There's a simple, obvious power housed inside of a photograph. Even a poorly lit snapshot captured at arm's length with a few friends squeezed uncomfortably into the frame, even it is immeasurably precious because it contains the seeds of a memory.
What do you get when you mix a few nerdy, talented videographers with some exceptionally skilled racing drone pilots? An epic tie fighter/X-wing aerial battle shot using drones and Star Wars toys of course!
In 2014, filmmaker Tom Leveritt used an ultraviolet camera to show people their skin like they'd never seen it before. Now, you can do the same thing with the Sunscreenr: a tiny, waterproof UV camera that is meant to keep you slathering on sunscreen by showing you when you've used enough and where it's worn off.
The airline Emirates is a sponsor of the French Open championship in tennis, and one of its advertisements at the tennis matches is an aerial camera in the shape of an Airbus A380.
Making an iconic landmark 'disappear' might seem like the purview of magicians, but it's street artist and photographer JR who gets the glory this time around. Through clever use of massive photo prints, he managed to make the iconic Louvre Pyramid 'disappear' into the Museum behind it.
Photography studio Bruton Stroube works with huge brands to create beautiful images, but not every step of the process is so glamorous. In a new Instagram series they call "Test Shot Tuesday," they're sharing some of the fun and ridiculous stand-in shots they capture on their way to a final image.
Ah, the Instagram #yoga hashtag. As of this writing, there are over 20 million posts hashtagged #yoga on Instagram, and this creative spoof describes/pokes fun of a good 50% of them.
The photo above is a perfect example of when preparation and luck meet, shake hands, and press down your shutter in unison. Captured by wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas, the photo shows a lion cub in the foreground with last September's supermoon eclipse in the background.
Color is one of the fundamental aspects of branding, and most major companies in the world of photography are known for using key colors in their branding.
Here's a humorous video that's making the rounds online: a guy named Mikey Grande (mikeygrande on Snapchat) visited a department store, snapped photos of various faces he found on display, applied Snapchat filters to them, printed them out at a Kodak kiosk, and then stuck the prints back onto the original images. Voila! Snapchat filters in real life.
The Hydraulic Press Channel is a staple of many people's online video diet. Every few days another gadget, foodstuff, or toy gets crushed on video while millions watch on, and this week it was time to surrender a few "tough" action cameras into its clutches.
The lesson of the video below can be summed up in one very simple phrase: always pay attention to your surroundings. This photographer didn't, and he got called out on television for his lapse.
Timelapse title credits for television shows are getting to be pretty common, but this one definitely stands out. One creative YouTuber recreated the Game of Thrones intro credits using some really stunning macro mold time-lapses.
A student at the Rochester Institute of Technology had a creative idea for his Visual Media Innovation Project this past semester: he created the first (to our knowledge) instant camera drone by hacking a Fuji Instax Mini 8 camera onto a DJI Flamewheel f450 drone kit.
DON'T DO IT!!! *clears throat* ummm... I mean... this is pretty bold. The CEO of GoWing, makers of the popular Lens Flipper camera accessory previously featured here, wants to give you a heart attack and demonstrate the strength of his product at the same time.
Well, this is odd. A university in the UK is banning the traditional throwing of mortarboards at graduation; but no worries, they say, students can pretend to throw their hats and the event's photographer will Photoshop them in after!
Installation artist duo Anna Heinrich and Leon Palmer loved the landscape around Hadleigh Country Park in Essex, England so much, they decided to capture it forever through the magic of the Camera Obscura. Thus was born "The Reveal."
Photo projects usually are planned, researched and given approval to. This one just kind of fell into my lap after a single day of shooting on a bunch of expired film on a whim at the Daytona 500.
What's your deepest... darkest photography secret? Do you occasionally give in and shoot *shudder* Auto? Is your most popular photo taken with *shudder* an iPhone? This silly DRTV video is all about these kinds of "shocking" photographer confessions.
It may not be the first place that comes to mind, but the Soviet Union is a great place to start if you're looking for a good quality piece of glass on the cheap.... well, what's left of the Soviet Union anyway.
Over on Tumblr, there's a new blog called Guns Replaced with Selfie Sticks. As the title suggests, the site features movie stills from action films with all the guns Photoshopped out and replaced with selfie sticks.
This is some serious dedication. When wedding and adventure sports photographer Nathan Welton fell through the ice and into a frozen lake while shooting a wedding ceremony in Colorado, he didn't stop or let his assistants take over. Nope... he just kept on shooting.
Photographer Murad Osmann's wildly popular "Follow Me" project features photos of his girlfriend leading him by the hand to exotic locations around the world. Now some folks over in Taiwan are parodying the style with a strange new meme called "Hold My Head."
Now THIS is a sunrise timelapse. Captured by astronaut Jeff Williams on the International Space Station as a way to celebrate the station's 100,000th tour around the world, the video is breathtaking in the way only images of our planet from space can really be.
The folks at AwesomenessTV are paying homage to "Instagram Bros" and their quest for the perfect coffee cup photo. You know the one: a crisp white cup sitting on a reclaimed wood table next to your passport, a copy of Kinfolk magazine, and some sort of Apple device.
