Impossible image enhancing is a well-known cliche in movies and TV shows. When law enforcement computer whizzes get their hands on a photograph or video still frame, anything seems to be possible.
It seems a movie finally got image enhancing right. The 36-second clip above is from the 2014 movie Algorithm, a movie that's (fittingly) about a freelance computer hacker who discovers a shady government program.
Weighing just 1.66 pounds, Nikon's newly announced 300mm f/4 is the world's lightest 300mm full frame prime autofocus lens. It's also the first Nikon DSLR lens to feature the company's new Phase Fresnel (PF) technology, which is the main reason the lens can be so small and lightweight.
Rokinon, the lens brand owned by South Korea's Samyang, has been teasing a new "three digit" lens for weeks now. The first images of the lens were leaked onto the Web today. As many commentators suggested, it will be a 135mm f/2 lens.
UK-based videographer Cal Thomson recently got into astrophotography and creating time-lapses of the …
Men who share selfies online are more likely to exhibit psychopathic tendencies. That's what researchers are saying after conducting a lengthy study on the link between selfie-taking and certain personality traits.
German photographer Jan von Holleben is known for creating imaginative scenes by having kids lie on the ground and carefully arranging everyday objects around them. One of his first viral projects that featured this style was "Dreams of Flying".
His latest one is the most ambitious and elaborate of them all. Titled "Konrad Wimmel is in Town," the series features gigantic scenes that took a year to create.
If you’d like a primer on the technologies found inside Canon’s EF line of lenses, look no further than …
The world is going to pieces and people like [Ansel] Adams and [Edward] Weston are photographing rocks! -- Henri Cartier-Bresson
What better way to conjure up a longing for freedom than to evoke the name of that avuncular figure of American photography Ansel Adams. It’s a name synonymous with photography, with stunning landscapes that leave one with an unbounded sense of liberty. So why not use Ansel’s name to grace a bill that sets forth to “restore the first amendment rights of photographers?”
On April 1st, 1995, the Hubble Telescope captured a photograph that became one of the most iconic space photos ever captured. Titled, "Pillars of Creation," the image shows the gigantic columns of interstellar gas and dust of the Eagle Nebula 6,000 light years away.
Now, 20 years after that image was created, scientists have recreated that image using the same space telescope (shown above).
The value of the Japanese yen has tumbled in recent months, and that could mean changes to where Japanese camera companies choose to manufacture their products. Canon is one company that is making changes in response to the changing economic landscape: it says it plans to bring more of its camera manufacturing back to Japan.
What are the most popular cameras used in the Flickr community? Now that 2014 is in the past, the photo sharing service has done some serious crunching on EXIF data to figure out which cameras were the most popular among its users over the course of the year. Here's a look into the findings.
Yongnuo has taken another big step towards legitimacy as a third party brand for camera gear. The Chinese company's wares are now being carried by B&H, the largest non-chain camera store in the United States and one of the largest gear retailers in the world.
Update: Please see below for new developments.
Singer Justin Bieber is the new face of Calvin Klein, and a number of new advertising photos and videos have been published in recent days as part of a new #mycalvins campaign. The black and white photos are causing a bit of controversy though: a leaked unretouched version of one photo suggests that quite a bit of Photoshop was used to alter Bieber's appearance and... proportions.
Zwier Spanjer recently purchased a DJI Phantom 2 camera drone and captured the video above on his first day of flying it outdoors. The flight didn't turn out the way Spanjer planned.
As the drone was flying over a field in a small town, its battery became depleted and the Phantom began a slow uncontrolled descent to the ground. Unfortunately for Spanjer, it wasn't actually ground beneath the drone, but rather a small body of water.
Nicky Bay is a Singapore-based photographer who captures the beauty and diversity of insects in Singapore's rainforests through macro photography. He made 46 trips out into the wild in 2014, capturing tens of thousands of photographs and sharing thousands of photos online.
On essaye de glaner des images comme on peut #CaCestDuZoom #Dammartin pic.twitter.com/uyAFTwTULT— Maxime Goldbaum (@MaximeGoldbaum) January 9, 2015
Le Monde journalist Maxime Goldbaum tweeted the above photograph this morning as a hostage situation involving Charlie Hebdo suspects unfolded in Dammartin-en-Goële, France. It seems that the Nikon 1200-1700mm is a tool in Reuters' arsenal that's used to keep photojournalists at a safe distance.
