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Rangefinder Magazine has announced the photographers selected for their 4th annual "30 Rising Stars of Wedding Photography." The 30 photographers, who have been shooting for five years or less, were selected from more than 200 portfolios worldwide, including submissions from Croatia, France, England, New Zealand, Scotland, Tahiti, and all over the U.S. The images will be on display at the WPPI Conference in March.

Remember those "Shot on iPhone 6" ads you saw everywhere this past year? They were on billboards, TV spots, magazines — everywhere. And Apple barely had to create one piece of original work. As the world of user-generated content rises in popularity and thousands of brands republish creative work to advertise their products, it's nice to see Apple remembering what these images started as — art.

Despite making cameras that so many people love, Nikon seems to be suffering a severe camera parts shortage at a number of its repair facilities for certain cameras. While these tend to be older cameras like the D7100, others are still in production, like the F6 (which has been the same camera since its release in 2004). Still, many professional, pro-sumer, and hobbyist photographers rely on these tools every day. Such lengthy or indefinite wait times for repairs are unheard of and could severely hurt the company's reputation as a brand of professional imaging.

Sony A-Mount users have reason to rejoice, as the company has announced the α68, featuring a 24MP APS-C Exmor sensor, OLED viewfinder with 100% coverage, and what Sony calls "4D FOCUS."

Most of us know Lytro for their light field cameras that capture scenes in a way that allows you to refocus an image anywhere you want with the click of a button without having to take a new image. I'll admit, I thought it was a neat trick, but as a commercial photographer, I never saw how it would apply to someone like myself. Well, Lytro has blown me away today with the announcement of their new virtual reality camera system that works much like their light field cameras and allows the user to move within a video environment (not a computer-rendered space) while wearing a virtual reality headset. They have officially changed the game.

You know, I always thought that Chatroulette was a place you went to speak to random strangers in foreign lands and sometimes see the unwanted privates of strangers in distant lands. Well, one director from Realm Pictures has used the platform in a revolutionary way to create one of the craziest choose your own adventure zombie and space adventure films, in which the viewers give our hero orders that will hopefully save his life and those of his shipmates. Read below to see parts one and two as well as the full behind the scenes content!

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 no secret that Sony is the amongst the biggest players in the imaging sensor business. Aside from the sensors that go into their own cameras, they make the sensors that go into your iPhone, Nikon's DSLRs... you name it. Even Canon is recently reported to be testing outside sensors for the first time (and there's a good chance some of those are Sony's). Needless to say, all of this talk and excitement over Sony's sensors means they're going to need to scale up manufacturing. Solution: buy and manage Toshiba's CMOS chip factories.

For one reason or another, this has been the week of all weeks for those anxiously awaiting firmware updates. While some are rather mild updates to fix various bugs (which is still important, granted), other updates like the one for Leica's T camera boost things like autofocus speed twofold. Fresh updates! Come and get 'em!

I don't have specific numbers. I don't even have vague numbers. But I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me Adobe's mobile photo editing apps have seen a huge success. The biggest reason: they're free. And the second: they really work, which makes the first reason even better. Today, Adobe updated two of these apps, Photoshop Mix and Photoshop Fix, with support for split view in iOS 9, for the screen size of the iPad Pro, and for the pressure and tilt sensitivity of the Apple Pencil for use on the iPad Pro.

Think we're in the middle of a Photoshopping epidemic? You don't even know how bad it is (well, now you do). According to a recent survey, 68 percent of adults take to some kind of photo editing before they share any photo with another person or online. As desktop and mobile editing tools become easier to use — with some even serving the specific purpose of being easy to use for the less technically inclined — Photoshopping images is the latest trend... and it's still growing.

Just months after America's largest railroad launched a campaign to get people off the tracks, Britain's rail provider, Network Rail, is doing the same, after one disturbing day showed eight incidents at a single rural crossing. With 6,100 total crossings in their purview, Network Rail is seriously concerned about the safety of its users, particularly as the older crossings do not have many of the modern safety features newer ones do, allowing people to generally walk directly onto the tracks, or as the videos show, even sit on them.

