lucky

Startling smartphone footage of a man being flung into the air from his vehicle after it flipped several times on a beach has surfaced and gone viral.

The largest supernova seen in over a decade just exploded (from the perspective of observers on Earth), and one lucky photographer managed to capture it in a before-and-after sequence of photos.

A Massachusetts couple tasked with cleaning out a storage unit was blown away after finding that it contained roughly 2,000 vintage cameras and lenses.

A photographer in Wisconsin has captured a series of stunning photos of a fox after the curious creature decided to take a closer look at his homemade camera trap.

A nature photographer has captured a remarkable one-in-a-million macro photo of four hover flies aligned in a perfect mid-air formation.

My name is Lance Wilson and I'm a 14-year-old nature photographer located on the Central Coast of California.

I should go out and buy a lottery ticket. Last week, I took advantage of Nikon’s 10% off sale on refurbished gear to get a great deal on their 500mm f/5.6 PF lens. Did I need it? No. But I’ve been lusting over its compact size and light weight since it came out, so finally pulled the trigger and bought one.

Montreal-based photographer François Guinaudeau went out a couple of nights ago to shoot Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner during the Perseid meteor shower. As he was capturing photos of the comet for stacking, a shooting star flew into the frame and exploded near the comet. Above is one of the photos that resulted.

One of the big photo stories on the Web this past week has been the picture above, shot over the weekend by Australian photographer Sam Yeldham. Yeldham was shooting time-lapse photos of a storm rolling into Sydney when a bride and groom strolled into the scene. He captured a gorgeous shot of the couple as the sun was setting and before the storm struck, but the couple was gone before he could get their contact information.

Beautiful photo compositions generally require a keen eye and a quick shutter finger, but sometimes luck plays a huge role as well. That's what happened today for UK-based photographer Amy Shore, who was photographing the total solar eclipse from her backyard in Leicestershire. A bird flew into Shore's frame as the Moon was passing over the face of the Sun, adding a unique touch to her shot.

First things first: the photo above isn't a composite. In fact, as Elizabeth van der Bij of ENV Photography jokingly explained in the comments on her Facebook page, her Photoshop skills "suck", so she couldn't have faked it even if she had wanted to.

No, the Alberta-based photographer and the couple, Kassandra & Craig, simply stuck it out and kept taking pictures as the storm approached until, as luck would have it, the Universe delivered in a big way.

The video above, featuring renowned Dancers Among Us photographer Jordan Matter, is only a minute and a half long, but he shares a very interesting perspective in it. Many photographers are all about planning every shot, and to be sure, this approach can yield spectacular results. As they say, luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation.

But Matter seems to take a different approach. He prefers to "make his own luck," ala Titanic antagonist Cal Hockley... minus the big diamond and evil tendencies.

I’ve been shooting photos for 20 years. I’ve made my living in the profession for the last 15. I can count on one hand the number of times that everything lined up perfectly and a truly rare image was created.

Want to snap a memorable bridal photo? Just have her pose on the side of a mountain, and then capture a double rainbow in the background. That's what Alaskan wedding photographer Josh Martinez did yesterday, resulting in the incredible image above.

Some people have all the luck right? The above photo was taken by photographer Jason Smith, and it's a great example of the right place meeting the right time. While taking 4th of July photos at a friend's house, he was able to capture a lightning strike that synched perfectly with some fireworks.

Walkthroughs of photographs that aren't easily reproducible (or are impossible to reproduce) might not be very useful to many, but it's still interesting to learn how rare shots come about. An example would be the photograph above, captured by photographer Bryan Hanna last week. Hanna was aiming to capture a long-exposure nighttime photograph of a landscape in the foreground and the night sky in the background, but he accidentally snagged something even better: a fireball zipping across the sky in just the right area in the frame!

This past Thursday, a spectacular three-alarm fire consumed the upper floors of a 6-story building in Old Montreal. Photographer Evan Kitaljevich found himself in the right place at the right time, and documented the blaze unintentionally in an uncommon way: through time-lapse photos.

On its own, the video above is horribly filmed and some of the most difficult-to-watch footage you'll ever see, but what it shows makes it fascinating. It's a point-of-view look at what it's like to fall 12,500 feet without a parachute... and survive. Skydiver Lucas Damm was jumping out of a plane over British Columbia recently when his helmet-mounted GoPro camera smacked against the plane door and fell out of its holder. The camera, still rolling, fell the entire way down and miraculously escaped without any damage.