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.

Fujifilm has officially announced the 16-55mm f/2.8, a lens that the world has known of since last year when Fuji released a detailed roadmap of upcoming products.

Nikon has announced two new lenses alongside its new D5500 entry-level DSLR: the 300mm f/4 telephoto and the 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6 II versatile zoom.

After weeks of leaked details and photos, the Nikon D5500 was finally made official today. It's an entry-level replacement to the D5300, and is the company's first DSLR to feature a full-fledged touchscreen LCD on the back.

The shutter on my old Canon 5D Mark II died while on a trip to Fiji earlier this year. It happened quickly; I was shooting a panorama when horizontal black bars started appearing in some of the shots. After about 10 more photos in between turning the camera off and on again, it was dead. The shutter was stuck closed and powering the camera on yielded a helpless sounding soft ‘clunk’ and an “Error 20″ message.

I was quoted around $500 to get this fixed at a repair shop. But.. an OEM replacement shutter is only $90 on eBay. So, after about 6 months of putting it off I finally built up enough #YOLO fever to have a crack at fixing it myself, saving $400 and learning a few things along the way.

The first leaked photographs have emerged showing the Nikon D5500 DSLR and two new lenses: the 300mm f/4 and the 55-200mm f/4-5.6.

Smartphones don't need to be bulky to offer a camera with optical zoom. Just take the new ASUS ZenFone Zoom, which packs a 3x optical zoom system into a phone that's less than 12mm thick. It's the world's thinnest 3x optical zoom smartphone.

A new Chinese lens manufacturer called Venus Optics has unveiled a new 60mm f/2.8 ultra macro lens that it claims is the world's first 2:1 magnification lens with infinity focus.

22-year-old Vietnamese photographer Nguyen Dinh An is making headlines in his country. The attention isn't for his photographs, but for the bizarre way in which he captures those photos. As the video above shows, Nguyen turns framing his pictures into something of a performance art.

Canon has refreshed its PowerShot compact camera line with five new cameras. Three SX series cameras feature wireless connectivity, while two ELPH updates feature simple spec improvements.

Canon today announced a new product called the Connect Station CS100. It's a system designed for storing, viewing, and sharing your digital photos and videos.

Yongnuo has had quite a busy few months. In addition to the Canon lens clones that have generated quite a bit of buzz, the company has also quietly created a cheaper version of the Canon 2X III teleconverter.

A company called J.B. Camera Designs is selling a line of premium bamboo grips for a number of popular digital cameras. These accessories attach to the base of your camera and are designed to add "improved ergonomics, increased protection, and a unique look."

During the glory days of film photography, Fujifilm ran one of its major production facilities in Tilburg, the Netherlands. The plant was founded in 1982 and became one of the biggest manufacturing sites for the company outside of Japan, with nearly 1,000 workers producing film (reportedly up to 200 million rolls per year), photo paper, and other imaging equipment.

In 2006, Fujifilm shut down much of the operations at the plant, and now the company is auctioning off the equipment that has been sitting idle for the past 9 years.

The Nikkor 400mm f/2.8E FL ED VR is a new $12,000 lens for sports and wildlife photographers. One of the new features to appear in the lens is a vibration reduction mode called VR Sport. The video above offers a look at how VR Sport compares to VR Normal and no stabilization.

The lifelogging camera market is starting to get crowded. One day after Narrative announced a new version of its wearable, always-snapping camera, a new challenger has emerged. It's called the SnapCam, and is made by a company called iON (better known for making home and action cameras).

Want to cut down on the size and weight of your photo storage system when shooting on the go? You may want to check out the new Seagate Seven external hard drive. It's the world's thinnest -- and arguably most beautiful -- external hard drive.

For his ongoing project "Lands in Limbo," photographer Narayan Mahon has been visiting de-facto countries that aren't recognized as countries by most of the world. Unless you're into geography and/or politics, you may never have heard of any of the places before: Abkhazia, Nagorno Karabakh, Northern Cyprus, Somaliland, and Transnistria.

Narrative has just announced the second generation of its wearable lifelogging camera, and the new model features wireless connectivity and a better camera for constantly documenting your life.

"Barbie Blad" by photographer Hamid Blad is a series of portraits that mixes the old and the new. The oldness is contributed by the fact that they are created using the 19th-century collodion process, while the newness is due to the fact that each portrait is of a Barbie doll.

Here's some news that flew under our radar late last year: in December 2014, a family in Minnesota became the majority owner of Polaroid through a $70 million deal.

Here's a behind-the-scenes look at how photographer Tomás Munita journeyed through the landscape of Patagonia in Chile to document the lives of bagualeros -- cowboys who make a living by rounding up feral livestock.

What is the current state of the professional photography industry in the United States? Back in April 2014, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released statistics about the photography profession from May 2013. The data offers an interesting look into where photographers are living and how much they're earning.

18-year-old Saar Oz of Creavite created this beautiful and inspirational video for people who are just starting out in a creative field such as photography. It's easy to become frustrated (and even give up) when you experience "the gap" between your skills and your tastes, but the important thing is to never give up.

Spinning some burning steel wool around on the end of a rope is popular as a way to create dazzling long exposure photographs. It can also be used for dazzling video as well.

Photographer Richie Johnston created the video above by capturing a woman spinning steel wool in a forest and then reversing the footage. It's titled "Ignition Sequences."

Photographer and film director Naren Wilks created this mind-bending music video by arranging DSLRs around a circular green screen room. When the perspectives of the cameras are combined and synchronized, a "rotationally symmetric, kaleidoscopic world" is created. The song is "Fear & Delight" from the album Puppet Loosely Strung by The Correspondents.

