This incredible photo of a lightning strike at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon was shot by photo and videographer Travis Roe in July of 2012. A spectacular capture by a photog who has been shooting lightning since he was a teenager, the most surprising thing about this photo is that it went viral only after it somehow didn't even place in the National Parks Service 2012 photo contest.

When Brad Josephs took his GoPro camera out in beautiful Alaska, he was probably trying to get majestic footage of Grizzly bears for the BBC's Great Bear Stakeout. Instead, what he got was a hungry mother Grizzly and her cub trying to eat his camera. We get some, shall we say, interesting views of what a Grizzly bear's mouth looks like (not that that's something we're all interested in seeing, is it?).

Lately I’ve been looking for ways to photograph people besides just my friends and family. I was super inspired after reading photographer Peter Waterman's account of photographing 80 people in 1 day. I’m a hobbyist just looking to improve my skills and have fun. I like to get the best bang for the buck with my equipment purchases and keep my gear budget contained.

I checked my town’s local event website and noticed there was a 10K run scheduled for the upcoming weekend. I had never shot a sporting event before; I usually just shoot portraits and travel. The race map showed the course went right by my house so I had a perfect opportunity to take some pictures.

Canipre -- short for Canadian Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement -- is a Canadian anti-piracy company that has joined hand-in-hand with film studios and record companies to track down those who steal and share stolen content over the internet. On the surface there's nothing wrong with this, what is wrong is when an intellectual property advocate is found using photos without permission, which is exactly what happened to Canipre a couple of days ago.

A few weeks ago, we reported that Sony may be in the process of dropping its unique pellicle mirror SLT technology. The rumor claimed that the company would be saying goodbye to the translucent mirror in favor a fully mirrorless A-Mount line. Well, if patents are to be trusted, that rumor has been confirmed just as another exciting Sony rumor hits the mill.

Back in March, we shared a time-lapse that showed photographer Liu Bolin -- also known as the "invisible man" -- disappearing into the stage at TED 2013. The time-lapse showed what he goes through for every project: days of preparation followed by hours of standing still while artists paint him "into" the background.

His talk during that conference, however, went into much more detail. He talks about the process of creating some of his best shots, about his start, and about the motivation behind his most impressive work. Fair warning: the talk is given with an interpreter but you'll find you need to activate and lean mostly on the closed captions as the interpreter only gets the occasional word in.

Comedians Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele were recently asked to participate in a photo shoot for Fast Company's "100 Most Creative People." And although we've taken part in spreading the word when it comes to making sure your models are happy and comfortable, the Fast Company photographers didn't have to worry about it for this shoot -- before long the two comics were in their element.

Shoppers will soon have a tough time trying to pick up a cheap Olympus point-and-shoot compact camera. The company has said it is planning to do away with its V lineup of low-cost compact cameras, priced just under $200 at various retailers.

The move comes as the company anticipates a steep decline in its camera business, with forecasted digital camera sales this fiscal year expected to be about 2.7 million units, down from 5.1 million units last year. Olympus president Hiroyuki Sasa has put the financial loss from its camera business at about $225 million.

A team of researchers at the University of Glasgow's School of Physics and Astronomy just published a paper in Science that details how they managed to use an altered style of "ghost imaging" photography to create accurate three-dimensional images.

Check out the picture above. Pretty cool, huh? Well, to make photos like this you can use a special technique. It wasn’t invented by me, but by a Bay Area photographer named Scott Jarvie. It's a pretty eye catching way to take portrait photos, and here's an introduction to how it's done.

For her series of Photoshopped images titled "The Real Life Models," 19-year-old Hungarian photographer Flora Borsi created a set of heavily post-processed self-portraits that imagine what real life models of strange abstract paintings would have looked like.

I had a hard drive fail on me once. It was a total nightmare. I lost two years of digital photos and all of my music that i’d digitized. Never again.

