Smooth Trans Focus (STF) was invented by Minolta in the 1980s and became available in the Minolta 135mm f/2.8 STF in 1999. The special design of the lens with an Apodization (APD) filter allows for the smoothing of out-of-focus areas, or bokeh. The APD filter reduces the light transmitted through a lens, but the strength is gradually decreased toward the center of the filter.
Alper Yesiltas, a photographer and lawyer from Istanbul, Turkey, spent the last 12 years shooting photos of the same window. The project only came to a halt last year because the owner knocked down the building, but the images are very creative indeed.
Photographer Jenna Martin's wildly popular Lowe's photo shoot seems to have sparked a trend. Cincinnati-based photographer Adam Delane visited a local Hobby Lobby crafts store with four of his model friends and shot some portraits. The photos have since gone wildly viral.
Photographer Vincent Laforet dazzled the world a few years ago by photographing iconic cities at night through the open door of a helicopter flying at 7,500+ feet. The work has since been published as a museum-quality photo book titled Air. Laforet's next goal: to bring the same concept to life by shooting video.
If you're looking to add a creative touch to your photos, you can consider making a DIY lens filter for custom effects. Here's a 3-minute video from COOPH that suggests 8 photo filters that you can make at home to spice up your photos in seconds.
Here's an 8-second video showing $5,000 in Nikon lenses getting smashed with a mallet. If you cringe at the thought of harm coming to any photographic equipment, here's the good news: the video isn't what you think. It's a creative video by stop-motion extraordinaire PES.
While traveling in Rome, photographer Oliver KMIA discovered how popular tourist spots were crowded with tourists fighting to shoot their own precious personal photo. He later scoured Instagram and created this 2-minute video, titled "Instravel," which shows a "photogenic mass tourism experience" and how so many of our travel photos look exactly like other people's.
Late last year, my wife and I had to say goodbye to one of our beloved dogs, Sophie. She was far too young and our loss was devastating. After several months, one of my breeder clients (Kristen from Zero Gravity Australian Shepherds) announced a litter coming.
The great photographer Jay Maisel used to talk about color, light, and gesture being three essential elements of a great image. With 20 square meters, my goal was to create a body of imagery that transports viewers into the scene and allows them to imagine the whole range of smells and sensations of a summer outdoors.
In my opinion, there’s an extra layer of believability -- a tangibility, if you will -- to using practical effects as opposed to relying heavily on post-production. Post work is limited by the breadth (or lack thereof) of imagination, which is why I try to get as much as I can in-camera.
Photographer Joseph Ford and knitter Nina Dodd have spent 4 years working on a creative project called "Knitted Camouflage." Ford shoots portraits of subjects wearing custom, carefully hand-knit sweaters by Dodd that blend them into very, very specific locations.
Here's a beautiful 2-minute short film by Raphael Boudreault-Simard of Flow Motion Aerials that shrinks kayakers and the beautiful outdoors into a miniature world using a tilt-shift effect.
Structure is a new short film by photographer Drew Geraci, who used a microscope and 4K camera to capture the beauty of ordinary organic objects when magnified up to 1000x.
If you're looking for a wacky idea for portrait photos, check out this 4.5-minute video by COOPH. It's a collection of 8 wacky things you can do with things that you can mostly find around a home.
Photographer Zev Hoover has created a rather unusual camera: it's one of the world's first 8x10 large format video cameras.
I recently shot the 2017 Christmas card photo for Stavanger Foto, the passionate camera store on the west coast of Norway. Being granted full creative freedom in making the card, I went back to the old masters for inspiration.
In 2016, there were 762 murders in Chicago, the most by far anywhere in the United States -- more than the total of New York and Los Angeles combined. This year there have already been over 600 homicides. I was born and raised in Canada, where there are fewer murders in the entire country than Chicago has in one year.
Want an interesting idea for turning your digital photo into something tangible that you can hold? Look into the lithophane, the centuries-old technique of carving an image into a piece of translucent material to create a 3D image. Photographer Daniel DeArco recently turned a photo into a lithophane with 3D printing, and he documented the experience in the 4-minute video above.
Photographer Jason Siegel is still using old camera equipment to share an anti-violence message in a creative way. Since we featured his work at the beginning of 2017, Siegel has created even more guns and weapons of war using various cameras, lenses, and accessories for his project Shoot Portraits, Not People.
If you like "things organized neatly" photos of camera gear, check this one out -- it includes the photographer himself. This photo shows John Bozinov's essentials as an Antarctic expedition photographer.
Tired of keeping track of all your different lens caps? Kuvrd's Universal Lens Cap is a new "one size fits all" lens cap that is both water- and dust-proof. It's made of silicon and can keep all (or most) of your lenses safe.
I blended 105 exposures to create a 620-megapixel photo of New York City transitioning from night to day after a snowstorm. "New York Transitions I" captures the dawn of a new day in New York City.
Brooklyn-based photographer and graphic designer Alfra Martini has been taking famous album covers and recreating them with cats instead of humans. She calls the project The Kitten Covers.
If you easily get motion sickness, you may want to stay away from this short film. Visual storyteller Tim Sessler recently spent 48 hours shooting in New York City with an iPhone 8 and the new Freefly Movi cinematic robotic gimbal. What resulted is Vortex, this 1.5-minute short film in which the world continually turns.
"You're My Music in This Silence" is a new short film by videographer Erick Flores Garnelo of Guadalajara, México. The 3.5-minute visual experience consists entirely of cinemagraphs.
Trying to think of a photography-related present for a photography-obsessed person in your life? Here's a 4-minute video by COOPH that features 10 great DIY gift idea for this this holiday season.
Throughout the years, I noticed that I visit the same locations around my house many times to see how they look during different seasons and different times of the day. Sometimes the area where you live may not motivate you very much to photograph because you see the same things every day. However, when I started photography, I began to see the world (and my home area) in a different way.
What if Adobe decided to jump into the keyboard market and create a keyboard for photographers and other creatives? What would it look like? Brazilian designer Vinicius Araújo decided to turn his best guess into a futuristic concept keyboard called the Adobe Keyboard.
The multiple exposure is one of the easiest, fastest and most flexible ways to create striking images. It is usually my go-to technique when I am struggling with creativity and I need a good shot fast or when the venue is less than ideal for creating amazing images.
Filmmaker Kevin McGloughlin and musician Max Cooper just released this new video titled "Resynthesis." For the visuals, McGloughlin explored the ideas of space and time using still photos and real-time footage captured using a Sony a7R II mirrorless camera.