useful

For those of you who partake in any sort of nighttime photography, it’s no secret that light pollution can be the bane of your existence. Thankfully, there’s a neat, simple online resource that can help you better prepare to avoid this enemy of great Milky Way photography.

It’s called Dark Sky Finder, and it’s an easy-to-use website that gives you an up-to-date, radar-style view of what light pollution across the United States looks like.

When it comes to understanding how depth of field, focal length and other variables are affected by different film/sensor formats, it can get confusing. Fortunately, Reddit user redblue has created an incredibly useful interactive resource that will help you better visualize the factors at play by letting you change variables while swapping sensors sizes and seeing the effect in real time.

Here's a new reason you might want to consider picking up a Google Glass if you're a photographer: it can be used as a light meter.

A new app called Google Glass Light Meter is trying to pioneer a new way of metering light -- with a device strapped to your face instead of held in your hand.

There are some Lightroom plugins that make you truly question why the feature isn’t built directly into Lightroom itself, and Show Focus Points is one of those. Just as the name implies, it’s a plugin that lets you see which focus point was used when your camera captured the photograph.

Filmmaker Richard Michalak has spent over 30 years behind the camera, and in the video above by Hugh Fenton he condenses all of that knowledge into a set of tips, techniques and concepts that will prove to be incredibly useful whether or not your interests involve moving pictures.

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.

Adobe’s major Creative Cloud update yesterday gave photographers several updated features, new features and even an all-new …

When it comes to getting the most out your post-processing applications, you really want to know your shortcuts. The problem is, there's so many within each program that it’s impossible to remember them all.

If there's one thing I lose more than anything else while shooting, it's lens caps. I've never permanently lost one (knock on wood), but I've certainly misplaced them for days at a time. And I have a feeling I'm not the only one who's guilty of this.

Here to help us through our absentmindedness is a new Kickstarter for a product called HACKxTACK.

DIRE Studio has released an application for photographers and cinematographers alike that they've aptly named Mark II Artist's Viewfinder.

We've shared a few pretty cool life hacks over the years -- for example, check out this super-simple drop test that'll let you know if your AA batteries are juiced and ready to go -- but the video above brings together some of the most useful.

Put together by DigitalRev, these ten photo-related life hacks have the potential to make your photographic life that much easier, while saving you some money as well.

Asking a stranger to snap a photograph of you is a risky proposition. If the person has no concept of basic photography concepts and techniques, the resulting photographs may be completely different than what you had hoped for -- and you're too embarrassed to ask for another photo (so you wait for that person to leave and for a new one to walk by).

Samsung wants to help solve this problem: they're working on a camera feature that helps guide photo-inept strangers in snapping the shot you want.

One of the advantages of digital photography is having information about how each photo was shot embedded within the photograph's file itself. This EXIF data is something photographers commonly jot down in notebooks as they walk around and shoot with their analog cameras.

Photographer Oriol Garcia wanted a better solution than manually writing down shot times and details. Since most people have smartphones now, why not make an extremely easy to use app that can document the info of every photograph taken? He ended up creating an app called PhotoExif that can do just that.

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.

Last week, we wrote about an emerging digital camera feature called "focus peaking", which lets users easily focus lenses through live view by using colorful pixels to highlight in-focus areas. Photographer Karel Donk wanted the same feature in Photoshop, which doesn't currently offer it, so he decided to create it himself.

Bandoliers are pocketed belts made for holding ammunition. They’re often seen in action and war movies, slung over the …

Still shoot film? Use filters when you shoot? FilterCalc is a new Android app that’s designed to help non-TTL …

Virtual Lighting Studio is an awesome new free studio lighting simulator that doesn’t …

Posing App is a new app that offers a pocket reference for poses …

Did you know that your morning cup of coffee can help you predict rain? It’s a trick used by …

Here’s a great diagram by Mobot that shows how the 41-megapixel sensor inside …

Curious about where people like to take pictures in your part of the world? …

Steve 21 has an interesting trick for finding good available light: he places …

Tired of packing a huge mess of cables every time you go on a trip? The Magic Cable Trio …

Knowing how long to develop film for is easy if you use popular films and developers, but what if …

Knobroom is a free add-on for Lightroom that lets you use the knobs …

Having trouble framing shots when “shooting from the hip” and not looking through (or at) your camera? …

We've featured special gloves and mittens designed for photographers before, but what if your camera uses a touchscreen instead of physical controls? Here's a video by Make's Becky Stern showing how you can sew some conductive thread into your glove to make it compatible with capacitive touchscreens.

Src Img is an uber-simple bookmarklet created by …

Mirrorless cameras are designed to be compact, but how big are they compared to DSLRs? How big are popular DSLRs compared to one another? Camera Size is a website that helps answer these types of questions. It's a simple web app that shows you exactly how big digital cameras are compared to one another and compared to reference objects (e.g. a battery).