Did you know that some creatures can actually see the world in long exposures? Scientists recently discovered that cockroaches are the latest insect found to have that feature built into their eyes and brains. It allows the resilient little bugs to see in near-pitch black environments.
Visitors to Google today are being treated to a Doodle logo replacement that pays tribute to photography pioneer Anna Atkins. Atkins was born 216 years ago today, and in her life she became one of the first -- if not the first -- women to create a photograph.
Here's a great video on photographic composition, created by The Cooperative of Photography using tips and photographs by legendary photojournalist Steve McCurry. Each of the 9 composition tips is illustrated with examples from McCurry's impressive body of work.
Smartphones and social networks have made snapping and sharing photos extremely easy to do, allowing us to preserve our memories and broadcast our experiences. It's not all positive, though: there are downsides to our snap- and selfie-happy culture.
It's the end of the road for the company behind Rolleiflex cameras. Just two months after Fujifilm put up one of its major film factories at auction, DHW Fototechnik is doing a liquidation auction of its own, selling off the massive amounts of equipment used in manufacturing twin-lens reflex cameras.
Every day about 200 million photographs get uploaded to Facebook. That’s almost double the number of all the books that have ever been published in human history. And that’s just Facebook, I’m not even mentioning Instagram, Snapchat, or just the photos everybody takes and doesn’t even post online.
If you've never used a circular polarizer filter before, here's an interesting video by Mitch Bergsma that shows the effect it has on various outdoor scenes. He mounted a B+W Polarizer filter onto a couple of lenses on his Canon 7D and filmed a number of landscape spots while turning the filter to see its effect as a gradual transition. Pay attention to the sky, leaves, and reflections.
Note: This is part two of a series on depth of field. you can read part one here.
Photographer Levi Bettweiser of the Rescued Film Project regularly processes large batches of old films of different styles and eras. Earlier this year he received quite a bit of attention after finding, processing, and sharing 31 rolls of undeveloped film from World War II.
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce is a French photography pioneer who is credited with capturing the oldest surviving photograph of a real world scene, a print made back in 1825. In addition to that famous image, titled View from the Window at Le Gras, Niépce also created a number of other photos that are recognized as being some of the earliest photos ever made.
Astronomers have captured the first photo of a single supernova showing up in four different places of a single image due to a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. The "lens" in this case was a massive galaxy that is capable of using its gravity to bend and magnify light.
It's not just the megapixel war that's raging in the world of digital cameras. One of the big competitions going on is the battle of powerful zoom lenses on compact cameras, and the zoom capabilities on the latest "superzoom" cameras are pretty ridiculous. The video above shows what the new Canon SX60 can do with its 65x optical zoom (and 4x digital zoom tacked on at the end).
A video posted by Paul Luning (@pluning) on Feb 14, 2015 at 9:45am PST …
The word "speed" is used a lot in the world of photography equipment -- things like lens speed, film speed, and shutter speed. But speed is generally used to refer to how quickly something travels or operates per unit time, rather than a period of time itself. So is the term "shutter speed" a misnomer?
This is a picture of the smallest life form that's known to exist, an ultra-small bacterial cell. That black bar you see is for scale -- it indicates 100 nanometers. To put things into perspective, more than 150,000 of these bacteria could fit onto the top of a human hair.
Here's a 5-minute video by Seeker Stories about how young urban explorers are connecting through Instagram and teaming up to explore the hidden places of New York City. They risk arrest -- and often death -- to see and photograph the city from perspectives that ordinary people will never get to experience.
Want a better understanding of how Photoshop's sharpening filters work and how to best use them? Here's a tutorial in which Photoshop expert Deke McClelland discusses using Photoshop's features to bring out clearer details in your digital photographs. McClelland discusses all the sharpening filters found in the Sharpen menu in Photoshop (e.g. the one-click sharpening filters, Unsharp Mask, and Smart Sharpen), as well as the Sharpening panel found in Adobe Camera Raw.
Did you know that certain wide angle lenses offer slots on the rear mount that allow you to insert gel filters? Often this design decision is due to the fact that the bulbous front element prevents the use of a standard filter that screws onto the front, but sometimes it's not.
New Internet culture slang words such as "selfie," "photobomb," and "duckface" are being added to respected English dictionaries, so it makes sense that there should also be new signs added for them in American Sign Language. Here's a look at what those signs are.
Over the past year, the Carnegie Museum of Art has been slowly releasing a 5-part documentary series titled The Invisible Photograph, which offers a look into the hidden side of photography -- things that are "guarded, stashed away, barely recognizable, or simply forgotten." …
As a tribute to Photoshop for its recent 25th birthday, Lynda created this "before there was Photoshop" video that shows the darkroom tools and techniques that were used by film photographers before Photoshop and digital photography arrived on the scene.
In 2013, we reported that the Italian film company Ferrania was planning to reboot its production of analog film. The next year, the company launched a Kickstarter campaign and ended up raising over $300,000 to bring film back.
An ignite is a type of event in which presenters are given 5 minutes to talk about a subject in just 20 slides. Each slide is shown for only 15 seconds before the slideshow is automatically advanced. It's a rapid fire of learning and inspiration that has the motto: "Enlighten us, but make it quick!" …
Ronald K. Fierstein is a man who has had a front row seat to the evolution of photography as we know it. He's a lawyer who helped represent Polaroid during its lengthy legal battle with Eastman Kodak over patents.
Photographer Stu Maschwitz of Prolost recently paid a visit to the Bay Area Lightroom User Group and tried something he's always wanted to do: Lightroom Iron Chef.
