Humor

"Behind every cute girl on Instagram is a guy like me, and a brick wall." The latest video from the folks behind The Mystery Hour gives us a glimpse into the lives of the men who take the photos of the ladies of Instagram.

What's your response when you're told that you're beautiful? Eighteen year-old photographer and student, Shea Glover, decided to "film what I thought was beautiful." Without intending to, she has conducted an amazing social experiment on the effect of simple positivity and a compliment. The reactions are perfect!

Shopping season is upon us, but let’s not kid ourselves. This isn’t entirely about giving to family and friends. It’s also about the sweet savings that are about to fall upon all of that gear. You can practically smell the stench of GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) wafting off of the photography masses. Our greed for new stuff reeks like the belly of a ship hauling squid legs from Tokyo to New York in mid-August. Long after the turkey legs are wrapped in tin foil and the gelatinous blobs of cranberry sauce are sealed up in the freezer, the deals will emerge. It might be a new lens or a camera upgrade that has you breaking down the door of Best Buy or your local camera shop like some geeky, sweaty villager storming over the moat of his local lord’s keep, but just make sure you don’t waste your time on a new bag.

So I get this message from Chelsey, "Kenn I know how much you love these guys!" with a link to a trailer for a new series, to premiere exclusively on Hulu. And as usual, Chelsey wasn't wrong. I do love these guys. Who other than the fantastically spirited and dedicated crew of RocketJump would attempt to make (and chronicle the creation of!) eight of the best shorts on the Internet. You'll be able to watch a new short every Wednesday, starting December 2.

Today, anyone may call themselves a professional photographer and practice photography. There is no degree that validates the use of the term "pro." So, why do we feel the need to specify that? What does it show about the way we see our work and our competition? Let’s put things in perspective.

“Star Wars” hype is at an all-time high. The teaser trailers, the TV spots, the toys, the apparel, the video games and more. It's an amazing celebration of the rebirth of the sci-fi magnum opus that gave me my love for all things science fiction. You'd think I might be tired of seeing it everywhere? The gum, the soup, the socks... Nope. Bring it on!

Moustaches and Beards. The ultimate sign of masculinity, or so some say. Every year there is a National Competition, "The Just for Men National Beard and Moustache Championship presented by Hanes X-Temp," to show off all of hard work of beard connoisseurs. Photographer Cristopher Benitah was there to capture the show.

If you're like me, you have way too many apps on your smartphone. I know this might sound crazy coming from Fstoppers, but we really do rely too much on our phones. Yes, even the great iPhone 6s Plus. “Connectivity Lost,” by filmmaker Walter Stoehr, is a short showing what could go wrong if we depend on our phones too much.

As recently as yesterday, we've seen all kinds of articles comparing various cameras' qualities to one another, pixel-peeping to see which one edges out the competition by a razor-thin margin. You can put your magnifying glass away, however, and trade it in for a beer as you sit back and watch a real comparison. Photographer Jim Goldstein took the pleasure of comparing two of Canon's top-of-the-line DSLRs from different time periods: the 5DS R and the Canon D2000.

All good things must come to an end. The Instagram account, Socality Barbie, called it quits yesterday as the genius behind the satirical photos revealed herself to the world. Darby Cisneros, a Portland wedding photographer, said goodbye with one last post saying she would leave the account active for a while, but felt her job calling out hipsters and poking fun at hashtags was done.

Each week, we get contacted by a range of different companies asking us to review their products. Normally, we don't accept the majority of these products, but for your entertainment, we've decided to review every single one of these products in some sort of entertaining (and unfair) way. Today, I got the BOOMR camera strap in the mail and put it through a stress test.

What do you get when you allow two random people off the street to write a movie on the fly? The amazing screenplay “Under Sixty Seconds.”

If you've been on Facebook or hopping around YouTube's popular videos lately, chances are you've seen the video advert for the "Squatty Potty," a step stool used to make, well, going poop much easier on your body. Sound like a tricky concept to sell? See how a team of creatives turned an ad about a dookie-easing product into an Internet sensation.

In an all-time low for humankind, this one can clearly be filed under "Phenomena Against Humanity." I truly regret to inform you that, in a fit of absolute male narcissism, people are finding beautiful landscape views, dropping their pants, and positioning their cameras "just so" in order to capture the bottom of their man-junk hanging in the frame. What at first seems too obtuse to be true, slowly, photo after photo, becomes a rather gross case of human failure henceforth to forever be known as "nutscaping."

It's hard to keep up with Casey Neistat's daily vlogs, but today's stands out in particular for its special ingenuity and because it's Halloween. Thanks to a little creativity with an electric skateboard, some red cloth, and an Aladdin costume, New York City has Neistat and his buddy, Jesse Wellens, to thank for a truly epic Aladdin and Magic Carpet sighting. Go behind the scenes and see how they filmed it.

South Africa native Matthew Rycroft creatively combined creepy music, a creepy-looking dude, and some dark, chiaroscuro lighting techniques to create a video that brilliantly mocks the cliché Instagram accounts with which we're all too familiar. The final result is a well thought-out piece that's short and sweet and definitely leaves room for more.

