The Preacher Who Patented Flexible Film in 1898 and Died Before Kodak Paid $5 Million for It
Hannibal Goodwin's application for a photographic pellicle reached the Patent Office on May 2, 1887, and stayed there for eleven years and four months while a succession of five examiners rejected it. George Eastman's chemist filed his own flexible film application on April 9, 1889, and had a granted patent eight months later. By the time Goodwin's US Patent 610,861 issued on September 13, 1898, Kodak had been selling transparent roll film to the public for nine years.
You Don’t Need a Macro Lens for Mushroom Photography. There, I Said It.
There is a tendency in photography to believe that if we want to photograph a particular subject, we need to buy the equipment designed specifically for it. Want to photograph wildlife? You need a long telephoto lens. Want to photograph the night sky? You need a fast wide angle lens. Want to photograph mushrooms? You need a macro lens.
But do you really?
Why One Superzoom Might Be All You Need on a Long Hike
The OM System M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100mm f/4 IS PRO covers the same range as a 24-200mm zoom on full frame, so it raises an obvious question if you hike long distances with a camera: can one lens stand in for the three you usually carry? A single weather-sealed zoom saves weight and spares you lens changes in wind and spray, but landscape work also asks for real wide angle coverage, close foreground focus, and sharpness from corner to corner.
Why a Rained-Out Race Is Worth Photographing on Film
A storm that cancels an event usually sends everyone home, camera included. On a long trip, the days that fall apart often produce the frames you end up keeping, and with film you won't know which ones worked until the rolls come back.
Why the Panasonic Lumix S1RII Is a Great Buy for Everything but Sports
The Panasonic Lumix S1RII pairs a 44-megapixel full frame sensor with 8K video for about $3,300, and that sensor isn't stacked, so it reads out slowly. If you shoot both stills and video, that one design choice shapes nearly everything about how the camera behaves in your hands.
Why It's OK to Come Home From a Landscape Shoot Empty-Handed
Watch enough landscape videos and you start to believe the professionals walk out at golden hour and come home with a portfolio image every time. That belief shapes how you judge your own outings, and how hard you are on yourself when the sky catches fire and your card holds nothing you want to show anyone.
Critique the Community: Unique Edit
Welcome to the November installment of the Critique the Community! This month's critique theme is going to be "Unique Edit," and we want to see your best photographs that were brought to life with a new or unique editing style or specific editing software.
In 2013, Researchers Pulled Recognizable Faces of Bystanders Out of the Eye Reflections in a Portrait
An anonymous peer reviewer worked through a manuscript, looked at one of its figures, and recognized one of the authors. The face was a reflection in another person's eye. Across the study's bystanders, those extracted faces ran 27 to 36 pixels wide and covered roughly 322 pixels apiece, and that accidental recognition became the paper's second experiment.
The Luminar Fall Update Has Some Powerful New Tools
Luminar has released a solid fall update with some new features and some enhancements. The update is free to current owners and can, of course, be purchased by photographers who are interested.
This new update is version 1.29.0. The update should appear automatically, or you can click "Check for Updates" in the Luminar dropdown menu.
Can’t Afford a Leica? Buy One of These Instead
If you’re pondering a Leica rangefinder film camera but can’t bring yourself to spend a crazy amount of money, maybe give this a go.
Having reimmersed myself back into the wonderful world of analog about five years ago, my collection of film cameras has slowly been growing. And like many analog enthusiasts, there’s one camera that has a certain allure, especially as all the cool kids on YouTube seem to own one: the Leica M6.
Chasing a Vivid Fog Bow and a Golden Gate Bridge Shot Years in the Making
Fog in the San Francisco Bay Area can bury a scene in seconds and hand it back a minute later with trees, towers, and light arranged in ways you won't see again. Shooting it well means working quickly, reading the direction of the light, and resisting the urge to stick with the first composition that looks good.
The Viltrox AF 35mm f/1.4 Pro Is Sharp in the Corners Wide Open
The Viltrox AF 35mm f/1.4 Pro sells for $829, and it brings a metal body, weather-sealing, and a clicked aperture ring at that price. Few focal lengths stay on a camera as long as a 35mm does, so how a lens like this behaves wide open, in the corners, and while tracking a moving subject affects a big share of everything you shoot.
The Case for Photographing the Place You Already Know
The places you see every week are the ones you're least likely to photograph, since they feel too familiar to bother with. Familiar doesn't last, and the village fair or street corner you skip this year is exactly what someone will want to see decades from now.
Why You Don't Need Focus Stacking for Every Landscape
Focus stacking has become close to a default step in landscape work, with plenty of people blending 20 or even 50 frames so every rock and grass blade is sharp from front to back. Whether that effort shows up in the final image, or whether a single frame focused at the hyperfocal distance would look the same, decides how much of your time goes into focus while the light keeps changing.
DoorDash Will Photograph Your Menu Free, Claim a 44% Sales Lift, and Bar the Pictures From Uber Eats
DoorDash's help center lays the deal out in plain language: a professional photographer comes to your restaurant for a 1.5-hour session, shoots up to 20 menu items plus one header image, and DoorDash pays the photographer. You pay for the food and the labor to plate it. Then comes footnote three, which reads, "Photos provided by DoorDash may not be used on other third-party delivery platforms."
The One Thing I Want Most for My Nikon Zf
In today’s article, I am going to shamelessly beg Nikon to add one very specific feature to what is already my favorite camera body.
Why a Silver Card Fixed a Reflection That White Paper Couldn't
Acrylic rods under studio light look a lot like smooth, healthy hair, which makes them a smart prop for photographing a Total Results haircare bottle. The problem is that a glossy bottle behaves like a mirror, and every rod you bring into the set wants to show up across the label.
How to Shoot and Edit a Giant Moonrise Behind a Landmark
Getting the moon to rise behind a specific building means planning for a moment that lasts only a few minutes, then shooting it in fading light with a very long lens. Even with the time and direction worked out ahead, you can still find yourself in the wrong spot when it finally breaks the horizon.
4 Questions to Ask Before You Choose a Lens
Most people learn lenses as a set of assignments: wide angle for landscapes, telephoto for portraits, a 50mm for everything in between. Those assignments are easy to memorize, and they quietly limit how many different photographs you can pull out of a single scene.
A 4-Shot System for Better Travel Photos
You can spend months planning a trip around one famous view and still come home with a memory card that feels thin. The pictures that bring a place back years later are rarely the ones you saw online before you left.