How to Shoot Your First Concert… at a Crappy Venue

So you're getting ready to photograph your first concert? That's awesome. Chances are, it’s a less-than-perfect venue -- that's usually how it works out. It’s kind of like getting your first car. You don’t start out with a Jaguar. You get a baby blue minivan with doors that don’t shut in the winter…

Watch as a Tintype Portrait of Adam Savage is Made on Stage, From Start to Finish

Tested recently put on a show at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. One of the presentations was by local photographer Michael Shindler, who specializes in wet plate collodion photography.

In the 12-minute video above, Shindler transforms the theater into a studio and darkroom, introducing the live audience to this 19th-century photography process by creating a large-format tintype portrait of Adam Savage (the co-host of Mythbusters).

Reuters Issues a Worldwide Ban on RAW Photos

Reuters has implemented a new worldwide policy for freelance photographers that bans photos that were processed from RAW files. Photographers must now only send photos that were originally saved to their cameras as JPEGs.

How to Fake Depth of Field Blur in Photoshop Using Z-Depth Pass

Here's a tutorial on how you can create fake depth of field blur in the background of photos using something known as "Z-Depth Pass." I'm not saying that this technique is better than other methods -- because it has some problems -- but it's quite different, and some of you may learn something new.

LifePrint Prints Augmented Reality Photos That Come to Life in Your Hands

LifePrint is a new portable photo printer that aims to change the way photos are experienced. Instead of printing static photos that capture a single moment in time, LifePrint uses augmented reality to let you embed a video inside a printed photograph. The video can be watched by pointing a smartphone camera at the print.

How Photography Saved My Life After I Lost the Love of My Life

My name is Fernando Krasovitzky, and I'm a nature and landscape photographer based in Miami, Florida. My story is one of tragedy followed by good fortune. It is the story of death giving birth to life and of the power of photography to make it happen.

OCOLOY: A One Camera, One Lens, One Year Project

With 2016 just around the corner, many photographers will be dusting off the cameras they've been neglecting and making New Year's resolutions in an attempt to rekindle their creativity. If you're looking for ideas and inspiration, here's a good one: do a OCOLOY project. It requires using just One Camera and One Lens for One Year.

The Power of a Picture: A Look at ‘Young Farmers’ by August Sander

John Green of vlogbrothers made this interesting 2-minute video in which he talks about his favorite photo: a picture titled "Young Farmers" by German photographer August Sander. Upon first glance, it may look like a simple snapshot of three nicely dressed men walking along a road, but there's so much you can learn about the photo by examining it closely and by looking at the cultural context.

Bye Bye Gura Gear: Company to Sell All Camera Bags Under the Tamrac Brand

The Tamrac brand of camera bags has been around for nearly 4 decades now, and it looks like it will continue to live on much longer. Gura Gear, on the other hand, ends here.

When Tamrac went bankrupt last year, Gura Gear swooped in and acquired the company's brand and assets. Now, a year later, Gura Gear has decided to drop its own brand name in favor of the older Tamrac brand. Thus, Gura Gear will be no more.

How to Put Together Your Very First Fashion Shoot

You may have the eye, the talent, and all of the other necessary hard skills to make it in the commercial world. The only thing you lack is a portfolio relevant to the stuff you want to get paid to shoot. It’s a classic chicken and egg problem.

Creating your portfolio is easy. Assuming you have everything else up to par, it’s as simple as three steps: Concept, Connect, Create. This is something I recently did to expand my Asia portfolio while traveling through Hong Kong and Taiwan. I assembled a team like for any other shoot, albeit a limited team because it was a test shoot.

Creating ‘Bokeh Madness’ with a Tilt Lens Adapter

After using a vintage 1910 lens on a modern Sony a7II, Paris-based photographer Mathieu Stern is back again with another interesting lens experiment.

This time he created "bokeh madness" by attaching a Russian Jupiter 9 85mm f/2 lens onto his Sony a7II using a M42-to-E tilt adapter.

Russian Cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko with the Nikon DSLR Gear on the ISS

Here's a portrait of Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko posing with Nikon DSLR gear on the International Space Station on October 6th, 2015. Tens of thousands of dollars in camera equipment is stored on the walls of Zvezda, the Russian service module in the ISS. As you can see, there are lens mounts fixed to the walls of the module for storing the collection of glass.

