When I was a semi-professional 4x5 landscape photographer I often spent a half-hour shooting a single sheet of film and several hours enlarging it to the best of my ability. I sought the sharpest possible result. And now in the digital age, I still pursue sharp images.
Great news for photographers who like sharing their work on Twitter, but hate what the site does to the quality of your images: the social media giant has announced that it will no longer compress your JPEGs to death. No more transcoding that totally destroys your photography.
The rise of social media has had a massive impact on the art we see, consume, and interact with on a daily basis. Some of that impact was positive, some negative, but one of the most radical changes has also been one of the most detrimental: the demise of the gatekeepers.
DxOMark has published an interesting look at how smartphone cameras have evolved and improved over the past half decade, starting from when the camera testing lab began reviewing smartphones in 2012. Needless to say, we've come a long way in just a few short years.
Fujifilm may have a quality control issue on their hands. Two reports have emerged this month of new Fujifilm lenses arriving with sizable dust specks, cracks, and excessive variations between copies.
The iPhone 8 Plus' reign as the sole top tested camera at DxOMark didn't last long. The camera testing lab just published its review of the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, which now joins the iPhone 8 Plus with the same highest-ever overall score of 94. The Note 8 also has the highest-ever still photo score of 100, beating the 8 Plus' 96.
Cinematographer Matteo Bertoli got his hands on an iPhone 8 Plus and took it out and about in Los Angeles to test its video capabilities. The 4K cinematic footage in the 2.5-minute video above was shot entirely on the smartphone.
The first dynamic range tests of the new Canon 6D Mark II DSLR are trickling onto the Web, and one thing seems to be clear: the results are very disappointing for Canon fans. In fact, Canon appears to have taken a step backwards.
I recently had a few prints made from some medium format negatives. The prints are for a specific purpose so I wanted them to be of the highest quality possible, this meant taking them to a local specialist where the film was scanned with a $16,000+ Hasselblad Flextight X1. The Flextight is about the best quality scan you can get before moving up to dedicated drum scans that can be messy, time-consuming, and expensive.
Sigma is still on a roll when it comes to its high-end Art lenses, and the latest accolade is impressive: DxOMark just awarded the new Sigma 85mm f/1.4 Art lens the highest score the benchmarking company has ever given.
I am a street photographer currently based in Manila, the Philippines. I prefer to photograph the streets alone or with a non-photographer, but on the occasions when I do shoot with fellow photographers, I tend to find myself painfully trapped in conversations about gear.
Here's a quick PSA for those of you who have a mobile workflow that involves posting to Instagram from the Flickr app. Don't. For some reason, sharing from Flickr to Instagram on your phone absolutely destroys photo quality, leaving you with a pixely mess.
I was editing some images that I took last week in New York City, including some taken from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Then I remembered that I had taken some shots of the same view from the same location, 15 years ago.
Want to see how the Nikon D5's video recording performs under low light and high ISOs? Kenneth Yung over at Photoblog.hk shot this short film -- what you see is straight out of camera and lit using a single 50W incandescent light bulb.
Pentax recently announced the K-1, the brand's first full frame DSLR camera. The company has just released official sample photos showing what the camera is capable of.
Want to see what the Nikon D5 can do on the video front? Nikon ambassador photographer Corey Rich shot this short film titled "Inspired" using the new flagship DSLR. The video "explores what drives today’s most diverse and interesting professional photographers and filmmakers, and captures the commitment it takes to tell truly meaningful stories."
Most people use their smartphones as their go-to snapshot camera these days, and the impressive image quality of the latest models is great for recording everyday memories. The small sensor and lens do have their limitations, though, and quite a few people found that out last night when they pulled out their smartphones to photograph the supermoon lunar eclipse.
You’ve spent the last few hours working on the perfect photo shoot and everything went better than you could have possibly imagined. After importing the RAW files to your PC and making a few edits in Photoshop, it is time to save your masterpiece. But, what file type do you select? With over twenty different file types to choose from, we are here to break down some of the most popular and tell you a bit about their strengths and weaknesses.
Last month Flickr proudly announced major new features, a slick new redesign, and 112 million members, but the service may have rolled out a disappointing change as well: increased compression that reduces the quality of photos.
Here's a look at the optical quality of the Yongnuo 35mm f/2 for Canon EF. There’s only so much that can be tested at 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.
This 'Just the Lenses' article will take advantage of a Trioptics Imagemaster optical bench to compare lenses from different camera mounts with no camera involved. Why is that different? Because all other forms of testing (DxO, Imatest, or even photography) tests the camera-lens combination.
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.
Every time you post a photo to Instagram, it loses a tiny bit of quality. It's not really noticeable for a single upload, but if you save and repost the photo over and over, the quality loss becomes extreme. It's a concept known as "generation loss," and is the subject of artist Pete Ashton's project "I Am Sitting In Stagram (2015)."
If you have a friend who just got into photography and they ask you to recommend a first lens to buy in addition to the standard kit lens, chances are very good you're going to tell them to go prime. Of course, their next question will inevitably be 'why?'
If you've been following PetaPixel for a little while, then you know that the idea of a web app that shrinks down the file size of your images without "noticeable" loss in quality is nothing new. JPEGmini has been doing it for years. So what is it that makes the new Compressor.io web app stand out?
When it comes to cameras, is bigger always better? Samsung didn't try to answer that question, but the company did shoot a funny video that shows pretty clearly that the general public seems to think the answer is "yes," even if there's no difference at all.
Walker Evans' famous photo book "American Photographs" was first published in 1938. Since then, the book has been released in new editions every 25 years or so. Although the photos contained within its covers have remained the same, the processes and technologies used to print the photos have evolved over time, causing each edition to be every so slightly different from the others.
A few weeks ago, we casually remarked that the best cameraphones today can probably snap better photos than top-of-the-line compact cameras from over a decade ago. Turns out that it's true.
Earlier today, Apple announced its new iPhone 5, which features a camera that's nearly identical to the one found in the 4S. Soon after the announcement, Apple put up the official product page for the phone, which includes a gallery of sample photographs shot using the iPhone 5. Unfortunately, none of the shots show low-light environments, which would have allowed us to gawk at the power of the camera's new and improved noise-killing processor. For now, we'll just have to settle for these generic shots showing what the 3264×2448 images look like when they pop out of the camera.
A user over on the Chinese forum Xitek has leaked the first sample photographs captured using the Sony A99, the company's upcoming flagship SLT (i.e. pellicle mirror) camera. The images are 100% crops of straight-out-of-camera JPEGs, with noise reduction completely turned off.