Photography News

Lightroom users everywhere have reason to celebrate! Today, Adobe released version 6.3/2015.3, which in addition to bug fixes and a slew of updated lens and camera profiles, brings back the much-missed features of the old Import dialogue.

There is a new cat in town and it's roaring like a lion. PICR is a startup from Portland, Oregon that promises to make your life as a photographer easier. They have created a platform for photographers that could build a bridge between the potential consumer and the service provider. An online agent of sorts. Can they really deliver?

If you're a traveling filmmaker, professional or enthusiast, one of the most important investments you can make is in a tripod. The challenge is often finding a set of sticks that are lightweight, sturdy, can extend to be at least 5 feet tall, and last but most important, pack down to a size small enough to carry on a plane. A tripod that can do all of this often comes with a hefty price tag, but for backers of the International Kickstarter, you can snag a pre-order at a discount.

As holiday season officially approaches, some of the first season deals are coming in as well. B&H Photo Video is one of the first ones out and they have some great deals on some stalwart Canon items, as well as others. Links are in the article!

Iceland has become a naturelovers' playground and a hotspot for adventure photographers looking to visit the home of some of the most popular Instagramable locations on Earth. But many travelers visit the island nation during the warmer and more accessible summer months. Winter is when most of the country is covered in snow and ice and tourism drops dramatically. But that isn't stopping four British adventurers from attempting something that has never before been accomplished; crossing the country unsupported in the heart of winter in what they're calling "The Coldest Crossing."

Let me preface this article by stating that this is based on educated rumors. Late in September, the rumor mill was flying with speculation about Samsung shutting down its Digital Camera Division and the NX line in particular. This was sad news because many photographers throughout the industry have found that they really like the NX cameras and their price point values. Samsung officials responded stating that this was just a rumor and that the camera division was very much alive. Well, this week, several factors seem to be hinting to the contrary.

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.

Fujifilm X-Series owners will be happy to hear that today, the corporation has announced a new prime lens and teleconverter for their highly-regarded system. By adding another 35mm (53mm full-frame equivalent) prime and 1.4x teleconverter, Fujifilm continues to enrich their ever-burgeoning lineup. As an added bonus, those who are attending the Photoplus Expo in New York can play with the new equipment for a day at no extra charge.

After seeing an initial release in June of this year, Phase One is now releasing its first big platform update for the XF camera system. The update brings new controls and functionality, plus more refinement to its operating software.

A brand new full-frame mirrorless camera has just entered into the game, and it comes from the German-based luxury camera brand Leica. The Leica SL (Typ 601) is a 24-megapixel camera that packs a number of interesting features within its eye-catching design such as 4.4MP EVF with 60fps refresh, 11 frames per second burst capture, internal 4K video, and touchscreen controls, so let’s take a closer look.

I find myself saying this a lot these days, but that's not a typo. In fact, the listed ISO range for the new KONO! Donau film is actually ISO 3-6. With such a low sensitivity, photographers can capture longer exposures in daylight. The film's extremely blue tones serve as a reminder that it's still in the experimental range, but there's an entirely new limit to what you could do with a hand-rolled ISO 3-6 film.

With a slightly more enterprise-solution twist, Amazon has announced a new 50-terabyte "Snowball" drive that ships itself to your address, gives you ten days to load it with as much data as you can, and then gets picked up by UPS to transfer the data back to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud storage — all for $200 per job. The process works in reverse, too; so, you can import or export a job between any AWS product more quickly and at less cost than alternatives.

Just days after we saw the release of the world's widest full-frame f/1.4 lens, we're now seeing the release of the world's longest full-frame f/1.4 lens. Zhong Yi Optics, mostly known for their ultra-fast mirrorless lenses, has put up a pre-order page for their new Mitakon Speedmaster 135mm f/1.4 lens.

Recently, the game of artificial lighting, including flash, has started to change. LED lights have become more common, but also TTL and HSS have become available to studio strobes, not just hot shoe flashes anymore. Today, it is Elinchrom's turn to join in this new era. The Elinchrom Skyport celebrates its 10th birthday this year, and over 400,000 units have been sold since its launch. However, it was time for an update. But Elinchrom did not just update the Skyport, they made a whole new version introducing a range of hi-sync products.

According to NBC News, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is getting close to announcing new rules for recreational drone use, beginning with the requirement to register every drone a person buys. Registration itself, however, is not a large obstacle to drone ownership and operation, as registration will only be able to help the FAA keep track of just how many there are and, hopefully, identify aircraft that break rules or cause collisions. But just how effective will this be? And what other laws will come in the way of recreational drone flight?

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.

I can't honestly say I know where the XQD format is going. So few cameras have adopted the new format, but as bit rates will need to continue to increase to match the continuing rise of megapixels and video resolution, perhaps the format will begin to take hold out of necessity. Either way, for those with cameras like the Nikon D4 or D4S, Lexar just released their fastest XQD cards yet, the XQD 2.0 cards, supporting up to 440 MB/s transfer rates (or in other, less useful, but impressive-sounding terms, speeds up to 2933x). Meanwhile, the CFast cards are even 20 percent faster.

As mobile photography continues to grow in popularity, so does the creativity that goes along with it. It is truly amazing to see some of the images and videos that people are creating using smartphones, GoPros, and other devices. It is no surprise that companies are creating mobile accessories designed specifically with mobile photography and videography in mind. One company, Think Eleven, has developed an interesting new LED light.

Landscape, street, and astrophotographers have reason to rejoice. Today, Sigma announced the latest addition to their much-lauded "Art" line of lenses, the 20mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art, making it the world's widest full frame f/1.4 lens. Coupled with some other intriguing design characteristics, this looks to be another hit for the already popular line of lenses.

The same technology to protect movies, music and books could soon be coming to your images. The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) recently announced an initiative that may one day bring digital rights management (DRM) to the most common image format in the world.

For the last couple weeks, Fstoppers asked our readers to fill out a site survey. In exchange, all entrants were entered to win one of four prizes. The first name randomly drawn will receive a $500 B&H gift card. The second, third, and fourth names randomly drawn will receive an Fstoppers original tutorial of their choice for free. All entrants will receive special discount codes for the Fstoppers store. I wanted to send out a HUGE thanks to everyone who participated and filled out the survey. And now for the WINNER announcement...

The Pakpod is Kickstarter's latest small-camera tripod to hit the market. It's not made of carbon fiber or even metal. It won't stand much higher than a couple feet. And it looks a little funny - let's be honest. But it does one thing better than any other tripod I've ever seen: it attaches to anything (even under water).

The incredible deal that we discovered a few months ago is back for a very limited time. Right now you can get the Canon Pro-100 printer and 50 sheets of 13x19 photo paper for just $50 after rebate.

Canon's latest cameras are compact, but pack a punch (maybe). While some might be compelled to ask themselves about the reasons behind releasing the lackluster EOS M10 at all, the G5 X and G9 X both fit well into Canon's high-end compact lineup with interesting features that might draw the casual shooter looking for something a bit more spectacular than le quotidien.

Without a huge media hoopla, today Apple announced updates to some of its entire all-in-one desktop lineup. The 21.5-inch iMac now offers a 4K retina display, the 27-inch iMac now comes standard with the 5K retina display, the Mac sees its first Skylake debut, and Apple's Magic keyboard and mouse accessories see great updates (at a price). With even more under-the-hood changes, these are the iMac's you wanted all year, but may not have known about. (UPDATED)

When we heard the news, a few people in our office assumed it was a joke; maybe it was written by The Onion. Playboy magazine, which exists because of nude photography, will not longer feature it.