At night, it can be especially difficult getting enough light to shoot film. There are no color emulsions with speeds higher than ISO 800, and most stocks don’t even exceed 400. Pushing enables you to add sensitivity past the recommended ‘box speed’ of your film.
If your camera has an Electronic Front-Curtain Shutter (EFCS) feature and it's turned on, here's something you might want to know: it could be giving you noticeably worse bokeh when you're shooting at faster shutter speeds. Photographer Manny Ortiz shows the difference in the 4.5-minute video above.
"Color science" is a term that's thrown around a lot these days when discussing the merits of various digital cameras and brands, but how much of it is real color differences and preferences, and how much of it is simply brand loyalty? Tony Northrup recently conducted a blind poll of 1,500 photographers to find out.
While scanning through my Facebook feed, I saw that my friend Ruby had shared some pictures of a party, all taken on Kodak Ultramax. One of her friends, however, pointed out something that I had never thought of...
Most mammals rely on scent rather than sight. Look at a dog’s eyes, for example: they’re usually on the sides of its face, not close together and forward-facing like ours. Having eyes on the side is good for creating a broad field of vision, but bad for depth perception and accurately judging distances in front.
Last month, legendary British painter David Hockney's 1972 painting titled “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” (shown above) sold for a jaw-dropping $90.3 million, the highest auction price ever for a living artist!
"Migrant Mother" by photographer Dorothea Lange is an iconic image of the Great Depression and one of the most famous photos in US history. But did you know that the photo was "Photoshopped"?
Food photographers have an arsenal of tricks up their sleeves to make food look delicious on camera. And more often than not, these hacks make use of non-edible products that aren't appetizing. Blossom has created an eye-opening video that reveals the dirty (sometimes literally) little tricks of food photographers.
Art has arguably been around almost as long as humans have. The moment we learned to mark something for others to see and interpret, the moment art was born. Thankfully for us photographers, we needn’t go quite that far back to begin learning from the history of art. In fact, we only need to go as far as the "Old Masters."
Beware: instant cameras that produce Zink photos may not be a good option for preserving memories long term.
Nikon's new full-frame mirrorless Z lens mount is designed to be futureproof over the next 100 years and "redefine possibilities." How crazy are the possibilities? Get this: the Z-mount could theoretically accept lenses with apertures as large as f/0.65.
Heads up: if you enjoy watching documentaries about photographers and photography, there's a great one that's now free. Cheryl Dunn's highly-regarded 2013 documentary Everybody Street is now free-to-watch on YouTube with ads. You can watch the 1.5-hour film above.
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is a telescope that will contain the largest digital camera ever built. Here's a 4-minute video in which the folks at Gizmodo pay a visit to the 3.2-gigapixel camera that's the size of a small car.
VILSHULT is an IKEA ready-to-hang photo of Amsterdam that has been sold over 427,000 times. After many of my friends asked me why I bought such a "mediocre" photo for my living room, I decided to find out how this photo was made and how it ended up on IKEA's shelves and in almost half a million households. What I learned was fascinating.
Normally I use videos to document my work. This time the video is the main outcome of my work -- I shot an ultra-macro video that shows how the crystals/salts change during the wet plate collodion process.
Back in its heyday, Polaroid made seven 20x24-inch instant cameras, and only six of them are known to exist today. Marco Christian Krenn of Analog Things recently paid a visit to the camera found at Supersense in Vienna. In this 10-minute video, Krenn shows how this ultra-rare camera is used.
The astronauts onboard the International Space Station get new cameras delivered from time to time -- 10 Nikon D5s arrived in late 2017 after NASA ordered 55 of them. But did you know that it's extremely expensive to stock the ISS astronauts' camera arsenal? That camera kit you see above cost at least $150,000 to send to the space station.
The Ansel Adams Gallery made this 4-minute video about Ansel Adams' Moonrise, Hernandez, a photo the gallery calls Adams' "most famous and iconic image." Sales director Brittany Moorefield shares the story behind the photo while presenting an ultra-rare mural-sized print from the early 1970s.
With the rise of digital photography, social media, and geotagging, picturesque natural landmarks that were once relatively undisturbed are now swarming with more and more visitors every year. Vox made this 5-minute video on how geotagged viral photos are having a huge impact on nature.
I'm Johnnie Behiri, the co-owner of cinema5D. Adobe is a well-known company in the filmmaking and photography industries (and beyond). But for me personally, it was time to ask what lies behind just the name, so I reached out with the request to visit some of their facilities in the United States, intending to “create a face”, asking who this huge company actually is.
Earth is spinning... and fast! It was during my first nights in astrophotography that it became very concrete for me. By taking pictures of the stars, one quickly obtains a change of star physiognomy that confirms the rotation of the earth. In this article, I describe how to use this phenomenon to measure the rotational speed of the earth with a simple camera.
After disassembling a Canon EOS R, Roger Cicala over at LensRentals just did a teardown of the Nikon Z7. What he found was one of the best-built cameras on the market today.
Don't know what it means when one camera shoots 8-bit photos while another one shoots 10-bit? Here's a helpful primer by ZY Productions that will bring you up to speed on the basics of bit depth in less than 3 minutes.
After years of shooting portraits with Canon cameras, photographer Sean Tucker recently switched over to Sony gear. After many people warned him that his portraits would suffer from Sony's "terrible" skin tones, Tucker decided to put the cameras to the test himself in the 20-minute video above.
When I read or watch reviews of lenses by folks in the photographic community, it often seems like one of the most important qualities to them is how the lens renders bokeh. It’s often made me wonder, do we sometimes forget that bokeh is just background? And is this fixation healthy? Or most importantly, how much does it matter to an average person who has never heard the term “bokeh”?
