Michael Zhang

Founder, Editor

Michael is a photography enthusiast, entrepreneur, and programmer based in Northern California near San Francisco. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with two degrees in computer science.

Articles by Michael Zhang

Photographer Nick Ut Revisits the Place Where He Shot ‘Napalm Girl’

This past Monday, photojournalist Nick Ut paid a visit to the location in Vietnam where he photographed his Pulitzer Prize-winning photo titled 'Napalm Girl.' The short video above shows the visit, which was 43 years (to the day) after he pressed the shutter to create one of the most famous images of the Vietnam War.

Blacks to Close All Of Its Retail Photo Stores in Canada

Canadian photography retailer Blacks is pulling out of the brick-and-mortar store business. The company announced today that it will be closing all of its 59 stores in Canada on August 8th, 2015, citing an inability to make them profitable in the digital age.

Andre D. Wagner’s Street Photos of Life in Brooklyn

One of the most popular photographers we've featured recently is street photographer Andre D. Wagner. Originally from Omaha, Nebraska, Wagner now lives in Brooklyn, New York, and documents life and culture there through street and documentary style photography.

Leica Camera Rifle Prototype Valued at Over $350,000

One of the "most unusual" Leitz accessories is up for auction. This year's WestLicht photography auction features a New York Leica Gun Rifle Prototype, a device that lets photographers shoot images sniper rifle-style. The starting price is €150,000, and it's expected to fetch up to €350,000 (~$394,000).

POV: Photographing World Leaders at the G7 Summit

The 41st G7 summit was just held in Schloss Elmau, Germany, where a group of the world's most powerful heads of state came together to talk about economic issues. If you've ever wondered what it's like to work as a photographer in a room with presidents, prime ministers, and chancellors, we've got a first-person view for you to experience.

Apple OS X El Capitan to Improve the Performance of Adobe CC Apps

Apple just announced the next version of its OS X operating system at its Worldwide Developers Conference this morning. The successor of Yosemite will be OS X El Capitan, version 10.11. The update will be focused on user experience and performance.

Among the many new features is a big performance boost that should improve Adobe's Creative Cloud software.

There’s a New Free Browser-Based Film Emulator

Back in 2013, photographer Pat David released a large set of film emulations as open source color lookup tables. Software developer Jonas Wagner just took that data and turned it into a free online analog film emulator. It's a simple web app that lets you give any photo the look of a particular film stock.

Kate Middleton Shot Her Own Royal Baby Portraits

Did you know that quite a few members of the British royal family are passionate photographers? This past weekend, Prince William and Kate Middleton released a set of four portraits showing their two children. Rather than hire a photographer for the occasion, Kate, a photography enthusiast, shot the royal baby pictures herself.

ROL is Like the Tinder of Competitive Photo Sharing

If you like the idea of online photo sharing but dislike the idea of popular users getting all the attention, ROL is a new app you should check out. It's a competitive photo sharing service that focuses on promoting images based on their merits rather than on a photographer's follower counts.

Here’s a Bright Idea: Eco-Friendly Film Canisters

Like single serving coffee pods, film canisters aren't exactly the environment's best friend. One startup over in Italy is trying to change that. Called compagnia-imago, the company is trying to create a high-quality eco-friendly film canister that's biodegradable, compostable, an reusable.

DIY: A Raspberry Pi Photo Booth You Use with Your Own Smartphone

Design technologist Roo Williams was recently tasked with creating a better way to capture corporate employee headshots. What he came up with is a Raspberry Pi-powered mobile photo booth that's controlled entirely through the subject's smartphone through a special website. He calls it the "Pi-Booth."

Idiot Box: Portraits of Kids with Eyes Glued to a TV

In any given week, the average US child will watch more than a day's worth of TV. This subject is the focus of a new photo series by photographer Donna Stevens called Idiot Box. It's a set of portraits showing blank expressions on kids faces as they watch television in a dimly-lit room.