BuzzFeed's "Try Guys" are just average guys. But in this new video, they put themselves at the mercy of professional makeup artists, photographers, and (of course) some Photoshop retouching masters to see if they could recreate photos of buff, sexy male celebrities... and find out how those photos made them feel.
The group of traveling filmmaker/photographers were caught on camera disturbing the delicate ecosystem of Yellowstone's iconic Grand Prismatic Spring for the sake of a few pictures this past weekend, and now they're paying the price.
The creative process can be a painful one, but once in a while it's a good idea to laugh at our pain and remember that you're not alone. To that end, this humorous video by the folks at Lixi Studios is bound to elicit a chuckle... and perhaps a groan.
Curious if you have what it takes to be an action/sports photographer? What about a combat photographer? Or wildlife photographer? If you don't know for sure, this new Pokenmon Snap-like 'VR Photography Experience' might help you find out.
Want to recreate that "Martian" look? Or maybe it's the "Moonrise Kingdon" look you're going for, or your latest photo project needs the "Annie Hall" look. Whatever cinematic feel you're trying to capture, Cinema Palettes can help you achieve it.
After stumbling upon a birds nest with beautiful eggs in his front yard, Tan Nguyen decided to mount his GoPro camera nearby to try and capture a time-lapse video of the eggs hatching. Shooting at 1 photo per second, the camera capture something completely different: instead of the beauty of new life, it witnessed the harsh reality of life in the wild.
Model and actress Jess Adams was posing for an sea-side clothing photo shoot in Malibu last weekend when the DJI Inspire 1 camera drone that was being used flew right into the woman's face.
Forget wildlife cameras, when it comes to capturing cool photos of birds, it seems all we need are traffic cams. Just a few months after a CCTV camera in Canada captured these shots of a snowy owl in flight, a traffic cam in the UK repeated the feat with a 'speeding' blue tit.
Eadweard Muybridge is considered one of the fathers—if not THE father—of the moving picture. But his life story is perhaps more sordid than glamorous, as this fascinating short film by filmmaker Drew Christie illustrates.
Adding macro capabilities to your smartphone camera usually involves a DIY hack like this one, but if you're looking for more professional results then you should definitely check out the BLIPS micro & macro lenses.
The Internet has not been kind to Instagram's redesigned logo. Adweek called it "baffling" and "a travesty," and some went so far as to call it "an abomination." But if you hate the logo as much as these folks do, you're in luck: there's a hack to get the old one back... sort of.
Photographer Garry Cornes of Glasgow, Scotland, attended the demolition of a 24-story building this past Sunday. After joining the crowd there and setting up his camera on the other side of the street, Cornes had his view ruined at the worst possible time when a bus rolled in to photobomb his shot.
The saying goes that "you are your own worst critic," but when it comes to photography, a Canon photo trends study finds that the old adage simply doesn't track. In fact, the vast majority of people think their photography is 'good to excellent.'
What would it be like if, instead of Tom Cruise and Daniel Craig and Matt Damon, the biggest blockbusters in Hollywood all starred Asian actor John Cho? That's what 25-year-old digital artist William Yu set out to find out in his series and social movement #StarringJohnCho, a protest against whitewashing in cinema.
You can add "Russian guy with a spear" to your list of things your drone should fear. Joining Jet Skis, anti-Drone net bazookas, and mother nature herself, a Russian man at a history festival made his displeasure for drones known by taking one down with a spear.
We just found out about a really neat piece of software for Canon DSLRs. Called LooZ, it lets you see and record what you're light painting as you light paint it, taking the guesswork out of complex light painting creations and letting you share the final process in video form.
General consensus seems to be that your smartphone's flash is mostly useless, but the "Flens" wants to change all that. The tiny magnetic "flash lens" supposedly boosts the power of your smartphone's flashlight by a full order of magnitude: 10x.
Mercury just passed between the Earth and the Sun yesterday, a rare "planetary transit" that occurs about 13 times every 100 years. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft shot highly detailed photos of the astronomical event, and the beautiful time-lapse above is what resulted.
I'm an avid camera and gear hoarder, but not the new stuff... I prefer the classics. I usually go to antique stores, thrift shops, etc. in hopes of finding a real gem. That's exactly what happened last week.
The last time you had or saw road rage, did you post to Instagram about it? If you did, you might have ended up a statistic in a recent report on road rage released by The Auto Insurance Center.
Want to see what photo studios were like a century ago? Turkish artist Ali Alamedy recently spent 9 months building a 1900s photo studio... as a miniature tabletop diorama.
Two of the most influential gadgets of all time, as declared a few days ago by TIME magazine, are cameras—two gadgets that "changed the course of technology for good." One of them even made the top 10.
"As a rule of thumb, if your [Director of Photography] mentions something with a German-sounding name, it means it's going to be super expensive." Ain't that the truth...
If you're a photojournalist (or even just a lover of great photojournalism) this video may just be a 'must watch.' Recorded earlier today during a Facebook live stream, the video lets you sit down next to the New York Times photo editors as they sift through and curate their "Week in Pictures" feature that will go live on the Lens blog tomorrow.
Most GoPro footage from the edge of space comes to us courtesy of weather balloons (like this or this). But this particular GoPro Hero 4 didn't gently float up to the edge of space... no, it was blasted there on the side of a SL-10 rocket going 3,800 miles per hour.
