We've shared in the past how a broken lens can be used for "freelensing," or taking tilt-shift-esque photographs.

Photographer and lens hacker Witono Halim did this by buying a broken 50mm f/1.8 online for $25, sawing a piece off, and combining everything into a ugly-yet-functional lens with $2 of duct tape.

If you ever hand your phone over to family and friends with hesitance, afraid they might swipe over one photo too far when you’re trying to show them a few photos, Microsoft Research’s new app Xim might just save you from a few nerve-wracking moments.

The FlashDisc by Fstoppers is a portable softbox that can fit into your pocket when its not in use, thanks to a design that allows it to fold up in a manner similar to portable light reflectors. It allows photographers to achieve soft directional light in situations where larger softboxes are impractical.

Instagram’s Hyperlapse app is a simple way to create smooth hyper lapse videos. But beyond its basic functionality is a hidden set of features that cranks up its capabilities. It may be secret, but it's quite easy to get to.

Update: Canon tells us that "The 'Director' spot bears no relation to the individual profiled in this story," and that it is "a completely fictional character."

Canon's big "See Impossible" marketing push has received quite a bit of mockery from the creative community, as people hoped for more from the hyped-up countdown than an ad campaign and a couple of inspirational videos.

There's also a new development that hurts Canon's efforts even more: it turns out that one of the two people featured by Canon didn't actually shoot with Canon, and he's calling the company out on it.

Feminists in France are demanding that a statue based on Alfred Eisenstaedt's iconic ‘VJ-day in Times Square’ photo be taken down. They say that the original image it was based on is one that portrays sexual assault.

Nearly $2 million in cameras and production equipment were stolen from three Fremont, California businesses over the weekend. Thieves broke into the offices of Black Magic Design, Mac House Productions, and Core Microsystems, grabbing pricey high-end gear and hauling it off by the boxful.

The team over at DigitalRev is always thinking of new and interesting ideas. And their latest is an intriguing little camera exchange and review they've aptly titled ‘Camera Swap.’

A rule of thumb in design is that form follows function; however, with these clever and colorful pendants, you don’t have to worry about a compromise in either department.

Created by Vienna-based design firm TaliaYStudio, these pendants serve as jewelry, but are also built to function as colored filters when placed in front of your camera.

If you lived in Europe or Africa -- or if you're in the US and the thought of getting up between 2 and 5 in the morning repelled you -- you probably missed this week's total lunar eclipse and 'blood moon.' But have no fear, because Griffith Observatory in LA captured a close-up (if a bit shaky) time-lapse of the entire rust-colored event for you.

Connecticut-based artist Alexander Harding went a little bit meta with his intriguing photo series Visible Light. All photographers capture light, but he used light as the subject, trying to bring the essence of light to life in an almost tangible form.

Ever wonder how the tech packed inside of your new Nikon lens actually works? How does Vibration Reduction provide 4.5 stops of stabilization? And what about the silent motors, how do those work?

In a video released earlier today, Nikon Asia decided to peel away the outer shell of its glass and show you, revealing the technology that makes a Nikkor Lens a Nikkor.

Panasonic might have found the last piece of the puzzle keeping many DSLR users from switching over to mirrorless cameras.

The above image is taken from a patent that diagrams the basics behind adding an optical viewfinder to mirrorless cameras. Even more interesting, the viewfinder would be able to change focal length when synced with any Micro Four Thirds lens.

It looks like Canon isn't the only one ready to re-start the dreaded Megapixel Wars with a high megapixel camera that has been all but confirmed to exist. Nope, fresh info from highly trusted sources claims that Sony will be jumping into the fray as well with a 46MP full-frame camera to be announced at the beginning of 2015.

I have seen absolutely beautiful things happen in the photo industry. I’ve seen strangers become best friends, I’ve seen grand ideas being brought to life, and I’ve seen photographers grow from beginners to mentors. I’ve seen so many things that make me proud to be a part of such an amazing community.

In a new video released yesterday, Fujifilm offers a beautiful behind-the-scenes look at the care, attention, and technology that goes into creating each of their Fujinon lenses from start-to-finish.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration and one of its agents, Timothy Sinnigen, are being sued by a woman who claims they used the photos on a seized phone of hers to hijack her identity and create a fake Facebook profile though which they hoped to bust an alleged New York drug ring.

Two hundred million images... PhotoShelter has amassed over 200M images from over 80,000 photographers in the almost a decade since they burst onto the scene. And today they unveil a new way for those 80,000 photographers to share those 200M+ images with fans that might not even know they exist yet.

It's called Lattice, and maybe the simplest way we could describe it is Pinterest for Professional Photographers, Curators, and Photography Lovers.