Each week we get contacted by a range of manufacturers asking us to review their products. Once I had someone ask me to review a bag of lavender. When I explained that Fstoppers is a photography website, they said that even photographers like lavender and I should review it. Obviously I didn't review it but next time this happens I will review the lavender, and today I've reviewed the Parrot Jumping Drone.

If you're like me and you're sick and tired of the Drone Takeover, this state-of-the-art weaponry is for you. In an effort to defend the airspace around you, the Ohio-based, nonprofit Battelle has created the DroneDefender as a way to keep videographer drones at bay during that next wedding shoot. There will be no more swatting at poor-resolution cameras buzzing about your head; simply pull this bad boy from your quiver and "bang!" Drone down.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post mocking the new Holga Digtal Kickstarter campaign. Holga's PR team caught wind of my post and decided to send me the new Digital Holga. At the same time the Impossible Project sent me a Polaroid 600 camera with Impossible Instant color and BW film. Which is better? Let's find out.

UPDATE: Results from our reader's poll can be found here! Last week we released our head to head competition review between the Sony A7RII, the Nikon D810, and the Canon 5DsR ultra high megapixel cameras. Our test put all three cameras up against each other and compared their performance in terms of ergonomics, HD video, auto focus, ISO performance, Dynamic range, and overall image quality when used in the studio. Unfortunately a bunch of Sony users complained that our final studio test wasn't up to snuff, so we did what any respectable review site would do and brought back baby turtle. The new results might shock you.

I'm not even sure they existed five months ago but since then the prolific crew over at RocketJump Film School have pumped out some really great educational (and often funny) content, quickly becoming one of my personal favorite crews out there. In this humorous short, "Droneward Bound," Ashly and Lauren (both adored) have to chase down a super sexy Inspire 1 drone as it takes on a life of its own. From there, director Kevin Senzaki jumps in on the second video to show us how they went about repairing the audio for the video. Senzaki jumps in on the second video to show us how they went about repairing the audio for the video.

YouTuber Michael Delaney found a pit full of rattlesnakes and, despite anyone's best suggestions, didn't turn back. Instead, armed with a GoPro on the end of a stick, Delaney recorded the scene, most of during which the only audible audio was the collective rattling of the bunch. Eventually, repeated strikes from multiple snakes knock the GoPro off of its mount and into the middle of the pit (good luck getting that one back). Put it some headphones, put the video on full screen... I dare you not to flinch at the first good strike...

We live in a world of shared experience. It is no longer enough to simply enjoy a moment; it must be documented so that others know you were there and that in fact you did have a good time. This is more so popular with the younger crowd and as a result concerts have become one of the most popular venues to find the selfie and the Snapchat. Filmmaker Woody Roseland has put together a hilarious video to help you achieve a clean, simple, and effective result. That is of course if you'll even bother.

They say that the ability to still be surprised is the key to happiness. It's growing knowledge of the world around us that informs our expectations of behaviors of all kinds of entities that in turn ruins the surprise in our lives. It's the reason that we're not interested in our boring childhood toys. And it's the reason that it's so easy to stay glued to shorts like the Vimeo Staff Pick, "INPUT/OUTPUT," which juices our bored minds with just enough excitement and surprise to, at the very least, smile on the inside.

If you thought the megapixel war was over years ago then you might shocked by the latest cameras released by Nikon, Sony, and Canon. The D810, A7RII, and 5DsR are the biggest and baddest pieces of artillery on the front line, and today the team at Fstoppers is going to determine once and for all which camera is the best. With enough megapixels to challenge some of the most popular medium format cameras, these compact full frame cameras pack a lot more punch than you would think. Don't believe us? View the full high res images and take the poll yourself!

Ryan and Josh Connolly of Film Riot always brings us the coolest do-it-yourself filmmaking and special effects tutorials. In this "rewind" episode (read: old) they show us how to create the killer effect of throwing someone clear across the room. What's doubly cool is how easily this can be done with just a still camera and software that most of us already have (Photoshop and After Effects).

While the original source couldn't be independently confirmed, the studio behind the recently released movie, "Everest," apparently sent BBC a clip of the still unreleased film without audio effects. Instead, throughout the entire otherwise hair-raising scene, the actors speak to each other in a tone seemingly more appropriate for a focus group discussion between amateurs trying to solve a Rubik's cube than for a life-threatening situation climbing Mount Everest.

Nope, we're not joking. Photographer Kotama Bouabane is creating photographs using coconuts. While he used the fruit in several different ways to create images, his most interesting method simply involves tape, a coconut, and some photo paper! Read on and check out the video for more!

Five years ago I filmed the iPhone Fashion Shoot, a 10-minute video in which I take professional looking images with the iPhone 3GS. That video was supposed to inspire photographers who assumed that their work was suffering because their gear wasn't ultra expensive. The video became extremely popular and became very polarizing. The majority of people thought my images looked good because I used fancy lights.

It could be argued that the 80's pushed the experimental envelope further than any other decade before it. For the first time in history, consumers were able to watch movies in the privacy of their own homes, the camcorder brought home video recording to the masses, and digital technology opened the doors for tons of horrible musical and visual effects. When you combine home education with the ridiculous fashion of the 80s, you get this: pure comedy gold.