In this article, we're going to briefly look at the subjectivity of color. This is a colossal subject, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts on how color is perceived by each of us and whether it's really that important.
If you've been wanting to learn more about the subject of camera color science, here's a solid 13-minute video by Gerald Undone that will bring you up to speed on the subject.
In September 2018, I was asked to travel to Cyprus and photograph the Buffer Zone (or Green Line) in Nicosia. It was an exclusive opportunity since this area is not accessible for civilians -- it's a demilitarised zone (DMZ), patrolled by the United Nations.
The Canon EOS R is cause for controversy. After all, we’re in the middle of The Great Mirrorless Camera War. Tensions are bound to rise, turning sibling against sibling, camera tech against camera tech, and photographer against photographer. Despite this, I will do my best to describe the form factor and internal construction of the EOS R in a fair and unbiased manner.
I have no idea where I first heard this, but it’s extremely true: “the main difference between painting and photography is that the painters need to work hard to put things into their images, whereas photographers have to work hard to take things out of their images.”
Want to see the internals of Canon's first full-frame mirrorless camera? Roger Cicala over at LensRentals disassembled the new Canon EOS R to look at the design and engineering going on inside.
The Kodak moment is gone, but today Fujifilm thrives after a massive reorganization. Here is a detailed analysis based on firsthand accounts from top executives and factual financial data to understand how and why the destinies of two similar companies went in opposite directions.
I'm photographer Jay P. Morgan, and in this video and article, we are going to be taking a look at four different sensor sizes and see how they compare with one another.
Camera manufacturers have been utilizing different types of autofocus systems in modern digital cameras. If you'd like a primer on how each one works, here's a fantastic 18-minute video by tech tester Gerald Undone that will bring you up to speed.
How you light your subject is one of the key decisions you'll need to make when shooting portraits. The Koldunov Brothers published this 9-minute tutorial showing the impact the height of a light source makes and some typical mistakes photographers make in placing and angling lights.
Here's a 1.5-minute video published by NATO about the role of US Army combat cameramen who document soldiers in peace and war, at rest and in combat.
NASA’s Apollo Program was an audacious mission to send astronauts to the moon -- a national goal set by President John F. Kennedy’s in a bold speech in 1961 that was an ongoing part of the Cold War.
Art is something we all enjoy in one way or another. We assume it is a subjective subject, but there may be an objective angle that we can observe art from. Perhaps art isn’t subjective at all? Neuroaesthetics is a scientific approach to art in the way it is both produced and consumed, and this gives us a basis for figuring out what makes art… art!
I often hear my students lament about how if only they could travel to the rainforest they would find something really interesting to photograph. I tell students “look around where you live – there are wonderful things to photograph everywhere”. The photographers that work with local species often obtain shots that are unobtainable from casual travels.
One of the biggest complaints I hear quite regularly about Sony mirrorless cameras is that their color science is horrible. Many photographers don’t seem to like how Sony interprets colors from any given scene. This it seems, to be especially true for portrait photographers. In stark contrast, color science is one of the major positive points for Canon cameras.
As drones continue to explode in popularity, there have been more and more stories of operators flying way too close to airplanes. Now new research is revealing just how much damage a direct drone strike would do to an airplane's wing.
Our brand new Nikon Z7 full frame mirrorless camera arrived at the office this week, and we immediately got down to business. Four years ago, Sony fired the first shot of this battle with the A7 and continued to release one iteration after another, each improving on the last, and did so completely unanswered by the competition until August 23rd of this year when Nikon announced the Z7 and the Z6.
The Exposure Triangle; you’ve heard of it, I’m sure. It’s fabled in story and song and celebrated by photo instructors everywhere. We can even buy t-shirts commemorating the concept! There have been countless articles written about the “exposure triangle” (try a Web search and see for yourself), all with the intent of helping newcomers to photography figure out how exposure works in their cameras.
It’s photographer Jay P. Morgan here. Here's a new 11-minute video in which I compare the pros and cons of strobes vs. continuous light and conduct some indoor and outdoor lighting tests between the two for you to decide which one to use when you are shooting.
It has been widely reported that selfies cause more deaths these days than shark attacks. Now a new study has provided new facts and figures on how at least 259 people have lost their lives while trying to capture smartphone self-portraits since 2011.
My name is Sebastiaan de With, and I’m the designer of the iPhone camera app Halide. I recently detailed the camera hardware changes of the iPhone XS vs. the iPhone X, and I wondered why Apple’s keynote focused on changes in camera software rather than the new hardware. After testing the iPhone XS cameras for the last week, I get it.
Fujifilm made a splash in the photo industry this week by announcing the GFX 50R, a camera that squeezes a 51.4-megapixel medium-format sensor into a rangefinder-style body with a price tag of just $4,499. Here's a look at how the "compact" body compares in size to other popular cameras on the market.
If you've been wanting to learn more about using your camera in manual mode and have 26 minutes to spare, here's a helpful educational video by photographer Sean Tucker that's just for you. He teaches how to nail exposure using manual mode.
It’s standard practice for commercial photography clients to ask photographers for their ‘day rate’. Most estimates that photographers provide start with a day rate before going on to production costs and expenses.
My name is Sebastiaan de With, and I'm the co-founder and designer of the iPhone camera app Halide. Some reviewers with advance access to the iPhone XS have been kind enough to share technical readouts of the new phones with our team, detailing several camera hardware specs. After some analysis, we can now give you an overview of what’s new in the iPhone XS camera hardware and its technical capabilities beyond what Apple stated at their keynote.