Photographing Wild Bears in the Forests of Finland

My name is Will McGugan, and I'm a photography enthusiast living in London. This year I spent my birthday in a forest in Finland with no company other than about dozen wild Eurasian brown bears and more mosquitoes than I care to count.

Camera Sales May Be Stabilizing After a Few Years of Freefall

The camera market has been struggling in recent years, with Canon, Nikon, and Sony all recently reporting drops in camera demand from a year ago. But there may be a sliver of positive news for camera makers: sales appear to be stabilizing a bit after a few years of huge drops.

This is How Cameras Glitch with Photos of Propellers

If you've ever photographed spinning airplane propeller or helicopter rotor blades with your smartphone, you may have found that the spinning blades were turned into bizarre shapes in the resulting photo. What you're seeing is distortion caused by a rolling shutter, when a CMOS sensor captures a scene by scanning across it very quickly rather than capturing the entire frame at once.

Photographer’s Business Booms After Her Viral Act of Kindness

Selfless acts of kindness are sometimes rewarded in a big way, and that's what photographer Dana Gruszynski has been learning lately.

Last month, we shared how Gruszynski came to the rescue when a wedding photographer didn't show up at a couple's wedding. Gruszynski, who heard about the story from her cousin at the wedding, surprised the couple with a free photo shoot that faithfully recreated the wedding. The story went viral, and now Gruszynski has been overloaded with inquiries.

Someone Crashed Their Camera Drone Into the Giant Ferris Wheel in Seattle

Here's another story that illustrates why the US government is racing to create a national drone registry that attaches each drone to a name: on Wednesday, someone apparently tried to fly their DJI Phantom drone through the Seattle Great Wheel and failed, causing the drone to plummet to the ground and smash a basketball-sized hole in a plastic dining table.

Ansel Adams’ Pictures of an American Relocation Camp During WWII

Ansel Adams is best known for his breathtaking landscape photos, but he photographed much more than nature during his decades-long career. In 1943, already the best-known American photographer, Adams visited the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California, one of the relocation camps the US gathered Japanese-Americans into during World War II.

This Surreal ‘HyperZoom’ Time-Lapse Looks Like One Continuous Shot

Photographer Geoff Tompkinson has been working on a new time-lapse technique that he calls the "HyperZoom." By matching up shots from camera zooms and pans, Tompkinson takes us on seamless journeys through locations that look like one long continuous shot.

His new video above is a HyperZoom video that explores Hallstatt, Upper Austria, a beautiful historic town that's listed as a Unesco World Heritage site.

How I Had My Gear and 3 Months of Photos Stolen in One Brief Moment

My name is David Anderson and I'm a photographer from Scotland. I recently decided to take a different direction in life: I quit my job, bought a camera, and started traveling to places in Europe I had always dreamed of visiting and photographing.

Photoshop Fix Might Put a Smile on Your Face

Back in September, Adobe ate some crow after showing off the new Photoshop Fix, a mobile app that has many of the powerful retouching features of Photoshop. In the demo, an image of a model was used to demonstrate the new “Smile” feature, whereby the user can manipulate the strength of a smile by simply dragging a finger.

PETA’s Lawsuit Over a Monkey Selfie Copyright is Now Even More Bizarre

In September, the animal rights group PETA filed a lawsuit against photographer David Slater, arguing that the monkey who took a series of viral selfies with Slater's camera in 2011 should be the rightful copyright owner.

If you thought that was strange, get this: the legal battle has now evolved into a dispute over the pictured monkey's identity and gender.

The Unsettling Future of Facial Recognition

The first time I witnessed a camera detect a face to aid the autofocus system, I was amazed. In part because the technology seemed magical and the highlighted rectangle tracking faces seemed like science fiction, and in part because I seem to possess a talent for taking out-of-focus photos.

An Open Letter to Performers, Published on Behalf of Thousands of Photographers

Restrictive concert photography contracts have been a big story in the photo world over the past several months. Taylor Swift, the Foo Fighters, Dweezil Zappa, and Janet Jackson have all made headlines for their extremely strict -- and often rights-grabbing -- contracts that photographers and reporters must sign before covering a concert.

Now a number of the media industry's biggest associations and organizations have published an open letter to performers on behalf of thousands of photographers and journalists in the United States.

Photos of the Strange ‘Crooked Forest’ in Poland

German photographer Kilian Schönberger recently shot a series of photos showing one of the most unusual forests in the world. Located near the city of Gryfino in West Poland, the so-called "Crooked Forest" has a grove of pine trees that are curved at the base.