“Gear doesn’t matter.” You may agree with this statement or not, but it’s definitely the case if you have a good idea and an engaging story to tell with your photos or films. Sure, expensive gear can make the job easier, but what if you don’t have a high budget? Well, in that case – just shoot with what you have in your pockets – a smartphone. Ryan Connolly of Film Riot gives you some guidelines how to shoot a high-quality video using nothing but your smartphone camera....

Getty Images, one of the biggest stock image platforms, has banned AI-generated images. If you want to upload and sell work you created through DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, or any other text-to-image tool, you won’t be able to do it there. The reason? Potential copyright issues. Getty is concerned about the legality of such content, so they want to protect the site’s customers from unwanted copyright claims. Speaking with The Verge, Getty Images CEO Craig Peters said that “there are real concerns with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models and unaddressed rights issues with respect to the imagery, the image metadata, and those individuals contained within the imagery....

It appears that Google Photos is having a bit of a moment. It seems that it’s corrupting some older images stored on the service dating from 2013 to 2015, according to reports from users. The phenomenon shows up as what looks like digital tears (as in rips through the image, not liquid that comes from your eyes) across the image, as you can see in examples posted to the Google support forums....

If you enjoy traveling with photo gear, you know how annoying it is to manage all the chargers, cables and batteries. Even the cameras from the same manufacturer have different batteries and chargers, not to mention other electronics like smartphones, laptops and so on. This is why photographer David Bergman gives you a couple of great tips for managing these gear elements when you’re on the road. This is one of the most frustrating parts of packing for me as well, so I’ll also jump in with a couple of tips of my own....

A while back, I had another roundtable discussion at the Film Photographers Association. This time the subject was Still Life Photography. It is a genre we all take for granted and include in it a great variety of photographs. I would like to explore the origins of still life in painting, how it came to photography, and eventually expanded in coverage and scope. Mind you, I do not intend to limit anyone’s vision but to make the reader a bit more aware of the origins of still life....