This Magical Wildlife Sanctuary Lets Photographers Get Within Arm’s Reach of Giant Bears

If you ever find yourself as close to a wild bear as Drew Hamilton is in the video above, you're probably a little too close. Hamilton, a photographer and technician with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, captured the amazing footage while sitting with his camera on the bank of the McNeil River in Alaska. The bear simply strolled up and took a breather just several feet away from where Hamilton was sitting and snapping.

This High Speed Camera Can Capture 4K at a Mind-Bending 900fps

One of the biggest challenges of shooting 4K Ultra HD footage is the sheer amount of data you're processing. That's about 30 8MP photos coming into your camera every single second. But the old FOR-A FT-ONE and the new, smaller, FOR-A FT-ONE-S scoff at your measly 30fps.

These cameras, while they definitely don't come cheap, earn every penny of their price tags by capturing 4K footage at up to 900fps.

Humor: Why Guys Hate Being in Pictures

Do guys, in general, hate taking pictures? Comedian Robbie Sherrard thinks so, and in this tongue-in-cheek video that's currently going viral he breaks down all of the most awkward reasons why that is.

Open Letter to Client Regarding the ‘Job Killer’ Quoted Rate

Hello Potential Client,

Regarding your last email in which you said:

“... if they (your client) saw the $700/ $1400 a day fee for the photographer they would dismiss the project immediately... (most of my client’s people make between $25 and $45 an hour)... Showing $100/hr was also a job-killer as you can imagine”.

Well sure thing. I see where you’re coming from... Let’s rewrite the quote to show the actual number of hours I will work on this job, instead of only those spent with my face in a camera. Maybe that will help.

Video: This Cab Ride Through NYC at Night is Made from 3,454 Individual Oil Paintings

Stop-motion is a painstaking and labor and time-intensive process when you do it with photographs, so imagine creating an entire stop-motion video using only oil paintings. That's exactly what ambient folk band The Sea The Sea decided to do for their most recent music video, enlisting the help of artist Zachary Johnson to do the heavy lifting... or painting.

In all, the final music video is made up of 3,454 oil paintings that take you on a nighttime cab ride home through New York City.

What’s the Fastest Lens Theoretically Possible? And What Would it Look Like?

We've told you about some pretty fast lenses in the past -- from the legendary Zeiss 50mm f/0.7 lenses made for NASA and used by Stanley Kubrick to film a candle light scene, to X-Ray lenses that you can try to Frankenstein onto your camera body for some strange soft-focus results.

But what is the fastest lens that is theoretically possible? And what would that lens look like? Matt Granger answers those exact questions in the interesting technical video above.

A Cheaper Filter Holder for the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 Created with 3D Printing

Need a piece of gear but can't find a reasonably priced option? Perhaps 3D printing could help.

That's what photographers Patrick Ludolph and Christian Steinkrüger. After not finding an affordable filter solution for his Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens, Ludolph approached Steinkrüger -- a 3D printing hobbyist -- with the idea of creating a custom filter holder themselves.

Here are Portraits of Dogs Flying Through the Air

We've featured photos of dogs underwater, mid-shake, during bath time and in the middle of a gratuitous lick... but this is the first set of portraits we've seen that capture dogs in-flight.

Well, not quite flight... more like 'falling with style,' to borrow a line from Toy Story.

Photographer Uses 19th Century Process to Capture the Awe of Meeting New York City

When Peter Liepke set out to create his series Above & Beyond, he wanted to capture the feeling of having just move to New York City. The dream-like feeling of arriving in NYC for the first time and being swept away by the environment.

But where others might use a certain photographic technique to do this, Liepke achieves this ethereal feeling instead through platinum/palladium and gum bichromate processing.

Photographer Spurns $37,000 Photography Prize to Protest Spain’s ‘Pitiful’ Cultural Landscape

How much are your principles worth? It's hard to know until you have those principles tested with a dollar figure, and for renowned Catalan photographer Colita, she now has a figure she can hold up: about $37,300.

That's the amount Colita gave up when she declined the top prize at the 2014 Premio Nacional de Fotografía (National Photography Prize) in an unapologetic letter to Spain's culture minister about the unpopular policies he's recently put forth.

DIY Project Turns a Cheap Antique Store Camera Into the Perfect Shell for an Unused GoPro

Have you ever bought a GoPro just to realize that your life might not be quite as extreme as you initially thought? We've seen it before, and that’s exactly what happened recently with Instructables user Brooklyntonia.

But rather than watching her GoPro Hero 3 collect dust on a shelf, she decided to create an unlikely pair by Frankensteining together her unused GoPro and an old AGFA Ansco Shur Shot she had lying around.

Mother of Ten and Talented Photographer Captures Wonderful Natural Light Portraits

Lisa Holloway might be a super-human. Until we get her near some kryptonite, we can't be sure, but the self-taught photographer somehow manages to take care of 10 children while simultaneously running a successful photography business.

All the while, she's stacking her portfolio full of gorgeous natural light portraits of newborns, babies, children, seniors and families.

New Sony Sensor Will Bring Quick Tracking AF and 4K Video HDR to Smartphone Cameras

Sony isn't short on innovation. After exciting the photo industry last week with talk of a APCS (not to be confused with APS-C) sensor that promises to take dynamic range and especially frame rates to absurd heights, they've dropped another image sensor announcement.

The Exmor RS IMX230, announced earlier today, is being hailed as the first stacked CMOS image sensor with image plane phase detection, and it promises to bring super-fast tracking AF and better HDR to future smartphone cameras.

