There have been a number of cases in recent years of people getting struck and killed by trains after doing photo or film shoots on train tracks. One of the cases last year involved the filming of a movie titled "Midnight Rider." While filming on a narrow trestle bridge, a train passed through and killed one of the crew members.

The director, Randall Miller, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and has now been sentenced to two years in prison and eight years of probation for his recklessness.

Every day about 200 million photographs get uploaded to Facebook. That’s almost double the number of all the books that have ever been published in human history. And that’s just Facebook, I’m not even mentioning Instagram, Snapchat, or just the photos everybody takes and doesn’t even post online.

While taking all those pictures, most people don’t really think about what they’re actually doing, or how the process works. But if they did think about it, I guess their reasoning for that process would be somewhat like this...

I often shoot time-lapse photos in harsh outdoor environments, and over the years I have discovered a number of odd items that are useful for my work. One of them is sanitary napkins (AKA sanitary pads).

If you do a search for photos of Palm Springs online, the vast majority of the results will show the city basked in the rays of Southern California sunshine. Photographer Tom Blachford wanted to take a different approach. For his project Midnight Modern, Blachford photographed the modernist homes of the resort city under only the light of a full moon.

The SoundBarrel is a concept Bluetooth speaker design that shutterbugs should feel right at home with. Created by South Korean industrial designer SaeJoung Kou, the device looks like a wooden camera lens and features a nifty aperture mechanism that's used to change the volume.

This photo of President Obama leading a commemorative march in Selma, Alabama, was featured on the front page of the New York Times this past weekend. The event was attended by notable politicians from both sides of the aisle, including former president George W. Bush, who was also on the front line of the march. Times readers who noticed that Bush was notably absent from the photo began to criticize the paper, and soon news organizations began to report on this omission as well.

Italian video production team Moviechrome recently filmed this short interview with renowned American …

Want to see what cats look like without their fluffy coats of fur? Look no further than the Sphynx cat, which was developed specifically to look naked by breeders in Europe starting in the 1960s. Photographer Alicia Rius recently shot a series titled "Sphynxes" that explores the strange appearance of these cats.

Some jokester has put up a listing on eBay for a DIY version of the new Leica M-P "Correspondent" edition. Carrying a €33,000 (~$35,300) price tag, the unusual camera kit comes with an ordinary Leica M6 and a small square of sandpaper.

Director of photography Miguel de Olaso, Macgregor and architectural photographer Art Sanchez have been working on a new technique called the "Quicklapse" that allows them to achieve 8K video with cameras such as the Nikon D800, which is normally limited to 1080p. The trick involves capturing 36.3MP still photos in burst mode and then using interpolation in post to turn the images into real-time footage.

The video above shows an example of what a Quicklapse video looks like (it's at a much lower resolution for web viewing, but the original data was shot at 8K).

There are an estimated 3 million people in the United States who have stockpiled food and supplies in preparation for the end of the world -- people known as "doomsday preppers."

Photographer Henry Hargreaves recently turned his camera on these individuals for a new photo series, creating a series of images showing survival meals the preppers would eat in the event of the end of the world.

For the past 8 months, landscape photographer Peter Cox has been taking his camera drone up and down the wild and rugged west coast of Ireland, capturing the beauty of the coastline as its bathed in dramatic light. The 4-minute film above is a "highlight reel" of his journey titled "Atlantic Light."

I had a fun, cool portrait shoot with Pharrell Williams recently in a small suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Most of my celebrity portrait assignments are in hotel rooms and the first thing you have to consider when you arrive is: How do I turn a room I've seen a thousand times into a photo studio?

If you’ve never used a circular polarizer filter before, here’s an interesting video by …

Taking photos is one of the main ways people use smartphones these days, and phone makers are trying all kinds of ideas for one-upping its competitors in photo features. ASUS just showed off its latest idea today: a powerful xenon flash dongle that attaches to the back of the phone.