Thankfully this happened to me before I was a professional photographer and it was just my own images. Not a wedding client's. If you charge people for your photography, you need to be professional and have a proper bomb-proof backup strategy.

Photographer Nolan Conway's project Happy Meals is all about finding unique people in one of the world's most commonplace locations on earth: McDonald's restaurants. With his camera in tow, he has visited 150 McDonald's in 22 states, photographing some 180 patrons in the process.

Dr. Andreas Kaufmann, the majority shareholder and chairman of Leica, has apparently purchased a 25.1% stake in photo sharing and contest website I-SHOT-IT, reports Leica Rumors.

Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences postdoctoral fellow Wim L. Noorduin, along with his colleagues, have discovered an interesting way to make pictures of flowers from microscopic crystals, as seen under an electron microscope.

Back in January 2013, lens adapter company Metabones rocked the camera world by announcing the Speed Booster, an SLR-to-mirrorless lens adapter that can magically increase your maximum aperture, sharpness, and angle of view.

So far the adapter has been released for Sony NEX and Fuji X cameras, but greater things are on the horizon: Metabones will be releasing the Speed Booster for Micro Four Thirds cameras as well.

Portugal’s Krypton Films, in collaboration with production company Moonlighting and marine support company Frog Squad, recently succeeded in filming what they claim to be South Africa's first ever underwater time slice for an Aqua Das Pedras mineral water commercial.

An interesting new imaging technique in use by fertility experts at the CARE fertility clinic in the United Kingdom may be the key to increasing the likelihood of a successful a IVF therapy. The process involves snapping thousands of images of embryos in development in order to help doctors better select which embryos to implant successfully.

Photographer Nicolas Reusens has always been interested in insects, so when he purchased his first DSLR three years ago, he immediately dove into the art of macro photography. By using the technique known as focus stacking -- combining several images taken at different depths of field -- he's generated some truly eye-popping photos of creepy crawlies from all over the world.

Canon's DSLRs come with a variety of continuous shooting speeds, ranging from 2.5 frames per second on the 300D (AKA Digital Rebel/Kiss Digital) to a whopping 14 frames per second on the high-end 1D-X. If you want to get a taste of what these shutter speeds sound like on the actual cameras, check out the comparison video above by YouTube user dochero2005.

After reading our previous article on how Decipher Forensics had managed to find and restore expired Snapchats on Android devices, a photographer named Nick got to thinking that he might be able to do the same thing on his jailbroken iPhone.

The idea was that, since these snaps were simply saved in a folder in the file system, he should be able to use an app such as iFile to browse to that folder and see, save or even e-mail them to himself. It turns out he can, and it only took Nick 10 minutes to figure out where "deleted" Snapchat videos were stored.

Slovenian industrial designer Elvis Halilović, who dubs himself "a passionate lensless photographer" is aiming to bring several sleek-looking wooden pinhole cameras to the  masses through a Kickstarter project that has already exceeded its financial goal by over $20,000.

With the help of food stylist Charlotte Omnes, New York still life and food photographer Beth Galton put together an interesting series of photos that shows what prepared and packaged foods look like in cross section.

For now, if you want to get your child's point of view on anything, the best approach is to mount a helmet cam to their noggin and hope they don't mind -- so far we've seen a few cute videos filmed this way. But in the near future, the best way to get your 2-year-old's point of view may be by handing them a pair of Google Glass glasses.

That's what developer Chris Angelini did when his 2-year-old came calling for juice. The results are pretty darn cute.

After two years of testing, renting, buying and selling just about every level of Nikon and Canon lenses and cameras, I have learned quite a bit about what works and what doesn’t. Pretty much you can’t go wrong with Canon or Nikon, and just about everything they make is top notch.

Most people in today's society have a mobile phone. Most mobile phones have cameras. Anyone and everyone has become an on-the-scene photojournalist, reporting on everything from major news events to the odd and crazy.