Snapseed, Google's ridiculously powerful and popular image editing smartphone app, just got a major upgrade for its Android users. Following up on the introduction of raw file capabilities in Android 5 last year, the app now supports editing of those files right on your phone, greatly increasing the capabilities of photographers on the go.

As third-quarter profit reports came out, it's now known Canon assessed a 16 percent loss in net income, largely attributed to smartphones and mirrorless cameras, unsurprisingly. Nonetheless, the popular manufacturer is optimistic for future growth.

GoPro announced last month that it is working on bringing a drone to market in early 2016, and the go-to action-cam company just released the first video taken from their drone. Thankfully, the footage looks incredibly stable — so stable that some shots look incredibly similar to something that would come from a track-mounted or cable-mounted rig on the ground. Of course, the slight slow-motion nature of the shots help mitigate the perception of any small movements throughout the flights, but the footage is surprisingly smooth nonetheless.

Astropad Mini, the app that allows iPhone and iPad users to turn their device into a graphics tablet for the Mac, received a major update on Tuesday. The app now includes support for Apple's 3D Touch, meaning it can now recognize 256 levels of pressure, bringing it even closer to turning your iPhone into a fully functioning graphic tablet.

Not so surprisingly faster than the FAA, apparently, AIG sprung into action to allow drone operators and owners to purchase insurance that covers not only their drone and camera equipment, but also a number of other terrible things that can happen while you're piloting a UAV.

Los Angeles festival juggernaut HARD announced yesterday that there will be a total media blackout for the HARD "Day of the Dead" event. This along with other festivals cracking down hard on photographers may spell an end for freelancers.

We’ve long passed the beginning of the end and are now certainly in middle-of-the-end territory with respect to the freedom to fly drones. The latest high-profile drone incident further ensures that drone piloting will remain a privilege and not a right, though rightly so, as some people apparently can’t exercise enough common sense to stay away from populated areas (i.e. Los Angeles) and critical city infrastructure (i.e. power lines).

Our friends at B&H have put together a tremendous list of instant savings in celebration of PhotoPlus Expo! Even if you couldn't attend this year, there are still great offers to be had from home. Many of our favorite pieces of gear and software are included in the promotion.

This week, Instagram released a new app called Boomerang in efforts to grow its need for world domination in the mobile market. This time, they took aim at popular GIF-like apps such as Phhhoto and Apple's New Live Photos. I am a huge fan of Instagram and it has helped me grow my love for photography into something far greater than I ever thought possible, but I have no idea why they keep creating exact copies of already existing apps. Are they trying to simply steal market share? Or, are their hopes to do what Twitter and Periscope did to Meerkat by creating something far better on a larger scale?

From photos of Pluto and its moons to constantly expanding catalogs of images of our planet, NASA's releases seem to be never-ending lately. The latest epic space image, however, comes from German astronomers from Ruhr University Bochum. At a massive 46 billion pixels and a unwieldy 194 gigabytes, the image unseats the previous record holder for the largest photograph of space: NASA's 1.5 billion-pixel Hubble photograph of Andromeda.

The master of the headshot, Peter Hurley, has collaborated with Westcott to create a complete lighting solution for headshot photographers. Meant to be easy to set up, portable, and flexible, the kit looks to be a great option for anyone looking for an all-inclusive option for fashion, beauty, and commercial photography. 

We spoke, and PocketWizard was listening. The Plus III transceiver gets a highly coveted update, and you can say goodbye to sync cords. They have essentially turned the Plus III on its side and added TTL pass-through, along with a few other goodies.

We all know that Western Digital is one of the ring leaders in the consumer storage industry, and buying out SanDisk has now made them a competitor in the solid state drive market. SSDs are used in everyday technology such as laptops, smartphones, and cloud computing. If you are a creative professional, you most likely own or have owned a WD hard drive. Today, they have announced that they will be acquiring all of the outstanding shares of SanDisk for a combination of cash and stock. Yesterday, SanDisk shares went as high as $78.48 but were well below the offer price of $86.50 in cash and stock.