Let’s talk about gear, I know some of you are obsessed with it and the act of photography is just an excuse for acquiring more gear. I can kind of relate because chips are just delivery devices for salsas. But for me, it’s actually the other way around, photography gear is all about making my job easier so that I can do it better, anything else is just in the way.
Filmmaker Daniel Scott Murphy has created an incredibly useful new crop factor calculator that goes beyond anything we've seen online thus far. Not only does it tell you the crop, it actually simulates the results, and can even handle setups that include speed boosters.
Adobe has partnered with Google to release its very own Gmail add-on: a basic but useful tool that will make it much easier to share files from Photoshop or Lightroom over email... assuming, of course, that you use Gmail as your email client.
YouTuber Jordy of Cinecom.net recently put together a list of DIY filmmaking and photography hacks that are proving to be quite popular. In just under 7 minutes, he covers 9 hacks, all of which use cardboard to make the magic happen.
Recently I became—as I’m sure many of you already are—utterly sick of the endless chargers and cables in my studio. It's a mess of wires that always seem to get tangled and it always ends up looking like Medusa on a bad hair day.
Portrait photographer Miguel Quiles has put together an incredibly useful video that reveals the contents of his personal 'Mig'Gyver Kit: a set of 21 items that could save your butt during your next portrait session.
The folks over at Canva have put together a fun, interactive Color Wheel tool that might just be the easiest, most enjoyable way way to play around with and learn about color theory.
If you're new to film photography, or you're curious about the variety of film stocks that are out there, there's a useful new website you should definitely check out. It's called Filmtypes, and it's a database of emulsions that wants to help you find your next roll of 35mm film.
A recent update to Facebook's Creator Studio has added a highly requested feature for Instagram power users and marketers: the ability to natively schedule Instagram posts and IGTV broadcasts ahead of time.
Back in the Sony SLT days, the company included an incredibly useful feature into the a99 Mark II called the Custom Focus Limiter. It allowed you to limit your autofocus to any distance range you wanted, and by golly, we wish it were still a thing.
If you're a Windows user—or a Mac user who's been contemplating a switch—Microsoft just made it a little easier to switch over by releasing a useful new RAW Image Extension for Windows 10.
Here's something that isn't directly photography-related but is relevant to pretty much every photographer: if you've never heard of it before, you should check out the website Have I Been Pwned? It lets you search for your email addresses and passwords to see if any of your accounts have been compromised through security breaches.
As photographers, we’re always interested in how other people edit their photos to achieve a certain look. Pixel Peeper is a new website that can take a JPEG and tell you exactly how it was edited in Lightroom, along with the camera model, lens, and settings -- as long as that info is found in the file's EXIF data.
Absolut wants to revolutionize how we hang picture frames on our walls. Yes, Absolut the vodka brand. It has announced the Hangsmart, a new device that lets you do away with measuring, leveling, and even screws.
Last month, we reported on how Instagram has apparently been "shadow banning" certain posts, preventing a photographer's content from being discovered by others without the photographer knowing. If you're curious about whether any of your photos have been shadowbanned, there's a new web app that can check for you.
There's a useful new tool on the Interwebz, and it promises to help you decide what lens you should purchase next. Just select a category and pick 20 favorite photos as you scroll through, and What The Lens will reveal your lens preference.
Earlier this year, 22-year-old London-based developer Nick Smith launched Dehaze, a web tool that suggests relevant Instagram hashtags given a genre and a location. After being well received by Instagram users, Smith has now rebranded the tool and launched it for both iOS and Android. Dehaze is now Focalmark.
Cropping a photo just right can be challenging, especially if you're working on a smaller laptop screen. Use this quick Lightroom tip from the folks at Adobe to help you get more precise results every time.
Lighting company Aputure just released a light that we're pretty sure will make it into many (many many) photographer and videographer gear bags. It's called the Amaran M9, and it's tiny, ultra versatile, and costs only $45!
Using the right hashtags to get your work noticed on Instagram is an art in and of itself, that much we already know. But if this article wasn't enough help, a simple new Web tool called Dehaze makes finding the right hashtags a cinch!
Quick, simple, cheap, and useful—you can't ask for much more from a quick photo gear tip, and this quick tip meets all four criteria.
