1,250 glass negatives from between 1910 and 1925 were recently found in the archives of the Swiss photo agency Keystone. After some thorough research work, it was concluded that the photos formed an important chapter of Swiss photographic history: they were shot by photographer Jules Decrauzat, widely considered now to be the first sports photographer and first major photojournalist in the history of Switzerland.
Greetings, my name is Andy Baker and I'm the Group Creative Director at the National Geographic Channel. For the past two years, I've been running a blog called The Client Blog all about the client's perspective on the creative process -- a perspective not often heard or discussed.
It's pretty common for great images to go viral on social media sites, but what happens when a photo goes viral with an incorrect caption... twice? Bangkok-based photographer Luke Duggleby recently experienced that firsthand when his 2010 image of 40,000 Thai monks in prayer at the Dhammakaya Temple made the rounds on social media following the Nepal earthquake, captioned as "100,000 monks in prayer after the Nepal earthquake as a necessary gesture of power." Years ago, the image had gone viral …
It seems people still aren't learning to keep their distance from wild animals when shooting tourist snapshots. A man was attacked and seriously injured by a bison in Yellowstone National Park yesterday after he tried to take photos of it with his iPad from just 3 to 5 feet away.
What do you get if you mount a giant $60,000 broadcast lens to a tiny mirrorless camera? That's what YouTube user SirJonnyCargo recently set out to find out. He used a Fotodiox lens adapter to mount his Panasonic GH4 onto a Fujinon XA55 lens. The results were actually very impressive.
Here's a fascinating 14-minute documentary about the work of Chris Farina, one of the world's top boxing photographers and the official shooter for Top Rank. Farina shares about his career journey and how he goes about shooting some of the biggest athletes and fights in the sport.
Staring into a mirror and taking a self-portrait with a camera is nothing new. People have been trying to find ways to take their photographs since the 19th century. As humans, we take an interest in ourselves - a curiosity with a dash of self-obsession. A photograph can acknowledge our existence and allow us to view ourselves from the standpoint of others around us. Here are a collection of mirror self-portraits from years passed.
There is currently a scam targeting photographers nationwide. It begins with a threat of false negative reviews if a business owner doesn't pay a "reputation management fee". Whether the business responds or not, the scammers will post many negative reviews then offer to have them removed or pushed down the search results... For a fee, of course.
Robin Moore is both a nature photographer and a conservation biologist. An amphibian specialist, he uses his skills in photography to create beautiful photos of some of the most endangered frogs on Earth, sharing those images with the world to raise awareness.
If given an old print to restore, most photographers these days would probably choose to scan it and fix the image up in Photoshop. Japanese restoration expert Murabayashi Takao uses a different technique: one that involves the magic of chemical processes. Watch and be amazed in the 10-minute video above.
Yesterday we shared some interesting before-and-after images showing the visual effects work that went into the hit Hollywood movie Mad Max: Fury Road. Here's a second look at the film from a different angle: the composition. In the 1.5-minute video above, editor Vashi Nedomansky explores how keeping all the action in the center of each frame made the shots so effective and easy to follow.
In this article I will take a look at Google Photos' new photo compression performance. I've been using a program called JPEGmini for a couple years now to compress my JPEG images. Its compression of JPEGs is lossy, but it claims to do so leaving the perceptual image quality virtually unchanged. As far as I can tell, its claims are pretty accurate, and it has literally helped me cut the size of some of my picture folders in half.
Ongeim'l Tketau, or "Jellyfish Lake," on the island country of Palau is a place you need to add to your underwater photography bucket list. The waters are famous for the millions of jellyfish that migrate across the lake on a daily basis, which provide for incredible views that many have captured on camera.
The art of street photography can be an extremely rewarding experience for photographers who are looking to capture the current state of the human condition. Candid street photography has allowed artists to capture the nature of the world and reflect on how society truly acts when it does believe it is being watched. If you’ve begun your venture into the world of street photography and already have a good handling of the basics, here are some tips to take your work to the next level.
