educational

I ran across yet another case of Holy Cow Look At These Russian Photos, in which the photographs of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky were showcased. In 1902, Prokudin-Gorsky learned the method of shooting three negatives (color separations) and then projecting them in registration through filters to produce projected color images.

Kodak was once the 800-pound gorilla in the world of photography. But after a century of dominance, Kodak's business crumbled and it was forced to declare bankruptcy in 2012. If you'd like to better understand what happened to the iconic brand, watch this great 12-minute video by the popular YouTube channel Company Man.

The United States' U-2 spy plane first took to the skies back in 1955 during the heyday of film photography. But even as cameras these days have largely shifted to digital, the U-2 continues to shoot its spy photos on film. The Wall Street Journal made this 19-minute documentary on the U-2 that offers a closer look at the U-2's photography.

The most recent version of the Copyright Law of the United States (December 2016) weighs in at a whopping 354 pages. And while there are areas of ambiguity, the basics and benefits of copyright registration for photographers are well-documented. Unfortunately, well-documented doesn’t mean well-understood, so we asked attorney (and former photo rep) Leslie Burns to weigh in on a number of common copyright misconceptions that still persist, and why you should register your copyright.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, chemists Robert Bunsen and Henry Roscoe and showed that burning magnesium produces artificial light that's similar to daylight. A man named Edward Sonstadt then brought the technology into the world of photography, and thus the idea for the photographic flash was born.

Here's an enlightening 7-minute video by Fstoppers that explains why "lens compression" is a misconception that's actually "perspective distortion".

Here's a 6-minute educational video by Shutterstock in which filmmaker Todd Blankenship discusses the basics of diffusing light and introduces three cheap options for doing so... including a $5 shower curtain.

You've probably learned about the exposure triangle countless times by now. If you want a deeper understanding of the science of exposure, though, check out this 30-minute video by Filmmaker IQ.

The rise of smartphone selfies is causing big changes in how people see themselves. Here's a 2-minute video by Vox that explains why selfies usually make our noses look bigger.

"Zooming with your feet" means getting closer to your subject physically instead of relying on a longer lens, but you should be aware that the results you won't be the same. Here's a 9-minute video from This Place that looks at how different focal lengths affect perspective when compared to "zooming with your feet."

Most photographers rely heavily on the capabilities of autofocus systems in DSLR cameras, but knowing how they actually work is something that even experienced photographers may not have learned. Here's a 4-minute video by ZY Productions that helps decode the mystery of DSLR autofocus by explaining the technical details behind it.

Vintage lenses seem to be increasingly popular nowadays, and not just in the hipster crowds. In this 5-minute video, photographer Mark Holtze looks at why some people are picking up (and dusting off) old vintage lenses instead of their more modern equivalents.

The use of slit-scan photography is actually quite old. It is often called line-scan, photo finish, or streak photography. Slit-scan photography has a rich and colorful history rooted in chemical analog photography. This technique is often used to visualize high-speed events such as missiles and bullets, although it is probably best known as photo finish photography used to determine the outcome of races.

More bits are better, right? But do you really know the difference between 8-bit and 16-bit images? Photo educator Nathaniel Dodson breaks it down for us in this informative 8-minute video for his channel tutvid.

Hyperfocal distance is a tool often used by certain genres of photography to render an entire scene in focus. It allows you to capture the foreground through to the background, keeping the whole image sharp. But how does it work? This 12-minute video by Filmmaker IQ looks at the science behind hyperfocal distance.

The "dolly zoom," also known as the "Hitchcock zoom" or "Vertigo effect," is a filmmaking technique that involves changing a zoom lens' angle of view while moving the camera toward or away from a subject to keep their relative size in the frame the same. Here's a 4-minute video by Now You See It that explains this technique and how (and why) it's used.

Before you read the rest of the article, and it will be a long read, please allow me to share a few thoughts with you. Visiting the abandoned city of Pripyat and the disaster site of Chernobyl was an experience that I was looking forward to for a very long time.

This handy 7-minute lighting guide from Aussie music photographer PJ Pantelis shows how you can use 2 lights and a reflector to create a professionally-lit headshot. Even if you’re not shooting portraits, the video is a great tutorial on working with light.

Neutral Density (ND) filters are a great tool for producing unique photos in lighting conditions where a long exposure would otherwise not be possible. This 7-minute video tutorial goes in to detail about which filter to select for your scene, with before and after photos showing the effects possible.

Mike Mezuel II puts on workshops at Big Bend National Park in Texas for photographers who want to learn best to photograph the night sky. In this 5-minute video, follow along as Mike leads his students out on a shoot beneath the dazzling night sky over Texas.

There are three basic types of surfaces, as far as lighting is concerned: reflective, transparent, and neutral. In this video, you'll learn about the 3 basic techniques for properly lighting each of these—in other words: the 3 techniques for lighting ... everything.

Scanning film is probably the least attractive part of shooting film, but that doesn't mean you should neglect this stage. Nowadays, we all want to share our analog images online, and the only way to do that is by digitizing our negatives one way or another.

I think it's fair to say that most photographers will, at some point in their career, have to work with models at least once—whether you're a still life shooter that photographs models' hands holding a fork full of food a couple of times a year or an e-commerce shooter that works with models every single day.

A video is made up from 25 single photos per second, that, when placed back-to-back, trick our mind into seeing motion. But what would happen if we only took one photo every minute, and then played them back at 25 frames per second? The result is a magnificent hyper-realistic compression of time.

In the 16-minute video above, Gavin Free of the The Slow Mo Guys answers a question he often receives: “Is using a high-speed camera similar to using a normal camera?” The answer is “Yes and No”, and we end up looking into the biggest challenges in using high-speed cameras.