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Sometimes it’s easy for photographers to take for granted our skill set. It becomes natural to forget, from time to time, all of the elements rattling around in the synapses of our visual cortexes in the few tenths of a second it takes to put in motion the mechanics that make a picture. Like any professional of a trade, eventually you get to that point where you can begin to make it ‘look easy’, like anyone can do this. And with digital cameras and software readily available everyone sure …

If you're constantly on the prowl for new sources of photographic inspiration, there's a pretty sweet deal going on over at National Geographic. The magazine has long been praised for its focus on delivering high quality photography showing all kinds of subjects in all kinds of locations around the world, and now it's offering its complete collection of issues between 1888 and 2011 for just $25. The set of 7 DVDs normally costs $80, so it's a savings of almost 70%.

Drive across the west end of the Burnside Bridge in Portland, Oregon, and you're bound to see the iconic Portland, Oregon sign, commonly known as the "White Stag sign." It's an oft-photographed sign that was named a historic landmark back in 1977.

If you think about it, any digital photograph is simply a finite collection of pixels, with each one showing a specific color. There are also only a finite number of colors each pixel on a display can be. Thus, there are only a finite number of photographs that could possibly exist. An unfathomably large number, but finite nonetheless.

Mobile photo sharing has become one of the big photography trends over the past couple of years, and smartphone makers are now working hard to win the affections of smartphoneographer by developing better cameras and sleeker features. Two of the big players in the game, HTC and Nokia, are both generating some buzz this week through reports that they have some big photo-related plans in store for their upcoming phones.

As we wrote this past Monday, Chrysler scored a major advertising win during the Super Bowl with the commercial above, titled "Farmer." It's a simple photo slideshow with Paul Harvey's "So God Made a Farmer" speech playing in the background.

Director Cesar Kuriyama received a good bit of attention on the Internet last year for capturing 1 second of video on each day of his 30th year of life, and then turning the snippets into a beautiful recap of his year. The video premiered during a TED talk Kuriyama gave in March. That talk has just been published by TED, and can be seen above.

Alexander Semenov is an underwater photographer who doubles as a zoologist specializing in invertebrate animals. He recently decided to use macro photography to explore something you've probably never seen before in photographs: the rough surfaces of different species of starfish.

Behold, the coolest photography-related toy we've seen so far this year: War Journalist: Battlefield Hero. It's a 1/6-scale Toymaster-brand action figure that lets kids play make believe with their very own conflict photographer!

Back on September 17, 2012, Leica held a launch party in Germany to unveil its new Leica M full-frame digital rangefinder, which does away with model numbers in favor of simply using the model name. People are referring to the camera as Leica M (Type 240).

Astronaut photographers on the International Space Station have been beaming quite a few photographs of Earth as of late, but have you ever wondered how they manage capture relatively sharp photographs of Earth's cities at night? …

Director and photographer Jess Dunlap spent all of 2012 creating the 4-minute time-lapse video above, titled Monolation. It comprises over 17,000 gorgeous landscape photographs, and features beautiful camera movements that make it feel as though you're looking around and watching the world pass in fast motion.

Looking to jump into a particular genre of professional photography? Instead of shelling out money and time for lessons, workshops, and/or internships, check out the handbook, "How to be a Photographer in Four Lessons." Written by Brussels-based photographer Thomas Vanden Driessche, it offers the basic gist of how you can instantly become great in contemporary photography, war photography, conceptual photography, and more!

Paparazzi photography is a topic that has come up quite a bit in recent days, with most of the stories putting the camera wielders in a pretty bad light. Joerg Colberg over on Conscientious has a thought provoking piece on how photographers' rights seem to be trumping basic human decency -- with the blessing of our culture.

When Milan-based engineer and photographer Andrea Biffi needed a constant source of power for his Canon 40D in order to shoot time-lapse photos over many hours, he decided to save some money by going the DIY route. Biffi turned a defunct lithium DSLR battery into a power supply unit that can be used with everything from a wall outlet to a car battery.

If you're maintaining any of kind bucket list of things you'd like to experience before you die, you might want to think about putting "a massive murmuration of starlings" on that list. That's what Paris-based director and photographer Neels Castillon was treated to recently, and his video documenting the encounter has been making waves on the web.

