Sony has published an official warning on its website that states that it is aware that lasers can cause damage to its cameras' image sensors. While this information is probably not news to most, Sony notably has finally publicly acknowledged the danger.
A renowned Venezuelan explorer and naturalist lost a lifetime of work last week after a house fire broke out and burned down his studio. Among the losses were photographs captured during over 200 expeditions spanning roughly 70 years.
From time to time, we all get that desire to throw one of our electronics at the wall and/or smash it with a bat. But how many of us ever actually get to do it? For photographer Jaap Vliegenthart, he got to live out this fantasy: crushing some of his old electronics to smithereens and then capturing the aftermath.
The BBC/PBS show "Spy in the Wild" continues to be a never-ending source of robot camera hijinks. This time, a 'spy pig' robot ended up on the wrong side of a some territorial male Komodo dragons who didn't take kindly to its presence. The interaction didn't end well for the pig...
Vandals have attacked the world-famous willow tree in Wanaka, New Zealand, chopping off a number of branches with a saw. The seemingly "senseless" act is eliciting widespread outrage and condemnation.
A major storm brought heavy rains, floods, and mudslides that brought parts of Sao Paulo to a halt this week. Renowned photographer Bob Wolfenson's studio was caught in the midst of the severe weather, and he estimates that up to 80% of his collection was affected.
You probably know that the lasers in concerts and even on self-driving cars can damage your camera's sensor in a direct hit, but did you know that light reflected off skin during laser tattoo removal can also destroy your sensor? Watch this 37-second video to see for yourself.
New Zealand photographer Luke Riding was hiking around the base of Angels Landing in Zion National Park when he stumbled upon a smashed-up Fujifilm camera that had clearly fallen from atop the 1,488-foot-tall rock formation. The memory card was intact and Riding found a number of photos on it.
One of the viral stories on the Web last week was how NASA photographer Bill Ingalls had his remote Canon DSLR melted while shooting a SpaceX rocket launch. NASA has since revealed more details regarding exactly what happened.
Renowned NASA photographer Bill Ingalls set up a remote DSLR camera pointed at the launch pad yesterday during the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch. When he went back to retrieve the camera afterward, this is what he found.
Here's a pro tip: if you're looking for somewhere to place your camera for a while when outdoors, don't leave it under the tires of a vehicle. This 12-second video shows the pain that can result if you do.
My name is John Kraus, and I work as a photojournalist at Cape Canaveral, covering rocket launches with up-close cameras at the various launchpads here. For yesterday’s Atlas V rocket launch, I had two cameras at Space Launch Complex 41. These cameras were sound-activated; the sound alone would kill anyone standing at the launchpad during liftoff.
While shooting for two weeks in Hawaii last month, Israeli photographer Erez Marom's drone had an Icarus experience. Marom flew his $1,500 DJI Phantom 4 camera drone too close to lava flows and accidentally melted part of the camera. He was able to capture some gorgeous photos of lava up-close, though.
If you're flying with camera equipment, bring the gear onto the plane in a carry-on bag with you if at all possible. This $11,000 Leica lens shows what can happen if you entrust your pricey equipment to the hold inside checked baggage.
A woman shooting a selfie lost her balance at an art exhibition in Los Angeles recently, causing a reported $200,000 worth of damage to the artworks. The whole thing was caught on camera and can be seen in the 35-second surveillance video above.
Pro tip: if you'd like to keep your DSLR looking nice, don't let large dog get its jaws or paws on it. One photographer over in Belgium learned a hard lesson recently when his German Shepherd spent some quality time with his brand new Nikon D500.
Ouch. The DJI Mavic is one of the most adored drones released in 2016, and why not? It's small, it's fast, and it captures beautiful footage. But is it durable? Can it survive being sprayed with water, rammed into walls, walloped with basketballs, and set on fire? Let's find out!
Photographer John Kraus has brought rocket launch photography back into the mainstream. His photos regularly go viral online, and we've shared several of them here on PetaPixel as well. But these incredible shots come at a price, as he showed us yesterday.
In what is either a crazy accident or a brilliant attempt at a bit of viral marketing, this video shows 8-year-old Ruby Kavanagh, a world-class junior golfer, knocking a $1,900 drone out of the sky with a well-placed drive.
It's not just the big guys you have to be worried about when setting up a camera trap in the jungle. As naturalist Phil Torres explains in this Jungle Diaries video, you should probably look out for ants too.
If this video doesn't make you cringe, nothing will. In the middle of what looks to be a presentation at Cine Gear Expo, disaster struck. While testing out a powerful and pricey stabilizing rig, a $70K camera smashed to the ground.
The Hydraulic Press Channel is a staple of many people's online video diet. Every few days another gadget, foodstuff, or toy gets crushed on video while millions watch on, and this week it was time to surrender a few "tough" action cameras into its clutches.
If you ever try your hand at light painting photography with burning steel wool, be extra careful with safety and legality. Just a few months after a photographer allegedly destroyed a historic shipwreck in California with his sparks, another steel wool photo shoot has burned down a historic 1920s building in a US national preserve.