Some of these picture-worthy events take place on everyday flights. Shutter-happy passengers, snapping or even video recording the woman on the next aisle over acting unusual or a fellow passenger being disruptive. It's undeniable that we are curious beings, and want to document and share events we witness. But not everyone is pleased citizen photojournalists.

Here's a question I get asked about 15 times a week: “How can I get the dust out of my lens?” The right answer is you don’t. All lenses have dust in them and it doesn’t affect the images at all 99% of the time. Even if you clean it all out, it will be back after you use the lens a few times.

Yet another prize winning photographer has been accused of visual deception. Subsequently, Paul Hansen’s World Press Photo of the Year passed the forensic review that was set up hurriedly -- by WPP -- to address the scandal, but it has become clear that the image was substantially “improved” in post-production.

A rather interesting submission by Apple to the United States Patent and Trademark office shows potential plans for a synchronized flash system by connecting iOS devices, which will allow a primary camera to snap an image of a subject whilst being lit by another iPhone, as an example.

Want to see how the prices of various compact and mirrorless cameras stack up against each other? 1001 Noisy Cameras created this handy chart showing the prices of RAW-capable compact cameras on the market.

Earlier this week, Sony announced its new Xperia ZR waterproof smartphone that can double as an everyday underwater camera. After we reported on the story, we were contacted by reader Jeffery Richt, who shot the marketing photographs for Sony. The video above is a behind-the-scenes video showing how the underwater shoot went down.

Photographer Arne Svenson lives on the second floor of an apartment building in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City. For his project "The Neighbors," he pointed his camera at a luxury apartment building across the street and secretly photographed its inhabitants through open windows.

Those photographs are now being sold for thousands of dollars at a gallery in NYC, but it turns out the subjects aren't very happy with having their images stealthily snapped and sold.

Here's a TEDx talk photographer Brandon Stanton gave at Columbia University last October about "how our worldview is negatively affected by good stories." Stanton is the photographer behind the website Humans of New York.

Take a look at photographer Jared Lim's portfolio, and many of his photographs might look to you like they're the product of liberal Photoshop Clones Stamp usage. They feature repeating shapes, colors, and patterns found in various cities' urban environments.

Last year one of my friends got married and I was so thrilled to be her photographer that day. What was even more amazing was that she had an “Unplugged Wedding” after seeing pictures and hearing my rants over the years about well-meaning guests whom have inadvertently (or heck, even completely on purpose) ruined images.

AlmapBBDO, the ad agency behind the touching Getty ad "From Love to Bingo," are at it again. Last time they spent six months picking 873 stock photos out of 5,000+ options to create an award-winning one minute video.

This time Getty asked them to do the same thing, only using the agency's massive video archive instead. The resulting video is, dare we say, even better than the "Love to Bingo" ad.

Redditor Steven Withey's grandfather Derek is an 87-year-old WWII veteran who served in the Royal Navy, and a little while back he showed his grandson a badly damaged Navy photo (of a photo) of himself as a 20-year-old.

He had showed him the photo in the hopes that his technologically savvy grandson could maybe touch it up a bit, but given the massive creases and tears he didn't have much hope. It turns out he needn't have worried, because in this particular case, Reddit came to the rescue.

I have been shooting photographs regularly for over 7 years now. I spent the first year shooting with a 2-megapixel phone camera. Since then, however, I’ve almost always had RAW capable cameras and shot RAW compulsively. And why not? I get 16x or 64x more colour depth than JPEGs. I don’t have to bother about setting the right white balance, contrast or sharpness. I don’t have to choose between monochrome and colour at the time of shooting. I can figure all of that out on the computer during RAW conversion and even try out different settings for the same picture at my leisure. Why would I give up all this and shoot JPEG?

"Your darkroom is now a datacenter." That's the thought and slogan behind a huge update that Google+ Photos is rolling out over the next week. Many people already considered Google+ the photographer's social network because of the many features Google has built into the system over the years -- this announcement is another giant leap in that direction.