Multi-layer sensors and high-megapixel DSLRs aren't the only cameras Canon is rumored to be working on in the "breaking the status quo" category. Already mentioned by Canon Hong Kong, a large-sensor, high-zoom PowerShot premium compact is being officially teased in a Canon Netherlands video.

Photographer and educator Tony Northrup and company recently put together a video that …

‘Where to Start Chart’ is an infographic designed to help beginner photographers work their way through the settings on their camera. Produced by Adorama TV, the PDF is reminiscent of the "skill trees" found in various role playing video games, but instead of having spells and skills, the tree offers photographic tutorials.

The idea of ‘average’ is strange, especially when it’s put into real-world situations and memories. The places most familiar to us change on a daily basis, even if it’s just the slightest bit, but when we look back, our brains piece together this conglomeration of what we’ve seen over the days, months and years to create a familiar, cohesive memory.

It was a similar line of thinking that inspired photographer Wolfgang Hildebrand to create his strangely chaotic compositions of city streets.

HTC's rumored action camera is now official. Today the company announced the RE, a handheld action cam that could easily be confused with a miniature periscope or an inhaler.

The device represent's HTC's desire to expand beyond the smartphone market, and is yet another attempt to steal some of GoPro's thunder in the industry it dominates.

For years and years I’ve worked on location, slowly I’ve moved over to tethered shooting and past two years I have been trying to shoot tethered as much as possible, I’m a big fan of it and I find it can really help a shoot and improve the images overall when everyone knows what they are working towards.

For those of you who aren’t up to speed on tethering it is effective connecting your camera to your computer and shooting to the hard drive on the computer rather than the memory card on the camera. There are a variety of advantages to using this method (speed, accuracy and client feedback amongst them) but there are hundreds of articles on various blogs about tethering so if you want to start using it just give it a google search. This post will be focusing on my case rather than the principles of tethered shooting.

In Google’s ongoing effort to ‘Street View’ some of the most incredible places on Earth, the company has pushed the limits of the 360-degree genre once again.

This time, Google set out to capture a panoramic view of the Liwa Desert in the United Arab Emirates, by strapping their Street View Trekker Camera onto the back of a willing camel.

Update: We've received an official response from Flickr, which you can read at the bottom.

In the past, paying Flickr for an Ad-Free experience had a dual meaning: you wouldn't see ads, and neither would the users who looked at your photographs. That definition, it seems, has changed, as some disgruntled Pro users are reporting that every 4th or 5th photo on their streams is now a full-size ad when viewed from a free user's account.

'See Impossible' debacle and subsequent parody aside, recent rumors indicate Canon really is getting ready to innovate, or at the very least take some risks and release some interesting products.

The most recent rumblings from the rumor mill today indicate that not one, but two cameras with multi-layer sensors will arrive in 2015, and a high megapixel camera is definitely in the pipeline.

Canon's big 'See Impossible' reveal turned out to be a pretty big disappointment for us gear heads. Most headlines dripped with disappointment and one article led off its coverage with an image of Bart Simpson writing "I will never hold my breath for a Canon announcement again" over and over on a chalkboard.

What you see above is one of the most unusual pieces of lighting gear we’ve ever chanced across. Looking a bit like a prop from the upcoming Star Wars film, this contraption is actually a macro flash adapter designed by Polish photographers Agnieszka and Ernest Lysak.

Inspired by Steve McCurry’s “The Last Roll of Kodachrome,” four Tokyo-based photographers took to the streets with only a single roll of 120 film and a Hasselblad to capture what it would be like to shoot the very last roll of film in existence.

During the Max conference, as he was preparing to demonstrate some of the touch functionality baked into Photoshop CC on the Microsoft Surface Pro 3, Adobe's Josh Ulm said, "when we started to explore touch, we knew that we would have to radically shift the user interface."

What we didn't know at the time is just what he meant by "radically," but the ad above gives us a sneak peek at just how touch-capable Photoshop, Illustrator and other Adobe applications will eventually be.

Funny faces and unusual antics in front of a camera might be more prevalent now than ever before, but if you think our Victorian ancestors didn’t have fun with film every once in a while, you might be pleasantly surprised to see this humorous collection of slides that prove you wrong.

Liz Kaszynski has one of the coolest photography jobs in the world. As one of the 10 Lockheed Martin aerial photographers certified to take pictures from the back of fighter jets -- and their only female photographer for the F-35 -- she photographs and rides in some of the most advanced flying machines on Earth.

In the video above, we get to go behind the scenes with Kaszynski and see her in action.

If you're in the market for a GoPro Hero4, and especially if you've already purchased one, listen up, because there seems to be an overheating issue with some of the cameras that could potentially be dangerous.

