africa

Sony is partnering with the Photo Start foundation to encourage people to donate used (and new) working cameras, lenses, and accessories to help at-risk children around the world. The project uses photography to teach and improve self-reliance, self-esteem, and self-confidence.

Kenyan photographer Mutua Matheka wants to capture a better side of Africa, showing another perspective of the continent that's rarely seen online. To do this, he's climbing to heights that he says no other photographer has done in Africa. Here's a 3-minute feature of Matheka and his work by Great Big Story.

Photographer Sean Tucker's latest project is about a lot more than portrait photography. It's about respecting, honoring, and yes, capturing a culture far outside his own experience and comfort zone. Fortunately for us, he brought us along on this journey.

AP photographer Ben Curtis recently captured a photograph seen round the world. A brutal and shocking image that has sparked outrage and forced Kenya's police chief to launch an internal investigation. (Warning: Some of the content in the video above is graphic. Proceed at your own risk.)

Patience can lead to great things in photography. For photographer Johan Georget, it's what allowed him to capture this shot-of-a-lifetime of a rhinoceros in Africa.

For his project "When I Am Laid in Earth," photographer Simon Norfolk traveled to Mount Kenya to photograph the melting away of the Lewis Glacier, the largest glacier on Africa's second tallest mountain. To capture what once was compared to what exists today, Norfolk used gasoline to create lines of fire that mark where the glacier lines once stood.

The photograph above shows where the Lewis Glacier ended in 1934.

Wedding photographer Jonas Peterson has captured dozens of beautiful weddings all over the world. But even with his impressive resume and archive of incredible images, he says a wedding he recently shot in Masai Mara, Kenya might just top them all.

“I’ve traveled the world and shot weddings pretty much everywhere, but no place blew my mind in the same way Masai Mara did,” Peterson tells us in an email. “I secretly almost dreaded shooting the wedding there, knowing how difficult it is to shoot images that represent a place, especially during the constraints of a wedding day.”

Wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas -- a favorite of both meerkats and PetaPixel -- recently captured this time-lapse of the 'Great Migration' of wildebeest in Northern Serengeti, Tanzania.

There are some things in this world that are impossible to photograph without the willingness to make a little sacrifice and step out of your comfort zone. Such was the case with photographer Philip Lee Harvey, who took it upon himself to photograph what is referred to by some as the ‘world’s most dangerous church.’

Getting up close and personal with large lions is really only an option for a few people in this world; for the rest of us, capturing close-ups requires a bit of engineering. Enter wildlife photographer Steve Mandel and his LionCam.

Spanish photographer Marina Cano has been taking photographs since she was a teenager. Years later, she’s amassed an incredible portfolio and several awards for both her landscape and wildlife photography, the latter of which it's taking all of our energy not to use 'click-bait' words to describe.

Abidjan-based photographer Joana Choumali recently captured and put together an incredibly powerful portrait series titled Hââbré, The Last Generation. The hard-hitting collection of images shows some of the final faces of scarification, the ancient practice of cutting the flesh to form permanent markings.

Photographer Joel Krahn has spent the last two years of his life putting his time and talents towards helping non-profits. And after two years of doing this work in his hometown of Vancouver, he was given the opportunity to take his endeavors overseas and shoot with On-Field Media, a media division of Nairobi-based organization Africa Inland Mission.

Over the course of the three months he was there, Krahn captured a gorgeous collection of aerial landscapes of the African environment -- from the Nile River weaving its way through South Sudan to rural villages in Kenya.

Jaco Marx is a dental surgeon by profession and a photographer and conservationist by passion. Currently living in central South Africa, Marx spends much of the limited free time he has photographing the African wilderness, both to simply enjoy his passion, as well as to document the wildlife and Earth around him. And the results are nothing short of gorgeous.

Morkel Erasmus is an award-winning wildlife photographer based out of South Africa. He has an abiding passion for his country and its animals, which comes out in his beautiful photography that is perhaps best described as 'intimate.' You can find more of his work on his website, blog and 500px, or by following him on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

We recently sat down with Erasmus (digitally of course) to talk about his work and see if he had any words of wisdom to share with the wildlife photography fans who read PetaPixel.

Last year's World Press Photo of the Year award went to a controversial image of a funeral procession in Gaza, City. This year's winning photo doesn't strike the same tragic nerve as last year's, and yet it makes such a powerful statement about technology and our global community that we immediately understood why it took home the top prize.

This'll video will wake you up... or at least make you feel like your Friday isn't NEARLY as exciting as it could be. As part of their Hero3+ Adventure Series, GoPro teamed up with zoologist Kevin Richardson (better known as the Lion Whisperer) to show the special bond he shares with the big cats and shed light on the dilemma of habitat loss.