A Quirky Portrait Series that Features ‘Elderly Kids’

Los Angeles-based photographer Zachary Scott of Sharpe & Associates was recently commissioned by New York Times Magazine to shoot a quirky series of portraits for a feature titled, "What if Age Is Nothing but a Mind-Set?" The piece was about the area of reverse aging research, so Scott's task was to make a group of kids look like they had instantly aged 70 years or so.

3 Month Time-Lapse Shows Pigeons Going From Eggs to Adults

Back in June of 2014, YouTube user AvWuff noticed two pigeons and two eggs sitting in the flower box outside their window. Seeing an opportunity for an interesting project, AvWuff decided to set up a camera and capture the birth and growth of the baby pigeons.

Sample Footage Shot with the Ultra Rare Nikkor 6mm f/2.8 that Can See Behind Itself

About once per year, one of the rare Nikkor 6mm f/2.8 lenses out there pops up on eBay when some camera shop or another picks one up. The price ranges from $60K to $160K and it's gotten to the point where we usually just ignore the listings because... well... we've covered them enough times.

But when one of our readers tipped us off to a new listing earlier today, we took notice, because this one comes with a sample video of the lens in action.

Tutorial: How to Capture a Motion Time-Lapse of the Milky Way from Start to Finish

Ian Norman, the astrophotographer behind Lonely Speck, is a good friend of the blog and an incredibly generous photographers when it comes to sharing his years worth of expertise with the world.

His latest video tutorial is no exception, as Norman shows you, step-by-step, how to create a beautiful motion time-lapse sequence of the Milky Way inching its way across the night sky.

Swift Galleries Lets Clients See Your Prints on Their Walls, Pick an Arrangement, and Place an Order

Swift Galleries is an upcoming platform whose goal is to get your photography work on your clients' walls and, in turn, bring in some extra profit for you.

By leveraging a simple drag-and-drop web app, Swift Galleries makes it easy for you to customize and show off how your photographs would look in your clients' homes, with little to no effort on your behalf.

Wildlife Photographer Adam Jones Takes Canon’s 7D Mark II Into the Wild for a Real World Review

When cameras get put through a review, it’s often done at a pixel-peeping level in a studio, where the lighting is consistent across the board and variables are few and far between. This is NOT one of those reviews.

When it came time to review Canon's new APS-C flagship, the 7D Mark II, DPReview reached out to professional wildlife photographer Adam Jones and asked him to take the camera out into the wild... literally.

The Guardian: Photos Don’t Belong in Art Galleries

Does photography deserve a place in art galleries? Jonathan Jones doesn't think so. The Guardian art columnist has caused quite a stir after writing a piece titled, "Flat, soulless and stupid: why photographs don’t work in art galleries."

While Jones acknowledges that photographs can be "powerful, beautiful, and capture the immediacy of a moment like nothing else," he argues that they are, "poor art when hung on a wall like paintings."

Selling Art in Galleries: Everything You Need To Know

I’ll admit, there is a lot to learn if you’re hoping to start selling art in galleries. How do you approach a gallery, and then if you do finally get a meeting, what do you say? What are they even looking for? When they ask to see your portfolio, what does that even look like? Do you price your work or does the gallery price your work? How much commission is the normal amount for a gallery to take?

And on and on and on and on…

Well, I’m going to try and answer all of those questions and more, all in a single post. Wish me luck.

First Camera in Space Goes for 3X the Expected Price at Auction, Fetches Over a Quarter Million

A few weeks ago we told you that the first Hasselblad body and Zeiss lens to ever travel to space were going up on the auction block at RR Auctions in Boston.

Conservative estimates put the expected hammer price at between $50k and $100k, but the camera has officially been sold, and its selling price was a whole lot more than that... approximately three times even the highest estimates, in fact.

Abstract Long Exposure Photos of Sneakers Look Like Colorful, Glowing Vinyl

It's a frisbee! It's an LP! It's a... Nike sneaker!? Photographer Joost van Brug's abstract photos of 24 iconic Nike sneakers are unlike any shoe photographs we've seen before, mostly because you can't really tell they're photos of shoes.

Instead of taking regular images of the shoes suspended in midair or being worn by some athlete, he decided to take long exposures of the shoes being spun around.

The Prynt Case Turns Your Smartphone into an Instant Camera… and Then Some

Instant photography is making a big comeback lately. As both the success of The Impossible Project and the popularity of Fuji's most recent Instax models can attest to, people want to hold prints in their hand, and if they can do it as soon as they take the picture, all the better.

Prynt is a product that is planning to ride this popularity wave at its peak by combining instant printing with mobile photography in an extremely convenient fashion: by creating a photo printing case for your phone.

Milky Way Time-Lapse Captures Rare Glimpse of a Meteor Exploding in the Atmosphere

In mid-October, a meteor decided to explode in spectacular fashion in the night sky. Known as a 'bolide fireball,' a photographer named Ben Lewis was lucky enough to capture it and his video went viral the day after the event.

But he wasn't the only one with camera pointed towards sky, and for our money, we think photographer Wes Eisenhauer was fortunate enough to capture it better.

Is Black and White Photography a Gimmick?

In an age where digital photography is ubiquitous, and post processing allows everyman to bump saturation levels and create hyper-real images, black and white photography seems like a curious anachronism.

Color film went mainstream in the 1930s with the introduction of Kodachrome, but black and white has stubbornly persisted not only in newspapers, but also as an expressive outlet for many photographers who choose to shoot photojournalism, weddings, portraits and more by converting color digital files to black and white.