Is this a case of sensible anti-terrorism measures or racial profiling and an inappropriate suspicion of photography? Police in New York are currently looking for two men of Middle Eastern descent who were spotted taking pictures in front of multiple Jewish synagogues in Brooklyn.

VSCO updated its popular VSCO Cam app today to introduce Copy and Paste functionality that helps speed up your workflow. Instead of editing individual photos at a time, you can now copy the edits from one photo and paste them onto multiple images.

Note: This is part two of a series on depth of field. you can read part one here.

This video is seen from a third person point-of-view, perpendicular to that of what the camera user would see. Depth of field is a phenomenon of near and far, forward and backward from the point of focus. Changing our point of view rotates the axis of the depth of the field 90˚ so that we may view it laterally across the X axis. This helps us better understand the optic principles at play. The overlays in this video visually quantify the changing depth of field at the given lens setting.

The style editor-at-large of Vogue is receiving criticism for being insensitive and "out of touch" after sharing (and subsequently deleting) a photograph of a homeless woman in Paris reading a copy of Vogue magazine.

Photographs by Patrick T. Fallon for ProPublica, captions by Michael Grabell Joel Ramirez was paralyzed from the waist down …

English rock band The Police sold over 75 million records over the course of their decade-long career, making them one of the best selling music artists of all time. In addition to being the band's lead guitarist, Andy Summers was also a passionate photographer who captured behind-the-scenes photos of the band at the peak of their popularity.

Those photographs will be featured in a new documentary later this year, titled Can't Stand Losing You: Surviving the Police.

Here’s a little comic titled “Art Project” by …

The woman who was captured in a viral video last year attacking a drone photographer and calling him a "pervert" may have her charges dropped and record cleared.

A camera used on satellites to monitor vegetation from space may soon help save lives in the battle against cancer. The special camera will be capable of peering into human skin to see things that are invisible to the naked eye for the purpose of detecting diseases early.

Here’s a 365-day project that took a tremendous amount of planning and dedication. On January 8, 2014, Dean Smith …

Vienna, Austria-based time-lapse production duo FilmSpektakel has just released a new time-lapse of their home country that took 2 years, 600 sequences, and 5 terabytes of photos to create. It's a beautiful taste of Austria's beauty in both its natural landscapes and manmade cities.

Google's well-known Street View service is one of several monumental efforts to document the world's travel routes through ground-level photos. These projects generally use fancy camera rigs on cars, backpacks, and even camels to capture their images.

Mapillary is a startup that's trying to do things a little differently. Instead of taking the grunt work of photo-taking upon itself, the service is building a crowdsourced Street View competitor using photos submitted by users.

Without context, the images in Cosmos by photographer Marcus DeSieno may look like colorful and abstract images created with some mysterious method. Read the description and captions, and you may experience a sense of revulsion.

Each of the photos was created by introducing photographic film to bacteria collected from various places, both unusual and ubiquitous. The microscopic organisms eat away at the film, creating a series of abstract artworks.

Want to improve the way you look in portraits, or improve the portraits that you shoot? Here are 9 common reasons people look awful in portraits and tips on how to fix them.

Photographer Levi Bettweiser of the Rescued Film …

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce is a French photography pioneer who is credited with capturing the oldest surviving photograph of a real world scene, a print made back in 1825. In addition to that famous image, titled View from the Window at Le Gras, Niépce also created a number of other photos that are recognized as being some of the earliest photos ever made.

Astronomers have captured the first photo of a single supernova showing up in four different places of a single image due to a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. The "lens" in this case was a massive galaxy that is capable of using its gravity to bend and magnify light.

The popular YouTube tech channel LinusTechTips recently did an SD card showdown to see how the actual performance of the cards compares to what's written on the labels. One of the things they did was a Canon 6D test, the results of which can be seen in the graphic above (here's a larger version).

Photographer Craig Boudreaux was personally impacted by the devastation left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. Among the homes that were destroyed by rains, winds, and flooding were his grandmother's home, his friends' homes, and even his childhood home.

A year after Katrina struck, and after the flood waters had long gone, Boudreaux revisited some ravaged areas in New Orleans, capturing the aftermath of a storm that changed so many lives.

