Vintage manual lenses can give you splendid results in both photography and filmmaking. There are some real gems among them, with exquisite sharpness or crazy bokeh. Filmmaker Brandon Li likes to use a couple of vintage lenses for his videos, and he shares four of his favorite ones and the reasons why he loves using them. Vintage lenses have some imperfections that Brandon sees as more cinematic. He says it’s not easy to put it in words, but it has something to do with a little bit of softness, lens flare, and aberration....

While looking at my own images on Shutterstock, I noticed the Shutterstock algorithm was suggesting my photos as “similar” images. I thought it was a bug on the Shutterstock website until I noticed that others had downloaded my photos from other sites then uploaded them to Shutterstock. Shutterstock’s similar photos algorithm then noticed this and suggested the stolen photos along with my photos. After a little research, I found that this has been happening for at least 8 years and it doesn’t look like Shutterstock has done more than deleting the offending photos when found, but more just get uploaded....

There seem to be a lot of very fast lens options these days, even for full-frame cameras. Very few are them are coming from the long-established big-name companies like the camera manufacturers themselves or even Sigma and Tamron, but there are a lot of manual focus ones coming from some of the newer Chinese lens manufacturers. In this video, Christopher Frost puts four full-frame 50mm f/0.95 lenses to the test to see how they stack up against each other, including the Mitakon, TTArtisan, Brightin Star and the recently announced Laowa Argus lens....

If you’re into storm chasing and fantastic timelapse videos, then you’ve probably heard of Mike Olbinski. He has recently published his latest video, and just like before: it’s mind-blowing. You can see a tornado forming right before your eyes, and Mike managed to capture its entire lifecycle that will leave you in awe. Mike writes that the 2018 storm chasing season has been tough, with long days and not much reward....

It’s getting pretty hard to innovate with action cameras these days. They pretty much already have all the features most users could ever need now. The only real way to go up now is to improve the quality. Better picture, better dynamic range, better sound, less compression, and so on. The folks at FLIR, though, have very different ideas. They’ve just announced the new FLIR Duo, FLIR’s entry into the action camera world....

Long exposure photography is a lot of fun, whether it’s landscapes, cityscapes or light painting. It’s a technique that offers a lot of options to show the world in photography in a way that we don’t normally get to see it with the naked eye. How to shoot them sounds obvious. The clue is in the name. “Long exposure”. But it’s not always that easy. They’re not that difficult to get to grips with, though, and you can shoot them with just about any DSLR or mirrorless camera (or perhaps even your phone!...

We’ve covered a lot of ways to mount a camera overhead over the last few years, but this is probably the fanciest and most elegant. Because it’s not just to give you an overhead cam. Oh no, this Micro Jib by Lewin Day at Mechanistic is a full-on mini crane that lives on your desk and will let you mount the camera at whatever position you want. There are no commercial options available for small desktop-sized mini cranes, so Lewin designed and built his own....

Our planet consists of around 71% of water. Still, most photos of the Earth we’ve seen so far show some of those 29% of land. French astronaut Thomas Pesquet recently captured the Earth in a photo that reminds us what it’s mainly made of. In fact, in his magical image, it looks like it was made entirely of water. Pesquet tweeted three recent photos he took from the ISS, showing our blue planet....

Amongst Russia’s Kuril Islands is the uninhabitable island of Raikoke. It’s uninhabitable because it’s essentially just a giant volcano. The last eruption at Raikoke was in 1924 and it’s been dormant ever since. But a few days ago it erupted in grand fashion. Somewhat unexpected, it didn’t escape the notice of NASA, who photographed the giant eruption from the International Space Station using a Nikon D5, shipped to the ISS in 2017....

For anybody who shoots outside of a set or the studio, location scouting is almost a necessity. Whether you’re shooting video or stills, if you have a specific look in mind for the final result, you need to have a suitable location. Sure, you can skip the whole planning thing, and just drive around while shooting in the hopes that you’ll eventually find a spot. For some run & gun styles of shooting that might actually work, but for a lot of things, it doesn’t....

We’ve seen drones being used to knock down other drones. But have you seen a drone being used to save another drone? Redditor DubitON did it and he filmed the action of saving his neighbor’s drone when it got stuck in a tree. DubitON told DIYP that his neighbor got a new DJI Spark and managed to land it in a tree on his very first flight. Well, that would probably happen to me as well, I can’t blame him....

Building your own camera can be a whole lot of fun. Lucus Landers has been building them for a little while now. His latest creation is the Landers AL6, a 6×6 medium format camera. People have made 6×6 medium format cameras before, but this one’s not your typical DIY project that anybody can do at home. It was made using a mix of techniques including 3D printing, sand casting, welding and milling....

To compare a $50 camera to a $50,000 camera might seem a little unfair. And maybe it is, but whoever said that life was supposed to be fair? A battle between two video cameras at such opposite ends of the budget scale, though, does highlight some very interesting points. Such extremes illustrate the things to look out for when buying any camera. In this video, Niko Pueringer from Corridor Digital performs exactly this comparison....

Did you know that the most iconic movie prop ever was made out of a piece of photographic gear? While George Lucas was making A New Hope, he used all sorts of junk as props. He wanted to suggest the sense of history and make the items in the movie seem used. Because of this, set decorator Roger Christian looked for props in thrift stores and at antique dealers. At a small photography shop, he found a piece of gear that will become something we can’t imagine Star Wars without, and a prop every Star Wars geek dreams of having....

Because I’m based in the UK, every time a new camera is released, I always hear “It costs so much more in the UK than it does in the USA!” But how true is that claim? Is it just that the US price doesn’t include tax and the UK price does? Or is it really that much more expensive in the UK? Well, camera price comparison website Nukeni decided to take a look at the new Canon EOS R3 to see what its suggested retail prices were like around the world....

It’s been a long time since Photoshop was first introduced. More than 30 years, to be exact. If you’ve ever wondered what it was like to work in Photoshop in its earliest days, Krazy Ken of Computer Clan has a real treat for you. In this hilarious video, he guides you through PhotoShop 0.63 Beta from 1988. As you can imagine, Photoshop from 1988 isn’t the fastest program in the world....

Nikon has opened up to TechRadar about why they got rid of the mechanical shutter in the new Nikon Z9 and why it only features an electronic shutter. It seems like a strange move when Nikon has typically had the best and most reliable shutters over the years (with the fastest flash sync speeds), especially when Nikon’s not-a-flagship EOS R3 still utilises one. Essentially it boils down to new faster sensor technology....

Just because you may be getting blasted into space doesn’t mean you’re different from anybody else in the world. Sure, you might be above average when it comes to intelligence and health, but you’re still just a regular human being. And what’s more important to many regular human beings than their kids? So, if you’re an astronaut with children, what’s more normal than to bring them in on your NASA spacesuit portrait session?...

Have you ever imagined your favorite movie and cartoon characters in funny, absurd situations? Brazilian photographer Jefferson Bongarthner has, and he turned these situations into reality. Jefferson is a toy photographer and his favorite character is Woody from Toy Story. In his portfolio, Woddy and his friends from other cartoons and films get into all kinds of adventures. These photos are really fun, and they are made using only practical effects....

Photographer Noah Kalina started his ongoing project Everyday on 11 January 2000. He would take a photo of himself every single day, and his project turned 20 a few days ago. To celebrate this incredible milestone, Noah published a mesmerizing timelapse that shows 20 years of life in only eight minutes. A post shared by Noah Kalina (@noahkalina) Noah started this project when he was only 20 years old. He published the first video on 31 July 2006, six and a half years after taking the first photo....