Jordan and I were naughty this year and Santa put something in our stocking that was less useful than a lump of coal. Naturally, we decided to review our gifts and see if there was any merit to mass-produced photo gear on the cheap.
Looking to make basic adjustments to photos without having to shell out a lot of money for image editing software? There are a large number of online photo editors these days that can be used completely for free within your web browser.
With every year that goes past, photography becomes more and more accessible to the average person. Compared to even a decade ago, even the most basic cameras – including those on your smartphone – produce excellent images. Moreover, you can find plenty of free resources and classes that give you all the information you need to succeed.
Retro Game Couch made this 3-minute video showing how you can convert an old Game Boy Camera into a "modern" webcam. It may not have the best resolution -- it's 8-bit, after all -- but it will certainly guarantee you a lot of attention in your next Zoom meeting.
In "news we missed last month," genealogy website MyHeritage has launched its very own easy-to-use Photo Enhancer tool that uses deep learning technology to turn blurry or faded family photos into sharp snaps in a single click. People on social media are loving it.
Adobe's annual 99U conference is usually an expensive, in-person event in New York City for creatives who want to get some hands-on education and inspiration from experts across artistic disciplines. But this year, the event is moving online, and it's going to be free for everybody.
Less than two weeks after officially shutting down its last cloud platform, Canon is launching another. So say goodbye to Irista, and hello to image.canon: a new "camera cloud platform" that's less about storage and more about keeping your camera in sync with PCs, smartphones, and other Web services.
Instagram is testing Direct Messaging on the Web: a feature that could come in very handy for professional photographers who use Instagram as a business and branding tool.
When it comes to selling your used camera gear online, many consider eBay to be one of the safer options. But as one photographer found out recently, there's a new scam that gets around eBay's "protections" and could cost you thousands of dollars and your camera gear.
Here's an unusual way to obtain the simple stock photo you need: Photo Creator is a web app that lets you build your own realistic stock photos. The site features thousands of models, objects, and backgrounds that you can combine into your own creations.
Image protection is a fiery issue among us photographers and there’s a good chance you sit in one of four camps...
The startup Cape calls itself "the world's first online drone flight platform," and they do exactly as the name implies: Cape lets you fly a real drone, in a real-world location, without ever leaving the comfort of your desk chair.
Want to learn photography from Harvard? (Yes, that Harvard.) It turns out you can easily do so, even without being a student. The oldest institution of higher learning in the United States offers a free 12-module online digital photography class.
As a photographer, you obviously want to spend your time focusing on your passion: capturing great images, being creative, and making art. Unfortunately, in our connected world, photo security is a very real concern. This article is a comprehensive guide on protecting your photos from online image theft.
Want to take a university-level class on digital photography for free? Former Stanford professor and current Google engineer Marc Levoy has a site containing his complete course materials for a class that he has taught 5 times at Stanford and once at Google.
Nikon today announced the opening of its new Nikon School Online, a new web-based learning program that offers paid classes to photographers who wish to improve their skills.
This post will probably sound harsh to some, but I think it's needed as street photography has a problem. It may be because of a so-called renaissance in street photography in the past few years, or just the fact it’s become fashionable, but the sheer number of terrible photos is quite impressive.
After sharing some of his work online recently, photographer Sean Tucker got a harsh taste of the hurtful words of online critics. Learning from the experience, Tucker just posted this 5.5-minute video on how you can deal with Internet criticism and not allow it to kill your creativity and passion.
Over 1.5 billion people worldwide use the Facebook app on a monthly basis, and all of those people have opted in to Facebook’s privacy policy by the act of creating an account.
The New York Public Library has launched a new online resource called the Photographers’ Identities Catalog (PIC). If researching the world of photography is your thing, then you'll love this site: it features the biographical info of over 100,000 photographers and other businesses in the industry.
This week, the New York Public Library announced that it has released 187,000+ high-resolution digital images of public domain items in its collection.
Polaroid is teaming up with professional photographers to launch Polaroid University, an online photography education program that provides a crash course in digital picture making.
People often use social media photos these days to make their lives seem a lot more happy, exciting, and/or glamorous than it actually is. Popular Vine comedian/actor @MelvinGregg decided to poke fun at this fact of Internet culture with a little 6-second-long Vine sketch that's going viral.
Nothing seems to be a more tedious task than the need to fill out paperwork. Especially if the paperwork has to be sent back and forth between you and a client multiple times. Luckily, Agree.com is a website that aims at making contracts easy to compile and sign for photographers (and videographers, designers, and more). Let’s take a moment to try out the service and is if it delivers on its promise of simplicity.
