Photographing a meteor shower is more like photographing a time-lapse than traditional still photos. You can never anticipate where or when a meteor is going to streak across the sky.
When Polaroid announced that it would stop making Polaroid instant film in February 2008, The Impossible Project was founded to keep the film alive. Filmmaker Jens Meurer has spent several years shooting a feature-length documentary film about the saving and reinventing of the Polaroid picture.
Welcome to the world of photography, where geeky scientists make great lenses... and use all their secret codes to confuse consumers. Fret not, this guide will explain those EF-S, STM stuff to you, and a small history lesson to help you better understand.
Digital cameras are notoriously difficult to design and get right. Where do you start? Who is the customer? What features do you include on the camera? There are uncountable ways to approach a camera development and design program.
Once Syria's largest city, Aleppo has been the worst-hit city in the country since the Battle of Aleppo began in 2012 as part of the ongoing Syrian Civil War. Now a series of before-and-after photos reveals just how much the once-vibrant historical city has been marred by war.
Sony's sgnl YouTube channel published this 5-minute teardown video that offers a look at the guts of the company's high-end 24-70mm f/2.8 G Master lens, which retails for $2,200.
It's time for a long overdue post. Looking back through my archives, I realized that I've covered topics like film selections and scanning film but to date I've skipped one really important part: metering and exposing color film.
It's commonly said that a camera adds 10 pounds, making you look heavier than you actually are. Here's a striking animated GIF that shows how much the focal length of a lens affects your apparent weight in a portrait.
Want to see what it's like to tiptoe between life and death as a war photographer? Watch Conflict, a 6-episode miniseries that provides a no-holds-barred look at photography in conflict zones. Netflix just picked up the show, but you can also watch it for free online.
You may think you're no good at seeing in the dark, but your eyes are actually incredibly sensitive. In fact, according to a new study, the human eye is so sensitive it can detect even a single photon of light!
I never get tired of seeing our closest star set below the horizon, and seeing how the landscape changes as the warm light gets fainter by the minute. Every sunset has its personality depending each location, weather and season. One beautiful thing about a sunset is what happens right after the Sun has set. If turn around, you can slowly see the Earth shadow rising from the horizon.
Cameras and photography were birthed in Europe, so how did the Asian island country of Japan become the most dominant player in the global camera industry? Here's a great 30-minute video that explores that question, offering a look into the history and culture of cameras in Japan.
Want to see the composition concepts used in famous scenes from famous movies? Raymond Thi of Composition Cam has been taking still frames and overlaying neon pink lines to show things like symmetry, thirds, quadrants, triangles, diagonals, and more.
"The Exposure Triangle" is a catchy phrase meant to encompass the three factors which affect the exposure of a photograph of a scene with a given amount of light. It's often given to new photographers as a learning aid.
Since I got my Nikon D7000 camera 6 years ago I’ve used it almost everyday. That is a lot of shutter clicks, 148,558 to be exact. It looks like I will be in the market for a new camera soon as the D7000 is only factory tested to 150,000 clicks. My dilemma is should I go full frame, or stick with my cropped frame?
If you’re like me, you’re constantly looking to improve and expand your referral base. Once you’ve got a good number of weddings under your belt your base will be made up of (mostly) previous couples.
Photographer Tim Berry of Practical Photography magazine recently decided to take his camera onto the streets of London, England, to exercise his rights to photograph in public places and to see how people would react to seeing a photographer at work.
Photographer Matt Taylor was shooting with the 4K photo mode on his Panasonic Lumix G7 on a recent evening when a bolt of lightning flashed across the sky off camera. Taylor's resulting photos show how much the bright flash from a lightning can illuminate a nighttime scene.
Here's a 47-minute documentary about the work of renowned fashion photographer Mario Testino. Titled "Mario Testino: Diana's Favourite Photographer," the BBC Omnibus episode aired back in January 2002 to coincide with Testino's exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Cameras are often pitted each other in the area of image quality, but long exposure sensor noise generally isn't something that you can easily compare online. So photographer Brendan Davey took it upon himself to create such a resource, and the Sensor Noise DB is what resulted.
Here's a simple 8-minute video by photography instructor Phil Steele about how DSLRs and mirrorless cameras stack up against each other. He briefly describes the main advantages and disadvantages to each type of camera to help you figure out which one is best for your needs if you're trying to decide between them.
Have a broken or malfunctioning camera or lens and want to try your hand at a DIY repair? If you're intent on ignoring the manufacturers warnings about doing so, you should check out the YouTube channel mikeno62.
Snapchat's "lenses," more colloquially known as selfie filters or just "filters," may seem like a totally inane feature. But it turns out the facial recognition technology behind them is advanced, impressive... and a tad scary.
A rare Nikon 1200mm f/11 lens recently appeared on eBay. The earliest Nikon non-refractive long lenses were the Nikkor-Q 400mm f/4.5, Nikkor-P 600mm f/5.6, Nikkor-P 800mm f/8, and Nikkor-P 1200mm f/11. All of them were on the market around 1964 and withdrawn in the mid-1970. These lenses are actually lens heads and require a focus unit to be functional.
