Thinking about which lens to buy next? You might want to take a look at this 9-minute video first. In it, photographer Jamie Windsor argues that choosing the right focal length is more than a technical decision based on what type of photography you want to do -- your choice affects the dynamic and meaning of your photos.
Most the time when I am out doing landscape photography, I have a Canon EF 16-35mm f/4L IS and Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L IS with me. On road trips, I try to bring my Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II -- it’s a fantastic lens with great image stabilization and impressive image quality. Unfortunately, it is a bit too big and heavy for me to bring out more often!
During an earthquake, a camera capturing a long exposure of the night sky can capture star trails as seismograms that records the motion of the ground.
A long, long time ago, that is, in days of film photography, it was a rather difficult task to learn how to produce properly exposed pictures. There was no instant feedback and the only way to see how good of a job you did exposing the scene was to wait until the picture was developed.
Before Instagram, selfie sticks, disposable cameras, Polaroids, and box brownies, there were carte de visites -- small photographic albumen prints, mounted on card, which were wildly popular during the Victorian era.
There’s something unique about being a wedding photographer. It's a job that filled with joyful moments and happiness. A wedding photographer plays a significant part in the best day of someone's life. Plus, you can make a fair amount of cash capturing those joyful moments. Could this be a career for you? Well, it’s certainly an excellent idea, but there are certain things you need to know before you take the plunge.
I remember when I just started out with photography I would use external hard drives to save the biggest amount of my data on. I’m sure most of you reading have been there (or are still in this phase). The drive got full, and then I would get another drive, and because of technology and price, this one was often bigger... but eventually it would also run out of space.
Storm-chasing photographer and filmmaker Martin Lisius wanted to demonstrate the danger of flying debris in a tornado, so he got scientists to fire a camera out of a tornado projectile test cannon at 264mph. As you can see from the 1.5-minute video above, the camera doesn't fare too well.
You probably know that the lasers in concerts and even on self-driving cars can damage your camera's sensor in a direct hit, but did you know that light reflected off skin during laser tattoo removal can also destroy your sensor? Watch this 37-second video to see for yourself.
Portrait photos are often disliked by the subject themselves. From the early formative years of grade school on into the advanced years of adulthood, the feeling of dislike of your own picture is universal. Yet it is not for vanity sake, nor is it to spare the shock of another from seeing self-assumed horrors. Assuming you are neither a narcissist nor a person with flawless perfection, you may simply be like the rest of the human race: there is real science behind the reason why you may not like your own photograph.
Photographer Terrance Lam's friend recently purchased Sony's entire line of pro G Master lenses. Curious about how the cost stacks up against other ecosystems, Lam decided to do some research and find out how much equivalent camera and lens kits cost for other brands.
Today we are going to talk about placing a softbox -- not the positions that you would use, like a Rembrandt, a butterfly, or a loop, but how to place it once it’s in position. Let’s talk about how to finesse the look that you want to achieve while using a softbox.
At its a6400 announcement event back in January, Sony also gathered press together for a presentation in which it aimed to debunk some of the things being said about its E mount in recent days. One of the interesting facts shared is that the E-mount supports a maximum aperture of f/0.63.
Can an ordinary person made a camera lens from scratch? Here's a 22-minute video in which Andy George of How To Make Everything answers that question by producing clear glass and metal and combining them to create a camera lens.
If you've followed Tennessee basketball, chances are you've seen one of those really cool overhead photos. That top-down, bird's eye view is something you don't see every day, and only very few have access to capturing this unique angle.
I want to give you a brief overview of an investigation that began almost five years ago, led by me but involving the efforts of photojournalist J. Ross Baughman, photo historian Rob McElroy, and ex-infantryman and amateur military historian Charles Herrick.
What would iconic space probe photos of celestial bodies in our solar system look like if they had been shot with an ordinary smartphone camera? Astronomer Scott Manley made this 12.5-minute video that explains the answer, which is: "not much."
Each year from summer of 1872, the owners of Glacier Point hotel started the event of Yosemite Firefall. For seven nights a week, they would spill hot embers from Glacier Point down to the valley 3000 feet below. The event ended in 1968 when the National Park Service ordered it to stop because the overwhelming number of visitors that it attracted overwhelmed the meadows, and because it was not a natural event. NPS wanted to preserve the Valley, returning it to its natural state.
There are several terms in photography that are commonly mispronounced. Here's a 5-minute video in which Gerald Undone discusses them and teaches how to correct pronounce them.
Photographer and movie maker Henry Thong made this episode for his documentary series Makers Who Inspire about the life and work of photographer Ben Baker. Over the years, Baker has pointed his camera at some of the most powerful people in the world.
Gordon Parks was an American photographer best known for documenting African Americans, civil rights, and poverty in the mid-1900s. PBS NewsHour just aired this 6-minute segment that looks into how the self-taught photographer used his camera as a tool to help share people's stories with the world.
Mystified by talk of "guide number" and "flash power"? Gerald Undone made this helpful 10-minute video that explains everything you need to know about the light from strobes and speedlights, from common misconceptions to practical formulas that will help you light your shots.
Once a juggernaut of the photography industry, Kodak missed the boat when cameras shifted to digital. Cheddar published this interesting 7.5-minute video that looks at how the company that created the first digital camera in 1975 went bankrupt in 2012.
"Where should we go?" Melissa, my girlfriend, was trying to narrow down what seemed like a mountain of possibilities-places that were worthy of exploration. After a month of repeating that same question a million times, we finally settled on India.
When the news broke on January 29th, 2019, that the restructuring of Tetenal had apparently failed, a shockwave rolled over the analog community. Suddenly, supply for basic photochemistry of all sorts seemed uncertain.
