This video by RT, titled "Space 360," is the first-ever interactive 360-degree video shot on the International Space Station. It's also of special interest for photography enthusiasts: it shows the inside of the service module, where the astronauts' Nikon DSLR cameras and lenses are stored on the walls.
It's so easy to get caught up in the minutia of photography. Sure, megapixels, microcontrast, MTF charts, and the like are all important, but only after you understand how to work with the most important piece of the photographic puzzle: light.
It's here! A couple of weeks after teasing us with the release, TIME has unveiled their online portal where you can count down and learn all about the Top 100 most influential images of all time—pure photo geek nirvana.
This past Monday, the world was treated to the largest "supermoon" since January 26, 1948. If you're wondering how the supermoon compared to an average appearance of the moon in the sky, check out photographer Philippe Moussette's comparison photos above.
Everybody knows tilt-shift lenses can be used to get a "miniature" effect, but many photographers are oblivious to their other, more traditional applications, and even fewer understand exactly how these lenses work. The folks at LensPro ToGo are here to clear things up.
Want to see the state of cameras and photography back in 1948? Check out the 15-minute training film above, created by the US Navy in 1948. It's titled "Fundamentals of Photography: The Basic Camera."
Camera companies often slice cameras and lenses in half to show off the inner workings at trade shows. If you're wondering how the slicing is done, check out the 3-minute video above that shows a Canon EOS ELAN 7E 35mm SLR getting cut in half by a 60,000 PSI waterjet.
A .22 caliber bullet moving at 1,200 feet per second slices through an apple in the classic high-speed shot. This photo was created recently by Nasser Albahri at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).
I hold a private pilot certificate, as well as a remote pilot certificate; I am also a photographer. I just wanted to share with you some advice from a budding pilot who comes from the much larger world of flying that is general aviation.
When I was in college, I lived for a while in a crappy little rental house next to a cemetery. Neither I nor my roommate, Brad, knew how to cook anything, and we ate bologna sandwiches pretty much all the time. Eventually, someone gave us a cookbook so simple that even a half-starved English major could learn a few basic dishes--the first page actually had step-by-step instructions, with pictures, for making toast in a toaster.
Ernest Brooks was the first official photographer appointed by the British military, and he ended up shooting over 1/10 of all official British photos made during World War I. The 8-minute video above is a look at photography during the "Great War" and the life and work of Ernest Brooks.
At the core of every Nikkor lens, is Hikari glass. The company's factory in Japan's pristine Akita Prefecture churns out the lens elements that make or break the quality of your Nikkor lenses, and this short video gives us a peek at how it's done.
Back in 1967, Swedish National Television was granted a rare interview with Hasselblad founder Victor Hasselblad at his sea-side home in Sweden. In the 30-minute segment above, Hasselblad talks about everything from designing his first camera to dealing with copycats in Japan.
Here's a video by the Camera Repair Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia, that shows an overhaul they did recently of a Pentax K1000 film SLR -- the "dirtiest Pentax [they've] seen in a very long time." The 3 to 4 hour examination and cleaning is condensed down to 2.5 minutes, and shows the beautiful mechanical inner workings of the K1000.
One of the challenges (and rewards) of managing a digital production lab for a university research library is working with the wide assortment of analog formats that are collected within its archives, special collections, and map library holdings. For instance, we've recently begun conversion work on a 2002 aerial survey of Connecticut that was originally shot on 9"x9" positive black and white film.
If you've been itching to step up your film photography game—be it trying 35mm for the first time, stepping up to 120 medium format, or even trying out large format film—this old video that's circulating the Interwebz again today is a great place to start.
Marc Silber of Advancing Your Photography just released another insightful conversations with Ansel Adams' son Michael Adams. This time around, they tackle Ansel's famous book The Range of Light, his work schedule, education, childhood, and much more.
As we mentioned this morning, composition is one of the most critical aspects of photography. But another, equally important piece is understanding the basic laws of light and how to use them when capturing a photograph.
Over the past several months, Adobe has been promoting Photoshop at major sporting events with its "Adobe Photoshop Fan Cam," which shows fans in attendance being Photoshopped on the big screen. Adobe recently invited PetaPixel to a game for a behind-the-scenes look at how the Fan Cam is done.
Walt Disney reportedly smoked three packs a day, so how come it's so difficult to find a photo of Walt smoking when you're walking around Disneyland or digging through the Disney Archives? The answer is simple: all of the cigarettes have been Photoshopped out.
Here's a 3-minute video by Great Big Story about the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, a nuclear bunker that was once used by the Feds to house $4 billion worth of gold. Its goal these days is to preserve the nation's history of film.
Leading lines, negative space, rule of thirds, all of these compositional elements are discussed ad nauseam in the world of photography. This short video ignores all that, and instead focuses on a different, but equally powerful element in an image: geometric shapes.
Here's a helpful 12-minute video by landscape photographer and vlogger Thomas Heaton about lens filters. With the emergence of digital photography and powerful editing software, the benefits of some filters can be recreated digitally while others cannot.
The Tessina is a vintage Swiss camera that was created by an Austraian chemical engineer named Rudolph Steineck and introduced in 1957 in Switzerland. What's neat about the camera was that one of the accessories was a special wrist bracket that allowed you to wear the camera on your wrist like a watch.