Filmmaker Leonardo Dalessandri recently spent 20 days in Turkey, and by the looks of it, he didn't stand still for a single minute of it. Over the course of that 20 days, he travelled almost 2,200 miles with his camera equipment in tow, capturing the video and time-lapse clips he eventually compiled into the 3-minute visual journey embedded above.

Light modifiers don’t come cheap, especially softboxes. But, if you have enough DIY talent, some patience, and $20 bucks to spare, you’re only an hour or so away from having a custom-made softbox of your own.

There are a seemingly infinite number of videos that walk you through retouching a portrait from beginning to end; however, most of them are based in Photoshop, Lightroom and -- once upon a time -- Aperture. This leaves the less-used but robust Capture One Pro out of the game.

Well, not anymore! Giving Capture One Pro 8 some love is photographer and retoucher Michael Woloszynowicz, who decided to take it for a test drive and see how close he could get to his Photoshop results using Capture One Pro 8 instead.

Ansel Adams is one of the most famous landscape photographers known around the world. He is best known for countless, perfectly balanced black and white images of the Yosemite Valley, Glacier National Park, Yellowstone, and many more iconic national parks and landscapes throughout America. He set the standard of landscape photography presented as fine art to this very day.

Water droplets can make for some beautiful high-speed photography, but how do photographers manage to capture such precise moments? And what if you add even more elements to the equation, such as shooting a tiny pellet through the drop as it reaches its peak?

While repetition and luck are one option, a far better approach is to use a clever triggering system called the Camera Axe.

In June of 2011, astrophotographer Jean-Luc Dauvergne travelled all the way to Tajikistan to capture the total lunar eclipse on June 15th in the best conditions possible. Lasting almost two hours, he captured the eclipse from start to finish in a captivating minute-long time-lapse with one heck of a crescendo.

Tokyo-based artist Satoshi Araki is a man whose eye for the detail is immediately evident when you look at his dioramas... if you can even tell they're dioramas, that is.

For each miniature, Araki painstakingly plans out the layout of his trashed and scattered street scenes and photographs in such a way that, often, you'd be hard-pressed to identify them as dioramas at all..

High speed cameras that shoot thousands of frames per second are, in general, both big and expensive. But if you're looking for a much more portable and much more affordable option, and you don't mind trading in some resolution, the fps1000 might be the perfect 'poor man's' alternative.

Just in time for the updated GoPro hardware, Livestream has released an update to their iOS app that now allows you to share your GoPro video feed LIVE without getting a computer involved.

The other day I created a Google+ album of photos from our holiday in France. Google’s AutoAwesome algorithms applied some nice Instagram-like filters to some of them, and sent me emails to let me have a look at the results. But there was one AutoAwesome that I found peculiar. It was this one, labeled with the word “Smile!” in the corner, surrounded by little sparkle symbols.

It’s a nice picture, a sweet moment with my wife, taken by my father-in-law, in a Normandy bistro. There’s only one problem with it. This moment never happened.

Graduated ND (neutral density) filters have been a staple of landscape photography for a long time now, but if you've never taken the time to learn how these simple but useful tools work, this solid video guide will run you through the basics and then some.

What's the use of an image sensor that's 12 times more color sensitive than the human eye? We're not entirely sure, but thanks to a team of researchers at Universities of Granada, Spain and Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy you may someday get to try it out and find out for yourself.

Researchers at those two universities are using "Transverse Field Detector" technology to distinguish 36 individual color channels without any need for a filter, making it 12-times more color sensitive than standard Red/Green/Blue sensors and the human eye both.

A couple of months ago we shared a series of before and after portraits that showed you what Warped Tour musicians looked like before and after rocking out on stage. This series is similar... only the people in the photos did something quite a bit more difficult than playing Warped: they ran the United States of America for anywhere between 2 and 12 years.

As rumors swirl of exciting Canon products in the works -- rumors, mind you, backed up by promises made by Canon itself -- the world waited with bated breath for Canon's cryptic 'See Impossible' teaser countdown to reach zero.

They took out a huge ad in the New York Times, this couldn't possibly be another big fat teaser letdown could it? Yes... yes it could.

Want to see what it's like to cover a meeting between the world's nations as a photographer? Vienna-based photojournalist Patrick Domingo was recently sent to the annual meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at the United Nations Office at Vienna. In addition to shooting photos for official news purposes, Domingo decided to record some point-of-view footage showing what the experience is like.

We’ve come across and shared a number of time-lapses that show off the beauty of the Milky Way in spectacular fashion, but the video above is different than all of them. That's because this Milky Way time-lapse was actually created using photos taken from the International Space Station.