At the CP+ show in Japan, Ricoh is showing off a new camera prototype its developing that can capture full 360-degree immersive photographs with a singel push of the shutter. The omnidirectional camera looks like a cross between an electric toothbrush and a hammerhead shark. Lift it up into the air, press a button, and it will capture an image that shows every direction around you.

Remember Richard, the Fuji Rumors reader who turned his Fujifilm X-E1 into a Leica M9 lookalike by slapping on four small decals? He didn't stop there: once his camera was Leica-fied, he proceeded to give it a "Sniper configuration."

For the first two years of its young life, photo sharing darling Instagram focused primarily on delivering its service to smartphone users. Although demand would have likely been great, the company's founders decided to hold off on a browser-based component in order to become one of the pioneers of mobile photo sharing.

"Deadly sniper shot through the lens." That's the title of a photoblog entry published over on Reuters last week by staff photographer Goran Tomasevic, who's covering the deadly conflict in Syria. The photo above was accompanied by the text, "A tank fired a couple of shells onto the top of the building and rubble fell down around us."

Denver, Colorado-based action, adventure, and lifestyle photographer Dave Lehl recently wanted to do something a little different with skateboarding photography, and ended up settling on the idea of using fireworks to add extra action to the shots.

Panasonic is claiming a major breakthrough in the world of camera sensors, saying that it has doubled the color sensitivity with a new technology called 'Micro Color Splitters.'

Last year, New York-based guerrilla historian, urban explorer and photographer Steve Duncan gave an 18-minute talk (seen in the video above) to the audience at TEDxPhoenixville. Duncan spoke on his motivations for going deep into the underground infrastructure in major cities around the world, peeling back layers of a city to see and document things that are hidden to people above ground.

Tired of capturing the world as 2D photographs? What if you could just as easily capture things as 3D models? That's what Lynx A does. It's the world's first point-and-shoot 3D camera that produces 3D models with the push of a button. The company claims that "you can use a point-and-shoot Nikon, you'll find the Lynx A even easier to use."

For her project Mirrors, photographer Traci Griffin explores the concept of symmetry by photographing trees in various locations, and then mirroring the sweeping branches while omitting most of the trunks.

Lens caps are a great solution for protecting the front element of lenses when they're not in use, but can be misplaced when you take them off. On the other hand, screw-on lens filters are a great solution for protecting the lens' glass as well, but they introduce an additional layer of glass between your camera and the world. Is there a middle ground? …

Freelensing. It’s been around for a while. It’s essentially the “poor man’s tilt shift.” All the technique requires is disconnecting a lens from the camera body and floating it around in front of your sensor to shift the focal plane in weird directions. It takes practice to get accurate with it, but overall the technique is pretty straightforward.

On January 28, Nikon announced the 80th anniversary of the launch of the Nikkor lens brand, and that the total number of lenses manufactured since the beginning has exceeded 75 million units. The lineup now includes more than 80 types of lenses.

Reno, Nevada-based photographer Art Domagala was recently involved with an interesting photo shoot in which size and scale played a bit part. He was tasked with photographing bridge inspectors working on the Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge, officially known as the Mike O'Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge.

In late 2012, Photoshelter surveyed around 5,000 photographers to find out the industries outlook on 2013. Some of the findings were pretty interesting.

Buzz around the upcoming Canon 200-400mm f/4L IS 1.4x is heating up. Australian photographer Joshua Holko recently had the opportunity to play around with a pre-production version of the lens, and released this 7-minute video review that offers a look at the lens in action.

Wondering about the camera gear announcements Canon has planned for the rest of this year? Rumors floating around on the Internet could provide a glimpse into the company's roadmap.

One of standout commercials during the Super Bowl yesterday was the above ad by Chrysler promoting its Ram line of trucks. The 2-minute ad pays tribute to farmers across the nation, and is composed entirely of photographs showing various facets of the farming industry.

For his project titled The Sleep of the Beloved, German photographer Paul Schneggenburger set out to capture what a sleeping couple looks like over the course of a night in single images.