The U.S. Marine Corps has officially corrected photographic history this week. After a formal investigation, the Corps is admitting that one of the men in AP photographer Joe Rosenthal's iconic WWII photograph "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima" has been misidentified for the past 71 years.
This guide to photographic exposure aims to help you take full control of your camera. I often tell my students that I want them to move away from the idea “taking a photograph” and towards the idea of "making a photograph." I teach them how to take the camera off auto mode and take full control of the settings themselves in order to create the photograph they want.
At first glance, it seems like an easy thing to achieve: how hard can it be to get a great looking gelled background in your portrait?
The great American photographer Walker Evans is best known for his stark photos that document the years of the Great Depression in the US. In the 4.5-minute video above, produced many years afterwards, Evans looks back on his photography and offers a glimpse into his mindset at the time he shot it.
Want to see something mind-bending? Here's a simple optical illusion that will literally change the way you see famous photos.
Animator Drew Christie of Whidbey Island, Washington, was recently commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to create a set of animated short films that tell the story of famous photography pioneers.
One of the big arguments against taking photos is that the act distracts you from actually enjoying what you're experiencing. But a new study has found that snapping pictures actually helps people enjoy experiences more.
This is one of the most informative, technical, and (if you're a camera nerd) awesome walkthrough's we've ever stumbled across. In it, photographer Patrick Murphy-Racey shows you, step-by-step, how he lights a whole massive basketball arena with four powerful strobes.
Ask a photo nerd and they'll tell you that the world's first digital camera was invented in the 70s by Steve Sasson while working at Kodak (oh, the irony). But did you know that it's Fuji, not Kodak, who claims they invented the world's first "fully" or "truly" digital camera? It's true.
Even a single off-camera flash can make a massive difference in an outdoor portrait shoot, giving you a look that is simply impossible to capture with natural light alone. Photographer Manuel Ortiz demonstrates this beautifully in a quick, eye-opening comparison video.
In this blog post, I would like to share some insights with you regarding the connection between aperture and the inverse-square law of light, as well as their effects on light fall-off.
I tracked over 10,000 likes and followers I received on Instagram in May, 2016. Here's a look at the data and what I discovered.
British ESA astronaut Tim Peake has been regularly sharing photos of Earth he's shooting during his 6 month stay on the International Space Station. He's often asked about the gear he uses up there, so he decided to Tweet the above photo to show everyone.
I was editing some images that I took last week in New York City, including some taken from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Then I remembered that I had taken some shots of the same view from the same location, 15 years ago.
The Dallas Museum of Art is currently running an exhibition titled "Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty," the first retrospective of Penn's work in nearly two decades. If you're unable to see the show, which contains over 140 of the late photographer's photos, check out the fantastic 13-minute video above by The Art of Photography.
Want to see what goes into a $11,000 Canon telephoto zoom lens? This image shows what the Canon EF 200-400mm f/4L IS looks like when you disassemble it into its individual components and arrange those parts out neatly.
This short little tutorial by photographer and educator Phil Steele might be too basic for most advanced and even intermediate photographers, but you might find it useful all the same. That's because it tackles what Steele calls "the biggest confusion about Lightroom."
If you've seen the RGB and CMYK color models referenced all over the place but aren't exactly sure how they work or what the difference is between them, check out this short 2-minute video. Express Cards explains why the RGB additive color model is used in digital displays, while the CMYK subtractive model is used for color printing.
There are only a few people alive as qualified to give photography and composition advice as Huntington Witherill. A former "artist of the year," he studied under the great Ansel Adams and in this video he describes his approach to composing eye-catching images.
When you focus your camera, the area around the focal distance will also be in focus. But this can fall off to blur quickly or slowly. The acceptable amount of in-focus area around what's you are focusing on is called depth of field.
Starting out in studio portraiture and not sure what light modifier to choose to achieve the photo you want? In the post, we'll take a look at the differences between the main modifiers in order to help you make a good choice.
Over the past couple of decades, CMOS sensors have come to dominate the digital photography landscape thanks to their increasing quality and falling costs. If you're unfamiliar with the differences between CMOS and CCD sensors, CEI-Europe has created a helpful infographic that compares the two technologies.
In a world filled with tutorials and workshops and webinars and so much free educational content it could make your head spin, the mentor-mentee relationship is too-often relegated to the "unnecessary" bin. But getting a photography mentor can be one of the most important steps you ever take in your career.
You may swear by natural light, but sometimes available light just doesn't cooperate. So for those times when you're faced with an overcast sky but need a sunset, or the ambient light is harsh and direct, these tips from photographer Adam Angelides will help you capture natural looking images by combining ambient light with flash.
If you've thought about selling your prints but struggled with all of the minute details of putting together a print run—paper type, sizes, pricing, etc.—this quick video by Thomas Heaton may help you figure a few of those details out.
I had a great opportunity to do a “behind the scenes” of a recent portrait feature shoot which my very good friend Daniel Hambury was doing for the London Evening Standard. In fact I was mainly assisting, but couldn’t pass up the opportunity to document what happens as it’s something I’ve always been intensely interested in.
