Besides your essential camera gear, there are a few thing you might want to pack that may not be immediately obvious – but the best part is you can pick these items up for relatively low cost. Based on a few of my past road trips, here are my recommendations for five essential gadgets for a travel photography on the road. Car Cigarette Lighter Power Adapter Splitter and USB Charger I’m not sure if cars still have cigarette lighters or not – but they never have enough 12V DC power ports....

As if Sigma hadn’t given us enough today. With new 70mm f/2.8 Macro and 105mm f/1.4 Art series lenses, we were already pretty excited. But Sigma also have an extra gift for Sony shooters. Both of the two new lenses today, as well as nine of their popular Art series full frame lenses are being released with a native Sony E-Mount. A native Sony mount offers advantages over simply using the Canon mount version with the Sigma MC-11 adapter....

It’s been 12 or 13 years since I got seriously interested in photography. However, I haven’t made photography my business, even though I’m very interested in it and reasonably good at it. So why’s that? Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately. Why have I never had a wish to become a professional? I generally believe in “never say never,” but let’s say that it’s very likely that I will never become a professional photographer despite my interest in photography itself....

I wondered how long it’d be before these two did some kind of collaboration and now it’s finally here. We’re big fans of The Slow Mo Guys here at DIYP, who use Phantom cameras to show us events recorded in super slow motion, letting us see new things that our eyes simply aren’t capable of spotting in real-time. As well as the obvious visual appeal, the insights into physics and how things work is just fascinating....

SmallHD only just announced their new 703 Bolt wireless monitor a couple of months ago. And it should start shipping this week. But that’s not enough for SmallHD. Oh, no! With NAB just a day or two away, they’ve now announced five other new monitors, too. The SmallHD Focus now comes in an SDI flavour. There’s two new 1920×1080 Touchscreen OLED Focus monitors in both HDMI and SDI varieties and a new pair of Focus Bolt TX and RX wireless monitors....

Snap Inc, owners of Snapchat, have released their new Pixy drone. It’s a tiny “pocket-sized” drone designed specifically for shooting content on Snapchat. This little plastic drone (a term which Snap doesn’t use once in the press release, preferring “flying camera”) doesn’t come with a controller, as it’s designed to basically fly itself and you use the Snapchat app to tell it what to do. It’s certainly not going to be any kind of competitor to companies like DJI or Autel but for Snapchat users who want a flying selfie camera?...

Sony has announced the new FE 20mm f/1.8 G lens, the widest full-frame lens in its E mount lineup. Designed for things like astrophotography, landscapes and street photography, Sony bills this $898 lens as ideal for portraits, too, oddly enough – presumably they mean location portraits. But it’s a lightweight, compact, ultra-wide lens, and it can be yours for a mere $898. Sony says that the new lens features a two “advanced aspherical” (AA) elements and three extra-low dispersion (ED) elements to suppress chromatic aberration with minimal distortion, even wide open....

If Sony hadn’t already made it crystal clear that the A-mount was dead last May when they removed all of their A-mount cameras from their website. Minolta’s legacy has now been pretty much thrown into the abyss. It’s not too terribly surprising, really. The A-mount was created by Minolta way back in 1985. It was inherited by Sony during their acquisition of Minolta in 2006 and they haven’t released an A-mount body since 2016....

Companies like Samsung and Huawei have recently brought some innovations to the world of smartphone photography. And now Sony has introduced Xperia XZ2 Premium, another smartphone aimed at photographers. This phone has the impressive ISO 12,800 for videos and 51,200 for photos and the company promises it will let you “reveal the unseen.” Sony Xperia XZ2 Premium is the successor to Xperia XZ Premium and it’s equipped with a dual camera....

Sony’s new Airpeak drone system, first announced in November 2020, sees some new developments coming out of CES 2021 as Sony unveils a first look at the new drone, teasing some of its features and benefits. Sony says that the goal of the Airpeak brand is to further develop today’s drone technology while kicking things up a notch for professional creators. The initial offering, which Sony describes as “the first phase of this project”, will see Sony launch a new business targeted for professional photography and video production during spring of 2021 to go along with the first new drone....

Sony has scheduled an upcoming event to YouTube to begin on July 7th at 10am Eastern (3pm in the UK and 11pm JST). The event, it seems will be to announce a new camera, believed to be the Sony ZV-E10 – the follow up to their surprisingly popular ZV-1 vlogging camera released in 2020. The main reason I think people suspect it will be the ZV-E10 is because of the similar-looking fluffy microphone shield shown in the thumbnail for the video....

What happens when an award-winning director and a musician get together in a school gym with an iPhone? Well, from the looks of this latest music video released by Mumford of his song ‘Cannibal’, you get a pretty slick yet incredibly low-budget music video! Steven Spielberg directed and filmed his first ever music video with Marcus Mumford. It was filmed and released just this month, and it’s honestly both pretty great and also quite reassuring at the same time!...

At the P&I Shanghai International Wedding Photographic Equipment Exhibition Godox were showing off some new toys, including a powerful 600 Watt Bowens mount LED light with external ballast. The show was actually in July, although the photos from the show seem to have only just come to light. The images were posted as part of a series to the website Wakwb, which appears to be some kind of blog or social network based in China....

Recently there has been a spate of very sad, and ultimately defeatist articles decrying the “death of photography”. We have no shortage of examples. Seriously. In all their pain and detailed examples of how the art and business of photography have been “ruined” (their words), I can find little to no examples of the basic, most important reason that photographers are falling behind. And that is; Photographers are wildly devotedly, happily, and ecstatically in LOVE with the processes of photography....

The last time the family and I were in Florida I was less than impressed with the photo opportunities available (see Florida – Worst Place In The World To Take Good Photos). Several readers suggested that I needed to get away from Florida’s tourist trap attractions and visit some of the state’s more natural areas – so this time we made a trip to Blue Spring State Park – and it was totally amazing!...

If you’re a photographer and Netflix subscriber, you’ll definitely want to set aside some time to watch Tales By Light. The series is joint venture between National Geographic and Canon. Season 1 (six half hour long episodes – available on Netflix worldwide) follows five photographers around the world documenting their approach to photography and story telling. Continue reading to watch the trailer for both Season 1 and Season 2…...

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of The Slow Mo Guys here at DIYP. But when they team up with one of our other favourite YouTubers, like Mehdi Sadaghdar – otherwise known as ElectroBOOM – you just know it’s going to get crazy. After the boys saw one of Mehdi’s videos they knew they just had to collaborate with him on something extra special involving electricity and… Well, they’re The Slow Mo Guys, so they made it happen....

Filming from moving vehicles has been happening for as long as movies and vehicles have existed. But with the rise of movies such as the Fast & Furious series, it’s becoming more common. Not just in Hollywood, but amongst new filmmakers and even vloggers. And if they’re using something larger than a phone, they’ll usually have a second person in the passenger seat filming. But what happens to the passenger in the event of a crash when the airbag is deployed?...

It’s not rare that we hear of companies using images without permission. But Tether Tools have recently set an example what a company should do when this happens. As it turned out, their website had a photo which was used without the photographer’s permission. When they realized it, they removed the image and issued both personal and public apology to the photographer. You may wonder how come someone uses a photo without the permission and without realizing it....

The JerkStopper from Tether Tools has been a staple amongst many photographers who shoot tethered in the studio. It’s been around for well over a decade now and it’s seen several iterations during that time. For those not familiar, it stops your cables from being jerked and pulled out of the sockets of your camera. This prevents both the inconvenience of having to restart cameras and software in the middle of a shoot and also potential damage to the sockets on your camera....