Camera gear can be expensive, but one way to work around this issue is to purchase equipment used from online auction websites such as eBay. But it can be tough trying to determine the exact condition of an item without getting your hands on it. We will be going over tips to help you purchase both digital and analog film cameras without throwing your money down the drain. Here are some practical pointers to staying smart and safe on eBay when buying your next bit of kit.
Your photography deserves a website that can showcase its creativity and beauty... without breaking the bank. Former TIME CEO and Curator Gallery owner Ann S. Moore told us in a recent interview, “Shame on you if you don’t have a website! You absolutely have to have one!” Today we'll be looking at a few of the top industry solutions for hosting your photography portfolio in style.
Most of you have probably spent a considerable amount of time staring at the colors of photos in programs like Photoshop, but how good are your eyes at discerning colors? iGame's Eye Test is a simple online test that will assess the quality of your color perception through a simple game format.
Back in 2013, photographer Pat David released a large set of film emulations as open source color lookup tables. Software developer Jonas Wagner just took that data and turned it into a free online analog film emulator. It's a simple web app that lets you give any photo the look of a particular film stock.
If you're looking to learn to program, there are free interactive online courses such as Codecademy and CodeSchool you can use. Programmer and photographer Cody Meyer wanted to give the photography world a similar kind of resource, so he created Camera Instructor. It's a new web-based photography school that aims to teach photography skills for free through interactive videos and exercises.
Simeon Quarrie is a talented, well-respected wedding photographer based out of the UK. But despite his impressive portfolio, humble attitude, and dedication to his work, when he shares it online, people inevitably come out of the woodwork to tear into the most minute details, oftentimes without even bothering to put his work in proper context.
It’s these individuals that inspired Quarrie to sit down with a camera before a recent shoot and spill his thoughts on trolls: the overly and unnecessarily critical individuals who slam and bring down the work we all share online.
It was just over a year ago that we told you about Pics.io, a platform that promised to bring the RAW editing and photo organization capabilities of programs like Lightroom to your browser.
Well, after a year spent mostly under wraps and unusable, Pics.io is officially in public beta and ready for the world take it for a spin.
Google used to have a standalone photo sharing service. It was called Picasa. I never really liked it. It wasn’t a very social site. I thought Flickr was a lot better.
Today’s news is that Google is looking to spin off Google Photos from Google+. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. You never know. The timing of Friday afternoon stories and leaks always makes you wonder. Usually when companies want to push something they release it more like Tuesday mornings or make a big deal about it at I/O or something.
Following hot on the heels of a report that claimed Leica is looking to launch a cloud storage service, Canon has opened up Irista, a cloud-based photo storage solution of its own. Originally released in beta a few years ago under the unusual name Project 1709, the now-public service offers photographers a way to store, organize and share images in the cloud.
When it comes to wanting to sell physical prints of your photographs online, there are but a few platforms. And of the platforms that do exist, many of them seem to fall short when it comes to offering everything you need in one, simple workflow.
Seeing this as a ripe opportunity, an incredibly talented team consisting of the co-founders of DNA 11, CanvasPop and dozens others have created an online marketplace that offers an end-to-end platform for artists to leverage. It’s called Crated, and it has the potential to be a game-changer for photographers who want to sell their work online.
During an event yesterday morning, Dropbox announced a new photo application called Carousel. Meant to be a photo and video archive and sharing platform that uses the images stored within your Dropbox, it seems the company is trying to think outside the box in their latest endeavors.
Just as local, physical storage has since its inception, cloud storage and its accompanying infrastructures are becoming larger, more robust and cheaper as time goes on. Case in point: this past week, Google decided to bring down its Google Drive cloud storage solution pricing to insanely low prices, while increasing capacity at the same time.
Snapseed's team has been hard at work since their company was acquired by Google last September. They've already put new photo filters in the Google+ app and some auto-enhance tools in Google+, and now they're working on something even grander: turning Google+ into a full-fledged, browser-based photo editing tool.
It wasn't long ago that Flickr rolled out its massive redesign -- met by both boos and cheers -- that entirely changed the way you experience the photos sharing site. Now it's 500px turn. The premium photo sharing platform just announced its own redesign, focused around larger photos and a Focus Viewer feature that offers a "stunning full screen experience."
If you're a frugal photographer who's constantly searching for ways to save some dough when buying gear, you might want to look into the new Los Angeles-based startup company Greentoe. It's a shopping site that's trying to turn the e-commerce world on its head by taking pricing power from merchants and putting it into the hands of consumers.
Basically, it's a site that lets you buy camera gear at prices you want to pay.
The Online Lighting Diagram Creator is a web app for easily creating and sharing lighting diagrams. It was created back in 2009 by Sydney-based photographer and web developer Quoc Huy Nguyen Dinh. It's an extremely simple tool through which you can create detailed diagrams by simply clicking and dragging.