The ancient red pine forest surrounding Ontario's Wolf Lake is the largest that remains in the world -- and it's in trouble. Active mining leases encompass almost the entirety of this forest; leases that were just renewed last year for another 21 years. And so, in response, an organization called Save Wolf Lake has put together the above time-lapse, asking for help in preserving this endangered area.
The Samsung Galaxy S4 hasn't even made it into the hands of everyone who wants it, and yet there's already a rumor going around that the company is working on a different version geared more towards smartphone photographers with an eye for quality.
North Korea has a history of Photoshop fails, so you think the country's neighbor to the south would take heed and keep a close watch on manipulation. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case, as the above photo painfully clearly illustrates.
By now we should be used to photo apps coming from all corners of the industry -- even Snoop Lion has released a photo sharing app -- but it was still a bit of a surprise to hear that Manfrotto had released a photo taking, editing and sharing app of its own.
Nokia recently announced its new Lumia 928: a 8.7-megapixel PureView, Carl Zeiss, OIS-toting replacement for the already impressive Lumia 920 that will do its best to blow away the rest of the market in terms of image and video quality.
Retouching and manipulating photographs is done with fancy photo-editing programs these days, but back in 1946, making adjustments required a lot more than a computer, some software, and some pointing-and-clicking skills. Retouching required a whole box of tools, a very sharp eye, and an extremely steady hand.
Adobe has made several announcements over the past few days. We've seen a new version of Photoshop, Creative Cloud bundles geared towards photographers, and even a go at hardware with the "Mighty" Pen and "Napoleon" Ruler. But of the unveilings, none was as controversial as the announcement that we would be saying goodbye to the Creative Suite line -- from now on, it's going to be Creative Cloud or nothing.
Olympus has a major camera announcement day coming this Friday, but the cameras it's planning to unveil--the E-P5 and E-PL6--have been almost fully revealed now. New leaks have revealed the full specs for the E-P5, photos of a fancy "premium" version of the E-P5, and product photos of the E-PL6 (shown above).
If there hasn’t been a Color Run 5k or 10k race near you, there probably will be soon. And with all that color, you certainly want to take some pictures, right? Not with your camera you don’t.
Have you heard of Sid Kaplan? If you've studied the works of great American photographers, you've likely at least seen some of Kaplan's handiwork. Although he's a master photographer in his own right, Kaplan had made a name for himself as one of the industry's finest photo printers. Over the past four or five decades, Kaplan has made prints for some of the biggest names in photography.
For the first time since PetaPixel launched back in 2009, we're hiring! Team PetaPixel is looking for rockstar bloggers who would like their writing to be read by nearly 3 million photography enthusiasts every month.
Samsung found itself in an embarrassing copyright infringement controversy earlier today after the company published a street photographer's work without permission as an advertisement on its Facebook page. It wasn't just the unauthorized use of the image that was embarrassing; here's the kicker: the photograph was actually shot using a Nikon camera.
You know those iconic minimalist product photos for Apple gadgets? Have you ever wondered about how they're shot and who shoots them? …
You might think that bearded, Carhartt-wearing, ironic dudes riding fixed geared bicycles in Brooklyn are obnoxious, but a different brand of 21st century hipster is helping make photography, er, awesomer. Let’s celebrate the nerdtastic dedication that possesses these photo hipsters.
I focus on a relatively obscure (though rapidly becoming more popular) area of photography called gigapixel-resolution photography. I use a robotic panoramic mount to capture tens if not hundreds of images of the same location and then stitch the images together to create a single massive photograph. I've combined this technique with High Dynamic Range imaging to create HDR photographs that are anywhere from 200 megapixels to 4 gigapixels in resolution size.
Last Saturday, we featured a creative music video by the band James Wallace and the Naked Light that was shot entirely in one take in the reflection of a fan's eyeball. It was a wonderfully simple video and an approach we hadn't seen before in a music video.
Photographer Gary Albertson calls himself "the luckiest unlucky guy in the world." In 2010, after decades spent shooting the outdoors, he developed a rare form of glaucoma that has left him with little more than a circle of peripheral vision in each eye. But after some time away from the camera he's come back stronger than ever, creating photography so stunning he's attracted the attention of a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist.