If you're a Nikon D750 owner experiencing the camera's dark band/flare issue, help is on the way. Less than two weeks after announcing that it is investigating the issue, the company is now saying that it will be offering free repairs to customers affected by the problem.
Fuji has generated a great deal of customer loyalty and satisfaction with its "Kaizen" ("change good") policy of frequent and significant firmware updates that beef up existing cameras with exciting new features. Nikon may soon follow suit.
An apparently leaked press release suggests that Nikon will soon be launching a new program that gives Nikon DSLR owners the ability to download "advanced firmware updates" that add "new functionality" to their cameras.
Back in 2013, Adobe began posting a series of short video tutorials on YouTube called the "Photoshop Playbook." The series has since grown to contain fifty how-to videos showing how some of the most popular and fundamental edits are done in the photo editing program.
Of all the millions of historical photographs held by the US National Archives, the photo above is the single most requested. It was captured in the Oval Office on December 21, 1970, and shows Elvis Presley meeting then US President Richard Nixon.
Toshiba has announced the world's first SDHC card that has near field communication (NFC) baked right in. The technology allows you to see what's on a card without having to plug the card into a camera or card reader. Instead, you'll be able to 'preview' the contents simply by bringing a smartphone close to the card.
A couple of top European soccer clubs are taking a stand against selfie sticks by banning them entirely from their soccer stadiums. It's not the idea of selfies that the teams take issue with, but rather the fact that the sticks could be used by fans as weapons against each other.
VSCO may be trying to branch out from film emulation software and enter the business of photo books. The company has announced that it has acquired photo book printing startup Artifact Uprising.
For his project "When I Am Laid in Earth," photographer Simon Norfolk traveled to Mount Kenya to photograph the melting away of the Lewis Glacier, the largest glacier on Africa's second tallest mountain. To capture what once was compared to what exists today, Norfolk used gasoline to create lines of fire that mark where the glacier lines once stood.
The photograph above shows where the Lewis Glacier ended in 1934.
Do you recognize the DSLR seen in the photograph above? Reader Florian Feuchtner spotted the camera in a Connect Station product photo posted to Canon Austria's Facebook page yesterday. What's strange is that the design doesn't seem to match the backsides of any current Canon DSLR.
If you already can't stand the idea of a selfie stick existing, you may want to avert your eyes. The BelfieStick is a bizarre new device for "belfies," or backside selfies. It's like a selfie stick, except for the express purpose of photographing your butt.
Launched back in 2013, Unsplash is a site which posts ten handpicked photos every ten days and these photos are absolutely free. By “free” I don’t mean “free to download” — they’re free to use everywhere and in any way you want. Commercially and whatnot.
Which is a great thing, right? Finally, a place with photos hip enough to use on a lifestyle blog or design agency’s website. I’ve seen hundreds of sites using them, including ecommerce. I’ve also seen them used in magazines, on T-shirts, in books and as prints. People are now earning money from unattributed Unsplash photos — everyone, it seems, but the photographers who took them.
GoPro has announced that it will soon be rolling out new firmware for its HERO4 Black and Silver cameras that will improve the devices' photography and video capabilities.
For her project "Crazy Cat Lovers," photographer Andréanne Lupien used clone photography to turn ordinary cat owners with one cat (or sometimes two or three) into crazy cat people with an army of cats swarming their homes.
While working as a DJ for Paul McCartney's world tours, Chris Holmes would often be disappointed when his reflective outfits would ruin flash photographs by blowing it out with light. Then one day he had an epiphany: why not turn things around and use the photo-ruining clothing "for a greater purpose"?
He then came up with the idea of creating a line of hyper-reflective clothing for men. The garments are designed for people who want to keep their privacy and don't want to appear in photos, namely, celebrities.
NASA has released the largest and sharpest photograph ever made of the Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest spiral galaxy to ours that contains an estimated 1 trillion stars. The new image (above is a crop showing a portion of it) weighs in at 1.5 gigapixels (i.e. 1.5 billion pixels); it's so big that you would need 600HD televisions to display the entire digital photo.
