Posts

About every 10 years or so, large airliners need a repaint. Many airlines take the opportunity to come up with new livery for their fleet. Modernise the look a bit, add some flashy new graphics, etc. Air Canada recently put their new livery on a 787 Dreamliner. And with each new paint job come a new photo shoot to promote their new look. It might surprise some of you (it sure surprised me) to find out that they still actually photograph the actual planes....

If you listen to the wider DSLR & mirrorless owning community online, cleaning your own sensor is the scariest thing in the world. We’re talking Pennywise, Freddy Krueger, and Jason Voorhees all rolled into one kinds of scary. So, we ship them out or feverishly wait for the next photography show, to take our camera for cleaning. But, it’s really not all that scary. I’ve been cleaning my own DSLR sensors since 2002....

There are several ways to color correct your images in Photoshop and Lightroom. In this video, Jesús Ramirez of Photoshop Training Channel gives you a tip that will speed up this process significantly. He teaches you how to set Photoshop’s algorithms in only a few seconds, so you can change the white balance in a single click next time you need it. For starters, you can use either Curves or Levels adjustment layer, but Jesús is demonstrating the technique using a Curves layer....

Canon recently announced the new RF 85mm f/1.2L USM DS lens for the EOS R mirrorless system. But what exactly does DS mean? Sure, it means “defocus smoothing”, but what effect does that actually have on the image? How does it make the bokeh look? Well, Canon has put out a video showing exactly how it looks. The 90-second video shows a basic overview of defocus smoothing, along with some examples....

Infrared photography can give some unique images with some kind of an unworldly feel. Mathieu Stern wanted to see what it would look like to take portraits with this technique. He converted two cameras to shoot infrared, but they capture different wavelength. With a little help from his friends, he took some portraits with the converted camera, as well as a regular one. He has shared the results with us, and they are really interesting....

If you use power banks to charge your phone or other gear on the go pay attention. If the price sounds too good to be true: it probably is. A cheap power bank may explode and cause a serious disaster – and this is just what happened to a man in China recently. While riding on a bus, his power bank exploded in his backpack and set it on fire....

I took the best photo of my life today. I came down from the mountain and loaded it up on my computer. When I brought the photos up on my screen, they were just trees. Bummer. But it felt so good; looked so good on my camera’s LCD. What’s the deal with that? This is why processing is the key to a great image. This is why revision is the key to great writing....

Photos of Northern Lights and volcanic craters are mesmerizing on their own. Photographer Sigurður (Siggi) William managed to capture them together and created a stunning photo of Aurora Borealis reflected on the water surface of a volcanic crater. We asked Siggi to share with us how he made this fantastic shot, and he shared the details with DIYP. The photo was taken at the edge of the Kerið volcanic crater lake in Iceland, where Sigurður camped....

From vintage golden rings to lifelike animals, hidden cameras come in many interesting shapes, sizes and purposes. But in a recently sold collection of Russian spy cameras at Aston’s Auctioneers in the UK, one of them caught my eye. It’s a spy camera disguised as – a camera. Sometimes works best to hide things in the most obvious places, and this is a perfect example. At the first glance, the camera seems like a normal Zenit E in its case....

As traveling photographers, we often encounter locals who don’t share our language(s). If you prefer human interaction to googling everything, there’s now a perfect T-shirt for you. ICONSPEAK (see what they did there) has launched a line of clothing and accessories that will make interactions easier, more fun, and help you get the information that you need. ICONSPEAK offers a few models of men’s and women’s shirts with 39 icons....

Most of us use different Photoshop blending modes to achieve different effects. Many tutorials suggest which more to use to achieve a certain look, but you have to admit – they rarely state what exactly the blend mode does to the layers. This comprehensive and thorough video from Photoshop Training Channel explains them all! It explores each of the 27 Photoshop blending modes. It tells you exactly how they work, but also offers some useful tricks and shortcuts you can use....

Everyone has those days when it would be better if they just stayed in bed. Photographers also have them, and often things simply don’t go as you’ve planned. Thomas Heaton shows what it looks like when a landscape photographer has a bad day. And no matter what kind of photography you do, you’ve probably had a day like this, too. A day of a landscape photographer often starts early in the morning....

The winter sun was low to the horizon as I steadied myself upon a rather uncomfortable wooden perch. My back to the sun and downwind, target in clear sight, I drew in a deep breath then slowly exhaled as I prepared to take the shot. At the bottom of my breath I waited for that brief moment between heart beats as I took up the slack in my finger. Thump thump… Thump thump… squeeze....

We’ve seen some interesting DIY lenses, like those made from crap, an iceberg, or 3D-printed components. But have you ever seen a lens made from scratch? And by that, I mean sand, rocks, and metal turned into a lens? Well, Andy George of How To Make Everything took DIY to a whole new level. He combined raw sand, rocks, and metal with his knowledge and experience and made a working camera lens entirely from scratch!...

Since I finally jumped on the bandwagon and bought a Sony mirrorless camera (even after I said I wouldn’t), I have been looking at options to use my existing Nikon (and Sigma with Nikon mount) lenses with a Sony mirrorless camera. There are three main options available with the price ranging from under $100 to nearly $500 depending on the Sony mirrorless camera and Nikon lens combination you are trying to use....

When it comes to filters for drones, the first name that usually springs to mind is PolarPro. But just as PolarPro break out into the world of “real cameras“, the big names in filters seem to be targeting drones. This time, Tiffen is expanding their drone filter range with new filter kits for the DJI Mavic 2 Zoom, DJI Mavic 2 Pro, DJI Mavic Air and DJI Inspire 2....

The volcano Mount Vesuvius in Italy is famous for its appetite for destruction. The Roman towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii are a testament to its force. One American tourist almost added himself to its death list recently when he lost his phone in the crater after attempting to take a selfie. If that wasn’t enough, the 23-year-old from Baltimore decided to climb into the crater of the dormant volcano, lost his footing, and then had to be rescued....

The Fukushima disaster was one of the biggest and most terrible man-made catastrophes of all time. In the course of several days on march 2011 a nuclear power plant near Fukushima went from being a welcomed power source to hell on earth. The place was evacuated and access has been denied. Some photographers go through excruciating process to get the necessary permits, but this story is about Keow Wee Loong, Malaysian photographer, who is oblivious to man made boundaries (see his volcano and scaling the Finance Centre in Shenzhen photos)....

We’ve all had a situation where we think we’ve created the perfect image, but we want to try something. Perhaps it’s to test an idea, sometimes it’s just to see how it looks or play with a preset. Whatever the reason, the last thing we want to do is undo all the work that came before it. “Undo” is great, but it’s easy to forget exactly where you were, especially with small changes....

This is an interesting one. It’s not uncommon these days for companies to feel they can just take that which does not belong to them and then use it for their own commercial gain, particularly when it comes to appropriating images. But after one photographer claims car manufacturer, Volvo stole his images, he’s fighting back, as is the model shown in them. Photographer Jack Schroeder worked with model Britni Sumida on a photo shoot in April 2019 which happened to include a Volvo S60....