The Ironman Kona Championship is one of the toughest races on the planet. With over 200km of swimming, cycling and running, it’s pretty challenging. The strong wind, lava, and high temperatures add extra risks. Some people just like to really push themselves, I suppose. The same is true of photographers. Like Czech photographer Dan Vojtech. Working with Red Bull Photography, Dan chose to photograph the Kona event with a large format Polaroid camera, and the results are quite intriguing....

I like thrift stores as much as the next photographer. And garage sales, car boot sales, and other places where another man’s trash is my potential treasure. I’m a sucker for a good bargain. I thought I got a good deal a few years ago finding a Nikkormat FTn for a mere £1. And while I might’ve paid less for that FTn than Reddit user GreenteaBanana paid for this Leica M2, he certainly got a much better deal....

Remember that little game we’d play as kids, finding familiar shapes in the clouds? I still play it from time to time, but Australia-based photographer Peter Adams-Shawn has raised it to a whole new level. His project titled “From the Deep” features aerial photos, taken with a drone above the surfs of his local beach. In the photos he takes, surfs form various shapes we can analyze and recognize something familiar in them....

I know many people who keep a hold of all sorts of bits and pieces thinking “I’m gonna need this someday.” I admit, I can get like that from time to time. If you’re a filmmaker/photographer and have this tendency, all those knick-knacks that you keep stored in your garage or basement might actually come in handy. In this video, Michael Lohrum a.k.a. DIYCameraGuy goes through his garage and gives you plenty of ideas on how to turn household items you already have into filmmaking gear....

Whether you’re a photographer or a filmmaker, understanding the principles of light and how it will affect your subject are important. It doesn’t matter if it’s flash, continuous LED, natural ambient, or the harsh bright sun, you want them to help tell your story. There’s a lot of different lighting styles and setups out there. Most of them, though, operate on a fairly basic set of principles. This video from the guys over at Film Riot talks about the different techniques of lighting subjects primarily for video....

Anything can be an artistic tool if you’re creative enough. While CT scanning is usually used for medical purposes, guys at Scan of the Month have used it for something completely unordinary. In their latest series of scans, the team has performed CT scans on different types of instant cameras. Other than revealing the engineering behind each piece, the images look almost magical. The project was released in November 2021 and it’s all about scanning everyday stuff most of us are familiar with....

Abandoned buildings are an ever-popular subject for photographers, they hold such promise, especially when they’ve truly been left untouched for years. Finding beautiful abandoned places has become more difficult as more of them are demolished or discovered, but they’re definitely still out there. German Photographer Michael Schwan has spent more than a decade exploring Europe, specialising in the field of abandoned places. He’s been gathering locations, shooting photos and has created some hauntingly beautiful images for his project The Beauty of Decay....

We’ve seen NVIDIA’s impressive content aware tool and noise removing tool. They have recently developed a generative adversarial network (GAN) which easily customizes styles of realistic faces and creates new faces. That’s right, these super-realistic faces you can see in the lead image are not real at all! The Verge writes that GAN has only existed for four years, comparing the results then and now and reminding us how much artificial intelligence has progressed....

After Snapchat Spectacles turned out not to be a really good idea, another company has taken a chance on a similar concept. However, their idea seems a lot better for now. ACE Eyewear are also sunglasses with a camera, but instead of posting to Snapchat only, they let you post directly to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. They don’t record round video, but the standard rectangular format. And they even look better, if you ask me....

Cameras need lenses to work, right? Electrical and computer engineers at the University of Utah have developed a camera that doesn’t need a lens. Instead, just like you or me, it sees the world through a window. And this technology could have lots of different applications in the future. Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Rajesh Menon and his team have developed a lensless camera that uses a plexiglass window instead of a lens....

Yes, you’ve read that right: robot photographer is a thing. Eva Photography Robot was launched in February current year by servicerobots.com and this month, Eva made her debut at a wedding in Warwickshire, UK. Gary and Megan Barker wanted something unusual for their wedding, so they hired Eva the robot to take photos of them and their guests. The robot is programmed to roam around the room and use facial recognition to latch onto a guest (or guests) and ask to take their picture....

The things people can do with Raspberry Pis, especially when it comes to photography and video related projects, always fascinates me. And Adafruit has recently posted a very interesting project. It’s a camera that actually knows what it’s looking at. It’s based around Adafruit’s own BrainCraft HAT system, which is an AI Machine Learning addon for the Raspberry Pi 4. This project shows it in practical use in an actual project....

The Sony Alpha 6 series doesn’t have a tilting screen that covers 180 degrees. This makes it hard to use the camera for vlogging or selfies and makes you need to buy an external monitor. YouTuber Hozz of Hozz and Sarah channel has created a DIY solution to this problem with some cardboard and a mirror, and he built one of the best DIY hacks I’ve seen in a while....

Slit scan cameras are quite a unique breed. Rather then exposing a complete frame with every shutter click, they expose a small slit and advance the film while exposing. You know whats cool about that, you can create very long photos, as long as your subject is moving in a predictable speed. (which will correlate the speed in which you advance the film) Take this DIY slit-scan medium format camera from Hugo Cardoso....

This probably isn’t a tutorial you’ll see on the DJI YouTube channel anytime soon and it’s almost certainly not a suggested use for the DJI Mavic Mini – or any of their other drones for that matter – but when a photographer who goes by the name Dripped found his backyard infested with a bald-faced hornet’s nest, his go-to was indeed the DJI Mavic Mini. Well, ok, his go-to was to call around and get some quotes from local companies to have the nest removed but after receiving quotes that he says were “into the thousands”, he decided to give it a go himself....

I always find videos of storm chasers fascinating. The things that will make them turn around and go in the opposite direction to everyone fleeing harm’s way and actually seek out imminent danger is something that I find simultaneously admirable and baffling. But it’s an incredibly dangerous job, and it’s not always possible to put actual humans in the path of a category 4 or 5 hurricane. So, enter the drones....

It’s impossible to imagine modern video games, architecture or engineering without 3D modeling. It’s a skill of its own and, but it’s about to became simpler than ever. Enter RealityScan, a mobile app that lets you turn your smartphone photos into realistic 3D models. Not only is it simple, but it’s also completely free to use.Advertisements RealityScan is a product of Epic Games developed in collaboration with Quixel. It’s designed to make the process of 3D scanning simple and accessible to everyone, no matter if you’re a professional or an amateur....

What Prime Day deals have you picked up this year? [via Fuji Rumors]

Dropping $20K on a camera something that most high school students wouldn’t consider. Hell, dropping $20K on a camera isn’t something most adults would consider, either, for that matter. But budding young filmmaker, Thad Swift, wanted to make a solid commitment to his career. And what better way to do it than buying yourself a RED Scarlet-W cinema camera? And, no, it wasn’t bought for him, nor did he get any no loans....

Any Gaffers out here? You will immediately get this system. For anyone who is new to this, let me share a bit of an intro. (Gaffers, feel free to skip to the good stuff). As a gaffer, my main job is rigging things in the three-dimensional space. The director and DP decide on the lights they want, but getting it into position is my job. Same goes with rain machines, flags, gobos, diffusers, reflectors and basically any gear you’d need to execute a shot....