Star trails are a common subject amongst astrophotographers. When they’re not trying to capture the milky way, they’re showing the path that our stars take in the night sky. The process for creating these isn’t dissimilar from shooting timelapse with digital. You take a lot of photos over a period of time and then stack them on top of each other in Photoshop. But this technique from Nemanja Sekulic shows you a way to do this with just a single image....

Video sequences with a camera seeming to fly through tiny spaces isn’t a new idea. Certainly not when Laowa’s been using them to market its 24mm f/14 probe lens for the last several years. But do you really need to buy a $1,500 lens to get this type of shot? Well, it turns out that no, you don’t, not if you can shrink the camera itself down to the size you need, as Luke Edwin proves in this video....

I like to use the leading lines technique because the world is just chock full of lines and so it just can’t be helped – but I also like to think it’s because it makes me feel that my photo is going to take you somewhere. Sometimes the destination is not so important, it’s the journey that counts. And don’t we all like that feeling like we are actually going somewhere?...

At some point, almost all of us will need to shoot a good product photo. We may not be shooting them for clients, or doing video reviews, but we’ll probably stick something up on eBay and want to show it off well to increase the chances of it fetching a good price. In this video from Curtis Judd, we see a quick and easy setup for lighting products on a white stage for some great looking images....

This article will cover a client case study on how I organised not only myself, but the client prior to the actual shoot day. Topics I’ll cover in this article include: Initial client contactClient phone callPricingBrainstormingMood boardsInterpreting client mood board into an actual shoot planFinal images Just before we dive in, I just want to remind you that there’s a huge variation in the client jobs you may encounter and each one is almost always unique....

Planning and producing a photo shoot, especially when there’s crew involved, can be a demanding and stressful task. This is especially so while you’re still learning, making mistakes, and figuring out exactly what kind of things you need to plan and prepare for. Not everybody has access to a produce to figure all this out for them, so Alexi Lubomirski is here to help with his new video, detailing everything that goes into producing a shoot....

Long exposure effects with video can create some very cool results. This particular video from cinematographer Dan Marker-Moore is a particularly good example of that. Dan’s known for his outstanding time slice work, and very cool time related video effects. And in this video project for Toyota, he does not disappoint. It’s a very interesting long exposure type effect, that uses multiple frames of video to create a sort of time warp, amongst other things....

Hoya has announced their new Hoya Mist Diffuser Black creative series filters. Designed to give a “stylish cinematic effect”, Hoya’s new Mist Diffuser Black No1 and No0.5 filters are of the screw-on variety, available in 49mm, 52mm, 55mm, 58m, 62mm, 67mm, 72mm, 77mm and 82mm diameters. The “No” denotes their strength. The goal of these filters is to create a soft and diffused look that’s often seen in cinema while retaining the sharpness where it counts....

Portable storage is a must for all us photographers and filmmakers if we want to store all those huge RAW photos and 4K (or even 6K) videos. I guess we all want a large portable drive, with fast read and write speed, but at a decent price. Enter HyperDisk – it’s a tiny SSD, with up to 1,000 MB/s read and write speed, with the price starting at $85....

Backpacks are a tough sell for me. I think that over the course of ten years in the game, I’ve accumulated more bags than a shopaholic. Everything from travel bags, to slings, to mini bags, TSA Approved bags, the whole nine yards… But there is one bag I have been waiting a while to switch, my drone bag. I just have not found the perfect drone bag yet. Even with how small drones are getting, they, along with all their accessories need space and security, two things that regular backpacks, are hard to come by....

You see the crowd cheering, but you don’t hear a single word. You’re not punched in the chest by every firework explosion that goes off in Central Park. It’s the calmest chaos I’ve ever experienced in my life… When you’re a native New Yorker, there are certain things you just don’t do. New Yorkers have never been to the Statue Of Liberty, we never been to the top of the Empire State Building, and we never go to Times Square… especially on New Year’s Eve....

Photographing famous landmarks is something most of us do when we travel. It’s always a nice memory, but honestly speaking – it’s hard to make these photos original. But British photographer Rich McCor (or Paper Boyo) has found a way to do it. His photos of landmarks are definitely unique, yet the solution he found is stunningly simple. Rich uses black paper cutouts and transforms the landmarks into something completely new....

The coronavirus outbreak has affected our industry in a number of ways. One of them is pretty weird and probably frustrating for many new couples and their photographers. As you might know, the number of people who can be in closed spaces has been limited in the majority of countries. In Australia, it’s currently five, which also severely limits the number of guests at weddings. In other words – if you want the photographer to attend, he or she will have to act as one of the witnesses....

It looks like Ilford is about to make film photographers happy in about ten days. On its official Twitter page, the company has announced a recent release of new film stock in several different formats, with the launch date of 24 October. The tweet shows four images that don’t reveal much. There are date and time: 24 October, 3 pm. Ilford doesn’t tell us which time zone, though, but since the company is based in the UK, I guess it’s GMT+1....

Instagram is bringing another child-safety feature to its app, and it could actually be useful. Starting this week, you will be seeing pop-up AMBER Alerts in your Instagram Feed. If there is a child missing in your area, Instagram will act as one of the official channels for alerting the public and notify you. This feature has been around on Facebook for a while, since 2015. But it’s only coming to Instagram now in collaboration with The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC)....

There’s a new, highly elaborate, and even well-paid scam going around on Instagram. Some users are reportedly taking advantage of Instagram’s anti-impersonation, suicide, and self-harm policy. For $60, they will pretend to be someone else, report them for impersonation, and then “help them get back on Instagram” for $4,000. According to a report from Motherboard, some people even advertise “professionalized ban-as-a-service offerings.” Some of them are, at the same time, connected with services that restore accounts for users who are banned from Instagram, or they even offer these services themselves!...

Instagram seems to have been evolving and assimilating at a rather rapid pace recently. Since the redesign of its user interface, it’s implemented Stories, live streaming, comment love, and a host of other features. It looks like the ability to upload “albums” is next on the list. According to Droid Life and Twitter user Philip Chang, the new feature is currently inside the latest Beta version of Instagram for Android....

After testing their “Album” feature in Android Beta, Instagram has now officially released it. It is now possible to upload up to ten photos or videos in a single post. We argued before that Instagram is looking more and more like Facebook, and repeating some of its own mistakes. However, this new this feature may actually be useful to some groups of Instagram users, and photographers are among them....

Running with a small crew can be a challenge but if you are coming well prepared, it could be an advantage. Being just one person, or running with a small team means that you can keep things light, move around and generally if you play your cards right, you can set up and teardown relatively fast. While having a big crew is nice, some jobs just call for smaller, light crews....

For one reason or the other, all of us delete plenty of photos from our phones while choosing the keepers. If you have an iPhone X, your “deleted” images are not entirely gone. As a result – they may be accessible to hackers. Two researchers have recently found a vulnerability that could let hackers access your images, even if you previously deleted them. Richard Zhu and Amat Cama of Fluoroacetate discovered the bug at a recent hacker contest....