Photographer John Coates wanted to become more familiar with the latest default Photoshop CC 2014 keyboard shortcuts, so he created a handy cheat sheet to use as an at-a-glance reference. It's designed for photographers who use Mac, and is of high enough resolution (2560×1440) to be used as the desktop background on many displays. You can download the file for yourself here (or here).
Now here's a neat use of Canon's lenses: the University of Toronto owns one of the smallest professional astronomical telescopes in the world that uses an array of photographic camera lenses instead of a single lens. Called the Dragonfly Telephoto Array, it uses ten ordinary Canon 400mm f/2.8L IS II lenses that cost $9,999 each. That's $100,000 in photo gear.
Collotype is a photo printing process that was invented by French photographer Alphonse Louis Poitevin back in 1856. Due to its ability to preserve fine detail in prints, the process was used to create fine art photo prints for many years before other processes arrived on the scene.
In a world in which photographs are primarily taken with digital image sensors, there are a growing number of photographers who are newly interested in film formats of the past. But why would anyone in our age of technological convenience still choose to shoot with analog film?
Mossless photo magazine founder and freelance photo editor Romke Hoogwaerts has launched a new video series titled in situ, which offers a casual, behind-the-scenes look at how photographers work and interact.
Most photocopiers (AKA Xerox machines) these days use a technology called xerography, which is also known as electrophotography. While it's almost always used as a means to create copies of documents, electrophotography can also be used as a photo process for making prints.
Since 2012, photographer Kenneth Brandon has regularly ventured into the great outdoors at night to shoot time-lapse photos of the dark sky. He recently began to wonder what a time-lapse would look like from a point-of-view on his telescope rather than through it, so he attached a DSLR to the outside on a recent shoot in Panamint Valley, California. The video above is what resulted.
OldSF and OldNYC are two websites created by software engineer Dan Vanderkam, who gathered tens of thousands of historical photos of San Francisco and New York City and plotted them on city maps.
Back in 2010, San Francisco-based photographer Christopher Michel received a once-in-a-lifetime photo assignment from the US Navel Institute: to ride in the back seat of a U-2 spy plane at the "edge of space." At the plane's cruising and intelligence-gathering altitude of 70,000 feet above the ground, temperatures outside the plane fall to 70 degrees below zero.
Want to understand the math and science behind how JPEG files store your digital photographs? The YouTube channel Computerphile has a new series of videos on the JPEG. They're a bit long and heady, but you may find them interesting if you've ever wondered about the technical details behind one of the world's most popular image compression methods.
France's Ministry of Culture and Communication has published a new report on the state of the photography industry in the country. The study contains numbers that offer an idea of how professional photography has changed over recent years.
"All Our Suns" is a new project by NYC telecommunications grad student Michelle Chandra that visualizes the snapping of sunset and sunrise photos around the world using Instagram data.
In the age of digital photography, many of us turn to online cloud solutions to help us backup our precious moments. However, the question that many of us want to know is what permissions a perspective service has with our content. With a form of hysteria sweeping the Web, we have decided to take a look at the industry’s top storage solutions and what their terms of service say about the files you upload. By using any of these solutions, you are automatically accepting their terms.
Adobe wants to be the 800 pound gorilla of mobile photo editing. Today the company released the 2-minute sneak peek video above showing off some mobile retouching features its currently developing. In the clip, Photoshop product manager Bryan O'Neil Hughes shows how effortlessly photographers will be able to edit 50.3 megapixel Canon 5DS photos in the app.
In today’s society, it seems that no knowledge is more prudent for photographers to learn than the rights of themselves and their photographs. Here at PetaPixel, we wanted to create a comprehensive one-stop guide to your constitutional rights to capture the world around you and what you are permitted to do with those photos.
Popularized by the likes of Instagram, photo filters are divisive in the world of photography: some people love using and viewing them, while others hate what they've done to the medium. No matter which side of the aisle you find yourself on, one thing is clear: filters can have a big impact these days on how popular your shared images are.
Want to see what it's like to photograph a NASCAR race up close? Check out the video above, which shows a photographer shooting through a fence that surrounds the track. It's a wild experience.
Did you know that back in 2010, scientists managed to calculate the orbit of a comet using amateur photographs found on the Internet? It worked with a high degree of accuracy, and it was a brilliant idea for using crowdsourced photos in an unconventional way.
