These days there's a lot of talk about "fake news" on the Internet, and Facebook recently announced the introduction of fact checkers. Is that a good thing? I feel ambivalent about it, and I'll explain why.
If you're an Olympus OM-D E-M1 user, we'd suggest you hold off on updating to the latest firmware. Version 4.2, which added some focus stacking capabilities, seems to be leading to corrupt images and locking up cameras.
GoPro made the shocking announcement today that it's recalling each of the ~2,500 GoPro Karma camera drones sold so far in the 16 days since it has been available. Why? Because there's a chance the $799 drone can lose power during flight and fall out of the sky.
Google says its new Pixel smartphone has the best smartphone camera ever made, but it looks like the company still has some issues to work out. Pixel owners are reporting that the camera sometimes captures annoying lens flares in photos.
Wedding photographers these days often find themselves competing with guests who spend the whole ceremony shooting photos with smartphones, DSLRs, and even tablets. The short film above, titled "Unplugged," is a parody that shows why couples are sometimes choosing to have an "unplugged" wedding free of these distractions.
Canon has released an official service advisory for the 1D X Mark II that you'll want to pay attention to if you're one of the few already using the new camera. Apparently, some SanDisk CFast 2.0 cards don't play well with the 1D X Mark II; in fact, they'll corrupt some of your images.
Recently there has been a spate of very sad, and ultimately defeatist articles decrying the “death of photography”. We have no shortage of examples. Seriously.
Despite rave reviews, the Nikon D750 has been plagued by several issues since its release in September of 2014. And even though Nikon did issue a recall of certain models due to a well-documented flare problem, it seems another potentially-related issue with the shutter is being reported in the forums.
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.
In a Nutshell created this 5-minute video that offers a simple explanation of the problem of "freebooting" on Facebook, when copyrighted videos are ripped from other sources (mostly YouTube) and uploaded to the service without permission. The videos then go viral, gaining attention for the uploader and ad views for Facebook, but leaving the original content creator out in the cold.
Update on 10/9/15: Adobe has released a Lightroom update that fixes this bug.
If you've been frustrated with Lightroom crashing on you after upgrading to the latest version through Creative Cloud, don't worry: it's not just you. Adobe announced yesterday that the company is aware of critical performance and crasher bugs that are current afflicting some photographers.
Editor's update: It appears that SmugMug has identified and fixed the issue described in this article.
I recently discovered a glitch with SmugMug that's now causing me a massive headache. If you use SmugMug, this may be negatively impacting your business as well, so this article is a heads up for any photographer on SmugMug that may be affected.
Nikon has issued a new service advisory for the D750 DSLR, warning owners that some cameras may have a shutter defect that causes shading in a portion of photos. This notice comes half a year after Nikon warned D750 owners of a flare issue that had been discovered by photographers.
Leica has discovered a serious bug that owners of the new Monochrom (Typ 246) need to be aware of. The camera's DNG files have been found to be incompatible with Apple's new Photos app. It's not just that they can't be opened: the files could corrupt your library and cause you to lose your entire photo collection.
Every once in a while my gear rental company notices something, because of the large quantities of cameras and lenses we buy, that we think people should be aware of. This particular issue won't affect our renters; we've sent the affected cameras back. It may not affect very many people at all, since this is from a relatively small sample size. But I still think it worth mentioning.
It appears that the Nikon's response to the D750 flare issue is much more than an offer for a free repair. The camera is currently disappearing from stores, both online ones and brick-and-mortar ones, suggesting that some kind of recall or delay has been implemented while Nikon fixes the defect. [Update: We have confirmed that there is a recall.]
A week ago, we reported that some owners of the Nikon D750 are reporting a strange and ugly dark band that appears at the top of the frame, interrupting lens flare when the camera is pointed at certain angles towards light sources. Nikon acknowledged the issue today and says that it's currently looking into a fix.
The Nikon D750 full frame DSLR has been receiving fantastic marks from reviewers so far, but now an issue has popped up that threatens to damage the camera's reputation. Photographers around the world are reporting a problem with their lens flares. At certain angles, an ugly dark band shows up across the top, separating lens flares from the edge of the frame.
One pesky issue you may have run into with your DSLR is front-focusing or back-focusing, a problem that, in the past, required that you send your camera into a service center along with any troublesome lenses.
The iPhone has been touted as the world's most popular camera, but that world's most popular camera may be having some hardware issues. Several iPhone 6 Plus users are complaining through an Apple Discussion forum that their iPhone's camera is producing extremely shaky photos and videos... even when they stand completely still.
Update: It looks like it's already been fixed. Kudos to Getty for the quick response.
Getty's embed tool has been live for less than 24 hours and ALREADY somebody has figured out how it can be taken advantage of. It turns out that all it takes is some extremely simple code to remove attribution entirely.
Photographer Daniel Shea recently penned an op/ed on sexism in editorial photography that generated an important discussion about women in photography. It is a topic that I've thought about for a while now, especially as it relates to the diversity (or lack thereof) of the photographers who are most often promoted by the industry at large, whether by the photo media or the companies that produce the equipment and gear that we all use.
Thou shalt not steal.
It's one of the first things we learn as kids: don't take something that doesn't belong to you. And it's a hard lesson to learn, for as children, we feel the entire world belongs to us. I learned this lesson the hard way. No, I didn't shoplift...I stole little metal ashtrays from a Burger King in Panama City, Florida. I did it. I admit it.
In an attempt to speed up its sizable network and lower costs, Facebook recently decided to begin using Google's WebP image format. The format was designed by Google as a space-saving alternative for PNGs and JPEGs. WebP provides lossless and lossy compression, support for an alpha channel, support for animation and more -- all at much smaller sizes and almost identical image quality.
But all of these advantages come at a price, support for the WebP image format outside of your browser is far from universal. Google set it up as a Web format that, for now, is not supported by any of the major operating systems natively. And so, after the switch, when Facebook users tried to download a funny photo or the vacation pics their friends decided to share through Facebook, they wound up with un-viewable WebP files.
Reviews of the new entry-level full-frame Canon 6D DSLR are starting to make their ways onto the Web. While …
Back in April, there was a small hoopla amongst Nikonians who purchased the Nikon D4 or D800 and discovered that the LCD screen had a greenish tint when compared to the D3s and D700. Nikon denied that anything was wrong with the new cameras, and stated that it was actually the older models that were too cool. A couple of months later, it was rumored that a soon-to-arrive firmware update would address the issue. That update has yet to arrive.
There's now some good news for those of you looking for a fix "change". Photographer Noah Bershatsky is reporting that Nikon's service center will actually do the correction "change".
This isn't a biggie as far as camera issues go, but there are a few photographers reporting some strange discoloration on sections of their Canon 5D Mark III that makes the camera look like it's a lot older and more beat up than it actually is.
Canon has issued a couple of service advisories to notify customers of known issues with the 6D and 1D X DSLRs. The former camera has a YouTube problem, while the latter has some autofocus issues for certain customers.
A little earlier today, we reported on how Sohail Mamdani of BorrowLenses had discovered that one particular Nikon D600 he was testing was consistently overexposing photographs by two stops. After searching long and hard for the cause, he stumbled upon the culprit: the D600 wasn't closing the aperture blades to the correct opening size.
Gear reviewer Sohail Mamdani over at BorrowLenses was testing the Canon 6D and Nikon D600 last week by shooting nighttime photos of San Francisco Bay, when he discovered something strange: the DSLRs exposed the scene differently even when all the settings were identical in full manual. The photograph above was captured using the D600 at f/8, 30s, and ISO 100 (in JPEG mode).