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

Guitarist Andy Summers Photographed the Rise and Fall of The Police

English rock band The Police sold over 75 million records over the course of their decade-long career, making them one of the best selling music artists of all time. In addition to being the band's lead guitarist, Andy Summers was also a passionate photographer who captured behind-the-scenes photos of the band at the peak of their popularity.

Those photographs will be featured in a new documentary later this year, titled Can't Stand Losing You: Surviving the Police.

Mapillary is Building a Crowdsourced Street View with User Submitted Photos

Google's well-known Street View service is one of several monumental efforts to document the world's travel routes through ground-level photos. These projects generally use fancy camera rigs on cars, backpacks, and even camels to capture their images.

Mapillary is a startup that's trying to do things a little differently. Instead of taking the grunt work of photo-taking upon itself, the service is building a crowdsourced Street View competitor using photos submitted by users.

Cosmos: Abstract Images Created by Destroying Star Photo Film Slides with Bacteria

Without context, the images in Cosmos by photographer Marcus DeSieno may look like colorful and abstract images created with some mysterious method. Read the description and captions, and you may experience a sense of revulsion.

Each of the photos was created by introducing photographic film to bacteria collected from various places, both unusual and ubiquitous. The microscopic organisms eat away at the film, creating a series of abstract artworks.

These Are Three of the Earliest Photos Ever Made

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce is a French photography pioneer who is credited with capturing the oldest surviving photograph of a real world scene, a print made back in 1825. In addition to that famous image, titled View from the Window at Le Gras, Niépce also created a number of other photos that are recognized as being some of the earliest photos ever made.

Stress Testing SD Cards to See How Their Real Write Speeds Stack Up

The popular YouTube tech channel LinusTechTips recently did an SD card showdown to see how the actual performance of the cards compares to what's written on the labels. One of the things they did was a Canon 6D test, the results of which can be seen in the graphic above (here's a larger version).

Crushed Dreams and Moldy Memories: The Messages on Homes After Hurricane Katrina

Photographer Craig Boudreaux was personally impacted by the devastation left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. Among the homes that were destroyed by rains, winds, and flooding were his grandmother's home, his friends' homes, and even his childhood home.

A year after Katrina struck, and after the flood waters had long gone, Boudreaux revisited some ravaged areas in New Orleans, capturing the aftermath of a storm that changed so many lives.

This is How Powerful a 65x Optical Zoom Is

It's not just the megapixel war that's raging in the world of digital cameras. One of the big competitions going on is the battle of powerful zoom lenses on compact cameras, and the zoom capabilities on the latest "superzoom" cameras are pretty ridiculous. The video above shows what the new Canon SX60 can do with its 65x optical zoom (and 4x digital zoom tacked on at the end).

An Algorithm That Can Distinguish Beautiful Portraits From Ugly Ones

Could machines be trained to tell the difference between a beautiful portrait photo and a not-so-pleasing one? Beauty is pretty subjective, but scientists are trying to boil down the common properties of beautiful digital portrait photos so that a computer can be trained to spot them. Along the way, they're revealing interesting new things about what people look for in portraits.

Top Instagram Users Making Thousands Per Photo by Promoting Products

It pays to have a lot of Instagram followers -- literally. Top users on the photo-sharing service these days are finding that their simple picture snapping can be turned into real dollars, and a lot of them at that. The numbers may astound you: some users are receiving thousands of dollars in exchanging for sharing a single photo that promotes a company's products.

We’re Giving Away a $1,000 Gift Card to B&H Photo Video

Update: This giveaway is now over. Please see the update at the end of this post.

We love our readers. As a thank you for being a faithful follower of this blog, we're doing another big giveaway. One lucky reader will receive a $1,000 gift card to B&H Photo Video for anything in the store your heart desires.

Firefighter Photographer Jake Niece Captures Beauty While Battling Destruction

Jake Niece is a "jake of all trades" who uses both mind and muscle in his multiple lines of work. In the summer he works as a wildland firefighter in Colorado, and in the winter he works on snowmaking crews. In both seasons he carries a camera and creates beautiful images through his passion for photography, which he has since turned into a third profession.

Divoom Bluetune-Bean is a Bluetooth Speaker That Doubles as a Wireless Shutter Release

As smartphone photography and selfie culture become more ubiquitous, we're starting to see new products that aim to make snapping smartphone shots simpler. First came the selfie stick, and now there's a new product called the Divoom Bluetune-Bean. It's an ultra-portable Bluetooth speaker that has a feature that sets it apart: on the side is a shutter button for triggering the camera on your phone.

This Slow-Mo Clip Shows What It’s Like to Photograph Planes Landing at Maho Beach

A video posted by Paul Luning (@pluning) on Feb 14, 2015 at 9:45am PST

Maho Beach in the Caribbean islands is famous for being a place where you can stand directly under airliners as they're landing at Princess Juliana International Airport. With giant airplanes roaring so close overhead, the beach is a popular photo spot that results in some unbelievable images.