500px is sponsoring us for the next week and a half to promote its new Portfolios, which we covered back in early April. As part of the partnership, we're running a photo contest for the next 10 days in which 10 people will have their accounts upgraded to the new portfolio system.

When it comes to creating quality time-lapse videos, many photographers relish having a serious amount of control over their result. But if you're the kind of person who isn't into intervalometers or messing with rail systems, and you're looking for something that's more of a "set it and forget it" system, Brinno's new TLC200 Pro may fit the bill just right.

Space collisions are massive, unbelievably powerful events. When two galaxies collide -- that is, when their gravitational fields start interacting with one another -- the resulting billion-year-long process contorts and twists the galaxies into the fascinating shapes we've seen in photographs taken by powerful space telescopes.

The above video is a supercomputer simulation of two galaxies going through a many-hundred-million-year-long collision. As the galaxies merge into the known stages of collision that have been photographed by Hubble, the video is paused and replaced with a photograph of that stage taken IRL.

We first shared photographer Chris McCaw's unique "sunburned" photos all the way back in 2010. A happy accident led to the creation of a burned, reverse-tone, solarized photo, and from then on he has used that technique to create more and more unique exposures dubbed "groundbreaking" by many museums.

In the video above he explains his process and shares his excitement for analog photography, a medium he believes is entering an era of unprecedented exploration now that digital photography has, in a sense, set it free.

Having photographs sell for more than $100,000 at a world famous auction house is no small feat, and it's one that will likely soon be accomplished by a photographer who gives new meaning to the term "chimping" every time he snaps a frame. The photographer is Mikki, a chimpanzee.

When it comes to solar eclipses, the total eclipse is king. We recently shared some unbelievable composite shots taken by Czech photographer Miloslav Druckmüller that showed one of those in a way you've probably never seen before. But when you don't have a total eclipse at hand, arguably your best option is an annular eclipse.

That's what photographer Colin Legg had to work with five days ago, and he made the absolute best of it, putting together this incredible video that combines time-lapse footage shot by three separate Canon 5D Mk IIs and 4K video taken with a Canon 1DC.

Photographer Clement Celma has an entire section of his site dedicated to photographing the architecture of Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí. And when it comes to the architecture of Gaudí, nothing is quite as stunning as the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família.

For his series of photos entitled Gaudí Architecture, Celma went to La Sagrada Família with his camera and snapped some breathtaking wide-angle photos of the architecture inside.

With over 2 million weddings taking place each year nationwide, there are over 2 million opportunities to make mistakes-countless pitfalls just waiting for the unsuspecting wedding photographer to stumble into. Sure, they seem harmless, until you realize the danger they impart to you and your business. I don't want you to be just another wedding photographer statistic, so, I've compiled a list of my top ten things a photographer should never do while photographing a wedding. If you recognize yourself in any of these, don't beat yourself up. Remember, it hurts to grow. Now, let's begin...

Yesterday we shared some photos of the Sun Halo that kept New Yorkers pointing their cameras skyward most of the day. That phenomenon is both harmless and cool to look at. Unfortunately, the recent ice heaves -- glacier-like lake ice that is pushed inland by strong winds -- in Minnesota only fall into the second of those categories..

Late last year, we introduced you to NYC-based photographer Jordan Matter's viral photo series Dancers Among Us, a set of photos that depicted professional dancers performing difficult dance moves in everyday life situations.

Many people fell in love with that photo series, and two of those people are college sweethearts Betsy and Peter, the latter of which recently put together an awesome Dancers Among Us proposal with some help from Matter himself.

Coffee is a wonderful thing. Early in the morning, there are few things that can put you at ease like a steaming cup of hot coffee warming your hands and firing up your brain. But have you ever wondered how those coffee advertisements manage to get the perfect shot of a coffee cup, steam and all?

Well, in the tutorial above, commercial photographer Robert Grant of LearnMyShot shows you how to compose and capture the perfect picture of a steaming cup o' joe that will have you craving your morning caffeine fix.