It began with an email one morning. The link in it led to the work of one hundred fifty photographers. I had 1,500 images to judge for Focus Photo, a s**t ton of looking to get it right. It wasn’t going to be easy to hold it all in my mind, to remember why I was making the decisions I was making.
Film is very rarely used in music photography anymore. The reason for this is primarily because of social media and instant news. There’s no time to go home and start pouring chemicals onto film to develop it or wait until the morning until a lab opens to do it for you.
Dorothea Lange's 1936 photo Migrant Mother is an iconic photo of the Great Depression. The Nerdwriter made this fantastic 6-minute video that tells the behind-the-scenes "story of how Dorothea Lange created perhaps the most iconic photograph in American history."
Architecture is an art form, it is a branch of science, it is a business, it is the architect’s personal expression as well as that of the commissioner. So, it is not surprising that I see architectural photography as overlapping various forms, kinds, branches of photography.
Walking past booth after booth at the PhotoPlus Expo in New York, I often heard camera company presenters explaining to their uncomfortably-seated, yet nonetheless-enraptured, audiences how they shot the “perfect” photo.
For a while now, I’ve wanted to cover the topic of syndication as it was a major factor in my work gaining widespread exposure and for the full-time career that I have now as a fine art, commercial, and editorial photographer.
Roughly two years ago, I bought my first decent DSLR camera. I was overprotective, cleaning every bit of dust I could see and adding extra padding in my bag to avoid any possible accidents whenever I carried it around.
I am constantly asked questions about how I started and how to start shooting film. So, here we go! This guide is intended to be a story of my introduction to film as a landscape photographer, provide some tips, introductions, and guidance, but in no means is it intended to be a foolproof method of how to shoot film.
It has never been easier to shoot and share photos than in our modern Instagram age. The YouTube puppet web series Glove and Boots made this tongue-in-cheek 5-minute video on the "terrible history of photographs" to explain how much time and effort it took to do photography in past eras.
The Auckland, New Zealand police department posted this interesting 9-minute behind-the-scenes video that shows a day in the life of a Kiwi Police Photographer.
Self-driving cars widely use a technology called lidar (which stands for light detection and ranging) to "see" the world using laser pulses. These lasers are designed to be safe to human eyes, but it seems they may not always be safe for cameras. A man at CES in Las Vegas says that a car-mounted lidar permanently damaged the sensor in his new $1,998 Sony a7R II mirrorless camera.
Want to see how Leica does its official digital camera sensor cleanings? Here's a 20-minute video that steps through the process.
I’ve always had a fascination with geometry and man-made structures, their perfection has a strong attraction on me. It took me time to realize that what I appreciated most wasn’t necessarily their symmetry or the simple repetition of shapes but the parallelism between the various elements of the construction of an image.
If you're looking to expand your skill set in shooting portraits with umbrellas, check out this 8-minute video by photographer Miguel Quiles. In it, he introduces different types of umbrellas and then shares 5 different ways he uses them to create stunning portraits.
Back in 1865, if you wanted to be a photographer, you needed to be patient, determined, and a bit crazy (not all that different from today, though for different reasons). As an artist and photographer, exploring new methods and mediums is an important part of the journey.
Here's a 6-minute video by photographer Kelly Hofer of Theory of Curiosity on Background Oriented Schlieren (BOS), a technique that lets you shoot photos and videos of heat using an ordinary camera and Photoshop.
In the past two decades, most people went from not carrying a camera to always having a smartphone camera with them at all times. With millions upon millions of photos shot (and shared) every single day, how is this explosion in photography affecting us? Here's a 10-minute video by WIRED that explores that question.
My name is Mattias Hedberg, and I'm a photographer based in Norrköping, Sweden. I was recently about to get the Flickr Pro upgrade and was hovering above the buy button when I decided to take a deeper look at the Adobe offer since it sounded a little too good. I was interested in other features of the plan also, but the Adobe one was very tempting.
The camera superstore B&H Photo Video is the largest non-chain camera store in the United States and one of the (if not the) largest in the world. The store made this 1.5-minute video that tells the story of how the juggernaut of the industry came to be.
The rise of Instagram in our culture has spawned a generation of professional Instagrammers who make a living from broadcasting (often sponsored) photos to their massive followings. Meghan Young is one such Instagrammer, and this 12-minute feature by Bloomberg gives us a look into what her life and career are like.
A number of prominent newspapers and magazines have laid off some or all of their photojournalists in recent years, but these moves are not without their consequences. A new study has found that switching from a photojournalist staff to non-professional photos causes, to no one's surprise, a significant drop in photo quality.
In the mid-1970s, 134 of the top photographers and curators in the world of photography posed for an unusual set of baseball cards that now sell for thousands of dollars as a complete set. The SF Museum of Modern Art just released this 4-minute video in which photographer Mike Mandel shares the story of how these cards came to be.
The concept of equivalent exposure can be a tricky one to wrap your mind around when you're just getting started in photography. Photography enthusiast and animator Vincent Ledvina of Apalapse made this helpful 5.5-minute video that explains it in a simple and visual way.
Finding new ways to create isn't always easy, so you have to keep your eyes open for inspiration. One day while making my way down the rabbit hole of YouTube, I stumbled across a video. These guys had created 3 colored shadows off this pencil while keeping a perfectly white background. What in the world was this sorcery? Turns out it wasn't sorcery, it was science.
"Earthrise" is an iconic photo of Earth rising up from the Moon's horizon that's considered one of the most important environmental photos ever made. Here's a fascinating 3-minute visualization by NASA that recreates how the photo was shot in real-time.