format

Split image featuring a vintage camera on the left and two boys standing against a city street background on the right. one boy has his arm around the other's shoulder. black and white tone.

Why I Shoot Medium Format Film

Back in the day, 35mm film was called “miniature” format; its itty bitty negatives were considered only good for snapshots and maybe street photography (sorry, Leica shooter Henri Cartier-Bresson). Serious photography—landscape, portraiture, documentary, commercial—was dominated by medium format film, a platform that produced images with fine detail and luscious tonality, even when blown up to make billboard-size prints.

What is an HEIC File? Everything You Need to Know

An HEIC is a type of image file that contains compressed data, along with metadata such as the location a photograph was taken, the date it was created, and more. While it does reduce picture information, it typically results in a better representation of the original source than an image saved in JPEG format.

Six Reasons Why the Most Successful Photographers Choose Format

To be successful as a photographer you have to be able to run a business. It’s no longer good enough to take excellent photos, you now have to manage daily tasks to help land more clients, while ensuring existing clients repeat their business or bring you referrals.

Format Launches Workfow: Adds Gallery Support and Business Tools

Format, a website-building platform that competes with the likes of Squarespace, has announced Workflow: a new suite of tools designed to help professional photographers run their businesses. Additionally, in support of the struggling industry due to COVID-19, a Pro account is free for the first year.

The Problem with Using Large Format Lenses on a Digital Camera

Large format photography still enjoys the status of a noble branch in image-making. Legendary names like Planar, Dagor, Heliar, Symmar, and Angulon -- to mention just a few milestones in lens’ history -- bear an almost supernatural aura of excellence.

ProGrade Digital Skips XQD Memory Cards, Pushes for CFexpress

ProGrade Digital, the new memory card company launched in mid-February 2018 by a group of former Lexar executives, is trying to stay ahead of the game in the memory card format wars. It will not be making any XQD cards, and instead the company is pushing for the CFexpress format.

Why You Should Try Soaking 35mm Film in Ramen Soup

Submerging your film in liquid might not seem like a good idea, but when done properly it’s a photography technique that can garnish unexpectedly beautiful results. Without any post-processing work, you can get a distorted effect with vivid streaks of color and interesting textures.

The Life and Work of Doctor-Turned-Photographer Zun Lee

By day, Zun Lee is a doctor in Toronto, Canada. When he's not working, he's often unwinding from stress with a camera in hand. As a self-taught photographer, his documentary and street projects have caught the eye of The New York Times, The New Yorker, Magnum, and more.

The 8-minute video above by Format's InFrame is an inspiring look at Lee's life and work.

FLIF is a New Free Lossless Image Format That Raises the Compression Bar

Every so often, a new image format comes to town and attempts to overthrow the established order of how images (and photos) are saved and shared. In 2010, Google announced a new format called WebP, which promised to speed up the Web by shrinking file sizes without hurting quality. Last year, well-known programmer Fabrice Bellard unveiled a format of his own called BPG that claimed to pack the same quality of JPEGs at just half the size.

Now there's a new contender that raises the bar (and shrinks file size) even more. It's called FLIF, which stands for Free Lossless Image Format.

Here’s Why Instagram Chose to Break the Frame

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?

6 Top Online Photography Portfolio Hosting Options

Your photography deserves a website that can showcase its creativity and beauty... without breaking the bank. Former TIME CEO and Curator Gallery owner Ann S. Moore told us in a recent interview, “Shame on you if you don’t have a website! You absolutely have to have one!” Today we'll be looking at a few of the top industry solutions for hosting your photography portfolio in style.

How JPEG Handles Colors and Compression

Want to understand the math and science behind how JPEG files store your digital photographs? The YouTube channel Computerphile has a new series of videos on the JPEG. They're a bit long and heady, but you may find them interesting if you've ever wondered about the technical details behind one of the world's most popular image compression methods.

BPG is a New Image Format That Wants to Replace the JPEG with Equal Quality at Half the Size

JPEG is a remarkably resilient file format. Despite having many upstart formats attempt to dethrone it over the years -- including JPEG 2000 and Google's WebP -- the JPEG is still used by nearly 70% of websites and is holding strong in popularity.

Now there's a new competitor in the ring. It's called BPG (Better Portable Graphics), and it's a format designed and advocated by notable French programmer Fabrice Bellard (creator of FFmpeg and QEMU).

Phase One Announces 40mm-80mm f/4–5.6 Lens for Its Digital 645 System

When it comes to medium format photography, prime lenses are the norm. The size, weight and quality of construction of lenses are all areas of constraint for medium format over DSLRs or mirrorless, and so zoom lenses are more of a rarity.

However, there are always impressive exceptions to the rule, which is exactly what Phase One has done with its second-ever zoom lens for the 645 digital medium format system.

New Open Source Exhibition Format Asks Artists to Bring Their Own Projectors

"BYOB" is an initialism that's readily understood by college students who party. To artist Rafaël Rozendaal, however, it means something entirely different. In 2010, Rozendaal launched Bring Your Own Beamer, a series of novel "open source" art exhibitions in which participants were asked to bring their own beamers (AKA projectors). The recipe for the concept is extremely simple: find a venue with plenty of wall space (and outlets), invite a bunch of artists and art-lovers, and have images projected all over the walls for everyone to enjoy.

Adobe Expands DNG Specification to Include Lossy Compression

Adobe has officially added lossy compression into the latest specification (1.4) for its Digital Negative (DNG) RAW file format. The new Lossy DNG, which first appeared as a feature in Lightroom 4 earlier this year, gives photographers a middle-ground between the quality of lossless DNG photos and the small file size of JPEG photos.

XQD a No-Show at Photokina, SanDisk Opts to Avoid the Format

When XQD memory cards were announced in December 2011, the CompactFlash Association touted the format as the successor to CompactFlash cards. We definitely seemed to be moving in that direction at first: one month after the unveiling, Nikon's flagship D4 DSLR was announced with XQD card support. The day after that, Sony became the first major memory card maker to announce a line of XQD cards. Six months later, Lexar also announced its intentions to join the party.

Since then, things have died down to the point where you can hear grasshoppers chirping. Not a single XQD-capable camera was announced at Photokina 2012 this past week. Despite being the first to make them, Sony strangely decided to leave the cards out of its top-of-the-line cameras as well.