Bird Photographer of the Year contest shares my opinion, so they threw a contest for choosing the best bird photo every year. The results won’t arrive until fall, but the finalists are now out and all I can say is – the jury will have a difficult task choosing the best. So, if you like birds or at least bird photography, let’s take a look at these beautiful photos together....
Photographer Tyler Shields has made many fantastic portraits. In his latest video, he sums up the essentials of powerful portraits and everything you need to put in them. He discovers the secrets to powerful portraits in four and a half minutes, to help you level up your portrait photography. Capture the emotion Tyler admits it would take hours to explain everything that goes into a portrait. And indeed, it takes time and practice to master portrait photography (or any kind of photography for that matter)....
As often happens around this time of year, Make a Website Hub have released their guidelines and cheat sheet for the image sizes we should be using on social media. Here, we’re going to go over the two that are most relevant to photographers. Facebook and Instagram. If you want to know the others, be sure to download their cheatsheet PDF. Facebook has a whole slew of different types of image for different purposes....
The whole 61-megapixel thing kinda stole the limelight when it came to the announcement of the new Sony A7R IV mirrorless camera. The camera still doesn’t ship for about six weeks, but YouTuber Jason Vong has managed to get his hands on one. In this video, he talks about his favourite 10 new features to come with the camera. Redesigned body – It’s slightly larger than the A7R III, making it a little easier to hold in your hand....
Nikon Photo Contest has been around since 1969 and it’s one of the largest photo competitions in the world. This year is its 50th anniversary, and the 2018-2019 winners have just been announced. Out of nearly 100,000 entries, we bring you the best of the best selected by the contest judges. This year, the contest received record 97,369 entries from approximately 33,000 people from 170 countries and regions around the world....
No matter what camera you use, the ability to focus remotely is a wonderful thing. And if you’re filming yourself, it can often be invaluable. I’ve spoken about it before in the Weebill 2 Pro Plus Kit review. And while I tend to avoid it when shooting video, I’m not to big to admit that there are times when autofocus can also make your life drastically easier. Autofocus is a feature notably lacking from Blackmagic cameras, but this iPhone app gives it back to you using your iPhone’s LiDAR sensor to determine the distance to the subject and telling your camera to focus to it....
Power is always an issue for photographers and filmmakers when you’re away from plug sockets for extended periods of time. And I’m a big fan of portable power for my gear and to recharge stuff. But this one really takes the cake. It’s billed as “portable” power bank, but it doesn’t exactly fit in your pocket… Or even a camera bag. An entire camera bag. Without any camera gear in it....
We hear a lot these days about privacy, especially when it comes to our smartphones and social media. There’s the constant paranoia of being “spied” on by these big companies, and the amount of data they’re collecting on us. Well, what if we could use some of that data to our own advantage? That’s what software developer Chuck LePlant has done. His new Python script adds GPS tags to your photos based on your Google location history....
Luca Luce has worked as a makeup artist for almost two decades, and he turned his craft into optical illusions that will mess with your mind. The Italian artist uses only makeup to transform his face, head, and hands into mind-boggling 3D optical illusions. Luca has been into art ever since he was a child and he began his artistic career as a cartoonist. Over the years, his passion for art evolved to make him become a makeup artist....
The lockdowns that have been in place around the world have pushed at us all a little at times. For some, it’s pushed a little harder than for others. One person whom it’s most definitely pushed is YouTuber and former NASA engineer Mark Rober, who turned his backyard bird watching isolation up to eleven after he noticed the squirrels were stealing all of the food in the feeders he’d bought for the birds that visited his garden....
German student director Eugen Merher has produced a commercial which really shows the pros how it’s done. Without the fancy CG and special effects of most modern sports commercials, Eugen tells a beautiful story. A former marathon runner, stuck in a retirement home. After finding a pair of old running shoes, he starts to run once again. He attempts to “break free” (the title of the short film) a number of times, but each time his indoor run is cut short....
When Black Magic announced their Pocket 4k camera, they started a race. A race for improving their crappy runtime being the best battery solution for the camera. And it’s a hard race to win. (technically, Black Magic said they would release a battery grip in September, but we are still waiting…) I would say that every P4K battery solution has its ups and downs. The trick is to find the balance between size, placement, and battery life....
With can experiment and play with almost anything to create a piece of art. In his latest timelapse, Martien Janssen shows us that we can even play with time. He traveled to Myanmar to capture its beauty, and he brings you Timeblend, a timelapse that blends and bends time, draws with light, and shows you a totally different perspective on the world around us. Timeblend is the fourth movie of Martien’s Bagan timelapse pentalogy....
I’m a sucker for old glass. Whether for stills or video, I’ve always been a big believer that the lens plays a massive part in getting “the film look”. It’s why I often shoot video and stills with old M42 and Nikon Ai-S lenses. Older glass just has character that modern lenses do not. Modern lenses are too perfect, too clinical. In this video, DP Jody Eldred visits filmmaker Todd Fisher (brother of Carrie) to test out some of cinema’s most famous lenses....
Movie and shot breakdowns are always a lot of fun to watch. Even breakdowns for bad movies are often quite interesting. That’s the case here, as film boffin Patrick Willems describes in this particular video. It describes a particularly bad movie (The Bonfire of the Vanities) by a particularly good director (Brian De Palma). It was widely regarded as a pretty bad movie when it was released and it still is today....
What’s the camera you are looking forward to? Are you upgrading your gear this year? There were several exciting announcements of cameras we can expect in 2017. Zacuto ran a poll asking the users what is the most anticipated camera for them in 2017. They have published the list of top five most anticipated cameras, and one has won a very convincing victory. 5. Nikon D5600 The fifth place for the most anticipated camera belongs to Nikon D5600....
When National Geographic published Beth Moon’s images of “the world’s oldest trees by starlight,” seasoned astrophotographers like Adrien Mauduit cried foul. Not only were sections of the sky cloned, but specific stars were appearing in portions of the sky that were physical impossibilities. As other astrophotographers chimed in, a microbiologist emerged as the most eagle-eyed of the bunch. Dr. Elisabeth Bik, a science consultant who runs Microbiome Digest (@microbiomdigest), started finding more manipulation in Moon’s work, as well as other images on the Nat Geo website and by photographers like Steve McCurry....
I believe that you’re already familiar with the power of text-to-image AI. Tools like DALL-E and Google’s text-to-image AI turn any random text into illustrations. They try hard to make it as realistic as possible, but more often than not, the resulting images are bizarre. So, have you ever thought about what happens when you put song lyrics into a tool like this? Jason Scott did. He took lyrics of a song about data encryption (how appropriate), let AI turn them into images and made everything into a video....
Sometimes you absolutely must use a wide-angle lens to get the entire scene in the shot. But there’s a downside to it that can turn out quite hilarious. This is exactly what happened in this photo. The US president Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden met with former president Jimmy Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter last week. Thanks to a wide-angle lens, the Carters look like giants in a tiny house and the longer you look, the funnier it gets....
Photographer Brendan Barry has made quite a few DIY cameras from most unexpected objects: a pineapple, a mannequin, a loaf of bread, to name just a few. His most famous project is a giant camera and portable darkroom made from a $200 camper. In his latest project, Brendan has converted a shipping container into a fully functional camera with built-in darkroom and teaching space. As he jokingly says, it’s basically “the world’s biggest, slowest and most impractical Polaroid camera....
