For many advanced photographers, the rule of thirds is seen as something of a beginner's trope or amateur construct, but learning how, why, and when to break it can be a challenge. This short episode of Brain Flick helps deconstruct that question and explain why and when "bad" compositions work.
It may seem counterintuitive, but even a sports action photo can tell a story in a 1/1000th of a second, and the Rio Olympics men’s 200m butterfly final provided a perfect opportunity to analyze the role of not only the decisive moment, but decisive position in telling a story.
Amidst a barrage of violent imagery in the past week graphically illustrating the deaths of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and five Dallas police officers, Jonathan Bachman’s image of a protest in Baton Rouge has emerged as iconic.
We tend to see photos in isolation. By that I don’t mean we only see one photo at a time -- between Facebook, Flickr, and Instagram, we’ve become comfortable consuming many photos at once -- but that we see only one photo from a scene.
Here's a great 4-minute video by the YouTube channel society of geeks that looks at the work of official White House photographer Pete Souza.
One of the things about film photography is that exposure on film, unlike in digital photography, is not equivalent at all to overall brightness of an image.
When talking about the right kind of lenses, there are some characteristics that people should not be buying for most photographic practices. In this post I'll be discussing the problem with modern lenses.
John Green of vlogbrothers made this interesting 2-minute video in which he talks about his favorite photo: a picture titled "Young Farmers" by German photographer August Sander. Upon first glance, it may look like a simple snapshot of three nicely dressed men walking along a road, but there's so much you can learn about the photo by examining it closely and by looking at the cultural context.
A few months ago I stumbled upon a very interesting article on PetaPixel titled "Why I Stopped Using The DNG File Format." In this article the author mentions that Capture One give us a better starting point for color processing. This point made me excited about the whole idea that my portrait images could turn up a lot better and that I only need to start using Capture One.
What's the current state of photojournalism, and where is the industry headed? That's what a major survey recently attempted to answer, and the result is a massive 76-page document that was just published today. It's an interesting and in-depth look at the state of news photography.
Canon's latest press release has confirmed some of the rumors that have been floating around the Internet for a while now; that it has decided the megapixel war is not over and is preparing to drop its "nuclear option", a 120-megapixel behemoth.
Instagram cracked the restrictive barriers of its iconic square format yesterday, announcing to the world that it intends to remain the dominant platform of the visual content world. Initially created so that the every picture could be seen full screen on any device and any orientation, the square frame also incidentally made reference to the Polaroid format, adding another touch of the nostalgia that made Instagram so popular. So why change it?
Yesterday we shared some interesting before-and-after images showing the visual effects work that went into the hit …
Last year I launched a new initiative called the Streettogs Academy, a biweekly challenge for motivating and sharpening the skills of street photographers around the world. Photographers are given 2 weeks to shoot photos for the latest theme and upload 1 to 3 of them to our Facebook page.
Our latest assignment was "Black and White." The submitted photos that received the most attention from members of the group were those that had the simple basic requirement of a good image: a strong visual hook. Here's a look at photos.
In my mind, there are three important elements of a photograph. Lighting, Composition and Moment. Every picture that I love has these elements, in varying amounts. A great picture may have strength in all three areas, or it may be, for example, such an emotional moment that it overpowers poor composition or light.
But for this article I want to take a quick look at composition, and how photographers will be subconsciously considering many compositional elements when making pictures as well as editing and post processing later.
If you're a Canon user and a hater of all things DxOMark, you might want to skip over this one and read this article on how well the 7D Mark II is weather sealed instead. If you're a Canon hater, read on! You'll love this!
Earlier today, the lab released their official review of the Canon 7D Mark II, and while there were a few bright spots, the tone of the review in general might be summed up by the word 'meh.'
It’s not uncommon to hear someone say that they were haunted by an image, often an old photograph. It is a figurative and evocative expression. To say that an image is haunting is to say that the image has lodged itself in the mind like a ghost might stubbornly take up residence in a house, or that it has somehow gotten a hold of the imagination and in the imagination lives on as a spectral after-image.
