I recently captured this picture of Jupiter, the 5th planet from the Sun. It was well received and many liked it. Lots of people wanted to know how to take a picture like this and what it would cost, and surprisingly I did this on a relatively low budget for astrophotography.

Here's a rundown of how it was done, including a list of all the gear I used.

While hiking in the Beskydy Mountains on the border of Slovakia and the Czech Republic last week, photographer Jan Bainar captured this stunning image of frost-covered tree trunks.

Smartphones have revolutionized the way we go about our everyday lives. And while more often than not they’re used for more trivial tasks, there are times where their ubiquity and decreasing costs play a vital role in far more meaningful endeavors.

One such case is Peek Retina, a smartphone camera adapter and accompanying app that enables anyone with the know-how to perform an extensive eye exam on anyone... anywhere. The humanitarian potential is obvious.

Videographers need not apply, but photographers interested in picking up their first 4K Ultra HD monitor for photo editing have a heck of a deal they can take advantage of today. Microsoft is currently selling the 28-inch Dell P2815Q 4K Ultra HD monitor for only $300.

That's $200 less than retail and one of the cheapest prices we've ever seen on a 4K monitor.

Few countries celebrate Christmas as beautifully as Austria. Vienna in particular is known for its buildings adorned in decorations, streets illuminated by lights, and seasonal markets called ‘Christkindlmarkt.’

It’s these festive elements that inspired time-lapse production team FilmSpektakel to create a unique time-lapse of Vienna’s winter wonderland -- unique because the whole thing is captured refracted through a snow globe.

There are few things that symbolize the innocence of childhood the way a teddy bear does. A stuffed companion who is as real to a 2-year-old as anything made of flesh and blood, at that age the teddy bear isn't just something you play with... it plays back.

It's this innocence and wonder that photographer Adrian Murray captures in his touching photographs of his two boys, Emerson and Grayson, and their toy bear.

While the popularity of some creative photography techniques rises and falls, there are some photo tricks that continue to stand the test of time. Here, we’ve hand-picked 6 classic pictures that you should know how to make – and explain how to do just that.

Given Comet 67P is, after all, a rock, and given that gray rocks are not uncommon, you would be forgiven for thinking that the photos of the comet that we've seen thus far were in color. That, however, is not the case. What you're seeing above is actually the first true color image of Comet 67P taken by the ESA's Rosetta spacecraft.

It just started as a cool idea. New Zealand photographer Tom Hollow had a broken couch he needed to get rid of, and so he decided to burn it and take pictures. Then he decided to put a bride on it because, in his words, it "would look cooler with a bride."

It wasn't until after the shoot that he realized the images fit a particular storyline quite well: divorce.

Christopher Mitchell recently breathed some photographic life into a pice of technology many of us probably have languishing away in some drawer. With the help of an Arduino board, he’s found a way to Frankenstein a Texas Instruments graphing calculator and Game Boy Camera into the ArTICam: a 128–128 grayscale selfie machine.

Here's a simple photo idea that photographer Nick Fancher came up with for the folks over at Digital Photography School. If you wanna add some holiday flair to your portrait sessions this Christmas season on the cheap, try shooting through a $5 set of Christmas lights.

One afternoon, while hanging out with his coworkers at Bozeman Camera, photographer Tanner Johnson and his friend Beau Larson had an idea: they decided to recreate the Game of Thrones Season 1 poster with camera gear instead of swords.

From the Iron Throne to the Stark family's sword 'Ice,' all of the sharp pointing things used to kill people were replaced with huge lenses to create an awesome photographic version.

This is going to be a VERY long year, and we have J.J. Abrams to blame. Since its release on Friday, the trailer for Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens has swept across the Internet like a wildfire.

But as with almost anything viral, it hasn’t completely taken its course until it’s been parodied and recreated a handful of times. This viral sensation is no exception, and we have our first viral attempt thanks to LEGO fanatic Snooperking, who recreated the entire trailer from start to finish using stop motion animation.

Advertising imagery for everything from basketball shoes to weightlifting attire usually features muscled athletes performing some amazing (if occasionally Photoshop-enhanced) feat. Photographer Dean Bradshaw decided to turn that idea on its head with his series Golden Years.

In astrophotography, a star tracker is a piece of gear that compensates for the Earth’s rotation so you can take sharp long exposure photographs of the night sky.

Unfortunately, not everyone can get their hands on one of these, and so we've dug up this awesome tutorial by astrophotographer Forrest Tanaka on how to capture impressive astrophotography images without a star tracker.

The most poignant revelations often come at the most unlikely of times. That's what happen to photographer Elly Heise, who created the touching project #DaughterDoesMyMakeup, a series of portraits of mothers sporting makeup their young daughters did for them.

A new FAA report is confirming what we imagine many responsible camera drone enthusiasts fear: the number of idiotic drone pilots is on the rise, and they're threatening to ruin it for everyone or, far worse, cause a full-scale air disaster.

If you need some extra storage or you've been waiting for a good quality portable hard drive at a great price, we've found a deal you should definitely jump on. The Western Digital 2TB My Passport Ultra is selling at an all-time low price of $80 right now on eBay.