At the end of 2014, we reported that Los Angeles will be the first major city in the US to equip every officer on the street with a body camera. Now the city is announcing that it's going one step further towards making sure its cops are held accountable by the devices: newly issued Tasers will trigger the cameras when fired.
Here's a heartwarming case of photos being used to make a difference in someone's life: hundreds of thousands of people around the world are currently sharing their dog photographs to cheer up a teenager who's battling cancer.
What would you do if you came across a fat stack of cash while doing urban exploration photography? That's what happened to Dave of Freaktography last year.
The Federal Aviation Administration is notoriously strict about the use of aerial camera drones for commercial purposes. Much of the commercial imagery you'll find online was captured "illegally" without the permission of the agency.
Yesterday, realtor Douglas Trudeau of Tucson, Arizona became the first real estate agent in the country to be given permission to use his drone for his property listings.
Before Canon and Nikon became juggernauts in the world of DSLRs, Kodak actually created one of the first DSLRs by modifying the Nikon Pronea 6i film SLR. Called the Kodak DCS315, the camera was the world's first DSLR to feature an image preview LCD and JPEG processing in the camera itself. It was launched in 1998 and boasted an amazing (at the time) 1.5 megapixels.
Polaroid has new ownership and fresh determination to make its well known brand great again. This week the company launched a couple of new products in two similar yet different markets: mobile printing and... dashcams.
How does your daily schedule compare to the 24-hour routines of some of the most famous creative individuals throughout …
They may look like fitness models, but they aren’t.
They’re everyday people — office workers, programmers and mothers who took the chance to try something they had never done before.
A new "Ansel Adams Act" introduced in Congress could have big implications on photographers' rights across the United States. The bill aims to "restore the First Amendment rights of photographers" by removing restrictions on taking photos in public places.
We recently shared how baseball legend (and hall of famer as of this week) Randy Johnson has been working as a professional photographer, rekindling the passion that he developed while majoring in photojournalism in college. His website contains an impressive collection of travel and concert photographs.
It's not just his photography that people are talking about, though -- his strange logo (shown above) is bringing him quite a bit of attention.
In the past several years, there have been quite a few mentions of modular camera designs that split sensors, screens, and bodies of cameras into separate, replaceable parts. Today is the first time we've heard of a completely modular lens system.
A recently published Nikon patent appears to show just that: a lens that is assembled by connecting a number of circular pieces to form a complete barrel.
Here's an interesting look at the magic that goes into making movies look the way they do. The video above shows how scenes in one particular movie looked straight out of the camera compared to the finished version after color grading. It's like the video equivalent of the before-and-after post-processing examples photographers often share on the Web.
It looks like musician Lenny Kravitz is going to have a busy 2015 in the world of photography. The Leica shooter has announced a new photo book containing images captured by Kravitz himself documenting life on the road as a rock star. What's more, we may soon see a limited edition Leica M rangefinder named after him.
French computer company LaCie has announced a backup hard drive that's perfect for photographers who want to make sure their data stays safe in the field. Called the Rugged RAID, the device is super durable and can protect your photos by mirroring the data across two drives.
“Film didn’t die with Kodak’s Chapter 11” bankruptcy filing in 2012, says the Financial Times. The British …
Update: This giveaway is now over and the winner has been selected. Please see below for the announcement.
We're back with another big giveaway as a thank you to the readers of this blog. This time the prize is quite big: one lucky winner will choose between a free Nikon D810 worth $3,000 and a Canon 5D Mark III worth $3,100.
Due to the rotation of the Earth, it appears as though the stars are moving through the sky in long exposures. Star trails can be a desired effect when done for much longer exposures, but in other cases we want points of light to represent how we see the stars with our eyes. To achieve points of light you can use a simple rule that's often called the "500 Rule".
Kodak announced it would be jumping into the smartphone game late last year, and today the company did. The device is called the IM5 and is a stupidly simple Android device that is geared toward helping people snap, share, and print photos with minimal hassle.
What does opulence look like in the world of selfie shooting? The Tonino Lamborghini 88 Tauri, that's what. It's a ridiculous $6,000 limited edition smartphone designed for people with extremely deep pockets and a yearning to snap showy selfies in style.