Shooting the night sky can produce amazing images of endless starry skies, but it can be challenging to those used to working with plenty of light. This 15-minute beginner’s guide from Josh Katz teaches the key elements of astrophotography, and how to capture the sky even in sub-optimal conditions.
If you're a photojournalist who covers stories in dangerous places, here's something you should know: don't try to bring bulletproof vests or gas masks through airports in Thailand, as they're considered "war weapons." At least two journalists (including one photographer) have found this out the hard way over the past two years.
"The Forgotten Dream" is a new project by Hungarian photographer and Photoshop artist Flora Borsi. She found black-and-white photos of immigrants arriving in the United States in the early 1900s, colorized them, and Photoshopped the people into modern-day photos of New York City.
Last year, I was fortunate enough to earn a Nikon ambassador badge. I took this as a recognition of my work from a the institution I admire for making the best tools to meet my creative needs.
Urban Koi is an artist based in New York and over the years she has been working as a Director, Writer, and of course, Photographer. Enticed by the mystery and hidden wistfulness in urban life, she can be found with a camera in hand, capturing quiet, ephemeral moments, and documenting her adventures around the world.
Editing photos after a shoot can be extremely time-consuming, especially if you have not spent some time optimizing your workflow. If you'd like to speed up your editing process, here's a 5-minute video by Mango Street Lab with tips and tricks for culling, organizing, and editing photos.
As we roll into the climax of the NBA season, photographer Rob Hammer has a new personal photo project that may be intriguing to basketball fans. It's called The Basketball Hoops Project, and it consists of photos of all kinds of basketball hoops found across the United States.
PocketWizard has updated its line of E-TTL-compatible transceivers for the first time since 2009 with the new FlexTT6, which brings compatibility with newer Canon cameras such as the 5D Mark IV and EOS-1D X Mark II.
A tiny Swiss village has just passed a law that bans people from taking photos. Why? Because they want to save you from the pain of FOMO, or the fear of missing out.
The development of curved image sensors may be the biggest advance in camera technology in decades, allowing for simpler, flatter lenses with larger apertures as well as dramatically better image quality. Canon, Nikon, and Sony are working on the technology, and now Microsoft Research has developed a sensor with three times more curvature than previously achieved.
Episode 181 of the PetaPixel Photography Podcast.
Download MP3 - Subscribe via iTunes, Google Play, email or RSS!
Featured: Commercial and documentary photographer, Sam Comen
There have been some legal rumblings in the camera industry over the past couple of months. It's an ongoing patent dispute between Nikon and two other companies involved in camera technologies: Carl Zeiss and ASML. The latest news is that the United States has opened an official patent infringement investigation into Nikon's products.
Oliphant Backdrops are iconic backdrops used in portrait photography. You've probably seen these backdrops in photos by Annie Leibovitz and many other famous photographers. Art always comes with a price and rightfully so, and the biggest question many people ask is how much the backdrops cost.
Pinhole photography is still alive and well in the digital age, and this new pinhole lens from Thingyfy is the first to offer a variable aperture. Available through their Kickstarter campaign at about $50, the lens is a relatively cheap way to experiment with camera obscura.
"Giants" is a beautiful set of black-and-white underwater photos by Australian photographer Jem Cresswell that offers an intimate look at the beauty of humpback whales.
Retouching isn’t just for portrait photography — it can make a huge difference when you want to clean up distractions from an image. This video from Phlearn will teach you in 30 minutes how to utilise various Photoshop tools to remove objects and blemishes from your environmental photos.
Emmy- and Grammy-award winning comedian Kathy Griffin and photographer Tyler Shields are in hot water this week due to a photo shoot showing Griffin holding a bloodied Donald Trump mask that's made to look like the decapitated head of the president. The photo has sparked outrage and even a public response from Trump himself.
Adjusting colors of specific elements in a photograph can be used to bring harmony to an image or to add creative flair. Here’s a 5-minute video that shows how to match colors in Photoshop.
Nikon has just unveiled 3 new wide-angle lenses: the AF-S NIKKOR 28mm f/1.4E ED, AF-P DX NIKKOR 10-20mm f/4.5-5.6G VR, and AF-S Fisheye NIKKOR 8-15mm f/3.5-4.5E ED. The 10-20mm is a budget-friendly wide-angle zoom for DX-format cameras, and the 8-15mm is Nikon's first ever fisheye zoom lens.
Halide is a new ‘premium camera for your phone’ that provides advanced control over camera settings along with a gesture-based interface that aims to become muscle memory, like the dials of a camera.
We've shared some impressive work by photo colorizers who use Photoshop skills and hard work to add realistic colors into historical monochrome photos. If you're wondering how its done, check out this 7-minute video by Vox that discusses the process. (Note: there's a bit of strong language.)
Android co-founder Andy Rubin and his new startup company, Essential Products, just launched its first product: a powerful smartphone called the Essential Phone. Its photo-related features include dual 13MP cameras, 4K video, and a dedicated monochrome sensor for "true" black-and-white photography.
There’s a new cringeworthy video making the rounds that shows what can happen when a wedding guest’s attempt at capturing the perfect photo goes very, very wrong.
The Sony a9 is supposed to be a game changer in the world of sports photography, but now a new potential issue is threatening to disrupt those ambitions: photographers are reporting that the camera's overheating indicator is turning on after relatively short periods of use in ordinary conditions.