Amidst the many photos of hate, anger, sadness and sometimes outright destruction that have flooded the media since a grand jury decided not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, sparking riots and protests across the US, there are glimmers of hope and humanity.

One such glimmer was captured by Oregon-based freelance photographer Jonny Nguyen at a Ferguson demonstration in Portland earlier this week.

While working with CBS News to capture footage for a 60 Minutes segment about the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, filmmaker Danny Cooke got to explore the haunted landscape there in a way most people haven't yet: by drone.

The resulting video, released just 4 days ago, is called Postcards from Pripyat, Chernobyl, and it's every bit as eerie as you would imagine.

22-year-old Alexis Taylor recently shared an email she received from her 96-year-old photographer grandfather, and it's just too wonderful not to share.

In the age of the iPad, there still is something glorious about a photo book. Here are a few of our favorites from 2014, so send Santa (or Hanukah Harry) a quick tweet, and get a big dose of inspiration this Holiday season.

Micro-drones are typically thought of as more of a toy rather than a tool. If you want to capture real recreational aerial footage, you buy a bigger, heftier drone, right? Well, not necessarily. ZANO wants to change all that by packing both power and ease of use into a tiny package that measures just 2.5 x 2.5-inches and weighs just over 1.2lbs.

As Movember, or No Shave November, or whatever you're calling this month of bearded and mustached madness and charity, comes to a close, we're sharing perhaps the most appropriate photo series we could find.

A set of three images captured for the razor brand Schick by photographer Troy Goodall in collaboration with animal photographer Stephen Stewart, Free Your Skin features quintessential hipsters showing off beards made of... fuzzy animals.

While covering the "re-occupation” protest in Mong Kok on Thursday night, an Apple Daily cameraman was arrested by police after he allegedly assaulted a police officer with his camera and then resisted arrest.

There's just one problem with this story, told to the press by police: it's not true. The video above captured by a South China Morning Post reporter paints a very different picture.

There are some great Black Friday deals out there today, but we're not sure anybody is going to be able to touch the discount Hasselblad is offering on the Stellar Special Edition. So if you're interested in buying a luxury version of the Sony RX100 Mark I that doubles as a collector's item, listen up.

All of the Stellar Special Edition cameras, which usually retail for a whopping $3,300, are selling for $1,000 on B&H photo right now -- that's $2,300 off, very nearly a 70% discount.

Astrophotographer extraordinaire Göran Strand created this neat composite image to explore an interesting 'what if?' scenario: What if your eyes could see the sun the way a Hydrogen Alpha Telescope does? What would a sunset look like then?

Product photography -- even when done with cheap gear like this awesome tutorial using an iPhone, an IKEA lamp and some flashlights -- usually involves multiple light sources. But there is a way around that, as Laya Gerlock over on DIY Photography demonstrates in this awesome tutorial titled "How to Shoot a Perfect Watch with Nothing but an iPad."

Self-taught Canadian photographer Elizabeth Gadd described her photography niche better, perhaps, than anybody else when she said, "I, uh… shoot landscapey stuff… with people in them."

That, however, is something of an understatement. The 21-year-old photographer's body of work does, indeed contain "landscapey stuff with people in them," but that hardly does the spectacular vistas she photographs justice.

Despite the video's title, the short, encouraging snippet above from photographer Joel Grimes isn't about finding a specific set of characteristics that define "a great photograph." Instead, it's about finding out what a great photograph is to you.

It's a matter of taste, discovering your personal vision, and then coming to terms with the fact that not everybody is going to love what you do.

Time-lapse photography seems pretty straightforward, right? You just capture a stream of images over a designated time frame and put them together in post-production to create your video. But as simple as that may sound, there are a few basic elements to the post-processing of your images that can greatly alter what the final product will look like.

Here to go over just a few of those basics, including batch-editing for color correction, de-flickering images and more, is J.P. Morgan of The Slanted Lens.

Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner has been randomly selected and announced below.

Want to attend Gulf Photo Plus 2015 in Dubai next year? We're giving away a free trip to attend the photography festival from March 6, 2015 through March 13, 2015.

One lucky winner will receive: free airfare to and from Dubai from your nearest major international airport (~$1,200 if flying from the US), 5 nights at the event's official hotel (~$700), ~$1,000 worth of workshops during the event, and a $32 free pass to PhotoFriday at the event. The total package is worth roughly $3,000.

Photographer Zeb Andrews prefers to slow the world down when he captures a photograph. The Portland-based photographer first began shooting with a pinhole camera purely for fun, but little did he know that, within a matter of a few years his work would take him to Turkey where he would share his love of pinhole photography with Syrian child refugees.

DJI better watch out, because the camera that is commonly attached to its most popular line of Drones might soon have a drone of its very own. That's right, we're talking about GoPro, and the Wall Street Journal claims the company is planning to release its own line of drones next year.

Here's a wonderful little gift idea (stocking stuffer perhaps?) that’s sure to impress one of the photography lovers on your list this holiday season. It’s the Poladarium 2015, and it's a peel-away calendar where each day presents a new Polaroid photograph for you to admire.