If you're the type of photographer who's wary of the rights you sign away when using most photo-sharing services, you might want to avoid having your photos handled by Walmart Canada's Photo Centre. Reddit user Plerophoria noticed the following section in the service's Terms and Conditions: …

Jay Maisel is a photographic legend who is known primarily for two things: his amazing photography, including the shot on the cover of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue; and the lower Manhattan mansion he bought in 1966 for only $102K (a purchase that has been called "the greatest real estate coup of all time").

It looks like the Jessops name will be sticking around, even if the company's 187 physical locations won't. After going into administration (read: bankruptcy) a few weeks ago, and announcing that all stores would be closing, we thought that was it for the once-great UK photography chain.

Earlier today, we shared a time-lapse put together by an amateur storm chaser that captured 10 tornadoes touching down in Minnesota over the course of one chase. But time-lapses come in a few different varieties.

Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt has become one of the hottest stars in Hollywood in recent years, appearing in a number of major blockbuster movies (e.g. Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Looper, Lincoln). Back in 2006, as he was still a smaller name in the industry, Gordon-Levitt had a run-in with a couple of paparazzi photographers.

Back in October, Google took several Trekker Street View backpacks into the Grand Canyon to capture the majestic beauty of the national park for those who can't actually go there. Several months have gone by since that point, but finally, the cubicle-bound and financially unable among us can now visit the Grand Canyon from the comfort of our own desktops.

Two days ago marked the 10th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, in which 7 astronauts lost their lives during reentry as the rest of us watched horror-struck from the ground. The following day, newspapers the world over were announcing the tragic news, all of them using the same photo taken, not by a prolific AP photographer, but a cardiologist and his 6.3MP Canon D60.

Tornadoes can be simultaneously awe-inspiring and terrifying (as an Alabama resident for the past 6 years, I can attest to that), and this time-lapse captures ten of them in action, including a mile-wide EF4. Fortunately, the majority of the tornadoes caught on camera during this chase missed (sometimes barely) major towns and cities. If you wanna get right into the action, the good stuff starts around 3:45.

The colors you see in these photographs are real -- they're not simply landscapes modified using Photoshop. They're photographs of tulip fields captured by French photographer Normann Szkop from the air.

Want a cheap and simple way to project photographs from your smartphone onto your wall? Photojojo writes that you can actually make a makeshift projector with a few things you might already have lying around. Total cost: $1.

Photographer Philippe Echaroux tells us that he recently completed a photo shoot for a series he calls, "The Pigment Party". Echaroux's idea was to capture studio-lit portraits of models posing serenely amidst explosions of colorful powders. After covering the studio with tarps, hanging up a black backdrop, and setting up his lighting, Echaroux had his assistants toss pigment powders of various colors onto the model's face.

To fill the time during slow winter months, photographer Jonathan Andrew decided to follow through on an idea that he had a few years back: he started photographing old WWII bunkers. Based out of Amsterdam, he already had several to work with close-by, but as the project has received more and more media attention, he's taken the time to travel all over Europe, adding more beautiful, haunting bunker images to his portfolio.

Getting dust out of your camera body, and especially off of your sensor, can be a tricky process. It's not that there aren't plenty of options out there, it's that most of them put your sensor and other sensitive pieces of your camera at risk. Even ye olde air blower isn't entirely safe. The FireFly digital sensor cleaner, however, seems to be.

Eight years ago, it was discovered that some of the earliest daguerreotypes ever taken were fading away before our very eyes. Given the historical significance of these photographs, watching them deteriorate over time was unacceptable. So, in an attempt to save them, George Eastman House has enlisted the help of the University of Rochester.

You've got plenty of options when selecting a wireless memory card, but one thing is fairly universal across the board: they drain way more battery than their non-wireless brethren. Some cameras have menu options that will allow you to control your Wi-Fi cards, but if yours doesn't, Chinese software company LZeal has you covered.

If you're looking for a bizarre photo concept to try out, and live in a cold snowy environment, look no further than Yorkshire, UK-based photographer Oliver Turpin's Snow Portraits project. Turpin shot a series of self-portraits, but instead of photographing his real face, he captured photos of imprints of his face in snow.