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.
“Bit depth” is one of those terms we’ve all run into, but very few photographers truly understand. Photoshop offers 8, 16, and 32-bit file formats. Sometimes we see files referred to as being 24 of 48-bit. And our cameras often offer 12 vs 14-bit files (though you might get 16-bit with a medium format camera). What does it all mean, and what really matters?
It’s September, which means another generation of Apple iPhones. This year, the iPhone XS (pronounced “ten ess”) adds a slightly larger sensor plus significantly more computing power via the A12 Bionic Chip to enhance the phone’s image signal processing.
There are many sounds that native American English speakers have trouble reproducing. The French “r” (aka the “voiceless uvular fricative”), the rolled double “rr” in Spanish, tonal sounds in various Chinese languages like Mandarin and Cantonese.
Want to shoot powerful portraits? One of the keys to doing so is focusing on your subject's eyes. This 2.5-minute video by Light Club is an inspiring look into this critical facet of portraiture.
Want a cheap and easy way to white balance photos without having to buy a color checker or special cards? Here's a neat hack: you can actually use ordinary white plumber's tape -- the kind you use to seal pipe threads.
You may have heard the camera brand "Nikon" be pronounced in different ways by different people in different countries. But what's the official and "correct" way of pronouncing the company's name?
Check out this monster of a camera. It was the world's largest camera back in 1900, built for the specific purpose of shooting the largest photo in the world of the "handsomest train in the world."
A while back, I had another roundtable discussion at the Film Photographers Association. This time the subject was Still Life Photography. It is a genre we all take for granted and include in it a great variety of photographs. I would like to explore the origins of still life in painting, how it came to photography, and eventually expanded in coverage and scope.
Nike and Colin Kaepernick broke the Internet this week with an ad campaign celebrating the 30th anniversary of “Just Do It.”
Reflections are often unwanted, and glare will wash out an image. Polarizing filters counter the reflective measures and will deepen blues and add contrast to skies, reduce or remove reflections from water and windows, and increase contrast and saturation.
How literally should you interpret a histogram? Where do the lines intersect between artistic expression and photographic technicalities? It’s important to first recognize that a histogram is nothing more than a mathematical representation.
During the Cold War, the US enlisted the help of Kodak to create a satellite camera for spying on the Soviet Union. This 4-minute video by CNN is a look at the program and the former Kodak employees who "helped prevent World War III."
I don’t deserve to be writing this because there are more capable people who can speak more eloquently than I can that can deliver this message to you. This is exact thought that went through my head as I was writing this blog post because I’m not the best writer.
Nikon has understandably made a big deal about launching their new Z-mount alongside the announcement of their new mirrorless cameras, the Z6 and Z7. The Nikon F-mount was originally released 59 years ago and the company has made backward compatibility of the system a brand pillar.
Sight is very important to me. It’s one of my senses that I don’t think I could ever do without. A musician might fear going deaf, but I could live with that. I’d rather not have to but if it came down to losing my hearing or losing my vision, I’d take being deaf. That’s just me.
Along with the announcement of Nikon’s new mirrorless Z-system was the development announcement of a 58mm f/0.95 Noct lens. The Z-mount’s huge inner diameter of 55mm (the F-mount has a 44mm diameter) means more light collection capability, which enables ridiculously fast lens design. Nikon’s F-mount 58mm offering tops out at f/1.4.
The fashion industry is confusing. Here’s a list of some common fashion photography lingo that you should know.
A few years ago, I was embarrassingly very vocal about how disappointed I was about some of the Nikon lenses. I've been using Nikon cameras and lenses for decades and although I was very pleased with the image quality and color rendition their cameras produced, I strongly considered jumping the Nikon ship in search of crisper, cleaner looking lenses.
As the camera wars are heating up over the new battleground that is mirrorless cameras, the heavyweights in the industry are taking turns tooting their own horns. Canon just released this 2.5-minute video on the benefits of Canon Professional Services (CPS).
Space enthusiast and photo processing hobbyist Jason Major created this edit of a NASA photo showing a ginormous coronal mass ejection back on June 7th, 2011. See that little blue circle in the upper-left-hand corner? That's the Earth for scale.
