Besides sensor size, quality glass is the other major hurdle that smartphones need to overcome if they ever want to truly compete, quality-wise, with their bigger more capable brothers.
But since attaching a 500mm lens to a smartphone looks... well... kind of dumb, the folks at Canadian startup Algolux are taking a software-based approach and producing some truly incredible results in the process.
Now that Sony's QX1 -- basically a smartphone add-on that lets you use E-Mount lenses with your phone -- has arrived, it was inevitable that people would take these new interchangeable lens capabilities to comical extremes. Enter Facebook user Usperedi, who created the image above for Sony Alpha Rumors.
North Carolina-based photographer Tammy Cantrell has been shooting abandoned mills in the Gaston County area for years, but her Not an Exit exhibit/series reveals a part of those mills that no Urbex photo on its own ever will.
By combining her images with Lewis Hine's documentary photographs of child labor, she allows the past to peek out through her photographs and whisper of a harsher time in our history.
It wasn't long ago that we shared Trent Bell's viral photo series REFLECT with you. But while the photo series itself was an inspiring and beautiful collection of work that made its mark online, it actually started its life as an idea for a creative promotional mailer.
On Instagram, if it looks like you, and talks like you, and posts like you, it may not actually be you. A new wave of spam bots are apparently avoiding detection by Instagram's filters by copying real people... picture for picture, word for word.
As light painting photography is becoming more popular and common, photographers are coming up with better and better ways of bringing the technique to events. The Lightomatic is a fancy solution by Dazler, a collective of light painters based out of Lyon, France.
From the outside it looks like your average high-end photo booth, but it's one that allows users to make a creative light painting self-portrait print on the spot.
GoPro may rule the roost in the action cam market, but they aren’t the only ones with their hand in the basket. Sony makes a lineup of action cams as well, and today they’ve announced their latest adventure seekers camera, the Sony Action Cam Mini: a fun-sized version of the AS100v that packs just as much power into just two-thirds the size.
Well, this is certainly one of the more... interesting Photoshopping trends we’ve seen. Thanks to a brigade of dedicated Photoshop masters on Tumblr, Marvel superheroes are getting the most unlikely of makeovers -- Hello Kitty makeovers, to be precise.
Aperture is about to leave the RAW image organizing/editing game, and OnOne Software wants to tempt users over to their ranks before they all give in to Adobe. To that end, OnOne just announced an impressive new version of its Perfect Photo Suite.
It's Wednesday, or as our camel friend from GEICO would call it, 'Hump Day,' and if you need a little bit of a laugh, this squirrel is more than happy to provide it. Some, particularly the poor camera, might even call him over-eager.
Nowadays, anybody with an Internet connection has seen tens if not hundreds of photographs taken from space. Astronauts tweet them, Hubble sends them down... rovers even putter around planets other than our own taking pictures.
But it all started with the photograph above from 1946, the first ever photo taken from space.
There's a new law in the works in The Philippines that may soon make it illegal to photograph strangers without their permission... even if they just appear by chance in the background of your photos. According to a government official, even selfies with people appearing in the background would be a no-no.
Hovering somwhere between 205 and 255 miles above Earth is the International Space Station, currently housing six intrepid explorers that are hurtling through space at roughly 4.8 miles per second.
And one of those individuals is Alexander Gerst, a geophysicist who spends a great deal of his time on the ISS holding a camera and putting it to use taking pictures of our planet.
People have been questioning the wisdom of the Sony QX so-called 'lens cameras' since before they even arrived. CNET mocked the news when it was still a rumor, saying it made no sense for Sony to release a camera accessory that made your phone just as bulky as a real camera... why would people buy that and not a real camera?
Well, we're not sure of the answer to CNET's question, but it seems Sony is pretty confident in them, because they just released the QX1 and QX30: two new smartphone-mounted lens cameras that augment your smartphone with an E-Mount and 30x optical zoom, respectively.
If you've taken almost any math classes over the last decade, chances are good you have a graphing calculator sitting around in some drawer somewhere. And while we can't promise you'll ever use what you learned in Calculus (an engineer friend of mine used to call it 'calcuseless') the folks over at JACP Media can help put that old calculator to use by turning it into a homebrew intervalometer.
The breakneck pace of photo technology advancement makes it easy to forget how young our industry really is, but we had a reminder yesterday when, not long after 'modern photography' itself turned 175 years old, the very first Canon camera celebrated its 80th birthday.
More so than ever before, it's regular citizens with camera phones who are breaking the news... or in some cases shaping the news. And it's this topic, hot on the heels of the protests in Ferguson, MO, that developer Nicky Case decided to tackle in a powerfully simple game.
We’ve seen low-light photography before, but what about no light photography. While it seems borderline impossible, researchers have combined a number of techniques to produce photographs in almost complete darkness, where the resulting images are using less than one photon of light per pixel!
