Elaborately staged tableaus have become a staple of fine-art photography and something of their own medium -- the artistry of a Gary Salter or Annabel Mehran image is as much in the building of the scene as the actual photography.
How long does it take for a photon from the Sun to reach your camera sensor (or film) and help form a photograph? If you answered "8 minutes," you'd be kind of right, and but also kind of wrong. An answer that's more correct is "at least tens of thousands of years."
Have you ever noticed that the watches and clocks found in product photographs and advertisements usually show the time 10:10? If you haven't, pay attention the next time you're flipping through a publication and come across a watch ad---the rule is almost always true.
Want a peek into how much freelance photographers get paid by Sun-Times Media? The issue is one that may be on many a photographers mind after the Chicago Sun-Times decided to fire its entire staff of photographers. Thanks to a "leaked" memo, we now have some idea.
Why is it that some photographs go viral online while others are left by the digital wayside? Are there certain elements in photos that make them more "sharable" to Internet users? …
Jacob A. Riis arrived in New York in 1870. As the economy slowed, the Danish American photographer found himself among the many other immigrants in the area whose daily life consisted of joblessness, hunger, homelessness, and thoughts of suicide. So when he finally found work as a police reporter in 1877, he made it his mission to reveal the crime and poverty of New York City's East Side slum district to the world.
I'm hoping this post can explain a lot of the confusion beginning photographers have about focal length and crop factors. Some understanding of basic geometry is required for you to fully grasp this post. Also note that I'll be rounding the math decently well. Just run through the calculations if you want exact answers.
The Curiosity Rover has been trekking the surface of Mars since late last year, and so far, there has been no shortage of great imagery.
Have you ever wondered why the professional photography industry is dominated by cameras that carry on the design tradition that was started by classic film SLRs?
Taking pictures on an offshore oil rig is serious business. For starters, due to the risk of flammable gas coming up the oil well, normal electronics are banned outside the living quarters. Smartphones are strictly forbidden and regular cameras require "hot work permits" be opened prior to use.
Rochester, New York — The cold hits me as soon as I leave the Amtrak station, stepping into a swirl of snow eddies that etch the low streets in black and white.
NASA's Image of the Day today is a photograph showing one of the best photo op spots to be found on the International Space Station: the Cupola module. The image (shown above) shows astronaut and flight engineer Chris Cassidy pointing a Nikon DSLR and 400mm lens out one of the Cupola's windows to photograph some location on Earth 250 miles below him.
Check out this mind-bending video that talks about the "Hubble Ultra Deep Field" image captured by NASA astronomers nearly a decade ago -- a photograph that some call "the most important image ever taken."
What you see above is an ultra-high resolution aerial photograph of San Francisco as it looked in 1938. The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection put the image together using 164 large format black-and-white photos of SF that were shot in 1938. When viewed through a zoomable image viewer, the composite photo is pretty much a 1938 version of Google Earth's satellite view.
When the Chinese military moved into Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989 to forcibly remove pro-democracy protestors, an anonymous man famously decided to place himself in front of the long column of Chinese tanks that were rumbling into the area. Photos and videos of the incident were immediately published and broadcast around the world. AP photographer Jeff Widener's "Tank Man" photo, shown above, is widely considered to be one of the most iconic photos of the 20th century.
If you've never attempted to photograph the night sky, be it a constellation or a planet, the idea may seem daunting. You may think that you need a specific type of camera or that you need to invest in a high-quality telescope.
There's something to be said about lens manufacturing. You could even go so far as to say it, in itself, is an art form, with the hands of skilled and methodical workers ever-so-delicately assembling the glass we use to take photos.
Here's an interesting photo trivia question: can you name any major world currencies that feature an image of a camera? …
A while back, PetaPixel posted some features about image averaging and faces. Richard Prince created a composite portrait of the 57 faces of girlfriends on Seinfeld. This led to Pat David exploring the averaging of faces with Martin Schoeller’s portraits of celebrities.
