun with her friends and family. When her mom unearthed an old family photo from the 1900s, she added her kids into the shot and pretended it was an authentic photo of long lost relatives... and it worked!
What would Salvador Dali eat for brunch? Designer Kyle Bean recently teamed up with photographer Aaron Tilley and food stylist Lucy-Ruth Hathaway to answer this very question by recreating the works of Dali and other artists using various brunch ingredients.
It’s not uncommon in any field to find yourself in a creative rut at some point. In this 10-minute video, photographer Sean Tucker discusses how he overcomes his main sticking points, and keeps creating new work week-in and week-out.
You can't make this stuff up. Scrolling through Facebook last night, we ran across a screenshot of an email sent to Reddit user justinwheelon on June 4th. The couple, clearly planning ahead, asks if the photographer could add "a clause that guarantees us a refund should we ever get divorced."
Adobe’s Photoshop is such a complex piece of software that even professionals find new features and settings every now and then. This 7-minute video from Colin Smith of PhotoshopCAFE explores 7 Photoshop tricks that may be new to you even if you've been using PS for a long time.
Remember Flickr? Yes, the Yahoo-owned (or is it Verizon now...) photo-sharing service is still a thing, and today they rolled out a major, long-overdue update to their profile pages. Say hello to the Flickr "About" page.
Photographer Jim Winters of Team Nikon Miami doesn't mess around when it comes to shooting an air show. He wants to get close, and he needs to stay mobile, so he leaves his tripod at home and mounts his massive Nikon 800mm f/5.6 VR lens onto this crazy custom-built shoulder rig instead.