This is useful. The folks over at LEE filters just released a handy little exposure guide app that will help you calculate the right shutter speed when you're using their Little Stopper, Big Stopper, or Supper Stopper ND filters.
The Photoshop Training Channel published this great 9-minute video with 5 useful Photoshop tricks that the majority of casual Photoshop users probably have never learned before.
If you're interested at all in bird watching and photography, Merlin Bird Photo ID is a website you should add to your bookmarks. It's a new website that can help you identify the species of the bird in your photograph.
A couple of months ago, we featured a helpful little web app called the Bokeh Simulator and Depth of Field Calculator. The website allows photographers to quickly visualize what different options in a particular shot (e.g. aperture, focal length, distance to subject) do to the bokeh and depth of field in the resulting photo.
The app has now gotten even better: in addition to some nifty feature upgrades, it can now be downloaded as a free app for Android devices.
One of the tricky things about online shopping is the price fluctuation that happens for products. The price you see today may not be around when you check again tomorrow. If you regularly shop for camera gear on Amazon, one website that you should bookmark and reference is CamelCamelCamel. It's a website that tracks the price history of Amazon's products, allowing you to time your purchases at historically low prices.
Depending on the type of photography you're involved in, a multi-tool may be one of the invaluable items found inside your camera bag. If so, Leatherman has a new product for you called the Tread. Upon first glance, the product may look like a sleek but rather ordinary metal bracelet, but look a little closer and you'll see that it's actually a fancy new multi-tool that puts 25 separate tools around your wrist.
Here's a cool patent that gives new purpose to a camera accessory you don't hear talked about much: the body cap. Chances are you don't give your camera's body cap much thought, but the body cap Canon just patented would serve a dual purpose by not just keeping your sensor protected, but also cleaning the contacts on your lens mount in the process.
Want to see what one of your photos would look like as wall art in a living space? WallApp can show you. It's a new browser-based tool that lets you see your photos in the context of a room without having to create a mockup yourself in Photoshop.
When it comes to food photography, particularly beverages, one of the most difficult things to capture is steam. Not only do the drinks not stay warm for very long, but the steam is often nearly transparent and hard to catch on camera.
For those of you who partake in any sort of nighttime photography, it’s no secret that light pollution can be the bane of your existence. Thankfully, there’s a neat, simple online resource that can help you better prepare to avoid this enemy of great Milky Way photography.
It’s called Dark Sky Finder, and it’s an easy-to-use website that gives you an up-to-date, radar-style view of what light pollution across the United States looks like.
When it comes to understanding how depth of field, focal length and other variables are affected by different film/sensor formats, it can get confusing. Fortunately, Reddit user redblue has created an incredibly useful interactive resource that will help you better visualize the factors at play by letting you change variables while swapping sensors sizes and seeing the effect in real time.
Here's a new reason you might want to consider picking up a Google Glass if you're a photographer: it can be used as a light meter.
A new app called Google Glass Light Meter is trying to pioneer a new way of metering light -- with a device strapped to your face instead of held in your hand.
There are some Lightroom plugins that make you truly question why the feature isn’t built directly into Lightroom itself, and Show Focus Points is one of those. Just as the name implies, it’s a plugin that lets you see which focus point was used when your camera captured the photograph.
Filmmaker Richard Michalak has spent over 30 years behind the camera, and in the video above by Hugh Fenton he condenses all of that knowledge into a set of tips, techniques and concepts that will prove to be incredibly useful whether or not your interests involve moving pictures.
Want to make sure you can upload your travel photos quickly from your hotel room? Hotel WiFi Speed Test is a service that can help you plan ahead when you're roaming the world with your camera.
Adobe’s major Creative Cloud update yesterday gave photographers several updated features, new features and even an all-new …
When it comes to getting the most out your post-processing applications, you really want to know your shortcuts. The problem is, there's so many within each program that it’s impossible to remember them all.
If there's one thing I lose more than anything else while shooting, it's lens caps. I've never permanently lost one (knock on wood), but I've certainly misplaced them for days at a time. And I have a feeling I'm not the only one who's guilty of this.
Here to help us through our absentmindedness is a new Kickstarter for a product called HACKxTACK.
DIRE Studio has released an application for photographers and cinematographers alike that they've aptly named Mark II Artist's Viewfinder.