Getting your photography removed from an offending website or Facebook page can be a hassle, and if you've never done it before, learning the proper process for any given situation can be a downright pain. Fortunately, there are awesome people out there who don't mind helping out their fellow photogs.

That's where James Beltz from PhotoTips and his new blog PictureDefense come in. What he's done is set up a free website where you can go and get step-by-step instructions on how to get your copyrighted photos removed from almost any type of website.

We don't feature a lot of tripods on PetaPixel because, frankly, once you've seen one you've just about seen them all. That's not to say that tripods don't vary hugely in both build quality and functionality, just that it doesn't really make headlines when Manfrotto comes out with their newest model.

Giotto's newest creation, however, has made headlines. Not because it's made out of any new super-strength material. Not even because it sports some crazy design that makes it much sturdier or steadier. No, the Silk Road YTL tripod has gotten attention because of one small design alteration that makes it 30% smaller when it's broken down.

One of the most vehemently argued conspiracy theories of all time is that, in 1969, NASA did not actually land on the moon. Many different breakdowns of the photo and video footage have been used to make this point (think: flag waving, missing stars, etc), leading most conspiracy theorists to argue that the great Stanley Kubrick actually filmed the moon landing in a television studio.

Less than two months after attending the 2011 Academy Awards with his friend and colleague Sebastian Junger, acclaimed photojournalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington (seen above) died tragically in Misrata, Libya, only minutes away from the hospital.

Over the following year, Junger began a quest to put together Hetherington's final hours by interviewing friends, family, and anybody who could shed light on his life and what had transpired. Being a filmmaker, it seemed only right that he record these interviews.

Natural disasters are tragic for many reasons. Assuming, most importantly, that you and your loved ones come through one such disaster healthy, you immediately begin the process of putting your life back together. And even though top priorities are probably your home, cars, critical documents, and so on, those things are replaceable; the photos that may have also been damaged or destroyed are not.

Copy protection and data encryption are standard in most storage media, but you don't often hear of copy protection as it pertains to memory cards. Although all SD cards come with a form of DRM copy protection (CPRM), it's rarely used; and something as common as re-formatting the memory card can erase protected sections that are required to make use of the copy protection in the first place.

Other copy-protected memory card options are marketed to/used mainly by companies, and not typical consumers. Seeing this market as an opportunity, Transcend Information recently announced plans to manufacture its own copy-protected SD and microSD cards and a corresponding reader.

A time-lapse of the aurora borealis captured from several different locations throughout Iceland would be a good enough way to start off your Saturday, but MIT neuroscientist Alex Rivest's time-lapse from a few months ago takes it one step further.

In a romantic gesture that will either have you saying "awwww" or being annoyed at how high he set the bar, Rivest's time-lapse ends with a marriage proposal.

Is your Adobe Lightroom running slowly on your computer? Adobe regularly receives questions through social media regarding sluggish photo editing, and recently decided to start compiling the non-traditional solutions that work onto a single helpful page. In the Lightroom Help section of the Adobe website, there's now a page titled "Performance hints".

A good number of websites are talking about the new official portrait of President Obama. It was shot in the Oval Office back on December 6th, 2012 by official White House photographer Pete Souza, whom we've written about quite a few times in the past.

Want to focus your camera simply by looking at a particular area of the viewfinder? If you're a Sony shooter, you might be enjoying that feature as early as next year. The company is reportedly working on building Eye Tracking autofocus into its cameras, with the initial version arriving in a flagship camera sometime in 2014.

Since June 19th of last year, political activist and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been living inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Although Ecuador has granted him political asylum, if he steps foot outside the embassy, he could be arrested, extradited to the United States, and tried for his role in leaking sensitive US diplomatic cables.

For most photographers, shooting a portrait of Assange while he's in hiding isn't the easiest thing to do. However, art collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik recently came up with a clever way of doing so: they sent him an Internet-connected camera that's baked into a cardboard parcel.

A couple of days ago, there were murmurings on the web that Instagram experienced a sharp drop in usage numbers following its ill-handled Terms of Service change. The story was based on findings by analytics firm AppStats, which claimed that Instagram's Daily Active User count had fallen from over 15 million to around 5 million in the span of about one month.

Now Instagram (and its parent company Facebook) are speaking up and denying that it is seeing a max exodus of disgruntled users. The company has released usage figures for the first time in its young life.

In addition to being passionate about image making, photographer Svjetlana Tepavcevic is also an avid collector of seeds. After finding and collecting a new specimen, Tepavcevic creates a highly-detailed high-resolution photo of the seed using an ordinary flatbed scanner. The resulting images form a project titled Means of Reproduction.

Unlike many camera lens lines, Leica's lenses are group into categories under well known trademarked names. Mention the word Noctilux, and a Leica shooter will immediately know that you're referring to a f/1 lens that's geared towards shooting in low-light environments.