Starting in 2011, photographer Stan Chang and his family embarked on a 3-year journey through 30 European countries. Chang has since taken the photos captured during this trip of a lifetime and turned them into gorgeous time-lapses showing the beauty of Europe.
Nikon is reportedly gearing up to launch a number of new products this week, and one of them is said to be a new Nikkor 28mm f/1.4 lens.
The "dolly zoom," also known as the "Hitchcock zoom" or "Vertigo effect," is a filmmaking technique that involves changing a zoom lens' angle of view while moving the camera toward or away from a subject to keep their relative size in the frame the same. Here's a 4-minute video by Now You See It that explains this technique and how (and why) it's used.
Google received praise from photographers last year when it made its $150 Nik Collection of popular photo editing software 100% free. But alas, all good things come to an end: Google has quietly announced that it will be abandoning the Nik Collection from here on out.
Photons to Photos has updated its Photographic Dynamic Range versus ISO Setting test database with results from the new Sony a9, and it found that the a9 holds its own against the flagship Nikon D5 and Canon 1D X Mark II DSLRs.
For the past few years, Chicago-based photographer Angie McMonigal has been working on a project titled Urban Quilt. Her goal is to capture her city's buildings as a patchwork of colors, textures, and materials.
Let's say you spent pretty much all of your camera budget on a shiny new $1,400 Sony a6500 mirrorless camera, yet you want a super telephoto lens for getting way up close to subjects. Here's a thrifty option you could consider: buy a cheapo 500mm lens, Sony adapter, and 2x teleconverter for just $80.
Every 53 days, NASA's Juno spacecraft flies close to Jupiter and travels from the giant gas planet's north pole to and past its south pole, shooting photos along the way. The eye-opening 2-minute video above was created using a set of these still photos.
If you're a Canon photographer and you've been longing for a full frame DSLR with an articulating LCD screen, your wait will soon be over. The upcoming Canon 6D Mark II will reportedly be the company's first camera of that category to offer the flexible display.
Bristol, UK-based Sam Hobson is a wildlife photographer with a difference from others: he primarily shoots wildlife that he can find in and around cities: foxes, badgers, deer, toads, squirrels, herons, ravens, pigeons, goshawks, falcons, gulls and others.
Family homes provide a multitude of possible backgrounds and framing opportunities for wonderful photographs. But it’s easy to end up with cluttered-looking shots if you get the background wrong. Choosing your location carefully can make all the difference.
Episode 180 of the PetaPixel Photography Podcast.
Download MP3 - Subscribe via iTunes, Google Play, email or RSS!
Featured: Photographer and filmmaker, Michael Shainblum
Sony is touting its new a9 camera as a sports camera with blazing fast autofocus and shooting speeds. If you weren't impressed with the camera tracking a pole vaulter at 20fps, check out the demo in the video above: the camera accurately keeps its focus locked on a basketball being tossed back and forth near it.
A new copyright protection service called Binded just launched this week. It's actually a rebrand of the company formerly known as Blockai, and the purpose remains the same: using the Bitcoin blockchain to protect photographers' copyrights.
Tanzania is one of the best places in the world to see nature and wildlife as it has been for thousands of years. The 947,303 square kilometer country holds some of the most famous national parks and nature reserves in the world with diverse landscapes and dense population of wildlife like the Serengeti and Ngorongoro crater.
I've worked in a camera store now for about a year and a half, and I've been a photographer for about 7 years. I enjoy working in the camera shop, as it's my one consistent form of income as a photographer.
Lens flare can either be an annoyance or an interesting creative tool. In this 6-minute video, Jay P. Morgan of Slanted Lens demonstrates how to master lens flare for your photography.
Here's an interesting effect you can capture in-camera without any digital trickery: place a waterproof camera directly under a running faucet. The camera can look up through the stream of water at the aerator, and the resulting footage looks like you're traveling through a tunnel of water.
Europeana.eu has launched a searchable online gallery of more than 2 million historical photographs, which catalog the first 100 years of photography in Europe.
Photographers Francisco Hernandez and Vanessa Tellez recently did an experiment: photographing the same model, Hernandez used an off camera flash and Tellez used natural light to see how their styles and results differ. You can watch the shootout in the 5-minute video above.
Taken in September of 1942, this captivating collection of black and white photographs show the New York Times in production during the height of World War II.
Conceptual photographer Erik Johansson created this beautiful and surreal image titled "Full Moon Service," showing a couple of workers swapping in a full moon to maintain the lunar phases. Johansson has also released a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how the project was done, from concept to final shot.
Garmin has unveiled the VIRB 360, a waterproof and dustproof camera that records both audio and video in 360 degrees, taking 15-megapixel spherical stills and video in 5.7K at 30fps. With a retail price of $800, it is not cheap, but the money buys you industry-leading resolution.
An unusual billboard was recently set up at a crosswalk in France to promote pedestrian safety. Whenever a pedestrian was detected crossing while the "red man" light was on, the billboard would emit a loud tire screeching sound. A camera built into the billboard would then capture the terrified face of the jaywalker.
What do you do when you find a roll of film that expired 34 years ago? Shoot with it, of course! Colin Wirth of This Does Not Compute shares the results of a recent experiment in this 8-minute video in which he shoots with some ancient Kodak Plus-X black and white film.
Viktoria Solidarnyh is a Ukranian digital photo artist who creates surreal, dreamlike scenes by cutting out and combining elements from a large number of photos. She has released a number of behind-the-scenes diptychs showing her source images to reveal how her composites are made.
