I don’t know if you’ll have a white Christmas in your area. But if there’s life on Mars – they certainly will. In this stunning photo recently released by the European Space Agency (ESA), you can see a crater full of “snow.” It’s actually the ice-filled Korolev crater, and it was recently sent to Earth by Mars Express orbiter. ESA’s Mars Express mission was launched on 2 June 2003. It entered the Red Planet’s orbit on 25 December, so tomorrow will be the 15-year anniversary of this milestone....

At some point, we were all beginners and there are new people coming to photography and buying their first DSLR or mirrorless camera every day. A lot of people starting out stick to the automatic modes and basically treat their camera like an expensive point-and-shoot, not really understanding how it all works. And that’s fine if that’s your thing. But if you want to learn more, it can be difficult to know where to start....

The artists who build and photograph miniature worlds never cease to amaze me with their skill, patience, and ideas. One of such artists is a German photographer and model builder Frank Kunert. He builds his miniature worlds from scratch, but the scenes he makes don’t belong to the world we see with our eyes. His Small Worlds are satirical, weird, surreal, often even dark. While all the elements look like they come straight from the world around us – each photo has a twist that will play with your mind and make you stop, stare and analyze it....

Timelapse videos can be amazing, as well as photos and footage of space. In this video, Adrien Mauduit brings timelapse and space together and takes you to the core of the Milky Way galaxy. It’s an awe-inspiring footage that will make you realize how vast our galaxy is. So sit back, watch closely and enjoy. Adrien writes that he has been fascinated by the core of our galaxy ever since he started astrophotography....

When you think about it, we’re surrounded by all sorts of chemical reactions, both in the outside world and inside our own bodies. And have you ever wondered what they looked up close? Scott Portingale has, and he’s turned his curiosity into captivating, gorgeous videos. In his latest work titled Chemical Somnia, he captures the exciting process of various chemical reactions, in both still and video format. To give Chemical Somnia its final form, Scott teamed up with Turkish composer Gorkem Sen....

Camera shutter sounds are photographers’ ASMR and they can be oddly satisfying. But have you ever thought about creating a song using these recognizable clicks? Folks at MIOPS have created a camera symphony in the literal sense of the word. Teaming up with a sound artist, MIOPS recently published a song that was composed and played using the shutter clicks of various cameras. Like most good ideas, this one was born by accident....

The Hubble telescope has been showing us breathtaking images of space since its launch in 1990. So far it has made 1.4 million observations. Physicist Dr Casey Handmer took 936,000 of these observations and created an insanely detailed composite image of all of them. After piecing the composite together (using calculations and coding rather than Photoshop!) Dr Handmer realised that around 0.8 per cent of the sky was on show....

The Gopro 4 was announced about a year ago at september 2014. With photokina fast approaching and set to end of september this year, I would not be surprised if we will get another announcement from Gopro in a month or so. But what will this announcement have? I mean, what will the Gopro 5 look like? What features will be in it and most importantly, will it be enough to pull GoPro out of the depths it is curently in....

Craft beers can have really interesting ingredients and flavors, and even get a little quirky. Delaware craft brewer Dogfish Head has launched a unique beer that will quench your thirst and let you develop film. It’s named SuperEIGHT and yes, just as the name suggests, it can be used to process Super8 motion picture film. PDN writes that SuperEIGHT has come to life as a result of a happy accident....

Charging stations are nature’s way of telling us we have way too many different types of batteries for our gear. For some, our “charging station” is just a loose pile of chargers haphazardly arranged on our desks. For others, they’re an organised work of our that allows us to charge and store our batteries with expedience and simplicity. In this video, filmmaker and YouTuber Duncan Dimanche shows us how he’s arranged his DIY charging station....

Good sliders aren’t cheap. Most cheap sliders are rarely good. But when your budget’s ultra low, what are you going to do? Either you buy something that you’ll probably use twice and throw away, or you build your own. The latter is the option chosen by YouTuber Atti Bear in his most recent video. In it, Atti shows us how he build his slider with items bought from Ikea for a total price of less than $20....

I remember when my office had a 10-Megabytes drive (Mega, with an M). It was (give or take) the size and weight of a car tire. A few weeks ago, I got the T7 SSD from Samsung. It is two Terabytes big and the size of a credit card. I feel old. Not only does this drive boasts an impressive 2TB storage, but it also claims to run at read speeds up to 1,050 MB/s and writes at speeds up to 1,000 MB/s....

UPS drivers drive all day long to deliver packages. On their routes, they met many people – but also their dogs. And some of these dogs are apparently so goofy, cuddly and lovable, that they’ve totally stolen drivers’ hearts. To honor the relationship with their four-legged friends they meet along the way, UPS drivers have started an Instagram page, and it will completely melt your heart. UPS Dogs is an Instagram page ran by drivers, and they note that it’s not a UPS Corporate-sponsored site....

Little over four years ago, I had a thought that would change my life forever. Little did I know then, but this thought would be the catalyst for me to discover my true purpose in life. As the days, months, and years passed by, the more I began to realize that this little sidling of thought was my destiny all along. I couldn’t shake off the feeling that something big was about to happen, and I was right....

I have been interested in building a device that would record the intensity of the light from our sun for a while. This past month, a colleague of mine brought to my attention a simple way to do this. Professor Michael Peres was working at his desk on a Sunny day in January with the sun low in the sky; He started to smell something burning. After hunting around his office, he discovered the sun was imaged by one of the large decorative lenses on his window....

Speed is always important. We are a culture obsessed with it. From optimising efficiency to having a faster workflow, it matters. Particularly when it comes to client work. How can we get from A to B more quickly? Well, that’s where redesigns of equipment can come in very useful. When companies throw out the traditional ways of making the workhorses of the gear we use, everybody wins. Sachtler Creative Director Alex Krause spoke to DIYP and gave us his ideas about how his company helps creatives speed up their workflow when shooting video....

Gaffer is one of those titles that unless you actually become part of the photo or film industry, you’re not really sure what it is. It’s just one of those jobs that scrolls up the titles at the end of a movie along with countless others. But they play a vital role on a film set. They’re the guys who make the light look the way the director or DP wants it while still making it look natural....

Now that the music Festivals are starting, I think it’s a good time to share what’s in my bag for Music Festivals. Last year, I was the official photographer of eight Summer Festivals here in Portugal, and this was the gear that I’ve used on all. On one of them, I also took an extra monitor, but not in my bag. As the official photographer, I have a place to safely store my extra gear....

If there’s one debate that never seems to end when it comes to cameras, it’s “colour science”. Of course, these days, if you’re shooting raw and own a ColorChecker Passport, the debate is kind of irrelevant. But back in the film days, where your look was pretty much set depending on the stock you used, it was a big deal! When Kodak released its Portra line of films in 1998, they sent out a promotional video to photographers and studios....

We often see lenses described as being for a particular type of photography. Anything in the 50-135mm range is for portraits, anything 150 and up is for wildlife or sports and anything 28mm or less is generally regarded as a “landscape lens”. Wide angle lenses just typically seem to be designated to that genre. It’s all nonsense, of course, you can shoot whatever you want with whatever focal length you like....