Photographer Thorsten Overgaard has been working on a definitions page that explains the origins of the various terms -- the explanations go beyond what the terms refer to, and include why they were given those names.

Artist Daniel Arsham has an exhibition at Philadelphia's Fabric Workshop Museum called Reach Ruin, which includes hundreds of cameras sculptures created out of plaster, glass, stone, and sand.

What are the most popular photo subjects in each location of your city? Is there any easy way of finding out? Those are questions UC Berkeley researcher Alexander Dunkel is trying to answer, and he has his sights set on Flickr as a possible solution. By combining the location geotags and context tags attached to many (or most) of the service's photos, Dunkel is able to create tag cloud-style maps of any location that reveals the tags that dominate each location.

Kodak had quite the surprise for the camera world today: the company announced that it will be soon joining the Micro Four Thirds standard with a new mirrorless camera called the S1. We had reported earlier this week that the company would soon launch a mirrorless camera (just like Polaroid did recently), but it seems most people didn't expect that the news would have anything to do with the Micro Four Thirds standard.

Back in November, Brazilian model Nana Gouvea felt the Internet's wrath after she used the Hurricane Sandy aftermath as a backdrop to further her career. Needless to say, those photos did garner attention, just not the kind she wanted.

Now Vogue is on an eerily similar hot seat after their most recent issue contained a high fashion spread honoring Sandy responders. General opinion seems to be that the photos were in bad taste, relegating the first responders to 'prop' status while the Marc Jacobs and Michael Kors clad models took center stage.

Over the last year, WordPress owner Automattic has launched pages specifically targeting bands, brides, restaurants and even cities. Today, we can finally add photographers to that list.

This new page is meant to attract photographers, designers and visual artists looking to build a quality portfolio where they can display their work. Not that you couldn't build portfolios using WordPress.com before, but this is the first time the company has reached out to photographers personally, adding them to the list of demographics it's gone after in the past.

We've featured Instagram-inspired presets for Lightroom in the past, and today a new challenger has emerged. The folks over at Really Nice Images has released a couple of preset packs that are designed to faithfully imitate the look of Instagram's popular filters. What's unique about this new offering is that the presets aren't limited to the latest version of the mobile app's filters -- there's also a pack containing the classic filters that were replaced after Instagram Version 2 came out.

Have you ever considered adding a prism to your camera bag? Washington DC-based wedding photographer Sam Hurd has done quite a bit of experimentation using an equilateral prism -- the kind used in schools to teach properties of light -- to add special effects to his photographs. The results are pretty interesting.

Want to see how the highly-acclaimed Sony RX1 is assembled? At CES 2013 in Las Vegas last week, Sony showed the above video at its special press event, using it as a creative countdown clock for indicating when the show would begin. The split-screen video shows three of Sony's newer products -- the Cybershot RX1 camera, the Xperia Z smartphone, and an HD camcorder -- being assembled from their basic parts.

Solar chargers have been around for a while, but not a lot of them can handle the power needs of an SLR battery, and none that we know of can charge virtually any camera battery -- until now that is. The Freeloader Pro and included CamCaddy can do both.

Art.com is "the world's largest online specialty retailer of high-end wall art." Zenfolio offers "online photography presentation and sales solutions for professional photographers and enthusiasts." Knowing that, Zenfolio's acquisition by Art.com announced earlier seems like a match made in sales heaven.

Every photographer has one, or maybe a few, favorite photos. Those images that tend to grace the front page of your website. The ones that turned out just right, capturing the exact feeling or message you set out to capture. For wedding photographer Jerry Ghionis, that photo was taken in December 2011, and the video above takes you behind the scenes at the shoot.

You know that feeling of extreme excitement when an Internet package arrives in the mail? That's what a guy named Jalal felt recently after ordering a Canon 5D Mark III and 24-105mm f/4L kit from Dell.com. Unfortunately for him, what he received wasn't quite what he had expected.

Back in early December, Google announced that the company would be adding 5,000 new stock images of "nature, weather, animals, sports, food, education, technology, music and 8 other categories" for free use in Docs, Sheets and Slides.

At the time nobody knew how Google got these images, who took them, or what kind of license they came with. The mystery continued on unsolved until a week ago when an iStocker discovered one of his own images in the search results. As it turns out, the use of these photos is the result of a little known licensing deal between Google and Getty Images.

Flickr celebrated the 5th year anniversary of the launch of The Commons today. The massive collection of public domain photos now includes more than 250,000 images from 56 different libraries, archives, and museums.

About three quarters of the EF-mount lenses out there are not weather sealed. Because of this, using those lenses often leads to more frequent sensor cleaning, dust and even water accumulation inside your camera body.

Fortunately, a simple but effective idea from California-based photographer Tyler Sterbentz fixes that problem. It's called the Dust Donut:

The short 1-minute video above is a beautiful time-lapse showing a train ride in Norway that spans not just …

Canon recently launched a new safety initiative aimed at keeping dangerous knock-off gear out of your camera. The tag line for the initiative is "Play it Safe, Power your Canon with Canon Power," and the company is hoping that a mix of warnings and education will do the trick and keep you from buying counterfeit "Canon" batteries and chargers.