Here's a fantastic 6-minute TED Talk by photographer Anand Varma, who recently became involved in the preservation of bees after being asked by National Geographic to shoot a story on them.
It might be old news that Leica opened a store in Los Angeles back in 2013, but nonetheless, it’s still a place that will be an important photography destination for years to come and definitely worth a visit if you’re in L.A.
This NASA photo roughly shows what a sunset on Mars would look like to our eyes if we were standing there to witness it. The agency released this true color image after earlier sharing a black-and-white version that was captured by the Curiosity rover in the middle of April 2015.
Truth Facts posted this simple tongue-in-cheek infographic showing how smartphone cameras have impacted the way people take and view photos. It's a then-and-now comparison of three simple measures: pictures taken, pictures developed, and pictures looked at.
This is the closest photo ever shot of the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt. It was captured on May 4th by NASA's Dawn spacecraft while orbiting from 8,400 miles away.
Photographer Andrew Jamieson was recently asked to give a presentation at work on his medium format film photography process. Instead of sharing a slideshow, Jamieson filmed this beautiful 4-minute video that covers how he loads Tri-X film into his Hasselblad, meters and shoots his photos, develops his film, scans it into a computer, and post-processes the images in Photoshop.
If you're a Nikon shooter who wants a better grasp of how your camera's autofocus settings work, check out this 11-minute video by Steve Perry of Backcountry Gallery. He runs through all the most critical aspects of the AF system, from the types of AF (e.g. single, dynamic, group) to how to set your custom functions to suit your system to your style of shooting.
Bending the Light is a new documentary film by renowned filmmaker Michael Apted about the journey of glass from the artisans who have dedicated their lives to crafting the perfect lens to the photographers who spend their careers chasing after the perfect shot.
If you're ever asked by an airline to stop taking pictures on their private property -- on their plane, for example -- you might want to obey their instructions and put your camera away. They're legally allowed to ban photography.
The image above may look strangely familiar to you. That’s because it’s a facial average of the leaders of the main political parties in this week’s general election in the UK. If you've been following UK politics, you have probably seen these people many times in the media, leading to an involuntary familiarity with them.
If you have an hour to spare, here's a fantastic interview you should listen to. It's a Talks at Google event featuring renowned photographer Rick Smolan, who has shot for TIME, LIFE, and National Geographic. He's also one of the bestselling coffee table photo book photographers of all time.
Geoffrey Berliner is the Executive Director of the Penumbra Foundation, a non-profit photo arts organization in New York City. He has also been an avid collector of historical camera lenses for 15 years. Pop Photo recently paid a visit to the basement where Berliner stores his massive collection of rare glass. In the video above, Berliner briefly talks about his passion and offers us a glimpse into his unique stash.
Want to pixel peep at full-resolution photos from the world's highest-resolution full frame DSLR? Here's a set of photographs that will satisfy that desire.
Want to see how CMOS and CCD image sensors work and how they differ from each other? Photographer and animator Raymond Sirí created a couple of simple animations showing the basic idea of how these two sensor technologies go about capturing light, reading it, and storing the information.
After having his ex-girlfriend stab his Nikon D80 to death using a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, Jon of Prime Studios decided to "take lemons and make lemonade" by using the camera for an in-depth teardown. In the 16-minute video above, Jon takes the DSLR apart to show us what things are like on the inside and what some of the main components are.
Since 2013, Sigma has been releasing an annual short film that shows how its highly regarded lenses are manufactured in the company's only factory located in Aizu, Japan. The company just released the third video in the series, which documents the daily life of the customer support department in the factory that services equipment for Sigma shooters.
Sony may not make the world's most popular smartphones or cameras, but it's playing a bigger role in those industries than what meets the eye: the company's image sensor business has been booming in recent years. In 2014, Sony was the company that made 40% of all the sensors sold across the globe.
It was five years ago that we first covered Eric Fischer's Geotaggers' World Atlas project. His goal was to gain insight into the world's most interesting places and routes by gathering vast amounts of geotag data from Flickr photos.