This is why we can't have nice things... A selfie-snapping young man in Portugal is making headlines the world over today after he toppled and smashed a 126-year-old statue to bits while trying to take a selfie with it.
An iconic shipwrecked fishing boat in Point Reyes, California, was severely damaged by a fire yesterday, and it may have been caused by a photographer's long-exposure light-painting photo involving sparks from burning steel wool.
The YouTube channel tesla500 wanted to see what happens when various objects fall into the spinning blades of an upside-down lawnmower, so they set up some slow motion cameras to find out.
In addition to dropping keyboards and mice, they also decided to destroy an old Olympus point-and-shoot digital camera (it's about 2.5-minutes in).
(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.3"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));Accidents Happen. We've got you covered!Canon is offering complimentary CarePAK protection coverage for select gear purchases at B&H through January 9, 2016!Details: http://bhpho.to/1PTopmqPosted by B&H Photo Video Pro Audio on Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Canon is currently running a special promotion in which photographers purchasing gear through authorized dealers will receive a free 13 months of CarePAK priority service and accident insurance (which protects from accidents such as careless drops and spills).
To promote CarePAK coverage of its products, B&H recently published the video above that shows careless and unlucky photographers having their gear damaged and destroyed in all kinds of painful ways.
Here's a random tip: if your $1,000 camera ever gets run over by a truck, don't just throw the crushed parts in the trash. sonyalpharumors reports that one unlucky owner of a flattened Sony a7 mirrorless camera still managed to sell the parts and the original box on eBay for $20 with an extra $18.65 for shipping.
YouTube celebrity Casey Neistat made the photography world cringe and groan today after publishing a new vlog titled "Quitter," which includes a particularly painful-to-watch case of violence against cameras. After repeatedly experiencing an error on his Canon 70D that caused him to lose footage, Neistat took an ax and destroyed both the camera and lens.
Can a GoPro survive a swift kick in the lens from a 9 Iron? You know what Betteridge's law of headlines says, 'any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word no," but we didn't put the question in the headline... so you'll just have to watch the video and see.
A New Jersey resident was arrested last Friday after allegedly firing a shotgun at and successfully hitting a drone that was taking photographs of a nearby home undergoing some renovations.
We're not sure what it is about destroying one's own work, but it seems Robert Frank, the photographer behind the iconic photobook The Americans, will be jumping on board with this trend following a pop-up exhibition at Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifa, Nova Scotia.
The video above isn't a time-lapse per-se, but it is being reported as such because it allegedly condense a full hour of Israeli Army air strikes on a Gaza Neighborhood down to just one minute of footage. In that minute, you see an entire neighborhood vanish into explosions and massive clouds of dust that clear to reveal only piles of rubble.
Reason number 14,526 why you should insure your gear: because a rowdy bunch of over-excited Croatian high school grads might just push you into a freezing fountain and destroy it all.
This might seem like an unlikely scenario (which is why it's so far down the list) but it actually happened earlier this month to one poor Croatian photojournalist, and the incident was caught on camera.
Just incase @29_JL @hullcityteam your not sure the ball is the yellow thing.... not the £6k camera (photo al walter) pic.twitter.com/op6zGrUBVX— Richard Heathcote (@rheathcote) December 21, 2013
Professional sports photographers know their equipment is always at risk, but British Getty Images shooter Richard Heathcote was still surprised and more than a bit miffed when his DSLR bit the dust at Saturday's Hull-vs.-West Bromwich Premiere League soccer match.
Those with delicate constitutions where the destruction of photography gear is concerned should look away or skip over this one. Whatever you do, don't press play on the video above... or if you do press play, don't watch past about the 3:50 mark, because that's when things get ugly.
After all the videos and examples posted online of everything from RED EPICs to 5D Mark IIs being fried by lasers, you'd think just about everybody in the photo community would know to keep their cameras safely stowed during a show where lasers are at play.
I'm a self-described Apple fanboy, and even I found this funny, but if you're adverse to seeing beautifully engineered tech destroyed before your very eyes you might want to skip this one. On the other hand, if you're an Android fanboy (or girl) who harbors a deep hate for Apple, this could be therapeutic.
In the fake DIY video above, Newtography's Andrew Newlun sets out to show you how to turn a brand new iPhone into a handy-dandy keychain lanyard by drilling a hole right through the iPhone's camera.
Purposely distressing and destroying negatives was never a part of photographer Rohn Meijer's plans, but when he discovered a box of old negatives in his basement that had been exposed to 15 years worth of moisture damage, an idea took shape.
The photos he found that day had a pleasing quality about them, and so Meijer, a fashion photographer by trade, decided he would start taking his old fashion shoot negatives and nearly destroying them into works of art.
Update: The video has been taken down by the uploader.
The harmful effects of concert lasers when exposed to your camera's image sensor are well documented. In the past we've shared several videos (here and here) that showed three different Canon 5D Mark IIs rendered unusable after a concert laser passed over them for only a second.
And if it can happen to a 5D Mark II, you better believe it can happen to a sensor much more expensive than that. The video above shows what happens when a $20K RED EPIC's image sensor goes head to head with a similar laser. Gear lovers might want to look away ...