We have all heard it: "save money by hiring a hobby photographer" or "my uncle got a really great camera and he will take our wedding photos for free." I will light a candle for all of you who regret, in hindsight, that you didn't hire a professional photographer for your wedding or special one-day event.
Sad news in the photo industry today: Australia's biggest newspaper company, News Corp, has announced that it will be gutting its photography departments at newspapers across the country, axing most of its staff photographer and subeditor positions in an effort to cut costs.
The winners of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography and Feature Photography were announced last night, and both are prime examples of powerful photojournalism and visual storytelling. Neither photo essay is for the faint of heart.
It's not one of Canon or Nikon's 800mm behemoths, but Sony's 500mm f/4G comes close... if not in focal length, then at least in price. At $13,000 it is the most expensive and longest prime Sony makes, and photographer John Sison got his hands on one to review.
Photographer Sean Tucker's latest project is about a lot more than portrait photography. It's about respecting, honoring, and yes, capturing a culture far outside his own experience and comfort zone. Fortunately for us, he brought us along on this journey.
You may not realize it, but you probably unconsciously date video footage based on the resolution. The higher the definition, the newer you assume the footage is, which is why this HD video of New York City recorded in 1993 just looks strange.
Israeli-American director Sigal Avin recently teamed up with actor and director David Schwimmer to create an anti-Sexual Harassment campaign that is guaranteed to make you squirm. Their video titled 'The Photographer' hits particularly close to home.
You've heard the terms "varifocal" and "parfocal" to describe lenses, but do you know what these terms mean? Or why they matter? If you don't, this informative conversation between Vistek video producer Dale Sood and product manager Brian Young is the perfect place to start.
Canon portrait photographers listen up, you're got some new glass coming your way. In a few months time, we will allegedly see a brand new lens added to the Canon L lineup of high-end glass: the 85mm f/1.4L.
With the recent release of the Leica’s new M10, I noticed an interesting commonality amongst the reviews: almost all of them tested the camera in sunny, dry, or interior environments.
As the saying goes, "you get what you pay for." But how does that rule flesh out with DSLRs? Why is a $6,000 camera 6 times (and $5,000) better than a $1,000 camera? Photographer and filmmaker Peter McKinnon wants to show you.
Episode 166 of the PetaPixel Photography Podcast.
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Featured: Hasselblad Ambassador, Blair Bunting
Since late 2015, rumors and reports have claimed that Samsung was killing off its digital camera business, and the company subsequently pulled out of camera markets around the world while announcing zero new products. Now a new report is confirming that Samsung has indeed ditched the business, and largely due to the rise of smartphone cameras.
AMD's new highly anticipated Ryzen CPU has shown impressive performance in benchmark tests, propelling the company's stock price from less than $2 to over $13 in a little over a year. Now a new test has found that a $1,780 PC running AMD Ryzen processors destroys a $5,660 Apple Mac Pro when it comes to Photoshop performance.
The stock photography search engine Everypixel has launched a new web app called Everypixel Aesthetics that uses a neural network to tell you how awesome any photo is.
Two years ago, I published an article that took a lighthearted approach to making fun of the major wedding photograph image processing trends of the day. In today's post, I will discuss the vintage film look at length.
If we wrote it once, we've written it a thousand times: you don't need expensive equipment to capture high-quality studio photography. As photographer Dustin Dolby of Workphlo demonstrates in this video, even that expensive cosmetics look is doable with cheap speedlights... and skill.
The comparisons were bound to start pouring in. When Tamron revealed their 70-200mm f/2.8 G2, priced at just $1,300, people started asking: should I still buy the Nikon ($2,800) or Canon ($1,900) versions? Jared 'Fro' Polin has answer for the Nikon users: you shouldn't.
Photo lens experimenter and prolific YouTube filmmaker Mathieu Stern is at it again. This time, he took one of his old, cheap (do we even have to mention that?) Russian lenses and made one small modification to create what he calls a 'bokeh explosion.'
A common rule of thumb to figure out your maximum shutter speed for sharp stars at night is to divide 500 by your focal length. Sometimes it's called the 600 Rule or the 400 Rule or several other numbers that can be used depending on your sensor size. Unfortunately, it's a a very inaccurate rule today.
Veteran wildlife photographer Michael Furtman has seen many images of northern owls swooping down, talons drawn on an unsuspecting black or white mouse on the surface of the snow. This kind of imagery makes his blood boil.
There are 27 different blending modes in Photoshop, and unless you're a real retouching junkie, chances are good you haven't explored each and every one of them in detail. But have no fear, to paraphrase an old Apple ad, "there's a [YouTube tutorial] for that."
Nikon is getting ready to announce a new DSLR. The Japanese camera company is reportedly planning to reveal the D7500 (followup to the D7200) sometime next week, and we're getting our first peek at a leaked photo and specs ahead of the official reveal.
I think it's fair to say that most photographers will, at some point in their career, have to work with models at least once—whether you're a still life shooter that photographs models' hands holding a fork full of food a couple of times a year or an e-commerce shooter that works with models every single day.
