While walking through Tel Aviv's Jaffa neighborhood some years back, New York-based travel photographer Sivan Askayo was drawn to the vibrant articles of clothing hovering overhead. She photographed this laundry from below, liked what she saw, and began a photo project that has since taken her around the world.
VSCO is expanding its popular line of film emulation presets/profiles yet again. The company has announced Film 04, a new pack of emulators that help photographers recreate the look of various slide film stocks in digital photos. It's "the most authentic film emulation available," the company says.
Yahoo is getting serious about making sure Flickr thrives: the company has hired former Google executive Bernardo Hernández to lead the popular photo sharing service. Hernández announced the news today through his Twitter account.
If you thought the Zeiss f/0.7 lenses we shared yesterday were impressive, check out this crazy piece of glass: it's the Carl Zeiss Super-Q-Gigantar 40mm f/0.33. It's what some people call the fastest camera lens ever made.
Is that claim true? Well, yes and no... but mostly no.
Last month, we featured the life and work of Arto Saari, a legendary professional skateboarder who has turned into quite the skateboarding photographer in recent years.
Fabiano Rodrigues is very similar. The Sao Paulo, Brazil-based skateboarder and photographer has a fantastic eye for composition -- particularly when it comes to shooting self portraits.
In early July 2013, Sports Illustrated writer Richard Deitsch posed an interesting question to his tens of thousands of followers on Twitter: "How many of you have a photograph of the single best moment of your life?" The photographs that people shared in response were powerful and emotional.
Here's a neat photo idea: capture a city's skyline in the reflection on the front of a camera lens. Photographer Christopher Anderson recently shot this picture of the Minneapolis, Minnesota skyline -- a picture that landed on the front page of Reddit.
Want to shoot portrait-orientation photographs while holding your camera in landscape mode? Sony appears to be tinkering with a way to do just that.
Firework photographs are generally pretty uniform in their appearance: a dark sky, glowing sparks that are either points or lines depending on exposure time, and perhaps some views of the surrounding area. When photographing a major fireworks show last week, photographer Rob Shaw of BackFromLeave Photo wanted to do something different. He played around with various camera techniques and captured a set of firework images that is quite different than most of the images you'll see online.
Want to capture images of a scene that's lit purely with candlelight? You can now rent a pair of Zeiss f/0.7 lenses -- two of the largest aperture lenses ever seen in the history of photography.
This weird looking contraption is a homemade adapter that lets you shoot digital photographs with a smartphone through the viewfinder of an SLR. Photographer Michael Amos built it a couple of years ago using a camera eyepiece and a smartphone case.
In October 2012, astrophotographer Raymond Collecutt of Whangarei, New Zealand shared a new (and risky) idea he was playing around with: converting a standard DSLR into a sharper monochrome camera for photographing space.
Ever since photography was invented in the 1800s, there have been people willing to risk life and limb to bring images to the public eye. Among the craziest examples are prisoners of war during World War II -- people who built makeshift cameras out of smuggled parts in order to capture what life was like inside their prison camps.
What would we think the surface of Mars looks like if NASA had equipped the Curiosity rover with a smartphone loaded with Instagram or Hipstamatic instead of the advanced scientific cameras they chose? Greek photo enthusiast Nikos Kantarakias decided to find out.
Want to own a piece of photographic and space exploration history? An original Hasselblad 500EL Electric Camera kit has appeared on eBay. This is the camera NASA astronauts used on the moon for its Lunar Apollo Missions.
For his project titled "Tree," South Korean photographer Myoung Ho Lee found solitary trees out in nature and then erected giant white canvas backdrops behind them. He then created photos showing the trees surrounded by artificial boxes in their natural surroundings.
Update: This giveaway is now over. The randomly selected winners have been announced at the end of this post.
Yesterday we picked the winner of our latest 50mm f/1.4 lens giveaway, and this week we're giving away another neat piece of gear. This week, five (5) lucky readers will each win a free Lomography Konstruktor, the world's first build-it-yourself 35mm SLR kit (here's our original article about it). Each kit will also come with six (6) rolls of Lomography Color Negative film.