Data is embedded in our environment, in our behavior, and in our genes. Over the past two years, the world has generated 90% of all the data we have today. The information has always been there, but now we can extract and collect massive amounts of it.
Given the explosion of mobile photography, social media based photo sharing, and video streaming, it’s likely that a large portion of the data we collect and create comes in the form of digital images.
Photographs like the one above by photographer Shikhei Goh go viral on a fairly regular basis. If the stories are to be believed, given enough patience and a little (or a lot) bit of luck, animals can be captured doing all sorts of amazing things.
According to an analysis published on Weibo, however, the stories can't (or rather shouldn't) be believed. Photos like these, the article claims, are staged by photographers who force pet store animals into awkward and unnatural poses.
As post-production software continues to become more and more powerful, researchers are doing their best to keep up by developing new methods of spotting digital photo fakes. In the past, we've seen that noise patterns and even Twitter trends can help spot fakes, but a new method out of UC Berkeley is taking a look at something else entirely: the shadows.
What can we learn about a city or event using Instagram photos? More than you might think. This interesting chart takes a look at what we can learn about Hurricane Sandy, simply by looking at an organized visualization of the Instagram photos taken during the storm.
The original title for this article was going to be “Group Buying Deal Review: Why WagJag Can Suck It”. After receiving an “offer” to participate in a group buying deal (also known as social buying or deal-a-day. Examples include Groupon and LivingSocial) from one of the larger local group buying companies in my area, it took me a few days, and some good advice from my wife to cool down and write this (mostly) rational analysis of the group buying deal economics.
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.
After reading the great reviews of the Fuji X100S, I decided to take the leap and buy one. I’ve been getting more interested in street photography lately, and this camera seemed like a good fit. Plus, it's supposed to sync at all shutter speeds, which is great for flash photography outside in bright sun. David Hobby and Zack Arias both have nice in-depth reviews.
But, things are rarely perfect. It turns out that the X100S can’t sync at f/2 unless you’re at around 1/1000 or slower on the shutter. Nice, but still, I was curious why that is. So I decided to run some tests to figure it out.
Has someone ever asked you why you like an image? Beneath the surface of great picture, there is a geometric design in hiding. During World War II, photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt worked for the early version of the Associated Press and went on to become a Life Magazine photographer, taking over fifty cover shots for them. Without getting too deep into Eisenstaedt’s personal story, I will say that he started photography with very little formal training.
Walker Evans' famous photo book "American Photographs" was first published in 1938. Since then, the book has been released in new editions every 25 years or so. Although the photos contained within its covers have remained the same, the processes and technologies used to print the photos have evolved over time, causing each edition to be every so slightly different from the others.
We now take a break from our regularly scheduled programming to direct your attention to an interesting study that was published yesterday by Pingdom. The website tracking company decided to analyze the demographics of the world's top 100 blogs (according to Technorati), sorting them by reader age and gender. It's findings regarding PetaPixel caught our eye.
Reikan Technology, the company behind the FoCal automatic lens calibration tool, tells us that it has released a new web-based tool for researching the performance of camera and lens combinations.
Respected stock market analysis website Seeking Alpha doesn’t think too highly of the …
It happens every time you press the shutter. Tiny circuits spring into action and furiously record the information from every sensor pixel onto your memory card. But pixel information is not all that is recorded. With every shutter press, your camera records dozens of interesting details about how the photo was taken. These details are tucked away deep inside the labyrinth of code that comprises your photo file. Photo editing softwares, such as Photoshop or Lightroom, can unlock some of this data for viewing later. But they normally only scratch the surface of the available information by displaying only the most commonly used Exif tags.
To mine the deepest depths of your Exif data, you may want to try a utility called Exiftool. This utility is known for its ability to squeeze every last drop of information from your Exif data. Don’t expect a slick, graphical interface, though. Although there are more user friendly softwares which incorporate the Exiftool engine, we’re going to demonstrate Exiftool where it is at its minimalist best – at the command line.