Polaroid wants to be a big player in the online photo sharing game. The company has partnered with Blipfoto to rebrand the photo-a-day sharing service as Polaroid Blipfoto.

Israel-based astrophotographer Gadi Eidelheit recently managed to capture the International Space Station crossing the moon on camera. In the video above, we see how fast the ISS appears to travel when seen by an observer here on Earth (it spends less than 1 second in front of the moon).

I visit San Francisco often to walk the streets with camera in hand, hoping to capture life as it happens. Invariably I am asked for change and/or a cigarette. For the most part I try to be generous, but as a non-smoker I’m not able to oblige. I then wondered what would happen if the situation was reversed: instead of being asked for a cigarette I would offer them to random people from all walks of life.

San Francisco-based cycling team/brand Mash SF is selling a line of “Purist” water …

Up until recently, Tao Liu was just an unknown water meter reader in China with an interest in photography. Then people started noticing his clever photos captured on sidewalks, and now Liu has become one of China's hottest street photographers.

Here's another case to file under "It's a bad idea to fly camera drones too close to animals": James and Mira Raley of The Honey Badger recently tried to do a "quick flight" with their camera drone over a group of male lions. Unfortunately for them, they lost control during the flight, crashed the drone into a nearby tree, and watched helplessly as the lions pounced on the fallen "prey" with the camera still rolling.

The Flex is a new light solution that comes in the form of a bendable white mat covered with LED lights. It's designed to be a flexible (literally) light source for photographers and videographers that can illuminate spaces that traditional lights may be too clunky for.

The short film above, titled "Che - A Moment in Time," was created entirely out of still photographs. Animator Bennie Melwin created the experimental short film by taking historical photographs -- including the iconic "Guerrillero Heroico" photo of Che Guevara -- and bringing the scenes to life through clever digital trickery.

By day, Robert Jahns is a digital artist and art director based in Germany. By night, he's known as nois7 on Instagram and runs a popular account boasting more than 600,000 followers. His stream of images consists of dreamlike photos that are often clearly the result of compositing, but there's one hidden fact that sets Jahns apart: his editing is done strictly on his phone.

Graphic designer Luca Masini of Zerouno Design created a series of graphics that feature questions or phrases that commonly annoy photographers.

Remember when I wrote "Dear New Photographer..." a few months ago? One of the big points I emphasized was valuing your photography and business skills.

Every year, on New Year's Day, the Internet is swarming with shiny new 52 Week Projects or 365 Week Projects directed specifically to photographers. And don't get me wrong -- I love these projects! The idea behind them is to get people shooting more, and shooting more outside their own comfort zone.

Famous professional athletes have all kinds of post-playing careers. Some stay involved as coaches, others become TV analysts for the sports they love, and a few strike it rich in business as entrepreneurs. For at least two former baseball stars, their interests have led them down a different path: professional photography.

3D projections are often used nowadays to create eye-popping visuals on flat surfaces such as the sides of buildings or on basketball courts, but could the same concept be done out in the wild where things aren't flat and orderly? Photographer Tarek Mawad and animator Friedrich van Schoor recently decided to try it out.

What resulted is the video above, titled "Projections in the Forest". The two artists spent six weeks illuminating various things in nature with a powerful projector and then capturing the results on camera.

Less than a week before Shelby Swink's wedding in November 2014, her fiancé sat her down, told her he did not love her, and just like that, the wedding was off. As she mourned the abrupt end of her four-year relationship, the idea of a "trash the dress" photo shoot came up. Swink decided that it would be the perfect way for her to mark the occasion and let go of the pain, so she enlisted the help of photographer Elizabeth Hoard to set the photo shoot in motion.

Here’s a lighthearted video that’s going viral on the Internet: over the course of 2014, …

For its 100th issue back in 2013, Vogue China invited renowned fashion photographer Mario Testino to help create a special issue by contributing every one of the photos inside. Testino delivered, and 153 pages of photographs went out to 1.2 million subscribers of the magazine.

Testino recently released a set of videos that offer an in depth look at how he went about tackling this ambitious project and a couple of similar ones he did for other Vogue magazines (Note: there's some nudity in the videos).

One second per day videos have gotten quite popular in recent years, and now there are even apps that can help you do the project. Ben Schmidt of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in Canada decided to take the concept to the next level by delivering a speech over the course of a year by saying one word to his camera per day.

"Portraits of Time" is a series of photographs showing the oldest and most majestic trees on the face of the Earth. Photographer Beth Moon traveled to the far corners of the world over a period of 14 years in the process of shooting the shots, traveling to remote regions where the trees have largely remained undisturbed by mankind.

"Seven Generations of American Women" is a project by Los Angeles-based photographer Christine McConnell in which she recreated her family portraits going back 200 years. The series starts with her great-great-great-grandmother and ends in the present day.

We've come to the end of yet another year of covering the latest and greatest in the wonderful world of photography. Before we head into 2015, here's a look back at the 10 most popular stories published on PetaPixel over the course of 2014.

One of the big stories in the world of camera gear this past year has been Chinese manufacturer Yongnuo's expansion into cheap clones of Canon lenses. While Canon shooters are buzzing about their new budget glass options, Nikon photographers have been wondering if Yongnuo will ever offer clones of their favorite lenses.

We've got the scoop that answers that question: Yongnuo will offer cheaper clones of Nikon lenses by the end of 2015.