Back in June, I was given the opportunity to test the new crazy lens by Laowa – the Laowa 24mm f/14 2:1 Relay Lens. It measures about 40cm in length and looks more like an endoscope rather than a traditional lens. While such relay lens designs are not entirely new with a few other examples in underwater macro photography, there are rarely any readily available options for terrestrial macro photography. I only managed to spend a few hours with it during an inter-tidal shoot, and compiled some clips in the intro video here:...

If you watch Stranger Things, you know there’s a lot to love about this show. And if you know at least a bit about filmmaking, there’s a lot more to love and pay attention to. In addition to the marvelous acting and exciting story, I particularly noticed the use of light and sound to cause tension. Another feature I started noticing in Season 2 are some creative transitions – and I’m not the only one who did....

Shooting reflective surfaces can be a tricky task, especially if you’re a beginner. And naturally, we all make mistakes. In this video, Alex Koloskov talks about the three biggest mistakes photographers make when shooting beverages, but he also teaches you how to fix them so you can improve your photos. 1. Shooting without diffusion 1. Shooting without diffusion Glossy surfaces are like a mirror. In other words, you’ll see the reflection of the light source on the bottle....

We’ve seen NVIDIA’s impressive content aware tool and noise removing tool. They have recently developed a generative adversarial network (GAN) which easily customizes styles of realistic faces and creates new faces. That’s right, these super-realistic faces you can see in the lead image are not real at all! The Verge writes that GAN has only existed for four years, comparing the results then and now and reminding us how much artificial intelligence has progressed....

It’s not rare that photographers are inspired by other types of art: it can be cinematography, music, painting – you name it. Photographer Nicholas Busch finds his inspiration in movies, and he brings together realistic miniatures, portrait photography, and compositing. Nicholas builds hyper-realistic dioramas from scratch to create scenes from The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Lord of the Rings and other movies. He then combines them with portraits, and with the help of Photoshop, he creates photos just like scenes we’ve seen on the big screen....