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Today I received an Experimental Lens Kit from Lomography and immediately took it on a test ride while having my lunch break.

It's hump day, and what better way to start the second half of the week than with a little bit of good old fashioned GoPro insanity... well, GoPro and Red Bull, which is a match made in action camera heaven.

Camille Lepage, 25, is an independent French photographer living in South Sudan. She works on long term projects about topics that do not make to the mainstream media and looks at the consequences of the politics on the populations.

Photographer Jordan Matter's Dancers Among Us photo series and book has earned him the kind of viral fame that many a photographer dreams of, but more inspiring than his success is his attitude and the joy he seems to take in his work.

We've found reason to share Czech astrophotographer Miloslav Druckmüller's breathtaking work once before when we showed you his composite of a total solar eclipse. Now he's back with another composite image that shows a nightscape the likes of which you've probably never seen before.

In addition to announcing the Nokia Camera app and RAW support for the Lumia 1020 and 1520 (read about that here), Nokia made one other camera-centric announcement that had us perking our ears up: the company also introduced a Lytro-like refocusing camera app called Nokia Refocus Lens.

We first shared photographer Carli Davidson's ridiculously cute SHAKE series back in 2011 before it had gone quite so viral. This week, her high-speed photographs of dogs making hilarious faces while shaking off water have been released in book form, accompanied by the above super slow motion video of the puppies in action.

Earlier today, Nokia let fly a slew of announcements at their Nokia World event in Abu Dhabi. And, as you might expect from the people that brought you the 41-megapixel PureView smartphone camera, a few of them have to do with pushing mobile photography to the next level.

Update on 12/16/21: This video embed has been removed by its owner. You can still watch it here.

In an attempt to show off just how powerful its Snapdragon 600 processors are, Qualcomm decided to go all Matrix on the people of Venice, CA and New York City. They did this by putting together an impressive 130-smartphone 540° bullet time photo booth using only HTC One smartphones.

Narcissism and obsessive personal documentation are all fine and good, but sometimes you just want to buy and sell stuff. A new site promises to make that considerably easier to do just that through Instagram by restricting searches to postings with a #forsale hashtag and providing a simplified transaction system.

Let's not kid ourselves, when it comes to health insurance, freelance photographers are in an unfortunate situation. Despite working long hours like everyone else and managing their own business, freelance photographers don't get the same group rates that regular employees do. There is no question that buying insurance as an individual is more expensive.

Next time a spouse or friend razzes you for spending too much on camera gear, try pointing out all the cool, expensive stuff you didn't buy. Like the antique, no-name, large-format lens currently up for sale on eBay for close to half a million bucks.

There are a total of six piece types in the game of Chess, and Italian photographer Francesco Ridolfi has managed to bring each of them -- in both black and white versions -- to life in his creative fine art portrait project "Chess Portraits."

There's a belief that being successful as a photographer these days runs the possibility gamut from difficult to almost impossible, but examples like Wyn Wiley seem to run contrary to that belief. Wiley is a very successful 21-year-old photographer, and in the Lincoln Nebraska TEDxYouth talk above, he blows minds by sharing his incredibly optimistic and inspirational world view.

There's no denying that the Sony a7 and a7R made quite the splash in the photographic industry both before and after their official arrival. With full-frame sensors, a mirrorless design and price tags that make at least the a7 cheaper than even the most affordable full-frame alternatives, Sony hit the trifecta.

Every two years, the lighting of the Olympic Flame amidst the ruins of the Temple of Hera is a pretty interesting performance. The torch is lit from the light of the Sun, using a parabolic mirror to focus the Sun's rays on the fuel in the torch and set it ablaze... but what exactly is that fuel? By the looks of it, at least a small part is a piece of

Photographer Richard Renaldi's 6-year-long project Touching Strangers has been an incredible success. From viral Internet fame to a full-fledged photo book that exceeded its Kickstarter goal eight times over, there's something profoundly moving about complete strangers posed together, sometimes quite intimately, on the streets of NYC.

In the digital age, having your photos stolen usually indicates copyright infringement by someone who decided to use your work without permission online. But for Ukranian-born photographer Aleksandr "Sasha" Onyshchenko, the term recently took on the old definition: two of his prints were literally stolen right out of the gallery they were being displayed at in broad daylight!

Have you ever heard of the "4 Seconds" myth in concert photography? Well, probably not, because I made this phenomenon up as a play on words with the 4 Leaf Clover "Myth." The 4 Seconds Myth talks about the fact that there’s a maximum period of time at just a few concerts when you can in fact shoot at crisp, noiseless ISO 100.

If you've followed PetaPixel for a little while, you'll already know that a laser pointer's focus lens can be put to good DIY use helping you take macro photos with your smartphone.

Late in 2012, photojournalist Daniella Zalcman moved from New York City to her new home in London. Zalcman adores both cities for, among other things, their photogenic nature. And so she decided to mix the two together into a creative series of double exposures dubbed New York + London, using her smartphone.

It's always nice when a company with plenty of exciting, brand new technology continues to support their older models in a big way, and that's what Fuji did yesterday when it released version 2.0 of the X100 firmware.

You can worry all you want about photos being stolen via Flickr, but maybe someone will like your photo enough to buy it... and put it on the cover of a platinum-selling rock album... and boost you overnight from the fuzzy border of hobbyist/professional to a high-profile career as a portrait and fashion photographer.

Here's a little bit of funny to get you through the rest of your Friday and send you off into the weekend in a good mood, because nothing helps alleviate stress like watching other people get the crap scared out of them... photo prank style.

DIY camera geeks have a new low-light option with the debut of the Raspberry Pi NoIR, a version of the popular camera module add-on for the single-board-computer that ditches the infrared filter on the image sensor.