If you're the technical type, or your just love to understand your photo and video history, you'll definitely want to check out this straightforward explanation of NTSC vs PAL, or why your camera shoots 29.97, not 30fps.
What would you do if you were stranded in the wild with nothing but your camera gear? Could you fashion tools for yourself to stay alive? That's what Chris Niccolls of TCSTV explores in this unusual 14-minute video.
For a recent project, I was tasked with shooting a hot rod. It was exciting from the beginning, because this particular kind of car is pretty rare here where I live. The owner also requested that their dog sit on the car's fender, and for the photos to be huge -- 100 megapixels were too few.
Flash is a complicated beast, let’s put it that way.
While embedded with troops in Afghanistan in the late 2000s, war photographer and writer Michael Yon captured numerous photos of the sparkling halo that can appear when a helicopter's rotors hit sand and dust. Upon finding that the particular phenomenon didn't have a name, Yon gave it one that honors two fallen soldiers: the Kopp-Etchells Effect.
A few months ago, photographer Karl Taylor got a tour of the LEE filters factory where he got to see how these high quality filters are cast, tested, and dyed (by hand!)—he even got to dye one for himself. Fortunately, he took a camera man (and now us) along for the ride.
We all have a blind spot, both literally and metaphorically. Ansel Adams had one so big and powerful that he, Beaumont Newhall, and a few others “disappeared” some very important and wonderful photographers from the history of photography. And in doing so they also helped “disappear” an important movement in photography, one called Pictorialism.
Fujifilm caused a great deal of excitement this week by announcing its first medium format mirrorless camera, the 51MP GFX 50S. But "medium format" is a a relative term rather than a specific sensor size, so how does the new 50S's sensor stack up against other digital cameras on the market?
If you ever see an ultra-slow-motion clip online, there's a good chance that it was shot using a Phantom high-speed camera. The 12-minute video above is a behind-the-scenes look at how the cameras -- which cost upwards of $150,000 -- are made.
Why do the new iPhone 7 phones have to simulate a shallow depth of field? The short answer: physics.
Canon just released this 3.5-minute video that explains how lenses work. We learn about focal points, spherical aberration, chromatic aberration, and how multiple lens elements are used together for aberration correction.
When you resize (and resample) a photo in Photoshop, you’re given the option of strategies such as Nearest Neighbor and Bilinear. If you have no idea what those mean, check out this 9-minute video by Computerphile.
In 1871, the Prevention of Crimes Act made it a legal requirement that anybody who was arrested in England and Wales had to have their photograph taken—thus was born the official "mug shot". But mug shots from the late 1800s look very different from the ones you might see today.
Myths and misconceptions persist because they’re either compelling or no one bothers to correct them. For photographers, many myths of digital photography arose when trying to draw imperfect analogies to film photography.
Back in the heyday of film photography, a common part of the photography experience was dropping off your film rolls at a store or lab, placing the roll in an envelope and checking boxes with instructions for what you'd like. Here's a fascinating 5-minute video that reveals what happened to your film between drop off and delivery of your prints and processed film.
It's been called the first underwater photograph and the first underwater self-portrait, but it doesn't seem to be either of those things. No, but this photo by diver and photography pioneer Louis Marie Auguste Boutan, taken in 1899, does seem to be the world's first underwater portrait.
Want to take a university-level class on digital photography for free? Former Stanford professor and current Google engineer Marc Levoy has a site containing his complete course materials for a class that he has taught 5 times at Stanford and once at Google.
How many famous modern and historical photos are you able to recognize simply by hearing the nickname? Go ahead, read each nickname then try to picture the image in your head.
Stop-motion photography has come a long way since the early 1900s, but it still involves creating an animation one frame at a time by introducing slight changes and movements between still photos. To see how far we've come with the technique, check out this 3-minute video, titled "The Evolution of Stop-Motion."
Here's a 2-minute video by SciShow that explains why the red-eye effect often turns irises into bright red spots in flash photos.
I’ve always found Olympus cameras to have excellent quality. But when I first picked up the PEN-F, it was immediately apparent that the quality of this camera is of a higher caliber. The PEN-F oozes quality.
Curious Droid made this 9-minute video that takes a look at 5 of the most amazing camera technologies, both those in existence and those that are coming soon. They include an ultra-powerful satellite camera, a high-resolution surveillance camera, the most powerful camera, the fastest camera, and the smallest camera.
Jeanne Adams is the daughter-in-law of the late and great landscape photographer Ansel Adams, and she served as the head of the Ansel Adams Gallery for 25 years. In the 10-minute interview above, Jeanne talks to Marc Silber of Advancing Your Photography about Ansel's workshops, teaching styles, and lesser-known portraits.
As beginner's guides go, this is one of the best we've stumbled across. In 10 minutes, Joe Edelman does a fantastic job comparing the standard speedlight to the standard monolight or "studio strobe," explaining some of the confusing terminology, and helping break down which is better when and why.
Since 1932, the renowned Swiss watchmaker Omega has served as Official Timekeeper at the Olympic Games 26 times. This year at the Rio Olympics, Omega is once again providing finish line cameras to provide officials and the public with the most precise view of the athletes.
Want to see light pollution changes photos of the starry night sky? Photographer Sriram Murali's new time-lapse short film will show you. Titled "Lost in Light," it shows different locations with progressively lower levels of light pollution.