Photographer and travel blogger Paul Luning recently paid a visit to the beach, capturing the eye-opening video above that shows just how close the planes come to the people on the beach below.

A Selfie a Day Keeps the Doctor Away: Creative Studio Self-Portraits by Mike Mellia

Mike Mellia is an advertising and fine art photographer based in New York City. Over the past year, he has been working on a project titled "A Selfie a Day Keeps the Doctor Away." It's an ongoing series of self-portraits captured in a studio and shared through Instagram.

Mellia poses as a wide range of fictional personas and includes clever and humorous captions to go along with each image. He says the photo above shows "that one time an affluent divorcee invited me to clean her pool."

This Camera Will Capture a 1,000-Year Exposure That Ends in 3015 for History’s Slowest Photo

Jonathon Keats wants to set a world record in photography that he won't live long enough to see. Nor will his children, or his children's children for many generations. It's a project that won't complete for a millennium.

Keats plans to capture the world's slowest photograph, a 1,000-year-long exposure of the city of Tempe, Arizona, that will be finished in the Spring of 3015.

This Museum is Designed for Fun 3D Illusion Photos Featuring Visitors

While major art museums around the world are issuing bans on selfie sticks, there's one unusual museum in the Philippines that's continuing to encourage visitors to capture silly portraits with paintings. In fact, that's what the museum is all about.

Called Art in Island, the museum is full of creative paintings that are designed to act as 3D illusion photo backdrops for guests.

KidPost Helps Parents Send Out Daily Digests of Kid Photos with a Simple Hashtag

Although things like RSS feeds and social networks have become primary channels for broadcasting and consuming content these days, some people still enjoy good old fashioned email newsletters. If that describes people in your life whom you'd like to share your latest kid photos with, KidPost is a service that wants to help.

It's an easy way to send out daily newsletters containing the latest photos of your kids without the hassle of maintaining the newsletter itself. All you need to do is share through social networks and include a simple hashtag.

These Giant Photostrips are Super-Sized Photobooth-style Prints for Your Wall

If you want photobooth-style prints of your pics, one way to get them is through Social Print Studio's Photostrips printing service. If you want to super-size your order, there's now an option for that too. The company has announced a new product called Giant Photostrips. It allows you to turn your photos into giant photobooth-style strips.

World Press Photo Reopens Investigation After New Accusation Emerges

Update: World Press Photo has decided to strip Troilo of his 1st place award.

Things are getting messier and messier for World Press Photo. After investigating a 1st prize winner due to accusations of unethical staging, the prestigious contest defended the photographer this week and stood by its award decision (much to the dismay of many in the photojournalism industry).

There's a new twist in the story, though: a new accusation is now being made against the photographer, causing WPP to reopen its investigation.

A Getty Images Photo and an HP Laptop Wallpaper

If you sell your photography as stock shots with royalty free licenses through services such as Getty Images, you need to be okay with buyers using the images in ways that seem disproportionate to the meager price they paid. That's a lesson Turkish photographer Murat Koc learned this past week after discovering his photo used as a wallpaper on a newly launched laptop.

Photographs of the Modern and Minimalist Stuttgart City Library in Germany

This photograph may look like some kind of computer-generated artist rendering of a futuristic space, but it's actually a high-key architectural photograph of the beautiful public library of the city of Stuttgart, Germany. Called the Stadtbibliothek Stuttgart, the library's new building features a simple cube-like design and a minimalist white interior, and it opened its doors in 2011.

Photographer Charles Peterson Captured the Birth of Grunge Music in Seattle

Charles Peterson is known for being one of the primary photographers on the forefront of the grunge music scene when it emerged from the Seattle underground during the 80s and 90s. He was able to capture images showing the movement from its inception through the days of bands such as Nirvana becoming huge commercial successes in the music industry.

Photographer Proposes by Flashing the Big Question Onto His Girlfriend’s Portrait Backdrop

Three years ago, photographer Marvin Lewis and his then-girlfriend-of-5-years Amanda Marie began an annual tradition of doing a photo shoot on their anniversary. For this year's photo shoot on the couple's 8th annivesary, Lewis decided to make it extra special by asking Amanda to marry him.

The way he popped the question involves photography in a clever way: he projected the big question onto the studio backdrop using his off-camera flash, allowing Amanda to see it when she reviewed the photo on the back of the DSLR.

Nikon Expanding Into Medical Devices with $400M Acquisition of Retinal Imaging Firm

Last year Nikon announced that it had set aside $1.96 billion for mergers and acquisitions into new industries in order to diversity from the camera industry that had grown the 98-year-old company to greatness.

The Japanese company is now using a portion of that cash pile on its first major expansion purchase: a £259M (~$400M) acquisition of the Scottish retinal imaging firm Optos.