High-end DSLRs by major camera manufacturers are made to be durable. After all, photographers find themselves in all kinds of environments documenting all kinds of subjects, so their cameras need to have serious protection against accidents and the elements.
Last month we shared some photo illustrations by science artist Ron Miller that showed what the night sky would look like if other planets in our solar system replaced the moon. Now Miller is back again with an equally interesting concept: what would landscape photos look like if Earth had a ring like Saturn's?
Canon's DSLRs come with a variety of continuous shooting speeds, ranging from 2.5 frames per second on the 300D (AKA Digital Rebel/Kiss Digital) to a whopping 14 frames per second on the high-end 1D-X. If you want to get a taste of what these shutter speeds sound like on the actual cameras, check out the comparison video above by YouTube user dochero2005.
Here's a TEDx talk photographer Brandon Stanton gave at Columbia University last October about "how our worldview is negatively affected by good stories." Stanton is the photographer behind the website Humans of New York.
Space collisions are massive, unbelievably powerful events. When two galaxies collide -- that is, when their gravitational fields start interacting with one another -- the resulting billion-year-long process contorts and twists the galaxies into the fascinating shapes we've seen in photographs taken by powerful space telescopes.
We first shared photographer Chris McCaw's unique "sunburned" photos all the way back in 2010. A happy accident led to the creation of a burned, reverse-tone, solarized photo, and from then on he has used that technique to create more and more unique exposures dubbed "groundbreaking" by many museums.
Coffee is a wonderful thing. Early in the morning, there are few things that can put you at ease like a steaming cup of hot coffee warming your hands and firing up your brain. But have you ever wondered how those coffee advertisements manage to get the perfect shot of a coffee cup, steam and all? …
Last month, the Library of Congress finally finished a project they started all the way back in 2008: they finished digitizing an archive of 467 panoramic postcards from the early 1900's. All of these postcards are now available online for interested folks to peruse through, learn from and enjoy.
The company LUMA Partners has gotten in the habit of occasionally mapping out various industry landscapes to show how a product or service gets from Point A (i.e. the creators, marketers, businesses, etc.) to Point Z (i.e. the buyers, brands and publishers), going through the rest of the alphabet in between.
Want to see what London looked like back in the year 1926? Check out this beautiful color footage shot in various London locations by Claude Friese-Greene, an early British pioneer of film. Frisse-Greene created a series of travelogues nearly 90 years ago using a color process developed by his father William Friese-Greene.
Want to see how old film single-lens reflex cameras were put together? Clare (Wyoh on Tumblr) recently found a number of camera schematics inside an old French magazine from decades ago. The schematics show exploded views of the Nikon F, Nikon F2, Nikon FM, and Nikon FA SLRs. Each camera is shown in its most basic parts, which are numbered and labeled (in French).
“I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do,” Chuck Close told an NPR interviewer when Polaroid stopped making instant film in 2008. He wasn’t the only artist attached to the medium.
Retouching and manipulating photographs is done with fancy photo-editing programs these days, but back in 1946, making adjustments required a lot more than a computer, some software, and some pointing-and-clicking skills. Retouching required a whole box of tools, a very sharp eye, and an extremely steady hand.
After reading the great reviews of the Fuji X100S, I decided to take the leap and buy one. I’ve been getting more interested in street photography lately, and this camera seemed like a good fit. Plus, it's supposed to sync at all shutter speeds, which is great for flash photography outside in bright sun. David Hobby and Zack Arias both have nice in-depth reviews.
Eposure, a UK company that brings commercial photographers together with the companies that need them, recently released the results of a survey they conducted about the day rates of UK and U.S.-based photographers. And even though some might expect that the vast majority are charging a pittance in our photography-saturated world, the outlook isn't as grim as you may think.
A while back, Atlanta-based editorial and commercial photographer Zack Arias decided to start a Q&A blog that would, in his words, "add signal to an industry filled with far too much noise." On this Tumblr he's answered 1,000+ questions ranging from the relevant to the rude about the art and business of photography.
