This article is about how this time slice shot of a lunar eclipse was made. Its focus is mainly on the planning that went into it, even before the first shutter click. Hopefully by sharing what I did, I can prepare you for creating your own lunar eclipse photo.
What do you get when you turn Photoshop tools into weapons for a computer game? "Shotophop" is one attempt at this concept. Like the "Selfie Assault!" game we featured a few days ago, this is another concept game that's strangely relevant to photographers.
Color management company Datacolor has just announced Spyder5, a new line of devices for making sure the color seen on your monitors is accurate to ensure that your photos look the same across screens and match your prints.
Triggertrap has announced Timelapse Pro, a new app for its mobile camera control kits that gives time-lapse photographers more flexibility in creating complex sequences than the basic Triggertrap app.
Apple's new Macbook features a redesigned pressure-sensitive trackpad called the Force Touch. In addition to being more powerful for inputs from your fingers, the new design allows for the use of a stylus on the touchpad if you'd like to retouch your photographs tablet-style.
Inklet by Ten One Design is the first 3rd party application for Mac that offers this.
Want to understand the concept of depth of field better? Polish photographer and programmer Michael Bemowski has created a fantastic and feature-rich online depth of field calculator and bokeh simulator that can help you wrap your mind around what's going on when you change things like focal length and aperture.
It was around this time last year that we shared a new product called SHORTCUT-S, a 319-key keyboard designed specifically for editing photos in Photoshop.
Creatives soon began asking the company to branch out into other popular programs, and today the company is doing just that. SHORTCUT-S tells us that it will soon be launching dedicated keyboards for 13 other programs, one of which is Adobe Lightroom.
The Photographer's Ephemeris is one of the popular sun and moon calculators out there for planning outdoor shoots with natural light. The service has just announced Version 3.0 of its popular iOS app, which is being featured by Apple in the App Store's Photo & Video category.
Depending on the type of photography you're involved in, a multi-tool may be one of the invaluable items found inside your camera bag. If so, Leatherman has a new product for you called the Tread. Upon first glance, the product may look like a sleek but rather ordinary metal bracelet, but look a little closer and you'll see that it's actually a fancy new multi-tool that puts 25 separate tools around your wrist.
These days, photographers are dramatically strapped for time. We live in a world where “busy” is the most common answer for “how are you doing?” Endless client talks, long emails, phone calls, social media messages and trips steal your precious time with no intention of giving it back.
So, how can you become more effective in the time you do have and maybe earn yourself some time for shooting? And I’m not talking about multitasking, everyone already knows that's not working anyway!
In this post I put together 15 time-saving tools for photographers that'll help save you more time for shooting. Tools for creating quick to-do lists, bookmarking links to read later, sharing various files with others, automating certain quick tasks, creating personal website in minutes, and much more.
Want to make sure you can upload your travel photos quickly from your hotel room? Hotel WiFi Speed Test is a service that can help you plan ahead when you're roaming the world with your camera.
Snapseed's team has been hard at work since their company was acquired by Google last September. They've already put new photo filters in the Google+ app and some auto-enhance tools in Google+, and now they're working on something even grander: turning Google+ into a full-fledged, browser-based photo editing tool.
Traditionally, a photographer's post-processing workflow does not include a web browser, but rather, tools like Lightroom and Aperture. Pics.io is hoping to change that, and is working to bring serious RAW picture editing and collaborating to the web browser.
The start-up, founded by three Ukranian entrepreneurs, uses WebGL technology (which, in short, allows web browsers to harness the power of a computer's graphics card) to make the online tools they offer a reality. The mission? Get more people to dabble into RAW photography by offering easy access to editing tools.
The Online Lighting Diagram Creator is a web app for easily creating and sharing lighting diagrams. It was created back in 2009 by Sydney-based photographer and web developer Quoc Huy Nguyen Dinh. It's an extremely simple tool through which you can create detailed diagrams by simply clicking and dragging.
Cameratico is a new "humanized camera recommendation engine" that's being developed by Brasília, Brazil-based photographer and programmer Fábio Pili. Sick of camera comparison websites that only dealt with specifications, Pili decided to create one that takes into account real world usage experiences.
Focus stacking is when you combine multiple photographs of different focus distances in order to obtain a single photo with a much greater depth of field than any of the individual shots. This can be done by turning the zoom ring on your lens, but this can be difficult to control (especially for highly magnified photos). It can also be done using special rigs designed for the purpose, but those are generally quite pricey.
Photographer and software engineer David Hunt recently came up with the brilliant idea of turning an old flatbed scanner into a macro rail for shooting focus-stacking photos.
A couple of weeks ago we featured a Google Chrome extension for overlaying "rule of thirds" lines over any online photograph. Now we have a different tool for examining other photographer's photographs: Image Histogram.
Created by developer/photographer Nick Burlett, it's a Chrome Extension that can quickly bring up the histogram of any online photograph.
Want to see whether or not your favorite photographers are following the rule of thirds when composing their shots? Programmer and photography enthusiast Alex Dergachev has created a simple browser bookmarklet that overlays RoT gridlines over any (or almost any) web photograph.
We live in a world that's teeming with digital photographs. More photos are now uploaded every two minutes than were created during the entire 1800s. Facebook is seeing thousands of photographs uploaded to its servers every second of the day, and Instagram was flooded with 10 storm-related photos per second during Hurricane Sandy.
With such a large quantity of photographs flooding the web, it's clear that visual data mining will be an in-demand market in the coming years as more and more people look to glean valuable images from the torrent of useless pixels. One of the companies trying to occupy this space is CrowdOptic, a San Francisco-based startup that's building some pretty interesting location-based photo curation technologies.
Bestselling author and marketing guru Seth Godin published an interesting thought to …