It happened again in San Francisco. A wedding photographer was attacked while covering portraits at the beautiful Palace of Fine Arts, yet another in a long line of terrible situations playing out in a city that has chosen, for whatever reason, not to crack down on these series of camera crimes. Because I’m a victim of camera theft and have written extensively on the subject, I had several people ask me this week, what to do?...

What would you do if your ND filter got severely cracked? Throw it away, of course. But don’t do it just yet – you can still make something awesome with it even when it’s broken beyond repair. Photographer Parker Rice experimented with a smashed filter and he got some really cool effect in his photos. Parker opened his camera bag to find that his ND filter had been smashed. “I almost tossed it out but decided to see what the results could be,” he writes....

Mike Muizebelt is a Holland-based photographer, who among other things, is known for his diversity with subject matter. His most common subjects are animals and landscapes, and he is hitting it hard with light painting as well. To paint with light as Mike does requires both a fine-tuned technique and the right gear. We know that we can’t reveal all his secrets though, Mike shares some insights and tips with DIYP....

Have you ever had the feeling that you predicted the future by something you’d photographed? With this light painting image, it seems like Jason D. Page knew something before the rest of us. He took this photo as a single frame, using different tools from Light Painting Brushes. He recently published it and noted that it looks a lot like coronavirus. The funny thing is that it wasn’t inspired by the current situation – it was taken two years before it!...

LED lighting has come a very long way in just a few short years, and Aputure wants to take on the sun with their new COB 120t LED light. The 120t certainly isn’t the first LED powered light to offer the benefit of a Bowens S-Type mount, but it does have a couple of neat features. The biggest of those, being that you don’t need to have it plugged into the wall....

We’ve all heard it right? Calibrate your monitor otherwise, your colours will be different from what they should be, and your photographic work will become a potential mess without you even knowing how badly. I recently sold my ASUS 27″ 4K monitor and side-graded to a 27″ Dell U2713H 1440p one instead. The main reasons being a wider colour gamut, a resolution easier on my eyesight (4k panels in Photoshop are just way too small for me, and the 200% option makes them far too big), and a way to gain some cash back....

From time to time, Mathieu Stern presents us with a cool, unusual lens. This time, he found Novoflex 600mm f/8, or as he calls it: a “bazooka lens.” It’s not an ordinary telephoto lens, at least not when it comes to its design. It’s made to look like a rifle, and it’s definitely not something you’d want to shoot with in a crowded place. At least if you don’t want to scare people off or have a talk with the police....

We’ve seen and shared a bunch of interesting camera replicas over the years: from paper, wood, Lego, and my all-time favorite: chocolate. But here’s one that just took our breath away. The Wooden Model Design, a craft company from Vietnam, produces realistic wooden camera replicas. So realistic, that they even have interchangeable wooden lenses. The company has produced a bunch of different camera models so far. From mirrorless cameras like Sony A1 or Olympus OM-1 to vintage film cameras like Hasselblad 500C/M or Nikon F....

During NAB 2019, DIYP had the chance to sit down with DP Rah Sharma on the Zhiyun stand to talk about how he uses the Zhiyun Crane 3 LAB for shooting cinematic footage. As you can see from the rig Rah’s using, which includes a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K in a SmallRig cage with a matte box, the Crane 3 LAB can take some serious weight. The Zhiyun Crane 3 LAB is a very interesting gimbal....

After the 400mm f/8 lens launched in 2020, Tokina has decided to go even further and zoom in even more. The company has announced a 500mm f/8 reflex lens, a super-telephoto lens that fits the palm of your hand. It’s compact and very lightweight, and it’s likely going to be cheap, but it still has some drawbacks. So let’s dive in and see what you can expect. The Tokina SZ 500mm F8 Reflex MF is, as the name suggests, a reflex lens....

If you live in the Northern hemisphere, tonight (December 12th) may be your one and only chance to see and photograph Comet Leonard, in your entire lifetime. Comet C/2021 A1, also known commonly as Comet Leonard after the man who discovered it, will be visible on December 12th 2021. That’s TONIGHT. Although it will be visible to the naked eye, conditions still need to be dark. So as always with night sky photography, getting away from the bright city lights will be the best place to observe the comet....

If you’re anything like us at DIYP, you use humor to live through tough times and make them more bearable. Just like the infamous 2020, the year of 2021 was also one of the weirdest and toughest in our lives. But thankfully, we still have our humor. And despite a tough year, we found time to laugh, joke, and of course – write stories that entertain us and you. As we’re wrapping up 2021, ye wanted to remind you (and ourselves) of some of the funniest stories we reported about over the course of this year....

The Icelandic police (Logreglan) are investigating the tragic death of a Chinese couple close to the famous DC-3 plane wreck at Sólheimasandur, south Iceland. The couple was found 150 meters apart. They were on the trail between the parking lot and the plane, which is 7.4 kilometers long. There is no official announcement for the cause of death yet. I speculate though, that it has to do with the severe weather conditions in the area....

This isn’t so much a photography post, but it is related. As many photographers use Apple MacBook computers, we thought it was worth talking about. Hopefully, it will help some of the MacBook users who might be reading this and are affected by this issue. It was only a couple of weeks ago that Apple was hit with an 8 count class action suit over an allegedly flawed “butterfly” keyboard design used in MacBook models since 2015....

The South Wales Police confirmed this Tuesday that they’ve arrested a man thanks to the automatic facial recognition technology (AFR). As they confirmed to Ars Technica, this was the first time AFR was used to perform an arrest, although it has been used for a while by the UK police forces. The officers used a camera-equipped surveillance van to scan the passers-by. The AFR recognized the face of a man from the police’s database, which led to the arrest....

The Western Digital My Book Live NAS products are extremely popular amongst photographers. External storage devices that you can just whack on your network and access from any machine on your network. I’ve owned a few myself over the years and they were pretty good. It seems, though, that there’s a big issue with them at the moment. They’re deleting files without the owner’s knowledge. According to a post on the Western Digital Community forums, many users have reported seeing their files missing with some being completely locked out of their devices....

We just posted about Felix’s Sandtroopers project yesterday, but is it too soon to post another Star Wars miniature related project? We don’t think so, so here’s a behind the scenes look into photographer Matthew Callahan’s essay, Galactic Warfighters. As a US Marine, Matthew serves as a combat correspondent, giving him special insight into war photography that many of us will never be able to experience first hand. In his Galactic Warfighters series, Matthew aims to humanise the faceless soldiers of the Star Wars universe by combining the worlds of science fiction with real world war photography scenes....

Venus Optics, the company behind Laowa lenses has just announced the release of their latest full frame lens in the Argus series. It’s a 45mm f/0.95 and according to the company, offers a field of view that is appealing and natural to human eyes. They go on to say that “With the super shallow depth of field at f/0.95, it easily creates a dreamy and romantic rendering.” With a maximum aperture of f/0....

Researchers at Virginia Tech test are hoping to enable drones to fly over people in the future. Therefore, they are testing the consequences of collision between a drone and a human. Okay, not a real human, but a crash test dummy. They are working on developing methods to evaluate the risk a small drone poses to anyone on the ground. And thanks to this research, the application of drones may be extended in the future....

When I hear “monkey selfie” or “stolen phone,” I don’t really imagine anything that ends happily. But here’s one story that involves a monkey stealing a phone and it even has a happy ending – and a few hilarious selfies. I lost my phone for 2 days and i thought it was stolen by someone but look who did it !!!??? This little monkey left my phone case below my bed lol....