Photographer Oleg Grigoryev, like many of us, is a man who enjoys traveling, hiking and camping. Unlike many of us, his latest endeavors have taken him through the Fann Mountains of Tajikistan, where he captured a simple yet beautiful series of wanderlust-inducing images aptly titled Morning Views From the Tent.
Dorothea Lange's iconic Migrant Mother, pictured above, is just one of the roughly 170,000 photographs taken between 1935 and 1945 for a project commissioned by the United State’s Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).
All of those photos are currently being stored in the Library of Congress, but a dedicated team from Yale University is looking to revitalize this invaluable collection of photographs by organizing them, pairing them up, and explaining how these images and photographers came together to create the most comprehensive looks at America following the Great Depression and into the early years of WWII.
Photoshop and other image manipulation software has become an interesting tool in the quest to define 'beauty.' Often used to sculpt and create false beauty, it's also been used by people like Esther Honig to illustrate how our definitions of beauty change based on culture.
Another project by animator Marius Vibe that is currently making the rounds seeks to answer a different question: If you combined portraits of eight of the most beautiful women in the world (at least according to Maxim) into a single composite, would that composite be even more beautiful than any of the individual parts?
About a year ago, we linked out to what we then believed to be the first 360-degree interactive panorama ever made of Pyongyang, North Korea. That interactive image was shot by photographer Aram Pan, but it was only the beginning.
Since then he's expanded in a big way, shooting over 40 interactive 360-degree panoramas all over the mysterious country for the DPRK 360 website and Facebook page.
Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon to hear about fauxtographers stealing other photographers work and passing it off as their own. Heck, there’s an entire website dedicated to shaming the scam artists who do this. But despite the distinct possibility that you'll be caught and have your career destroyed if you do this, it continues to happen.
Case in point is a recent situation involving Lin and Jirsa Photography and the tale of how their images were stolen and used by an unnamed photographer to entice new wedding clients with work that wasn’t his own.
When you think of colorful ripples of 'stuff' in the sky, the first thing that probably comes to mind is the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights. But while we'll never get sick of seeing those polar spirits dance, the phenomenon above gives Aurora photography a run for its money.
If you're thinking about adding a video component to your portfolio, one of the most important-but-confusing things you'll have to wrap your head around is codecs -- the different video compression/decompression formats available to you. These not only determine the quality retained by the camera, but also affect how you will approach the post-processing of the footage.
Unfortunately, video codecs -- with all of the myriad factors at play and the number of options available -- can be a bit confusing, and so cinematographer David Kong has shared the above, incredibly comprehensive look at everything you need to know.
After a week packed with photo and info leaks about this mysterious line of lenses, ZEISS officially pulled the cover off of its Loxia line of manual focus lenses for the Sony full-frame E-Mount a7, a7R and a7S cameras.
You probably wouldn't think it, but capturing shapes in smoke is an incredibly difficult task. In fact, it took photographer Thomas Herbrich a full three months, over 100,000 photos and one dead camera to capture approximately 20 images he considered keepers for his Smoke series.
You get a leak! And you get a leak! Everybody gets a leak!
It looks like somebody (or a few people) in the know at Sony were feeling very generous this morning because we woke up to not one, but two separate sources of leaked photos showing a very exciting new product from Sony: the next QX, smartphone-mounted 'lens camera.'
And it's exciting because, in this case, the term 'lens camera' doesn't really work anymore. This isn't a whole camera contained in a lens... it's more of a smartphone-attachable E-Mount that will let you swap out lenses!
What happens when you give a graphic designer a camera? Well, in the case of Lino Russo and his latest project Skymetric, you get a eye-catching series of images that explore the relationship between nature and architecture in the most colorful way imaginable.
It looks like Canon is looking to move some inventory -- or at the very least score some brownie points with its users -- because over the weekend, Canon announced a new permanent price drop on a vast selection of lenses, with discounts ranging from 5% to 33% off.
Nathan Kaso -- the professional time-lapse photographer behind this gorgeous Tasmanian car commercial -- usually uses thousands of dollars worth of gear, but when Instagram debuted Hyperlapse, he had to give it a shot.
Thus was born 'Bikerlapse,' one of the first of many future hyperlapses that show just how much potential there is in this simple-yet-powerful little application.
The Cheap Camera Challenge is back, showing us once more that it takes creativity, not expensive gear, to create an interesting photograph. Pairing a cheap camera with a professional photographer, this episode puts a modest Vivitar camera into the hands of commercial and fine art photographer Harold de Puymorin.
The more you look at South-Africa based photographer Anelia Loubser's Alienation series, the more captivated you become. A simple idea on the surface -- close-up, upside-down black-and-white portraits of people's eyes and foreheads -- the final images encourage you to dive deeper into each wrinkle and other so-called "imperfection" than almost any standard portrait might.
These days, photographers are dramatically strapped for time. We live in a world where “busy” is the most common answer for “how are you doing?” Endless client talks, long emails, phone calls, social media messages and trips steal your precious time with no intention of giving it back.
So, how can you become more effective in the time you do have and maybe earn yourself some time for shooting? And I’m not talking about multitasking, everyone already knows that's not working anyway!