A proper digital back for medium format cameras can easily set you back thousands of dollars, but a new company called Badass Cameras is hoping to disrupt that. The company says it's building an adapter that will let you use your smartphone as an uber-cheap digital back for your camera.
Framing passersby with light and shadows is a pretty common technique in street photography, and one that we've featured a number of times in the past.
Singapore-based photographer Weilun Chong frames his subjects with something that's a little more concrete -- literally. His "Please Mind the Gap" project features portraits of subway commuters framed in the gaps they're told to mind.
My first African experience began at age 17 when I won the 1974 Kodak/Scholastic National Photography scholarship which included a studies program to Kenya and Tanzania. For a teenager, it was an eye-opening revelation. Back then I was working an illegible night shift cooking burgers at Jack in the Box while going to high school. It was a tough gig but it made a new Nikon lens possible every couple of weeks.
Annoyed at people who have a habit of snapping a quick food photo before every meal? There might be a scientific explanation for why some of them do so: scientists have found that that rituals such as snapping a quick food pic may actually help make eating more pleasurable for the eater.
Here's a helpful safety tip for shooting action shots in or around water: if you're using your camera in a rough-and-tumbly environment, do your best to keep it at a safe distance from your face. If you don't, your face could end up looking like the one above.
Panasonic has officially announced the GX7, a sleek new high-end mirrorless camera with some features that are being introduced for the first time in a Panasonic mirrorless camera, including in-body image stabilization and a tiltable electronic viewfinder.
The rumor was true -- kinda. Sigma today announced a new Mount Conversion Service for its Global Vision line of lenses that will allow photographers to convert their lens lineups to different mounts if they ever decide to change camera brands (e.g. Canon to Nikon and vice versa).
Unlike what was previously rumored, it's not a free service: the conversion will cost you a pretty penny -- just not as much as you'd pay to buy a new copy of the lens.
Norwegian photographer Arvid Strømnes learned a lesson earlier this week about why you shouldn't get too close to wild animals while trying to capture them on camera.
Every year, in the third week of July, over 100 silver bearded men descend upon the city of Key West, Florida. Their goal: to be declared the man who most resembles American writer Ernest Hemingway. The contest they participate in is put on by the Hemingway Look-Alike Society, and is the largest sanctioned look-alike competition in the world.
Photographer Henry Hargreaves visited the festivities this year and created a new photo project titled "Becoming Hemingawy." It's a series of portraits showing some of this year's contestants.
Remember that fake anime fighting photo fad that emerged from Japan earlier this year? Vancouver-based photographer …
When you hear the words "retro camera," you probably think of some kind of silver or black camera crafted decades ago out of solid chunks of metal. But what would a retro camera look like if you kept the design the same but replaced its metal body with wood?
French photo enthusiast Cesar Sebouhian and his father recently decided to find out, and created the gorgeous Nikon "F2D" seen above.
Sigma has been on a tear as of late. Since late 2012, the company has put out a highly regarded 35mm f/1.4 lens, a novel USB dock that lets you calibrate lenses at home, and a revolutionary 18-35mm lens with a constant f/1.8 aperture (shown above).
It appears Sigma is only just getting warmed up: new rumors suggest that Sigma may be building a 24-70mm zoom lens for full frame cameras that boasts a constant f/2.0 aperture.
This is awesome: someone over at the Chicago Tribune made a hilarious mistake this morning, accidentally publishing a placeholder …
Want to see some action-packed photographs on a really small scale? Look no further than photographer Alex Wild's collection of photos titled "Ants Fighting." It's a series of macro photographs showing various species of ants engaged in intense battles to the death.
You know those shooting gallery games you find at carnivals? The kind in which you try to win prizes …
Pay a visit to photographer Zack Seckler's website, and you'll find "Humor" as a category next to "Lifestyle," "Landscape," and "Personal." The images in the collection are like miniature jokes in the form of pixels: each one is a strange and quirky scene manufactured by Seckler to make you think and smile.
Want to shoot photos using your smartphone from the hip, but don't want buy a MirrorCase? When photography enthusiast Angel Gonzales found himself in that situation recently, he decided to go the DIY route and make his own mirror case.
