For residents and tourists alike, Google Maps Street View is an exceptionally useful navigational tool. However, not every country has welcomed Google's iconic Street View cars to their streets. One of these longtime holdouts, Germany, has only recently begun to change its tune after more than a decade of resistance. But why?
Selfies have become a ubiquitous part of daily life in most major cities. But there is one European city where it may not be so commonplace: Berlin.
East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was one of the most tightly-controlled police states in recent memory from 1949 to 1990 that would spy on its own citizens throughout using all sorts of fascinating imaging equipment.
Ask nine out of 10 influencers, and the Leica Q2 will still be on their favorites list even though it's three years old. Its timeless styling made it an instant classic, but credit goes to the venerable 28mm f/1.7 Summilux for delivering the goods. Now Leica has released its latest version, the Q3, and we got our hands on a pre-production version to try out.
A new documentary explores the secret and unauthorized photographs that concentration camp prisoners clandestinely took during the Second World War.
Miniatur Wunderland, the world's largest model railway, has published an hour-long, 360-degree video that takes viewers on a soothing ride through multiple miniaturized recreations of iconic global locations.
Tesla has published a detailed first-person view (FPV) drone flythrough of its new European manufacturing location to promote what it says is the most advanced, sustainable, and efficient facility ever.
Last week, two astronauts spacewalked outside the International Space Station (ISS) to make repairs and perform maintenance on the structure. Astrophotographer Dr. Sebastian Voltmer managed to photograph the astronauts outside the space station from his backyard.
Jan Erik Waider, a fine art photographer from Hamburg, has captured monster-like formations created by snow and ice blanketing the evergreen vegetation in the upper reaches of the Harz Mountains in northern Germany.
The Leica Freedom Train was not a physical coal or steam engine, but the monumental effort of the Leitz family. This is how they and the Leica camera company saved hundreds of Jews from persecution at the hands of the Nazis.
Meyer Optik Görlitz has announced that it has opened a new manufacturing facility in Hamburg, Germany. This new lens factory welcomes visitors, will expand to include a showroom, and will be used to produce new lenses for global distribution.
Joerg Daiber -- the German filmmaker behind "Little Big World" -- has created a mezmerizing, miniaturized showcase of the Ore Mountains in Germany using a tilt-shift perspective.
Here's a fascinating 4-minute video that offers a tiny window into what life in one German town was like back in 1902.
The Zenit-M camera first announced over a year ago is finally available to purchase in the US. The full-frame M-Mount rangefinder, which was created in collaboration with Leica, is very similar to the Leica M (Typ 240)... and it has a price to match.
If you're a fan of German camera lenses and you're thinking of buying one in the near future, you may want to pull out your credit card and pull the trigger right now. The US is set to unleash $7.5 billion in punitive tariffs on the EU starting Friday, and German lenses look set to be getting a 25%+ price hike in the process.
Photokina is still the world's leading imaging expo, but changes to its structure and a struggling industry may be pushing participants away. In a press release published to the expo's website, the trade show's organizer Koelnmesse revealed that Nikon, Leica and Olympus have all chosen to skip Photokina 2020.
To mark 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we revisited the precise locations of 10 memorable photos taken when half of the city lay behind the Iron Curtain.
If you're keeping track today, the score is Big Corporations: 1, Photographers: 1. Because while Carol Highsmith might have all-but-lost her epic lawsuit against Getty Images, a photographer in Germany came out on top when he took Facebook to court.
While the Profoto D2 is still the world's fastest TTL Monolight, it is not the world's fastest monolight. That title belongs to Hensel's new, insanely fast Cito 500.
This complex, built in the end of the 19th century, was on my wish list for a very long time. When the opportunity arose to visit it, I grabbed my chance and carefully planned the exploration.
Germany is known to have some of the strictest privacy laws in Europe, and sometimes the policies trump photography rights and copyright. The country's highest court just ruled that a photographer must delete "intimate" photos of his ex-lover -- pictures that were consented to when they were created and which the man had no intention of sharing.
Taking a quick snapshot of your meal at restaurants has become a widespread pre-meal ritual in recent years. People often like to keep a memento of the food they eat, and perhaps share that image with others online as well.
But if you're a foodie blogger and/or photographer in Germany, you might want to think twice the next time you pull out your camera: your simple photo could constitute copyright infringement.
Since Globell Deutschland revived the Meyer-Optik-Görlitz brand, they have been committed to continuing the legendary engineering of lens optics that began in 1896. As of late, they have introduced a number of high-quality lenses designed and crafted in Germany. Now, Globell wants to breathe life into a modern 100mm f/2.8 Trioplan ‘soap bubble bokeh’ lens, a piece of glass known for its unique bokeh. The company has launched a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign that has already raised more than $250,000 to bring this lens back to life.
