When the Metropolitan Museum of Art set up an exhibition in 2019, they used a 1982 photo by photographer Lawrence Marano. The photographer claims that the Met stole it and filed a lawsuit against it. However, a panel of judges has ruled in favor of the museum, stating that it used the image “for educational purposes” The image in question shows band Van Halen, and it was a part of the exhibition Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock and Roll....

Dreams can be an endless source of inspiration for artists, and photographer Vatsal Kataria turns his dreams into reality in a quite literal way. He recreates the places he visits in his dreams using nothing but a few basic materials. And then, with his camera and some post-processing, he creates a fantasy-like series of photos. Vatsal shares his dreams with the world, and he shared some details about his project with DIYP....

I suppose like most photographers I have a “photographic bucket-list”, and documenting the life-cycle of the much maligned Mosquito has always been high on that list. Like many of my projects this turned out to be quite the undertaking filled with many challenging and unique problems. Mosquitoes start off as eggs which hatch into larvae. The larvae, also called wrigglers feed on algae and micro-organisms in the water. They spend much of their time at the water’s surface sucking oxygen through breathing tubes attached at their tail....

I admire birth photographers. I don’t engage in birth photography myself, but I marvel at those who do it well. The emotional climate is always changing at a birth, and so a photographer must not only be prepared in their own heart and mind, but also bring to the birth a level of patience, compassion, and skill that allows them to adapt to any and all changing conditions. The photographer is there to document what is in front of them and has very little to no control over the situation....

The Helios 44-2 is one of my favourite old lenses. This, along with the Jupiter-9 are my two most used manual focus lenses for stills and video. The Helios 44 line started in 1958. Its initial design is a copy of the Carl Zeiss Biotar 58mm f/2, and was produced by KMZ for the M42 mount. Since that first version, it’s been through several iterations as technology has advanced. In this video from Manny Ortiz, we see the Helios 44-2 58mm f/2 lens in action on a Sony A7RII....