Each year, London's Natural History Museum hands out awards for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, and the winner of this year's competition brought home top prize with an ethereal, beautiful and accidental photo of elephants at a watering hold in the Northern Tuli Game Reserve in Botswana.

New York Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota may be running as a law and order guy, but apparently the "law" part doesn't cover intellectual property.

The NASA spacecraft Cassini has sent back some incredible imagery of the planet Saturn over the years, much of which is being put to use to create an IMAX movie. But thanks to the work of a Croatian software developer, we now have a full, breath-taking, high-resolution photo mosaic of Saturn in all its glory as it looked on October 10th.

We're losing count of all the new gear announced in October so far, but one thing's for sure: if you have G.A.S. you're in serious trouble. Now joining Nikon's D5300, Sony's a7 and a7R, Panasonic's GM1 and more are two fresh cameras from the Fujifilm camp: the X-E2 and XQ1.

Photography student and street photographer Fernando Pereira Gomes is used to practicing his craft on the streets of New York, but recently, he's taken to shooting photos on the virtual streets of Los Santos, San Andreas, the fictional city of Grand Theft Auto V.

Great news, Micro Four Thirds shooters -- you no longer need Instagram filters and the like to make your photos look... how shall we put this... distressed.

With all of this talk of new cameras and new lenses and fake potential cameras, we thought it might be good to take a quick break and just share something awesome. So, courtesy of the good folks at GoPro and the sheer number of spare cameras they have lying around, we give you: fire-breathing in bullet time.

Now that we think about it, we should have expected this, but we just didn't see it coming. The photo above supposedly shows a new camera on its way from Hasselblad. In keeping with the Lunar and Stellar before it, the Hasselblad Solar pictured above will basically be a Sony a7 redesigned using expensive materials and sold at a much higher price.

In the midst of all these camera announcements, Nikon has taken the time to unveil a new piece of high-end glass as well. Paying homage to a lens discontinued 15 long years ago, Nikon is bringing back the 58mm prime lens, this time with an f/1.4 aperture.

When we first covered Brandon Stanton and his Humans of New York project almost a year and a half ago, he had accumulated about 3,000 portraits of people from around New York City. Now that number has grown to over 5,000, and the blog that started it all has birthed a book and the kind of viral fame the Internet it known for.

Adding to the deluge of camera announcements this month, Nikon chose today to release an update to its D5200 consumer DSLR. The new camera, the D5300, isn't a huge breakthrough, but Nikon managed to pack in a few new features that'll help the shooter keep up with competitors like the Canon 70D.

Small interchangeable lens cameras (ILCs) usually come with small sensors and a diminutive spec list. Take the Pentax Q7 for example, its 1/1.7-inch sensor was a big (or rather a small) deterrent for serious photographers who want a small yet capable camera of their own.

Last Friday, WPPI Director Jason Groupp announced that Jasmine Star and Doug Gordon withdrew from next year’s conference in light of all the controversy surrounding allegations of plagiarism.

If you like the idea of having a GoPro or other action cam to capture all of your daredevil stunts but don't readily have several hundred to drop on one, the company Pyle Audio just debuted something you might be interested in.

One of the oft-mentioned pitfalls of the smartphone photography movement is that we end up with a ton of photos that just stay on our phones indefinitely, never to see the light of day. This humorous video points out some of the photos that you and I both probably have sitting somewhere on our phone and that, for one reason or another, we haven't or won't ever delete.

The Triggertrap name has appeared on PetaPixel many times before: from the very early days of v1 on Kickstarter, to an interview with CEO Haje Kamps, to the release of Triggertrap Mobile and beyond. Now we have another exciting reason to write about Triggertrap, and that reason is called Redsnap.

Back in early July, we got a chance to share photographer Pelle Cass' intriguing Selected People series with you. For this series, he combines hundreds of exposures to create what amounts to a time-lapse in one frame: showing what a particular location looks like over the course of many hours, but capturing it as a single moment in time.

Admittedly, the a7 and a7R have sort of stolen the show when it comes to camera announcements today, but those two weren't the only shooters Sony debuted. The company is also adding another camera to high-end RX Cybershot lineup. Jointing the full-frame RX1 and the popular RX100MII is the RX10: a high-performance superzoom.

After all of the anticipation, rumors and leaks we sincerely hope the announcement still has you excited, because Sony has finally made the long-awaited a7 and a7R official. That's right, the cameras once known only as the "NEX Full-Frame" have finally arrived, with full specs, press photos and a lens and accessory lineup to prove it.

In a move that is completely legal and yet already has some people wondering just how much bad press the Chicago Sun-Times is looking to absorb, the beleaguered newspaper is putting the 'striking, one-of-a-kind photos' in its archive up for sale... you know, photos taken by the photojournalists the paper sacked in May of this year.

We told you about the upcoming Panasonic GM1 back in September when the rumors first surfaced, but now we have the first leaked photos of the camera that intends to claim the title of "world's smallest interchangeable lens camera" without compromising on quality.

It turns out that it does exist: a magazine that prides itself on not altering their models' faces or bodies in Photoshop. Verily is a fashion and lifestyle magazine aimed at women 18 to 35, and even though that is prime demographic territory when it comes to Photoshop use, the whole purpose of the magazine is to at least begin reversing this trend.

We dedicate a lot of time to finding and sharing relevant, inspirational and sometimes humorous stories with you here, and once in a while, we inadvertently help make something wonderful happen.

Elaine Mayes has been a photographic artist for more than fifty years. She also taught photography at The University of Minnesota, Hampshire College (founding faculty), Pratt Institute, Bard College, ICP and retired as Professor Emerita from NYU, Tisch School of the Arts where she was Chair of the Photography and Imaging Department from 1996 until 2001.