The title of this post is what we imagine safari guide Matthew Copham says whenever he tells people about his most recent adventure.... well, that or, "and then a cheetah tried to eat my GoPro." As far as the response he gets, we expect it involves copious amount of Awwwww.

The squeaks and grunts whales make are still mysterious, but at least now we know what whale-speak is for "Get that thing out of my face!" That would be thanks to diver/photographer Chris Coates, who had a close encounter of the paparazzi kind while observing humpback whales off the eastern coast of Africa recently.

Camille Lepage, 25, is an independent French photographer living in South Sudan. She works on long term projects about topics that do not make to the mainstream media and looks at the consequences of the politics on the populations.

For over a year now, documentary photographer Camille Lepage has been photographing the struggles of South Sudan. As a new country, sovereign since 2011, South Sudan can be considered a hotbed for social, political, and religious conflicts. These conflicts are laid bare by Lepage through a strong, intuitive eye and a determination to get her shot.

Her two on-going bodies of work, You Will Forget Me and Vanishing Youth (which are on display below) contain stirring imagery that speak of the violence, and the religious and cultural dissonance that permeates this young country and its people.

Purists might not take to all of photographer Erik Almas' work, and in particular the work featured here, but if you can get over the fact that these are composites that necessarily need some help in the computer to come to life, Almas' advertising photography will blow your mind.

Over the past few years, University of Minnesota researcher Ali Swanson has captured millions of photos of the animals of the Serengeti thanks to hundreds of camera traps set up as part of a project called Snapshot Serengeti.

Over the course of his wild and fascinating life, 75-year-old Peter Beard has made a name for himself as photographer, artist, author and playboy alike. Still, his legacy lies in the incredible photographs he has brought back from countless trips to Africa.

Whatever his fans and detractors call him, his dedication to the natural world is unquestionable, and in the short film above, he shares a few of his thoughts on nature, photography and how he has used one to tell stories about the other.

My first African experience began at age 17 when I won the 1974 Kodak/Scholastic National Photography scholarship which included a studies program to Kenya and Tanzania. For a teenager, it was an eye-opening revelation. Back then I was working an illegible night shift cooking burgers at Jack in the Box while going to high school. It was a tough gig but it made a new Nikon lens possible every couple of weeks.

The advent and continuous expansion of Google Street View has made it possible to explore far off places that we may never be able to visit in person. But where exactly does Google's reach end? One person deigned to find out.

Kibera is a division of Nairobi, Kenya, and as a rule, girls there don't have much of a shot at an education. Kenya is still very patriarchal, and if a family has both boys and girls, it's the boys who will be granted the opportunity to attend secondary school.

The Kibera Girls Soccer Academy (KGSA) is trying to fix that by providing girls in the area with a free secondary education, and photographer Jake Naughton has been fortunate enough to spend time there helping with the school and documenting its impact on the students who attend it.

"A new generation is using photography to celebrate, to question and represent a continent on the rise." That is the final sentence of the intro to Episode 1 of the six episode Al Jazeera miniseries 'The New African Photography.' It's a miniseries that, over the next several weeks, will look to the continent's photographers to paint a new, more accurate picture of Africa for the world.

Dereck and Beverly Joubert have spent the past 30 years living among lions in the African country of Botswana, capturing incredible photographs and footage of the majestic creatures that have garnered widespread praise. They are considered two of the world's preeminent experts on the big cats, having created tens of films, books, scientific papers, and articles in National Geographic magazine (along with a list of filmmaking awards, including five Emmys).

CBS' 60 Minutes recently paid a visit to the Joubert's, creating the fascinating video above that shows how the duo live and work, and how they've dedicated their lives to documenting and protecting the cats from human threats.

Remote cameras can give photographers perspectives they ordinarily wouldn't be able to capture, and these photographs by photographer Anup Shah show just that. For his project titled Serengeti Spy, Shah traveled to the African savannah in the Serengeti and the Massai Mara and photographed the wild animals using a remote camera.

Soccer, known as football around the world, is played by hundreds of millions of people in hundreds of countries, making it the world's most popular sport. However, a large percentage of its enthusiasts are unable to afford actual soccer balls to play with. Instead, they fashion their own makeshift balls out of things they have on hand -- things like socks, rubber bands, plastic bags, strips of cloth, and string. The DIY balls may be difficult to use and ugly in appearance, but each one is a treasured possession of its owner.

Belgian photographer Jessica Hilltout decided to turn her attention and her camera lens on these one-of-a-kind creations, documenting "football in its purest form" in Africa. The project is titled AMEN.

Last year we featured the work of Matthew and William Burrard-Lucas, two brothers who mounted their Canon …