Are you a photographer who's looking into shooting a roll of Aerochrome? Or maybe you have a roll in your freezer and have no idea how or when to use it? You’re not the only one.
I was recently fortunate enough to get an inside and ‘behind-the-scenes’ look into how film processing works at Richard Photo Lab in Valencia, CA. As the step by step process is very complex, if you’ve ever wondered what the stages of film developing are and look like, come and take this video tour with us!
When it comes to purchasing a new lens there are two questions that immediately come to mind for me, how much is it and how sharp is it? Now, I know there’s more to the lens buying process than overall sharpness, but as a landscape photographer, sharpness is king!
I was hesitant when I first found out that Best Buy had a camera shop in their stores. My experience in the past had been a disappointment, walking through their small camera section was underwhelming and most of the associates avoided that area. I didn’t think too much of it, as cameras were not generally accepted knowledge like it is with computers or TVs. Your average employee would have issues talking about ISO, shutter speed, aperture, and the practical application of these terms.
We've seen Soviet spy cameras disguised as everything from a gold ring to a pack of cigarettes, but this recently auction Soviet spy camera was disguised as... a camera.
This portrait is the average face of Vogue cover models over the past 25 years.
Astronauts on the International Space Station have shot and shared gorgeous views of our planet in recent years. Here's a 5-minute video by Big Think in which NASA astronaut Chris Hadfield offers an inside look at what shooting photos on the ISS is like.
When we think of tribes, the first thing that comes to our mind is, “what did those tribesmen and women believe in?” “What were their customs and beliefs?” That’s what I asked about the Konyak tribe that was nestled in Nagaland, India, in regard to the famous headhunters.
Photoshop 1.0 was first released as the Soviet Union was collapsing, but long before the software made photo manipulation easy, Kremlin censors went to extraordinary lengths to touch up history.
Film is on the resurgence as of late. Transparency film is another option from your regular negative film, but what is it exactly? When would you use transparency instead? How does it compare to C-41 or print film? And what is the dynamic range of transparency film? In this article, we'll answer those questions and more.
The three-color method of using colored lens filters when shooting black-and-white photos was one of the earliest techniques for creating color photos. This 11.5-minute video is an exploration of how this process is done.
Astrophotography is generally a race against time to capture as much subtle starlight we can before the stars create trails in our images. The movement of the Earth puts a natural limit on how much sharp, subtle detail we can reveal. We have to use super fast, wide angle lenses and high ISO values to see all the awesome detail. Fortunately, a tool exists to circumvent this barrier to reveal more of the hidden magic we have in our night sky.
Photography can reveal the hidden side of things, and that's exactly what photographer Tomas Sentpetery traveled around Europe to capture. He visited some of the continents most popular tourist attractions and went underground to reveal what lies beneath each location.
Sony has been receiving attention and praise in recent years for the quality of its sensors and the fact that it produces sensors for other heavyweight camera companies, including Nikon. But even though some of Nikon's CMOS sensors may be manufactured in Sony factories, Nikon actually spends a considerable amount of resources designing those high-end sensors.
Photography can be confusing. I get it. I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Because of this, at times it helps us to actually put some of these theories and myths to the test. One of these myths is the concept of compression and, with it, parallax.
If you use an interchangeable-lens camera, your camera probably has a weird symbol that looks like a circle with a line through it. If you've never learned what this symbol is, here's a 2-minute video by ZY Productions that explains the film/sensor plane indicator.
Mars is closer to Earth and brighter than its been since back in 2003. It's so bright that photographer Abdul Dremali managed to capture this photo of the planet casting a bright reflection on the ocean as it rose into the night sky.
In late 2017 Sabine Meyer, the Photography Director of the National Audubon Society, approached me to join the jury for their annual photography awards contest following an introduction by wildlife and conservation photographer Melissa Groo.
Canon DSLRs can trigger Canon Speedlites using the pop-up flash. If you try triggering those same Speedlites with a different camera's flash, it doesn't work, which means that there's actual light-based communication going on between the DSLR and Speedlite. In this 9-minute video, Roger Nieh of Science'n'me explores the technology behind this communication.