The Sony a7II and its impressive 5-axis in-body stabilization has generated a ton of well-deserved buzz since it was officially announced. There's only one problem: it wasn't officially announced in the US yet.

The main announcement was made in Japan and no US release date and pricing has been available... until today! The news just dropped, and American Sony fans can enjoy Thanksgiving tomorrow knowing they can have the a7II in time for Christmas.

"I got fired on Twitter last night." That's how NJ.com photographer Andrew Mills starts his side of a story that went viral on social media two days ago. Thanks to a photo that seems to show Mills missing what might have been one of the greatest photos of his career, social media tagged him with the tongue in cheek caption "this guy used to be a sports photographer."

Except that he did get the shot, or at least a shot... and the shot he got is a testament to how good of a sports photographer he really is.

You might think that Thanksgiving day has always consisted of football, the Macy's parade, and copious amounts of tryptophan, but as these old photos from deep within the Library of Congress' archives show, 100 years ago, Thanksgiving was something else entirely.

Here's a cool patent that gives new purpose to a camera accessory you don't hear talked about much: the body cap. Chances are you don't give your camera's body cap much thought, but the body cap Canon just patented would serve a dual purpose by not just keeping your sensor protected, but also cleaning the contacts on your lens mount in the process.

Approximately 40% of food is thrown out in America each year. This amounts to roughly $165 billion (with a ‘b’) worth of food, which could feed half of the 50 million Americans who struggle to put food on the table.

It’s tough statistics like these that inspired photographer Henry Hargreaves and his friend and food stylist Caitlin Levin to create the series Power Hungry: a poignant set of photos that illustrates the inequality between the rich and the poor by comparing what each class's meals have looked like throughout history.

High speed photography is all about fast-flash; the faster your flash, the faster the instant you can adequately freeze on a digital sensor. Modern strobes are pretty good at this, with flash durations as fast as 1/20,000 of a second, but a Bristol-based company Vela Labs is about to take high-speed photography to unheard-of heights.

Introducing the Vela One, ‘the world’s first high speed LED flash' that boasts a flash speed starting at 1/2,000,000 second, or 500 nanoseconds.

When you look at the photographs in her series Into the Umbra, photographer Julia Bennett wants you to think you're looking at outer space. And then, just as your mind is struggling to expand to encompass the far reaches of the solar system where the image was captured, that's when she wants you to realize that you're looking at something you could find in any old liter of Sea Water.

Her images weren't captured with a telescope peering into the heavens, but a microscope that peers into the micro worlds inside droplets of seawater.

In August of 2013, we shared the news that Thomson Reuters had dropped all of its freelance sports photographers in North America in favor of a deal they struck with USA Today Sports Images. But it appears that sad move was only the beginning.

Earlier this week, more members of the photography staff at Thomson Reuters were let go in the multi-national media company’s ongoing effort to downsize and focus its workforce, especially in the imaging department.

Minutes ago, Hasselblad officially unveiled the Stellar II, another Sony rebrand that will likely draw some ridicule from the photo community -- except that Hassy has changed their approach a bit with this camera.

Right in the first line of the press release, they're making one thing clear: this camera is "not intended to be judged against other cameras," but is, "rather, conceived and crafted exclusively for Aficionados, Collectors and Connoisseurs."

Then & Now style photo series are anything but uncommon, but what if the "then" you want to compare to "now" happened before the invention of photography? You would think that would be a deal-breaker, but one computer graphics manager and gaming enthusiast found a way around this issue.

For his 'Then & Now' series, Damien Hypolite printed out screenshots from the game Assassin's Creed Unity -- which is based during the French Revolution -- and then went around holding them up against modern-day Paris.

Flickr -- a site that sometimes seems like the punching bag of the photo community -- is again taking heat from photographers, this time over their recent announcement that people can select from millions of Creative Commons-licensed photographs to buy as wall art.

The photos are being sold for profit, but none of that profit will go to the photographers who took the shots, and some of these photographers are speaking up about what they see as an injustice.

Inspired by Alex Koloskov's popular iPhone vs. Hasselblad whisky glass video, photographer Tilo Gockel decided to give cheap gear professional product photography a try of his own -- and he knocked it out of the park.

Using just an old iPhone 4s, an IKEA lamp, two LED flashlights, and a few Translumfoil cards (you can use parchment), he captured the photograph you see above.

Ever wonder what 4.5 stops of optical image stabilization actually looks like? Now you can see it for yourself.

Red Bull is known for its clever advertising and incredible collection of sponsored adrenaline junkies. So, to make the most of both of these assets, the company recently decided to pair up with wind surfer Jason Polakow to create one of the most intense and immersive ‘tiny planet’ videos you've probably ever seen.

Footage shot with smartphones has become much more common in the world of journalism today, where quick turnaround times are just as important as getting the shot. Knowing this, one CNN cameraman wanted to see if it was possible for a smartphone (namely the iPhone 6) to keep up with a much larger, traditional broadcast camera.