In this post I put together 15 time-saving tools for photographers that'll help save you more time for shooting. Tools for creating quick to-do lists, bookmarking links to read later, sharing various files with others, automating certain quick tasks, creating personal website in minutes, and much more.
Have you ever wondered what you life would be like if you ended up with one of your exes? Or just a random person on the street, somebody whose trajectory in life would have changed your own drastically?
Czech photographer Dita Pepe has, but she took it an step further than most of us when she turned these spousal what-ifs into a series of portraits that take an interesting look at "what might have been" had her family life taken a different direction.
Instagram is a wonderful social network with simplicity built right into its infrastructure. But while simplicity may work for the masses, there are power users out there who would like to make the most of the photo-sharing network using third party options -- options that just got a bit more tempting thanks to the introduction of Picdeck.
Picdeck, a new web app for Instagram users, hopes to bring an interface similar to popular Twitter app TweetDeck to Instagram, letting users make the most of their square-cropped image streams.
So, you think taking your film to the local shop to get developed is a pain? Try being an American spy satellite in the 1960s. Getting your film developed then meant dropping it in a special 'film bucket' capsule from space, which the US Air Force then had to catch in mid-air.
Bellamy Hunt of Japan Camera Hunter recently stumbled across a very rare Leica IIIc Red Curtain Rangefinder -- rare because it comes complete with Nazi engravings on it. And though these Nazi symbols were not placed on the camera by Leica themselves -- the company actually helped Jews flee Nazi Germany during the Holocaust -- it's still a fascinating camera find.
Typically, colorizers focus on famous images. Photos like the V-J Day kiss photo from Times Square, or historic portraits. Honk Kong resident and Photoshopper Victor Liu's focus is more specific. His new project is all about Hong Kong, and he's hoping that his colorized images will encourage others to rediscover the city's past.
It seems Canon has a lot more up its sleeve for Photokina than just the rumored 7D replacement. In fact, if recent rumors prove true, you've got three new lenses to look forward to.
In April of 2007, to commemorate their first anniversary, the Leica Store Ginza in Tokyo, Japan released the beautiful camera above: a Leica MP Titanium limited edition that was only created in a single run of only 150.
Since then, the only place to get one of these has been at the Ginza store in Tokyo. But now, buyers outside of Japan have the rare opportunity to grab one of these gorgeous shooters through the Leica Store Miami... assuming, of course, that you've got $40,000 to drop on a film camera.
When photographer Mark Dawson and his girlfriend photographer Kari Wehrs were challenged to the popular ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, they decided to go old-school. In addition to donating -- that is, after all, the real point of all this -- they set up an old tintype camera and captured the entire thing 1850s style.
Casey Neistat doesn't believe he is the best looking, tallest, most talented, most capable, best funded filmmaker. In fact, he's pretty convinced he's not, and there's nothing he can do about those things. What he can do is be the hardest working person in the room, and the way he sees it, "the hardest working person will always win."
These little nuggets of wisdom and a whole lot more are all shared in the inspirational video above, which Neistat created a couple of months ago for National Geographic and their $50,000 dream expedition giveaway called Expedition Granted.
Yellowstone is no longer taking a slap-on-the-wrist, "we'll let you off with a warning" approach to people who violate the park's ban on camera drones. Egged on by several incidents since the ban went into effect, the park is starting to file criminal charges against violators that could mean $5,000 fines and/or 6 months in jail.
Dave MacLean from the Center of Geographic Sciences has put together a pretty awesome resource for space photography lovers. He's created an interactive map that lets you browse through over 650 photographs taken by ISS astronauts on Expeditions 40 and 41.
Jaco Marx is a dental surgeon by profession and a photographer and conservationist by passion. Currently living in central South Africa, Marx spends much of the limited free time he has photographing the African wilderness, both to simply enjoy his passion, as well as to document the wildlife and Earth around him. And the results are nothing short of gorgeous.
Ever wonder what a small mammal sees in its last moments of life before a bald eagle (we'll call it: 'Murica) swoops down out of nowhere and snatches it away? We're sure that question haunts your every waking moment, but it doesn't have to anymore, because 'Murica finally joined the many other animals who've taken a liking to GoPros they find lying around.
Second to actual food, there's nothing more appetizing than feasting your eyes on some beautiful food photography. Perfectly-crafted meals with just the right amount of sauce and the perfect garnish all contribute to the mouth-watering photography we come across.
This series from Australian photographer T.Q. Lee, however, is going to require a second look. Because if you look closely, you'll quickly realize that these are not the kinds of meals you want to sink your teeth into.
14 million historic images collected from over half a millennium's worth of books are currently making their way, million-by-million, onto the Flickr Commons courtesy of a man named Kalev Leetaru and an organization called The Internet Archive.
500px has been working on something special for its users. After months of hammering away at keyboards and staring at screens, the 500px team has officially launched its new Groups and Discussions section, both of which are currently in beta.