Purchasing a new lens for your kit can be an expensive endeavor and the more information you know before making a purchase is always useful. You may have noticed that lens manufacturer sites tend to include what is known as a Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) chart.
Geoffrey Berliner is the Executive Director of the Penumbra Foundation, a non-profit photo …
Sigma has been cranking out its Art, Sports and Contemporary lens lineups like mad this past year. Of those three, the Art series has been the most talked about, and it looks like the much-anticipated 24mm f/1.4 addition to that line might finally see the light of day in Q1 of 2015.
A few weeks ago we told you that the first Hasselblad body and Zeiss lens to ever travel to space were going up on the auction block at RR Auctions in Boston.
Conservative estimates put the expected hammer price at between $50k and $100k, but the camera has officially been sold, and its selling price was a whole lot more than that... approximately three times even the highest estimates, in fact.
Not long ago an image of Canon’s upcoming 11–24mm f/4L lens leaked out for the world to see, but many thought it might be fake... possibly because they didn't want to get their hopes up. Today, however, hopes can soar, because it seems Canon Germany's website accidentally posted the lens, all-but-confirming that it does indeed exist.
Joby -- the company best known for their tough, flexible tripods -- today announced the latest additions to their Action Series line-up. They're the Joby Suction Cup & Locking Arm, and the Suction Cup & GorillaPod Arm.
Yongnuo is a Chinese company that's known for making cheaper third-party alternatives to pricier camera gear. While they've focused on lighting equipment and various accessories up to this point, the company is now branching into a bigger and better market: lenses.
The first product announced is the Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 (shown above). If you mistook it for the Canon 50mm f/1.4, you're not alone.
Photokina brought about a plethora of new gear from a number of companies, and easily overlooked among the larger announcements was a quirky new lens from Voigtlander: the 40mm f/2.8 Heliar M-mount lens. And the interesting thing about this new pancake lens is that even though it's an M-mount piece of glass, it’s not compatible with M-mount cameras.
These days, it seems that if you want to get a nice sharp lens, you have to spend $1000 on a piece of L glass. Aside from the nifty fifty’s of the world, there are very few lenses that deliver quality results at a low price. But if you look harder, there are actually a few old lenses that still offer amazing quality for extremely low price. How is that possible? Well, it is. Keep reading to learn how.
It looks like Canon is looking to move some inventory -- or at the very least score some brownie points with its users -- because over the weekend, Canon announced a new permanent price drop on a vast selection of lenses, with discounts ranging from 5% to 33% off.
It's never a good day when you crack the glass screen that's protecting the LCD screen on your DSLR. Even if you're careful with your gear and travel with a bag between locations, accidents happen.
That's what happen to Instructables user coolscience.com, but instead of sending his camera in for repair, he decided to take the DIY approach and fix it himself. Fortunately for you, the steps he came up with ended up being both simple and cheap!
As the saying goes, quality lenses are a lot more important than good bodies when it comes to investing in camera gear. They last longer, retain their value more, and have more utility overall than, say, buying the latest DSLR that will become obsolete in 3 to 5 years. But if you are into photography for the first time, you’ll likely buy an entry level camera that comes bundled with an inferior, even crappy, kit lens. Or is it?
Do you really need quality gear to take good pictures? Spend thousands of dollars on red/golden rings lenses?
Well, I have to admit this has been a fun series. I’ve learned a whole lot. That’s what makes this so fun -- I get some results I don’t understand, get some help figuring out what is going on, and before I know it, I’ve learned something that explains other things I haven’t been able to understand.
Tilt-shift lenses are nothing short of optical magic... or so it seems. But as their namesake implies, they actually achieve this 'magic' through the use of two clever movements in the lens.
In the short tutorial above, Vincent Laforet, a Canon Explorer of Light and well-known photography educator, explains just how those two components work and how they dramatically impact the look of an image.
Lytro came into the photography world not only to create a novelty product, but to fundamentally change how we approach image capture. Because despite light field photography being around for over a century, it’s only with the latest technology that the company is able to exploit what it is a camera is truly capable of doing.
We recently spoke with Lytro about its upcoming Illum camera a bit, diving into the technology behind the specs and revealing how Lytro's approach is allowing the company to not only step, but leap into the future.