Firefighters Try To Shoot Down Camera Drone with Their Hoses

Angry (and possibly drunk) neighbors aren't the only ones attacking camera drones these days. Yesterday, a man named John Thompson took his drone to a structure fire in New York to capture some aerial shots of the fire company battling the blaze.

12-minutes into the flight, the firefighters on the ground suddenly began trying to shoot the drone out of the sky with water from their high-pressured fire hoses.

The Seawolf is to Water as Camera Drones Are to Air

Camera drones are all the rage today, but what if you want to take your camera down into water instead of up into the air? That's where the Seawolf comes in.

Created by the company TTRobotix, the Seawolf is a remote control submarine that's designed to carry a small camera for underwater photos and videos.

$1,350 Camera Drone Whacked Out of the Air by an Angry Neighbor

The folks over at Lucky7Drones were testing out their $1,350 DJI Phantom 3 camera drone this week when an angry neighbor walked up and whacked the drone out of the air with a shirt, breaking the 4K camera and three of the props.

Luckily for the drone operators, the whole incident was captured on camera.

The High Cost of Suing for Copyright Infringements

If you're wondering why copyright infringement is so widespread on the Web and why wealthy artists like Richard Prince can test the boundaries of copyright law without much worry, consider this: by the time photographer Daniel Morel won $1.2 million in 2013 after a 5-year copyright battle, his law firm had racked up a staggering $2.5 million in legal fees and costs -- most of which won't be paid.

Oops: An Epic Drone Shot with a Surprise Ending

Here's a funny little 30-second blooper reel drone shot by aerial photographer Daniel Peckham. While capturing some beautiful footage of the sun over the Pacific Ocean, Peckham's "epic" shot came to a surprising and abrupt end.

"The sunset was glorious, the flying was buttery smooth (probably my best aerial capture yet)... and then this happened," he says.

Leica Crafted a One-of-a-Kind Panoramic S2 for Josef Koudelka

Here's one of the perks of being a world famous photographer: having a major camera company make you a one-of-a-kind camera. When Czech street photographer Josef Koudelka made his jump from film to digital, Leica helped make his transition easier by creating a one-of-a-kind panoramic version of the S2 for him.

Relook: High-End Portrait Retouching Tools for iOS

The Finnish app development studio Sumoing has just launched Relook, a new photo-editing app for iOS that it calls the first professional-level facial retouching app.

Unlike other image editing apps out there, Relook is designed specifically for touching up faces, bringing many of the powerful tools used by pros on desktop software into the world of mobile.

Camera Instructor Offers Free and Interactive Online Photo Courses

If you're looking to learn to program, there are free interactive online courses such as Codecademy and CodeSchool you can use. Programmer and photographer Cody Meyer wanted to give the photography world a similar kind of resource, so he created Camera Instructor. It's a new web-based photography school that aims to teach photography skills for free through interactive videos and exercises.

Jules Decrauzat: The First Swiss Sports Photographer

1,250 glass negatives from between 1910 and 1925 were recently found in the archives of the Swiss photo agency Keystone. After some thorough research work, it was concluded that the photos formed an important chapter of Swiss photographic history: they were shot by photographer Jules Decrauzat, widely considered now to be the first sports photographer and first major photojournalist in the history of Switzerland.

Man Attacked by Bison After Taking Up-Close Photo with His iPad

It seems people still aren't learning to keep their distance from wild animals when shooting tourist snapshots. A man was attacked and seriously injured by a bison in Yellowstone National Park yesterday after he tried to take photos of it with his iPad from just 3 to 5 feet away.

Photos of the First Weeks of Baby Bunnies’ Lives

When photographer Ashraful Arefin's bunny had babies recently, he decided to document the growth of the new family members through a series of daily photos. Over the course of 24 days, Arefin shot 16 beautiful portraits of the siblings, named Totoro and Chihiro, starting from when they were 6 days old.

Google Working on Seeing Calories in Food Photos

Camera apps these days already have the ability to analyze your scenes before you shoot them, but what if they could analyze your food before you eat it? That's what Google researchers are working on: they're trying to teach a computer to calculate calories from ordinary snapshots of food.