While it is true that photo apps are in high demand and, therefore, a dime a dozen, we were still surprised to find out that rapper Snoop Lion (formerly Snoop Dogg) decided to branch into the market himself. In partnership with Upper Playground, 99centbrains and Cashmere Agency, the rapper has officially broken into the smartphone photography game with his new app Snoopify.
Even as compact cameras continuously attempt to up their game in order to compete with an ever more photographic smartphone market, the smartphone market is responding. We've seen Nokia with its PureView and HTC with its UltraPixel technology, and now rumor has it Sony has something up its sleeve as well.
The wildly successful Kickstarter campaign Blackprints is currently at the center of a heated controversy over stolen images that has already involved one copyright dispute. It seems that the campaign's creator, Sabrina Chun, might have taken to acquiring photos of cars off of the Internet, changing them to black and white minimalist versions, and selling them as part of this campaign. (See Update)
As Google Glass ramps up to the point where it's eventually available to the general public, app developers are looking to get in on the ground floor and start developing for the platform early on. Naturally, several of those apps will seek to provide an Instagram-like service for Glass users, and the first to jump on this bandwagon is an app called Glassagram.
About a month ago, we shared the news that the George Eastman House had become the first photo museum to join the Google Art Project -- essentially making their archive of over 400,000 photos and negatives available for your browsing pleasure online.
With the prevalence of smartphones and the massive photo community that is Instagram, it's no surprise that news outlets and journalists are more and more frequently turning to the service to source photos for major events. Unfortunately, Instagram's search functionality is almost non-existent. That's where the new open-source search tool QIS comes into play.
Adobe caused quite an outcry from the photography community yesterday after announcing that its future software offerings will only be available through subscription plans to its Creative Cloud service. The main gripe was that the $50/month cost for all the programs in the CC suite--or $20/month for just Photoshop--didn't make financial sense for independent photographers and smaller photo studios.
You know that moment when you agree to do a favor for a friend, and it turns into something a bit... well... more? This past weekend I ended up taking headshots of 80 people during six non-stop hours of shooting. Here is the story of what happened, things I learned from it, and some random thoughts on the experience.
David Scharf is a basement pioneer in the art of making some of the world's smallest things appear huge.
If you've ever been in a bad car accident, the images Danish photographer Nicolai Howalt's Car Crash Studies may bring back bad memories. The project is a photographic study of cars that have been involved in severe (and possibly fatal) accidents.
After reading the great reviews of the Fuji X100S, I decided to take the leap and buy one. I’ve been getting more interested in street photography lately, and this camera seemed like a good fit. Plus, it's supposed to sync at all shutter speeds, which is great for flash photography outside in bright sun. David Hobby and Zack Arias both have nice in-depth reviews.
David Hobby over at Strobist uncovered an intriguing new type of parabolic umbrella by B2Pro Lighting last week that has some people intrigued, even as many others are calling BS. The umbrella sports a patent pending pattern of RGB photo sites that, according to B2Pro, will "bring lighting for digital photography and motion picture into the 21st century."
In addition to the Photoshop CC and Camera RAW announcements, the Adobe XD team also debuted something entirely different at the MAX conference: the company's first shot at hardware. Coming in the form of a pressure-sensitive stylus and digital ruler, the two accessories are meant to take the creative brainstorming experience and shift it from pen-and-paper to pen-and-tablet.
Just as RAW photo files contain all the information you need to put together a photograph, DNA contains all the information needed for a human being. Information artist and PhD student Heather Dewey-Hagborg has a fascinating portrait project that explores this idea.
National Geographic photographers snapped over 1 million images over the course of 2009. Only about 1000 of those photos were selected and published by the famous yellow-bordered journal.
At its Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles today, Adobe announced Photoshop CC, the next version of its flagship photo editing software. Unlike version that came before it, Photoshop CC will only be offered through Adobe's Creative Cloud subscription plan.
Lisle, Illinois-based photographer Peter Hoffman's "Fox River Derivatives" project is a series of abstract photos that question mankind's relationship with natural resources. The photographs have a strange purple bubbles and colorations across the surface that are the result of an interesting technique: these images are what you get when you burn your negatives.
