Have you ever wondered what a gale-force sneeze would look like if you could see air currents, temperature gradients, and differences in pressure and composition of the air? Or, less disgustingly, the strike of a match? This fascinating 6-minute video demonstrates Schlieren photography, which makes the invisible visible.
You would think the physics of lenses and light are pretty set in stone—and yet, somehow, people still get really twisted around when it comes to things like crop factor, depth of field, and speed boosters. Hoping to end (or at least quiet) this debate, photographer Jimmi Kai created this very informative, easy-to-understand video.
Canon just released this 3.5-minute video that explains how lenses work. We learn about focal points, spherical aberration, chromatic aberration, and how multiple lens elements are used together for aberration correction.
A report published in the famed journal Science is giving us, perhaps, our first look at the future of optical technology. And that future comes bearing camera lenses that are thinner than a human hair.
When talking about the right kind of lenses, there are some characteristics that people should not be buying for most photographic practices. In this post I'll be discussing the problem with modern lenses.
Sony today launched an entirely new brand of interchangeable lenses: the G Master. This line will represent the best of what Sony has to offer in terms of optics.
The brand will launch with 3 new E-mount lenses: the 24-70mm f/2.8, 85mm f/1.4, and 70-200mm f/2.8.
Samyang Optics has announced two new lenses due out this October under their Rokinon branding. The first piece of glass announced is a 50mm f/1.2 lens, while the second is a 21mm f/1.4. Both products are compatible with Canon EF-M, Fujifilm X, Micro Four Thirds, and Sony E mounts. The lenses are entirely manual focus but feature aspherical elements, with the 21mm housing an extra-low dispersion element, for increased image clarity.
Most of you know I've been very impressed with Sigma's new Art lenses. Their 35mm f/1.4 Art I still think is the sharpest 35mm prime lens made. The 50mm f/1.4 Art is also superb.
Editor's note: If you're unfamiliar with how to interpret MTF charts, you can find a primer here.
I'll be honest. I'm pretty excited about the Canon 11-24mm f/4 L lens. I love shooting ultra-wide and the chance to shoot this wide with a rectilinear lens on a full-frame camera has me pretty excited. But I'm also very aware of how near-impossibly difficult designing a lens this wide would be, so my expectations were tempered a bit.
There's a reason I'll often stitch together a couple of 24mm shots for a landscape rather than take one 16mm shot. OK, there are several reasons, but image quality is high among them.
A team of researchers at Harvard are trying to revolutionize the world of optical lenses. Instead of traditional curved lenses that suffer from various optical flaws, they are working on a completely flat and ultra-thin lens that overcomes age-old problems and pushes optical quality to the limits of the laws of nature.
I recently did a simple review that compared Yongnuo's new $40 clone of the Canon 50mm f/1.8 II. Today I will dive a little deeper into how the two lenses stack up optically.
There’s only so much that can be tested in home without fancy gear (MTF charts and the like) so I did a few tests that gauge common aesthetic qualities, using techniques that are often recommended for testing at home.
In a new video released yesterday, Fujifilm offers a beautiful behind-the-scenes look at the care, attention, and technology that goes into creating each of their Fujinon lenses from start-to-finish.
Smartphone cameras have improved exponentially since their introduction to the world, but one company still believes there's plenty of room for improvement. That company is DynaOptics and their latest tech is promising to pack optical zoom into more smartphones without adding any bulk to the phones at all.
Dr. Hubert Nasse has been working in optics for almost 30 years. A ZEISS master, many of us dream of sitting down with a man of his optical know-how and just having a conversation in which he enlightens us (pun intended) on the basics of lens design.
Fortunately, photographer and photo educator Matt Granger is making that dream come true for us today with his video interview with Dr. Nasse from Photokina.
NASA is known for using some impressive optics for its telescopes. But with amazing optics come some logistical limitations.
Ground-based lenses used by NASA can be as massive as needed, but are limited due to atmospheric distortion. Those used in space-based telescopes such as Hubble, on the other hand, must be much smaller, capable of being launched into space and fixed on-the-fly. This leaves NASA with a little Catch–22.
A Catch-22 they’ve managed to find an answer to in the form of SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy): a Boeing 747 with a 17-ton telescope packed inside.
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.
Sony has officially released the very first image of what promises to be an impressive leap forward in digital imaging technology: the curved full-frame sensor.
Up until now, when exporting a RAW image from Lightroom to another program to work on, Lightroom first had to convert it to a JPEG or TIFF image. This effectively rendered shooting in RAW useless if you were wanting to do much outside editing on the images. Here to change that though is DxO with Optics Pro 9.5.
Get out your Easy Bake Ovens and your polydimethylsiloxane, it’s time to make some lenses. Okay, okay... so it’s not that easy. But researchers at an Australian University have developed a new way to make extremely inexpensive, high-quality lenses by using nothing more than droplets of a transparent silicon and an oven to cure said droplets in.
It’s not motion blur, it’s Iceland spar! Every year, I can’t think of anything I want for Christmas. So this …
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have come up with an inexpensive way to boost the resolution of common microscopes by a factor of 100, allowing medical clinics in developing countries to conduct complex tests with existing equipment.
Major camera makers including Olympus, Samsung and …
According to Hoya founder Shigeru Yamanaka’s grandson, Yutaka Yamanaka, Hoya’s acquisition of Pentax may not have been the best business …
These glasses might look like typical geeky photo dad gear or something your eccentric uncle might wear, but if …