Late last year, we shared a video in which a photographer tested the radioactivity of an old Pentax 50mm f/1.4 lens that is really popular with film photographers. But that is far from the only lens you have to worry about when it comes to radioactivity.
A high-quality time-lapse is a beautiful thing. From the aurora borealis over Norway to the thriving metropolis that is San Diego, we've featured many a gorgeous photographic fast-forward through time, each of them put together by photographers that knew how to pull the most out of the time-lapse medium.
The end of NASA's Space Shuttle program in 2011 meant the end for more than the shuttles themselves. One aspect of the program you may not have known about was the plethora of incredible photo and video equipment that was used during the program's heyday to capture each launch. At any given launch, about 138 professional still, video and TV cameras were pointing at the shuttle, and some of them were downright incredible.
If you're into photography, whether as a serious hobby or as a profession, you probably find yourself doing repetitive tasks on a routine basis. You've probably also heard various tips, tricks, and strategies on how you can do these tasks faster and more efficiently. Heed them.
Mark Vargo is a big time cinematographer who has worked on too many well-known movies to list. He's credited as a second unit director of photography on everything from Deep Impact and The Green Mile to Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Ted. In other words, knows what he's doing, and now he's chosen to share some of that knowledge with his fellow photographers and videographers.
The Japanese philosophy of Kaizen, literally "change good," is at the heart of many a successful company. It represents a dedication to constant change for the better, and is famously used by Toyota on their assembly lines, where employees are encouraged to point out issues and suggest improvements.
The way film photographers feel about digital photographers may be the way daguerreotype photographers feel about the film guys. Working with dangerous chemicals, buffing out silver coated plates, spending an entire day preparing for, taking and developing one shot; that's what daguerreotype photographers love to do. It's the difference between "crafting a photograph" and "just snapping away." …
Here's a fun piece of photographic/cinematographic history: the first ever portable motion picture camera was invented by a French scientist named Étienne-Jules Marey, and it was in the shape of a gun. Sort of a great grandfather to the the Mark III Hythe Machine Gun Camera used by the British during WWI to train aerial gunners, the Fusil Photographique (or "photographic rifle") made its debut on the scene all the way back in 1882.
If you had to select one photograph to best represent the entire human race, which photograph would you choose? That's a question encyclopedia editors must answer, and one that the Wikipedia community had to as well. The photograph above is what they have settled on (as of May 2013) for their article on "Human".
If you've ever shot with a Leica M rangefinder camera, you probably know how effective the camera can be for stealthy shooting. After all, there's no mirror that needs to swing out of the way like there is in a DSLR, so the main sound you'll hear is the soft click of the shutter curtain flapping open to expose the film or sensor.
A neat piece of photo-related home (or studio) decor: Brooklyn-based poster printer Pop Chart Lab has created a beautiful new poster called "A Visual Compendium of Cameras" that offers a brief visual history of photography.
This beautiful video shows three years in the life of the Sun in three minutes. The photographs are shown at a pace of two photos for each day. Thus, there are a little over 2000 photos in this video that are shown at around 12 frames per second.
One of the big trends in the camera industry these days is the stuffing of "big camera" sensors into "small camera" bodies. After all, if you can get the same image quality from a camera that's smaller in size, why wouldn't you want to? (That's the idea, at least).
This will probably be of limited interest to most of you, but we like to know how things work, not just how well they work. We thought we’d take a couple of pictures when we disassembled a ballhead in case any of you were interested. Our demonstration partner today was a Benro B1 ballhead that had a stripped tension adjustment knob, but all ballheads work basically the same way.
If you've never heard a basic overview of the history of photography, then this cute little animated video from TED-Ed is here for you. It covers everything from the invention of the camera obscura, to the battle between the calotype and the daguerreotype, to the rise of portable cameras.