After recently purchasing a Nikon 1 V1, Swedish photographer Sven Hedin decided to work on making the camera work with an external flash. Not just any external flash, mind you, but a vintage flash unit -- the kind that uses disposable bulbs.

Being out on the roads is dangerous, be you a donkey in Botswana, a deer in New York, or a Google Street View driver. Things don't get newsworthy, however, until one of the first two meets up with the third.

3D technology is consistently improving. And even though Samsung may have pioneered single lens 3D technology, Panasonic have put together an impressive rig that can shoot 3D panoramas.

The array is part of a project called Dive Into World Heritage 3D, in which Panasonic went and captured seven world heritage sites so that people could experience them even if they can't afford to travel there.

A couple of days ago, we featured a BTS video showing how portrait photographer Greg Heisler got a great Time magazine cover shot of Michael Phelps before the 2004 Olympics using some creative techniques and a lot of preparation.

In this video, part of the same Master Series, Heisler discusses photographic techniques and how they can actually mask your vision if you rely too heavily on them.

Instagram's new terms of service -- the ones that caused all kinds of trouble for parent company Facebook before being re-modified -- finally go into effect this coming Saturday.

Given that it's been almost a month since those terms were suggested, Instagram and Facebook may have been hoping that the controversy would have blown over by this time. Unfortunately, the stats seem to show otherwise.

For his ongoing project I’m Not There, Barcelona-based photographer Pol Úbeda Hervàs creates composite photographs from multiple exposures that blend his shoes with his shadows and reflections.

Photographer Zack Arias created this video titled Signal vs. Noise to help his …

As rumors predicted earlier this month, Canon has launched the first of a series of Image Square showrooms in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. These "Experience Centers" are brick-and-mortar locations where customers can try out the latest and greatest Canon products in a friendly and helpful environment.

In one of the first major tests of intellectual property law involving social media services, a judge has ruled that news agencies cannot freely publish photographs posted to Twitter without the photographer's permission.

Fungus is one of the banes of a camera lens' existence. In humid environments, nasty things can begin to happen if some fungus spore-laden dust particles make their way into your lens. To prevent fungus from growing inside a lens, photographers often silica gel packets to control the amount of moisture in and around their glass.

This past Sunday, there was a 2-hour-long police chase in Inglewood, California. A man named Jason Lee was watching …

Doumé Jalat-Dehen of Brittany, France creates custom coats, sweaters, and hats for dog owners using the fur gathered from their beloved pets (the stuff that results from shedding and brushing). Photographer Erwan Fichou decided to base one of his photo projects around the furry fashions. His series Dogwool features portraits of these owners wearing Jalat-Dehen's creations, standing besides the animals the materials were gathered from.

Facebook summoned a group of tech journalists to its Menlo Park headquarters this morning to unveil the latest products its legions of programmers have been hard at work building. The major announcement was a new search engine called "Graph Search," which will allow users to run extremely powerful search queries on the social networks database of 1 billion members, 1 trillion social connections, and 240 billion photos.

In the side-by-side images above, the photo on the left shows a city as seen by astronauts on the International Space Station, and then photo on the right shows a photo of a neuron imaged with fluorescence microscopy. One is massive and seen from a grand scale, while the other is microscopic and cannot be seen by the human eye, yet they look strangely similar in their structure.

Infinity Imagined has a gallery of these comparisons of cities and neurons, showing the strange and striking similarities between the two.

Want to create a long exposure photo but don’t have a camera that can keep its shutter open for …

Jamie Livingston isn't a household name. And even though he has his own Wikipedia entry and has had his story told many times over the years, it's as moving today as ever. Jamie was a New York-based photographer, film maker and circus performer who became famous by taking one polaroid picture every day for the last eighteen years of his life.

If you read the title and thought "huh?" you're not the only one. Hearing that an adapter can actually make your lenses faster and wider sounds a bit like photography science fiction, but it's true and it's getting some serious attention online -- it's Metabones' new Speed Booster.

The photograph above shows the location where the following Tweet was posted:

Love hiding in the back at work because I have a 35 year old creeper. #scared #help

It's one of the photos in a project titled Geolocation: tributes to the Data stream, by photographers Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman. Each image in the series shows the location were a particular geotagged Twitter Tweet was posted.

Lomography (the movement) has been called many things, including "analog Instagram;" but regardless of how you feel about the movement or the company that bears its name, it seems that Lomography (the company) has been one of the driving forces keeping film photography alive and interesting for the masses.

The company's newest project, up for your pledging pleasure on Kickstarter, is the Smartphone Film Scanner. It's exactly what it sounds like: an attachment that allows you to photographically scan your 35mm film using your phone.