Christian Richter is a fine art architecture photographer based in the small town of Jeßnitz, Germany. A fan of exploring old, abandoned buildings, Richter has often come across tall spiral staircases that look both beautiful and disorienting when viewed from the very top looking down. These staircases form a photo series of his that is aptly titled, "Abandoned Staircases."
According to an oft-forgotten clause in EU copyright laws, it is illegal to publish nighttime photos of certain public buildings in certain countries without asking permission from the owners of the buildings.
So why isn’t everyone who captures and posts images of iconic building such as France’s Eiffel Tower prosecuted then? Because the clause and accompanying law are rather vague, only accepted by certain states, and all-round confusing to interpret.
There are few enough times when the words haunting and portraiture truly go hand-in-hand, but the work of Polish-born, Germany-based fashion photographer Sylwia Makris fits this description perfectly.
Her dreamlike photographs take you into a strange, twisted world full of sculpted subjects under the most mysterious of lights and costumes.
For those of you who, like me, enjoy shooting film on occasion but keep a predominately digital workflow, German company Reflecta has a new 35mm film scanner on the way that will blow away almost any other consumer-level scanner you're going to find.
People familiar with the Brother's Grimm fairy tales know that the Disney versions of many of these tales were rather less dark than the original, broody, oh-my-goodness-did-that-just-happen-in-a-fiary-tale versions.
The photographs in German photographer Kilian Schoenberger's series Brothers Grimm's Homeland represent the latter universe: a foggy, dark, ominous place where the next footfall you hear might send you running.
Slow motion video is often mesmerizing, whether it shows creamer being poured ever so luxuriously into coffee, or a dog shaking off water. But the super slow motion series Stainless by photographer Adam Magyar put all of those to shame.
From no Photoshop straight to excessive yet awesome image manipulation, we're all over the spectrum today. Although general belief (at least among purists) is that it is always better to create something in-camera than in post, there are certain things that just can't be done in-camera... and architecture photographer Víctor Enrich did ALL OF THEM to this one hotel in Munich.
This is, as they say, an oldie but goodie. Put together all the way back in 2009, this self-portrait time-lapse chronicles one man's journey walking almost all the way across China on his way to Germany. A journey as much about the physical challenge as it was about self-discovery.
Sports games and medals are often won and lost at the hands of the referees. Be it an offside call that might have turned into a goal or the line judge that just doesn't want to give those last 6-inches your team needs for the first down, there's good reason cameras are becoming standard backup for refs who might have missed something.
German shot putter David Storl has a particularly good reason to be thankful for cameras these days, since a photo that was almost deleted managed to overturn an erroneous foul call and win him the gold in the IAAF World Championship Men's Shot Put Finals last week.
Back in 2011, developer Dean Putney's mother dropped a photographic goldmine in his lap as he was getting ready to leave home after Thanksgiving. Out from under the coffee table, she pulled out a big black photo album that, as it turns out, contained hundreds of photos taken by his German officer Great Grandfather Walter Koessler during World War I.
In the past, we've shared several online archives that give you access to a huge number of historical and historically significant photos online.
PhotosNormandie offered up 3,000+ CC photos from WWII, the NYC Department of Records compiled a database of over 870,000 photos of "the greatest city on earth," and now the Finnish Defense Forces have put up an online archive of their own, showcasing almost 160,000 wartime photos from Finland during WWII.
Bloomberg published this short feature earlier today titled, "The World's Most Wanted Camera vs. the iPhone Era." In the video, reporter Nejra Cehic takes us on a brief behind-the-scenes tour of Leica's gear manufacturing headquarters in Solms, Germany, and discusses what the future holds for the brand.
German photographers Marion and Dieter were visiting the Nuremberg Zoo earlier this month when they came across an odd sight: one of the polar bears named Felix was chomping on a $2,100+ Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS telephoto lens. Apparently another lady was trying to change lenses while standing at the edge of the enclosure, and accidentally let the 70-200mm slip out of her grasp and into Felix's territory.
Photographer Stefan Koppelkamm first photographed East Germany in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the reunification. He revisited the same locations a decade later, and rephotographed them from exactly the same viewpoints to document the drastic social and economic transformations that came about during the time between the photos.
German satire program Extra 3 conducted a humorous — albeit disconcerting — experiment testing photographers’ (and videographers) rights in …
Earlier this week the New York Times was lent a mysterious photo album that contained 214 photos of Nazi Germany, including images taken just feet away from Hitler. There was no indication of who the photographer was, so the Lens blog decided to publish some of the photos and crowdsource the task of solving the mystery.
Last week we briefly wrote on how Leica played a role in saving Jews by helping them …