Update on 12/16/21: This video has been removed by its creator.
Here's a photograph of Jessie Tarbox Beals, America's first female photojournalist, with her camera on a street a century ago. While most female photographers of her time shot photos from the peace and safety of photo studios, Beals ventured into the world of photojournalism and made a name for herself through her tenacity, self-promotion, and freelance news photos.
Last December, the art world balked when photographer Peter Lik announced the world's priciest sale of a photograph: a single black-and-white print titled "Phantom" for $6.5 million. Here's another fact that will drop your jaws: Lik has sold nearly half a billion dollars worth of photographic prints, which means he's possibly the best-selling fine-art photographer in history.
We’ve seen it in plenty of thriller/crime solver TV shows and movies: upon reviewing some grainy and very low-resolution surveillance footage, someone inevitably asks the technician, “can you zoom in on that and enhance it?” Then, with the quick press of a few masterfully placed keystrokes and bleepy computer sounds, the image is suddenly enhanced with vastly increased resolution and a key plot device is revealed.
Adobe celebrated Photoshop's 25th birthday yesterday with great fanfare. Since the original Photoshop version 1.0 was launched back on February 19th, 1990, there have been 15 major versions released that have advanced the way we work with (and look at) photographs.
Streetlights polluting your shots of the starry night sky? A strategically placed laser might be just what you need.
Want to make sure a photograph survives your lifetime? Print it out. That's the warning Internet pioneer Vint Cerf gave at a talk recently, saying that vast amounts of digital information may soon be lost in a new digital "dark age."
The key to mastering photography is not to follow the rules but to understand them. Understanding the photographic principles that define photography is a barrier that must be broken to truly unlock your full potential as a photographer.
The prestigious World Press Photo contest announced the winning photos of 2014 last week. In case you were curious, here's a look at the cameras that were used to capture the winning photographs.
When new smartphones are announced these days, the camera quality and specs are usually front and center. If you're wondering why manufacturers focus so much on mobile photography, check out the chart above: taking photos is the most used feature of smartphones alongside text messaging.
Photographer Steve Perry of Backcountry Gallery sent in this 14-minute video he recently made to teach photographers about the topic of lens diffraction. He explains both what diffraction is and how the knowledge can be applied to your photography.
Want to see what a 10K time-lapse video looks like? Look no further than the video above. Titled "10328x7760: A 10K Timelapse Demo," it was created by Los Angeles-based photographer Joe Capra, a guy who specializes in ultra-high-definition time-lapse photography.
Every time you post a photo to Instagram, it loses a tiny bit of quality. It's not really noticeable for a single upload, but if you save and repost the photo over and over, the quality loss becomes extreme. It's a concept known as "generation loss," and is the subject of artist Pete Ashton's project "I Am Sitting In Stagram (2015)."
After Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, passed away in 2012, his widow contacted the National Air and Space Museum. Carol Armstrong had discovered a white cloth bag in one of Neil's closets, and it was filled with items that looked like they had been used in space. Among the contents was a forgotten camera that had been used to capture images of the first moon landing.
In Japan, purikura refers to a photo booth in which you can pose for a photo with friends and decorate the portraits before receiving little printed versions.
If you'd like a long and fruitful career as a street photographer, Saudi Arabia might not be the most welcoming place for you to pursue it. Shooting public photos and sharing them online is becoming more and more popular in the Middle Eastern kingdom, but many practitioners are unaware that the country's strict cybercrime law could bring down huge fines and even jail time for their snapshots.
Fujifilm has a new website that lets photographers "try" X-Mount lenses to see what they can do. It's a lens simulator of sorts: select the lens, aperture, and focal length you want, and press the shutter button on the page. A sample photo will pop up showing what that combination of gear and settings would produce.
Back in 1887, a photography instructor named Edward M. Estabrooke published a book titled Photography in the Studio and in the Field. It was "a practical manual designed as a companion alike to the professional and the amateur photographer." …
Before the days of digital magic, people had to rely on clever film techniques and chemical processes for "green screen" (or chroma key) compositing. Tom Scott created the short video above that provides a quick overview of the techniques that were used.
Teleconverters are a great way to get some extra reach without having to drop some serious money for a 400mm+ lens. It can be an essential tool for many photographers who are constantly cropping in on their images, even when shooting with a crop camera and telephoto lens. In case you didn't know, a teleconverter is a small lens element that attaches to your lens and increases the effective focal range, typically by a factor of 1.4x or 2x.
Here's a 9-minute mini-documentary by the NPPA titled "The Value of Professional Photojournalism." It examines the current state of the photojournalism and the changing landscape of news imagery.
Want to see what it's like to flip through the first photo book that ever appeared in the world? The online show Objectivity recently paid a visit to The Royal Society in London to see its copy of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, a 1843 book by English botanist and photographer Anna Atkins that's considered to be the first book ever to be illustrated exclusively with photographs.
If you want to see the mechanics of how a modern DSLR shutter works, one way to do so is through slow-motion captured with a high-speed camera. That's what Gavin Free of The Slow Mo Guys recently did by pointing a Phantom Flex at his Canon 7D and capturing what goes on inside the mirror box during exposures of various shutter speeds.
Earlier this month, we shared some sample photos showing how Lytro's Illum light field camera performed in capturing the NFC Championship game. Here's another look at the camera with a very different subject matter: wedding photographs.
Self promotion has been one of the most difficult things for me to overcome as a photographer. I constantly ask myself "Who cares?", "Is this relevant?", and "Do I sound like a douche bag?". I’ve decided to get over myself this year and just put the work out there and let the chips fall as they may.
