Articles written by Alex Cooke

20 people were searching for a grandfather and his granddaughter in Iowa in dense woods, as sunset approached and made the rescue effort all the more difficult. Luckily, Emergency Management Coordinator David Penton had a clever idea: he called a colleague who owned a drone and told him to bring it to the site as quickly as possible.

LUTs are one of the essential tools in the video world. What in the world is a LUT anyway? If you're just getting started with video post-production, these two videos will give you a good kick in the right direction.

You might remember a recent story in which an athletic sponsor was forbidden from referencing the Olympics when reporting on one of their athletes. It seems the US Olympic Committee is now clamping down all the more, issuing very stringent restrictions.

What follows is one of the strangest and most remarkable coincidences I've ever come across in the world of photography. We've heard of photos that were blatantly stolen, but what happens when the concept of a major digital art project is copied? Is it even possible to copy a "copy" of an idea, or can two different artists be inspired to come up with the exact same concept completely independently? This is the tale of two composite photographs.

I know, I know. It's about the photographer, not the gear. But if you can look at all the gear Getty is sending photographers to the Olympics with and not salivate, well, you're stronger than me.

As you probably know, much of the epic imagery in "Game of Thrones" is computer-generated. It's a monumental task, and this video from Rising Sun Pictures, the visual effects company responsible for that amazing imagery, really puts into perspective the amount of work and imagination required to pull off such a feat.

"This is what we have to create if we want to sell." Ruben Salvadori, an anthropologist and photographer, spent months in East Jerusalem, where he initially went as a conflict photographer. Soon, however, his anthropological training kicked in, and he found a subject that was more interesting to him personally: the photographers themselves.

Score one for the good guys. When they realized their boat was being stolen, two Washington teenagers handled it in the coolest way possible: they called the cops, then they put their drone in the air and chased down the thieves, guiding police to their position and capturing video evidence in the process.

We spend so much time talking about how to retouch faces in portraits, but we rarely pay as much attention to the hair. However, hair can take up just as much (if not more) space in a portrait as the face, and it's what frames the features. Phlearn is here with a great tutorial on how to really make hair pop and take your images up a notch.