CyanogenMod, the popular Android firmware replacement installed on over 5.6 million devices, has announced a powerful new camera app to replace the stock camera app that ships with Android. It's called Focal, and is the first leg of a new development project called "Nemesis."
Ever wonder what resulting photos would look like if you developed film with various liquids found around the house? Photographer Matthew Cetta does too, and he's actually spent quite some time finding out. Cetta has been doing experiments through a project called "Photogenic Alchemy," creating toy camera photos with wild aesthetics by developing the films with all kinds of random things -- everything from lemon juice to Pepto Bismol.
If you're an active participant in the stock photography industry, you've likely heard of the big rumblings as of late. Earlier this month, bestselling microstock photographer Yuri Arcurs announced both a $1.2 million investment in Scoopshot (a crowdsourced photo app) and a new exclusivity agreement with Getty Images/iStockphoto.
If you dismissed the news the first time around, you might want to take a second look -- it may be bigger than you thought.
Disappointed in the power of your smartphone's built-in flash when shooting at night? The iblazr wants to help you. It's the world's first "fully synchronized" external flash unit for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets.
Want to see some beautiful street photographs that make use of light and shadows? Look no further than the project "Man on Earth" by London-based photographer Rupert Vandervell. Each image in the series shows a single person's figure framed by the shadows and features of a big city.
Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner has been randomly selected and is announced below.
The dust is still settling from the DSLR giveaway we did last week, but we're giving away another juicy piece of gear this week. This time you can win your choice of a Canon 50mm f/1.4 or a Nikon 50mm f/1.4, worth $399 and $469 (respectively).
Want to shoot with the oldest looking lens on the block? Lomography today announced that it has brought an old school lens back from the dead. It's the Petzval lens, originally introduced by optic inventor Joseph Petzval back in 1840. Lomo has reinvented and reengineered the lens for modern day Canon and Nikon SLR cameras.
Chinese photographer Liu Bolin has made a name for himself by creating photos showing his body blended into various environments with the help of carefully applied paint. Italian artist Johannes Stötter has been creating similar works, except he's more focused on the painting than the photos.
Lenstag generated quite a bit of buzz last week by introducing a service that aims to crack down on gear theft by making it easier to track and report stolen gear. The service is now getting a new feature that will further add trust to the used gear buying process: disposable verification links for individual items.
Do you always laugh and squirm when you look back at official school pictures from "awkward years"? You're not alone -- take a peek at the Awkward Years Project and you'll see what we mean. The project was started by a Utah-based graphic designer and photography enthusiast named Merilee, who's collecting then-and-now portraits to show people who have blossomed since their awkward teen days.
Are you the type of person who enjoys using things built using your own two hands? 20-year-old Croatian tinkerer CroBuilder is like that too. He recently spent 10 hours in his workshop building a camera tripod from scratch.
Some unlucky fellow was minding his own business in Disney World recently when he happened to accidentally walk in front of a couple as the man was proposing to his girlfriend. The moment wasn't just captured on camera (shown above) -- it has spawned a quirky new Internet photo meme.
Photographer Dave Hill has launched the world's first Instagram TV show, a science fiction series called Desert Friends. Created as "a side project with some friends," the show comes in short 15 second episodes and is about three friends who "are warped to a distant galaxy and need to get home."
The photography world is abuzz with news that Canon may be planning to launch a high-end DSLR with a beastly 75-megapixel sensor. If you're drooling over the idea of shooting photos that can span billboards, you might want to hold your horses: the sensor may not be what you think it is.
Creative, imagination-filled wedding photographs are starting to become quite trendy -- at least online. Earlier this year, we shared viral photos of bridal parties running for their lives from a T-Rex and from Star Wars Imperial Walkers.
Chicago-based wedding photographer Steven Kowalski also joined in on the fun, creating the epic Star Wars-themed photograph above at a wedding earlier this month.
If you're afraid of swimming in the ocean due to a fear of the unknown below you, you might want to skip over the post. A group of divers off the coast of California got a scare recently when they had an extremely close call with large humpback whales. They almost found themselves in the mouths of the feeding whales, and multiple cameras were there to capture what happened (note: the video above contains some strong language).