A chimpanzee in Kenya has captured an extended selfie using a 360-degree camera that she stole from a New York Times photojournalist on assignment there.
Everyone is a photographer, and that includes celebrities. But some celebrities take their photography more seriously than others, investing both significant time and money into developing their craft. Here’s a small sampling.
Western Digital today unveiled its first portable SSD. The My Passport SSD features blazing-fast data transfer speeds in a pint-sized drive that photographers can easily slip into a small camera bag.
In the world of Instagram, there is a practice known as botting -- and I hate it. For the uninitiated, botting is the process of tying your Instagram account to a wide variety of automation software, which charge users small sums of money to juice their profile. At the heart of it, it’s a pay-to-play relationship where you’re paying money to grow your following on Instagram.
Eye Stocker published this simple 5-minute Photoshop video tutorial that shows how you can color grade any photo using only solid color adjustment layers and the Blend If feature.
The future is exciting for mobile photography. Adobe just released this sneak peek that shows off some amazing features powered by Adobe Sensei, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to do edits on photos.
There are plenty of tutorials and examples on the Web for capturing amazing photographs of the moon. Photojournalist Van Applegate recently experienced a humorous personal fail that shows how not to do it.
Canon just announced a new macro lens for its crop sensor cameras. The new EF-S 35mm f/2.8 Macro IS STM is equivalent to a 56mm on a full frame camera and aims to bring affordable macro photography to the masses.
Episode 165 of the PetaPixel Photography Podcast.
Download MP3 - Subscribe via iTunes, Google Play, email or RSS!
Featured: Profoto Legend of Light, photographer Clay Cook
Canon has decided to break into the drone market, but probably not in the way you think. The Japanese camera giant has developed a search and rescue drone meant to work with the company's 4,000,000 ISO ME20F-SH camera.
Rotating an image in Photoshop might seem like a pretty simple process: you just... rotate it, right? Not quite. As this video from 2010 demonstrates, one of the ways a computer rotates an image is actually by applying 4 sequential transformations. (Warning: math incoming).
If you are troubled by blemishes big or small in your portrait work, this 16-minute tutorial by Nathaniel Dodson over at Tutvid will teach you how to use Photoshop to properly clean and heal skin in a flash.
Give weird lens lover and filmmaker Mathieu Stern some credit: he can pretty much make any lens you put in front of him work... including one made from a discarded lens tube he found in a 'trash' box at a flea market.
Firmware update usually fly under our radar here at PetaPixel, but Sigma's recently update to the sd Quattro line of cameras is a big deal. Why? Because Sigma is finally letting users shoot DNG RAW.
You don't need fancy lighting equipment to capture nighttime portraits. Follow these few simple tips from photographer Jordan Matter and you'll up your night portrait game instantly, no flash required.
There’s a very succinct analogy by Marshall McLuhan, summing up our society’s focus on the past: …
A video is made up from 25 single photos per second, that, when placed back-to-back, trick our mind into seeing motion. But what would happen if we only took one photo every minute, and then played them back at 25 frames per second? The result is a magnificent hyper-realistic compression of time.
The newest Zeiss Batis lens has officially arrived. It's a 'compact, lightweight, top-quality' 135mm f/2.8, but what it's lost in weight it seems to have gained back in dollar signs.
As camera makers struggle to innovate, consumers are finding little need to upgrade. The market is slowing to the point of inertia—manufacturers need to take a left field approach to stay competitive.
Professional photographers and videographers who have been lamenting that Apple has forgotten all about you, fear not: Apple Senior VP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller has some words of comfort for you.
Photographer Jana Romanova is suing VICE Media for using a photo from her series Waiting without permission... again. This is Romanova's second copyright infringement lawsuit agains VICE over the same photo series.
A brand-new Hasselblad H6D-100c will cost you approximately $33,000 before you even buy a lens for the system, which begs the question: is it worth the money? That's what Sonder Creative lead photographer Usman Dawood tries to figure out in this video review of the Hasselblad H6D.
Everybody wants to get closer when shooting wildlife, and one of the most affordable ways of doing this is to buy a teleconverter. These little gadgets will instantly add to your lens magnification without making your wallet thousands of dollars lighter... but are they worth it? Let's find out.
In the New York Times 2020 Report about the future of the journalism at the Times, the paper put this point first: "The report needs to become more visual." And now, it looks like the publication is putting its money where its report is.
Sony recently updated their sensor roadmap for 2017 and 2018, and there's some exciting news for medium format shooters on it. Not only will cameras like the Fuji GFX and Hasselblad X1D get a 100MP option, Sony is also developing a 150MP sensor for larger cameras like the Phase One 100XF.
What do photo editors want from photographers? And how can you get their attention in their very crowded inboxes? These are only the tip of the never-ending iceberg of questions for getting a leg up on that next assignment; and the truth is, it often depends on the editor’s personal preferences.