The video above is a creative stop-motion video that uses water drops as the "lens" through which the animation is seen. It was created without any computer-generated trickery: 2,000 individual photographs of different water drops were shot and combined to create the video.
Originally produced for the US military in WW2, the Kodak Aero Ektar 178mm f/2.5 is a large-format monster of a lens. Mounted in bombers, facing down at Europe, this lens was sold to the US government for the price of a family car. It found its way into military surplus after the war, and was widely used in journalism and by professional photographers.
Frenchman Joe Bunni is not a photographer; first and foremost he's a dentist. Once you learn that, the fact that he captured the above photo and won the Natural History Museum's Wildlife Photographer of the Year award in 2011 is even more incredible. The photo shows a polar bear swimming not more than a few feet away from Bunni, and if you think the photo is amazing, wait until you hear the story behind it.
Here's the story of how I was in the right-place at the right-time for a special series of eagle photographs.
Eposure, a UK company that brings commercial photographers together with the companies that need them, recently released the results of a survey they conducted about the day rates of UK and U.S.-based photographers. And even though some might expect that the vast majority are charging a pittance in our photography-saturated world, the outlook isn't as grim as you may think.
All of his life, French photographer Pierre Carreau has been fascinated by the shape and movement of waves. It makes sense, then, that much of his photography revolves around the project "AquaViva" -- a series that captures the majesty of waves in action.
The Civil War wasn't the first war to be photographed, but the leaps and bounds that photographic technology had taken leading up to the war in 1861 enabled American photographers at the time to come out en masse when news of the attack on Fort Sumter came.
Artist Todd McLellan gets to live out many a destructive child's dream: he takes gadgets apart with no intention of putting them back together -- occasionally, he even throws the pieces in the air. The project, which was initially called the Disassembled series, has officially been dubbed Things Come Apart, and it's a photo series made up of both arranged and "falling apart" images of common objects that McLellan has broken down to their most basic components.
At a public lecture in Pittsburgh in 1934, four hundred lucky students were privy to a lecture by Albert Einstein, in which the great man mathematically derived his famous mass-energy equivalence equation: E=mc2. What you see above is a photo from that lecture, and what is thought to be the only surviving photo that shows Einstein working on that derivation.
Last week we shared some photos from an awareness campaign by the Mexican organization Save the Children, which showed the "cycle of abuse" through powerful, hard-to-stomach photos of children growing into future abusers. The ads were meant to illustrate the statistic that 70 percent of abused children turn into abusing adults.
Late last month, NASA launched Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket into space, and with it a trio of satellites powered, get this, by Android Phones. Part of the NASA project "PhoneSats," the three satellites spent a total of 5 days in space, after which they burned up in the atmosphere as planned -- but not before they had a chance to beam down some sub-par smartphone snaps of Earth as seen from Orbit.
Located in the city of Toronto, ALPHA Alternative School is one of Canada's oldest free schools. For the school's 40th anniversary last year, photographer Michael Barker worked on a project titled Alpha Alternative School 1972/2012. It's a series of diptychs with portraits of students shot back in the 1970s/1980s placed next to new portraits of the students captured around four decades later.
Icebreakers are the bouncers of the ship world. With specially designed thicker hulls shaped to direct ice to the sides and under the ship, they ram into massive ice pockets and drive their way through, sometimes climbing up onto the ice to crack it under the ship's weight.
For 20 years, 52-year-old photojournalist Mark Hirsch drove by the lonely old Bur Oak two miles from his home in southwest Wisconsin without thinking to take its picture even once. Then, one evening, he took a particularly beautiful photo of the tree at sunset using his newly purchased iPhone.
A while back, Atlanta-based editorial and commercial photographer Zack Arias decided to start a Q&A blog that would, in his words, "add signal to an industry filled with far too much noise." On this Tumblr he's answered 1,000+ questions ranging from the relevant to the rude about the art and business of photography.
The Peregrine Falcon, also known as the Duck Hawk (a fact you won't soon forget after watching this video), is a spectacular bird of prey. Claiming the title of fastest member of the animal kingdom, a Peregrine Falcon can reach speeds in excess of 200mph during its characteristic high-speed hunting dives -- take that cheetah.