The first post I made on sensor-stack thickness wallowed deeply in PhotoGeekery. This one is meant to be of practical use so I’ll try to leave the Geek stuff out. We’ll start with the simple facts.
NOTE: This is a Geek Post. If you aren’t into geeky photo measurements, or into adapting lenses from one brand of camera to another, you’ll not be interested.
A year or two ago, I wrote a blog post where I basically showed lenses shot on adapters on other cameras aren’t acceptable for testing. If you run them through Imatest the results aren’t accurate. I suggested that reviewers shouldn’t test lenses on adapters, although obviously adapters are a great way to use interesting lenses to take pictures.
Sigma has done nothing but impress over the course of the last year, one piece of quality glass at a time. But as impressive as their Art, Contemporary and Sports glass already is, the company isn't anywhere near done yet.
It’s fairly well-known that, when it comes to capturing images, more important than almost any camera body is the glass being put in front of it. However, there are times when your camera body plays a vital role in determining the quality of the image rendered by said glass.
To prove this and also help show off what glass performs best with a particular body, DxOMark has published a series of articles that break down what the best lenses are for the Nikon D800E.
When it comes to buying glass, deciding what you want and how much you're willing to spend can be difficult even in the best of conditions. So, naturally, when buying second-hand glass, an added layer of caution is needed to make sure you're getting what you're looking and paying for.
While Google Glass user Kenny Zhu was in North Korea this past April, he took advantage of the small and comparatively inconspicuous size of the device on his head to snap what appear to be the first images taken in North Korea using the wearable tech.
If you’ve wanting to get your paws on a pair of Google Glass, your chances have been few and far between... until now. As of today, Google is opening up the sales of the Google Glass headset to all of the United States, assuming they’re in stock and you have $1.5k to burn.
When it comes to the type of glass used in still photography, versus the glass used in motion picture, there’s quite a dramatic difference in design, quality and price. Quite often, it's the last of those differences that is the most inhibiting for photogs who want to dabble around in motion picture.
To help ease that transition, Caleb Pike of DSLR Video Shooter has broken down a way in which you can convert still photography lenses into psuedo-cine lenses at minimal cost.
In a world where cell phone photography and videography is as prevalent as it is, CNN’s iReport has manage to become a fairly successful citizen journalism service, allowing users from across the globe to upload their eye-witness and breaking news. The service essentially crowdsources breaking news, but iReport is about to take it a step further than even the smartphone allows for.
You might think you have a fast lens if it tops f/1.2 or f/1.0, but that's nothing compared to the De Oude Delft 50mm f/0.75. It's one of the fastest lenses in the world, and -- compared to other super speedy lenses -- isn't that expensive.
In some gut-wrenching news shared by Leica Rumors this morning, a sponsor of theirs, Red Dot Cameras, has had approximately $62,000 in gear stolen from their shop overnight.
Lomography's already has some experience partnering with Russian lens manufacturers. And given how successful the Zenit partnership and Lomo's recreation of the Petzval lens has been, they've decided to do it again, this time with the Russar+.
Sunsets are beautiful. They've inspired songs and paintings, they've been the backdrops to weddings and celebrations, and overall they're natures way of ending almost every day on a beautiful note.
However, as photographers, we often see them as something of a cliché. To change that up a bit, photographer Bing Wright decided to create a series of images titled "Broken Mirror/Evening Sky" that add a new element to the equation. As you can see from the image above as well as those below, it looks like he photographed some beautiful sunsets through broken windows. But that wasn't exactly how the images came to be.
Apparently NOT April Fools' joke, the world's fastest purchasable camera lens looks to have been posted -- and now sold -- on eBay earlier today. Supposedly in impeccable condition, with all caps and T-mount adapter included, the Canon 50mm f/0.75 went for a rather measly $500 in a quick "Buy It Now" purchase.
Let's start out Sunday slow.... like reaaaaaaaaaallly slow... 10 million fps slow. As the saying goes: everything looks cool in slow motion; but this video of a ball hitting and breaking a pane of glass is doubly cool because it almost looks like a cinemagraph.