Los Angeles has agreed to pay a $50,000 settlement to three photographers after they were detained by LA County Sheriffs while taking pictures in public places. As part of the settlement, the city will also teach its sheriff deputies that photography is not a crime.

During past few weeks I have been working on a new picture I had in mind. This time I already knew the title: "The Rain Maker." It's a picture made with the collodion photographic process that was invented back in 1851.

This guy from Trollstation recently did an experiment to see what kind of …

It's not just the megapixel war that's raging in the world of digital cameras. One of the big competitions going on is the battle of powerful zoom lenses on compact cameras, and the zoom capabilities on the latest "superzoom" cameras are pretty ridiculous. The video above shows what the new Canon SX60 can do with its 65x optical zoom (and 4x digital zoom tacked on at the end).

As a photographer, I’m constantly striving for new ways to stand out. While considering that some of the greatest opportunities to create a lasting impression on a potential client in my realm (motorcycle and automotive photography) are at trade shows, or highly publicized events, sometimes all you have is one shot.

But how do I set myself apart from the hundreds of other hobbyists walking the showroom floor with a DSLR, a Facebook fan page and a business card itching for work?

Could machines be trained to tell the difference between a beautiful portrait photo and a not-so-pleasing one? Beauty is pretty subjective, but scientists are trying to boil down the common properties of beautiful digital portrait photos so that a computer can be trained to spot them. Along the way, they're revealing interesting new things about what people look for in portraits.

It pays to have a lot of Instagram followers -- literally. Top users on the photo-sharing service these days are finding that their simple picture snapping can be turned into real dollars, and a lot of them at that. The numbers may astound you: some users are receiving thousands of dollars in exchanging for sharing a single photo that promotes a company's products.

Since last year, Canadian photographer Daniela Majic has been working on an ongoing series titled "Secret Garden." It's a collection of surreal portraits created with elaborate handmade costumes and impressive garden sets constructed inside Majic's tiny attic.

Podo is a new wireless and sticky camera that serves as an on-the-go photo booth. Instead of shooting pictures of yourself at arms length, with a selfie stick, or with the help of a stranger, you'll be able to stick the camera to most flat surfaces and trigger the shot with your phone.

Update: This giveaway is now over. Please see the update at the end of this post.

We love our readers. As a thank you for being a faithful follower of this blog, we're doing another big giveaway. One lucky reader will receive a $1,000 gift card to B&H Photo Video for anything in the store your heart desires.

Apple has sent out an email reminder to Aperture owners, reminding them that Aperture will no longer be available for purchase starting this spring after it's replaced by the new Photos for OS X app. Aperture users can migrate their libraries to the new Photos app, which is now available for anyone to try through the OS X Beta program.

Jake Niece is a "jake of all trades" who uses both mind and muscle in his multiple lines of work. In the summer he works as a wildland firefighter in Colorado, and in the winter he works on snowmaking crews. In both seasons he carries a camera and creates beautiful images through his passion for photography, which he has since turned into a third profession.

If you appreciate simple pranks, here’s a photo-related one you may find amusing. Greg Benson of …

Dana Keller has made a name for himself as a talented photo colorizer, using his Photoshop skills to offer an idea of what historical black-and-white photos might have looked like had the photographer been able to shoot in color. The video above is a 6-minute look at how Keller approaches the task of colorization.

As smartphone photography and selfie culture become more ubiquitous, we're starting to see new products that aim to make snapping smartphone shots simpler. First came the selfie stick, and now there's a new product called the Divoom Bluetune-Bean. It's an ultra-portable Bluetooth speaker that has a feature that sets it apart: on the side is a shutter button for triggering the camera on your phone.

In August 2014, photographer Zhenia Bulawka and her boyfriend Christian took their three dogs on a special trip to the beach. One of their beloved dogs, an 11-year-old American Staffordshire Terrier named Mr. Dukes, was dying of cancer, and Bulawka wanted to give him a vacation of a lifetime before he passed away.