Computational imaging has given us some interesting and useful inventions so far, from fake bokeh to capturing the movement of light. This time, scientists have figured out how to take a clear image from as far as 28 miles (45km), regardless of the Earth’s curvature and the amount of smog in the air. Zheng-Ping Li and colleagues from the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai have come up with the technique that takes photos even these long distances....

There are so many mini matte boxes out there on the market these days that it can be difficult to decide which to get. I mean SmallRig alone makes five different models now. But if you own a 3D printer and have some filament lying around doing nothing, then you can have a go at making this one. It’s made by Edward Park at Mountain Breeze Studio, the same guy that does those cool retro lens cinema housings....

Virtual reality might be the buzz of the town, but a new company called Scandy wants the world to know that the world of 360º content isn’t destined only for headsets. Today, the company announced it’s raised one million dollars to start mass production on their ‘Scandy Spheres,’ a ball-shaped object that has a 360º image printed into them. The process for creating the image and getting it printed is fairly straightforward....

Okay, we all know that you can turn your fancy Fuji, Sony, Canon, Nikon, and other cameras into a webcam. But can you do it with something that is the opposite of fancy: a Game Boy camera? Well, yes, you can! Bernard Capulong aka berndog turned his game Boy camera into a fully functional webcam, and it’s as amazing as it is ridiculous. The whole thing started with a post on r/Gameboy/ subreddit....

You thought your full-frame DSLR with a telephoto zoom lens was heavy? Well, check this out. This gigantic camera was used in World War II to shoot aerial photos. Just like its size, the weight was massive as well: with a 24″ lens, it weighed 75 pounds (34kg)! This photo of a soldier posing with the camera emerged on Reddit and it was shot around 1942. The camera was first identified as Kodak K-24, but another user noted that it’s actually a Fairchild K-17 camera....

Cablecams are a lot of fun, but they’re not inexpensive, even if you need just something small for your action camera. There are commercial solutions out there, like the Wiral Lite, but they’re pretty expensive for what they are. Perhaps even more so than the camera you’re mounting to it. When Kasper at MAKESOME was asked by his friend Mick if he could help design and build one for his Insta360 ONE R, though, he jumped at the chance, and did take some inspiration from the Wiral Lite, but based the electronics off a cheap radio controlled car, to brilliant effect....

The videos posted by Gav and Dan (who’s currently MIA), AKA The Slow Mo Guys, are always visually very appealing. But for me, they’re at their most interesting when the video is about something that’s actually related to photography or filmmaking. And while this video, which explains the inner workings of a 16mm movie film camera is shot at a rather modest 1,000 frames per second, it’s no less mesmerising and interesting than the crazy 100K+ fps stuff they usually post....

I’ve only been putting content on my YouTube channel in its current incarnation for a relatively short time. I had a channel years ago that did rather well, but YouTube (and the rest of the web) was a much simpler world back then. Social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter had only just launched. Instagram hadn’t even been thought up. There wasn’t really a whole lot of creators out there publicly on the web, either....

As a general type, portrait photos are often disliked by the subject themselves. From the early formative years of grade school on into the advanced years of adulthood, the uneasy feeling for the dislike of your own picture is universal. Yet it is not for vanity sake, or to spare the shock of another from seeing self-assumed horrors. Assuming you are neither a narcissist or a beauty queen with flawless perfection, you may be like the rest of the human race....

What’s your go-to aperture that you always seem to gravitate towards? Go on, I bet you have one, even if you hesitate to admit it! For me, whether I’m shooting natural light or in a studio, I often seem to end up at f/2.8. For environmental portraits or groups, I’m often swapping between f/8 and f/11. but that’s just me, and honestly, although I’ve settled into shooting like this over the past few years, I’m not sure I’ve really taken a step back to really think about why I often end up shooting with these apertures....

As the name of the filter alludes to, these lens filters do indeed lower the overall contrast of a shot. To clarify what that means in relation to photography; these filters will reduce the darkness of the shadows by allowing light to bleed into them from surrounding highlights. From the example images above, you should get a very good idea of what the low contrast filters do. Both of these example images are taken with exactly the same camera settings and are displayed straight out of camera....

The holiday season is rapidly approaching and it will soon be time to start that desperate search for gifts. For those of you with millennials in your life, you might want to check out this little handheld bundle of nostalgia. The Kodak Memory is a tiny greyscale printer made to look like an old 35mm film roll. In fact, the photos come out of it in such a way that they emulate the look of the film exiting the roll....

We’ve seen all sorts of interesting Lego cameras: from miniature replicas to working DIY cameras. And if you’re a fan of vintage gear – you’re going to love this one! The 1914 Ur-Leica, or the “original Leica,” could soon become a Lego kit. But, it needs your help to get from an idea to reality. The original Ur-Leica prototype was developed by Oskar Barnack in 1913, and built in 1914....

The ISS astronauts are good at many things, and photography is certainly one of them. NASA recently published a magical photo of a crescent moon, taken up there from the ISS using a Nikon D5. In the photo, you can see the crescent Moon hovering above an orbital sunset. It was taken on 6 December 2021 as the space station passed over the Pacific Ocean east of New Zealand. So far, we’ve seen many photos taken by Thomas Pesquet, who is now here on Earth....

We’ve seen some incredible cases when people accidentally found forgotten and rare photos (this one’s probably my favorite). And something like this happened to a Missouri architect Brian Bononi. He was working in a closed photo studio on Kansas City when he found a pile of 167 portraits that never got delivered to clients. So, he gave himself a mission: find the people in these photos and reunite them with prints that were never delivered to them....

Flying a drone requires knowing the laws. If you travel with the drone, you need to get familiar with the laws of the country you’re visiting. To make this easier, foXnoMad has created a map that shows you the drone laws of every country in the world. It can be a really handy tool for all to you who want to get the aerial view of the places you’re visiting....

Many of us get enthralled in social media these days. And for photographers, that means Instagram in particular. But one Instagram user is going viral for a very unusual reason. They’re a chimpanzee. They scroll through the feeds, look at images and videos then flick back like a pro. https://www.instagram.com/p/Bwf080_Bfby/ Posted to Instagram by conservation advocate Mike Holston, the video has received already seen over 1.6 million views. While the ease with which the Chimp manages to navigate Instagram, or even understand the concept of a touch screen smartphone, is quite incredible, not everybody is happy about the video....

We’ve seen plenty of interesting things inspired by cameras and lenses: from gadgets, tools, and glasses to edible stuff like cakes and chocolate. This time, we bring you a very unusual lens compass that looks a lot like a lens aperture. I saw this unusual product on Facebook, in one of a million irrelevant ads I see daily. And even though it’s not something I’d buy, it caught my attention because it looked like an aperture mechanism....

When we think of lenses, we usually think of chunks of metal or plastic with glass elements inside them. If somebody says “wooden lens” to us, we usually think of CNC or laser-cut models of lenses that don’t actually have any optical properties and are simply chunks of wood that resemble a lens. But not this time. Oh, no. This one’s a wooden lens, with glass optics that actually works....

Should you or should you not add your prices to your photography website? Some say one, some say the other, and there are many shades in between. And of course, each of the approaches has its good and bad sides. In this video, photographer Chelsea Nicole will guide you through the pros and cons of all of these approaches. She suggests the three best strategies for adding pricing to your photography website so that you gain a lot of clients who are willing to pay what you ask....