A batch of packaging board made at a mill on the Wabash River on August 6, 1945 came out radioactive, and the X-ray film stacked against it fogged after roughly two weeks in the box. A physicist at Eastman Kodak worked backward from those spots to a bomb test about 1,000 miles away in the New Mexico desert. He then sat on the finding for four years before publishing it.

Having a comfortable and well-lit workstation is something that can vastly improve your time working at your desk, and while many of us spend hours every day working at a computer, lighting is probably something that most of us don't give a huge amount of thought to. 

Bright midday sun and a pitted concrete wall are poor ingredients for a dark, moody portrait, yet one small gridded flash can turn them into exactly that. Learning to shut out ambient light, shape a single source, and then finish the file with careful retouching gives you a look you can repeat almost anywhere with very little gear.

Butterfly eyes are pure black, and bees are dark, quick, and always hopping between flowers that expose completely differently. Getting crisp, detailed macro shots of subjects like that is hard with daylight alone, and a small flash solves more of the problem than most people expect.

When the colors in a Lightroom edit look gray, muddy, or garish, the first instinct is to open the color mixer and start pushing hue and saturation around. That approach can stack up 20 adjustments that cancel each other out, and the result often looks no better than the raw file you started with.

You can name every shot type, from a medium close-up to an over-the-shoulder, and still freeze when it's time to decide where the camera actually goes. That hesitation is often what keeps a small weekend project stuck as an idea instead of a finished film.

An old photo album pulled from a garage contains a snapshot with Clyde Barrow's and Bonnie Parker's names handwritten on it, and the man who found it believes several of its pictures show the outlaw couple in scenes that have never been published. 

The most famous face of the Great Depression belonged to a woman who wished the picture had never been taken. Florence Owens Thompson sat for Dorothea Lange for about ten minutes in a California pea field in March 1936, said almost nothing, and never earned a cent from the portrait that turned her into a national symbol. For most of the next 47 years, she resented it.

Getting my hands on the new DJI Osmo 360 II was an interesting experience, largely because the first generation was already so well-built. The original gave us solid specs that made it a serious contender right out of the gate. Because it set that bar so high, a quick glance at the Osmo 360 II’s spec sheet might initially feel like a letdown.

The railing you pass on the way to the shop, the peeling door down the street, and the traffic marker on the corner rarely look like photographs, which is why most people never point a camera at them. Learning to see images in those ordinary things means you can shoot well on any free evening, without a long drive or a planned trip.

Canon has released a wave of new RF primes since the RF 35mm f/1.8 Macro IS STM arrived, including a fast 35mm in its VCM line and an inexpensive 45mm f/1.2. That raises a fair question about whether the older, cheaper lens still deserves to be the first one you put on an RF body.

A white wall behind your subject can go pure black in the final frame, even when the light never moves. You can get two completely different portraits from one setup in a room the size of a spare bedroom if you know how to use the light already in the room and how to shut it out.

A car shoot can easily produce 1,000 or 2,000 frames, and the time you spend sorting and editing them often decides how many images you actually finish. The order of your Lightroom steps, from culling to tone curve to masking to Denoise, shapes the final look as much as any single slider does.

On October 5, 1986, the New York Times published the closest thing to an honest tally the milk carton campaign produced. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children knew of 107 children located because somebody recognized a picture of them, at least four of those from a milk carton.

Threads of Time is an exploration of legacy and lens. It is a collaborative project between kesi artist Jingwei and photographer Jing Huang, presented at the Leica Gallery in Amsterdam. I went along to see how this collaboration was woven together in a gallery setting.

Panasonic's Lumix L10 puts a Micro Four Thirds sensor and a fixed zoom into a body small enough for a jacket pocket, and it sells for $1,500. A fixed-lens camera at that price asks you to give up a lot of flexibility, so how it holds up after months of daily use tells you more than a launch-week impression can.

Every year around late summer, my inbox and DMs start filling up with some version of the same question: "What actually happens at Sony Kando?" 

An f/2.8 zoom usually costs more, weighs more, and takes up more room in your bag than its f/4 counterpart, and the price gap between the two versions of the same focal range can run to hundreds of dollars. A wrong choice in either direction tends to end the same way, with a second purchase or an expensive lens that keeps getting left at home.

Ask whether the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 or the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1100 makes better prints, and you'll get answers about gamut volume, D-max, and how many centuries pigment inks last. Those figures steer where hundreds or thousands of dollars go, yet they say surprisingly little about how a print looks once it's framed and hanging.

Fisheye lenses have usually forced a choice between a circular image and a frame-filling one. Sony's FE 8-14mm f/3.5 G does both in one small zoom for $1,600, so deciding to buy it comes down to how often you'd actually use a lens this specialized.

The teal peaks and orange haze of the "Cosmic Cliffs," the Carina Nebula image that helped introduce the James Webb Space Telescope to the world in July 2022, do not exist. Not those colors, anyway. Almost none of the light Webb recorded is light your eye can see, and every filter used for that particular image sits in the infrared.

Compact fixed-lens cameras have been getting more and more popular in recent years, and the Leica Q series holds a spot at the top of that category. While the Q3 is already more than a couple of years old, there are some updates to the camera that make it more enticing.

The 50mm is the lens most people buy first because it's the cheapest prime in the catalog, and plenty of them spend the first few months shooting it wide open just to see the background melt. Fewer people learn to see at that focal length, and the habits that work at 28mm or 35mm tend to fall apart once you move to something tighter.

Whenever I've photographed weddings, world events, landscapes, or anything else, it's not been uncommon for other photographers to come up and start a chat about gear. And as someone who's worked for a major camera company and taught photography for almost two decades, I've always been happy to engage in talks about megapixels, autofocus, and dynamic range. 

Classic camera design keeps showing up on new releases, but the vintage look in your photos comes from the glass, not the body. Cheap, older lenses can deliver a character that no retro-styled body will fake for you.