Composition is always such a hotly debated topic. There are so many “rules” (and sometimes a few that conflict with each other), but unless you want to start getting yourself obsessively wrapped up in those debates, you have to think of them more as guidelines. But they’re guidelines that we often see followed to great effect in many movies, TV shows, and photographs. Do you know why? Well, it’s because they often work....

Capture the Atlas has selected the top ten images of the Milky Way taken all over the world. If you are planning an astrophotography trip soon, these will kickstart your inspiration. But even if you are staying home, you’ll still enjoy these photos and their otherworldly beauty. Although there are only ten photos in the selection, they take you on a visual journey around the world. “From the remote deserts of the American Wild West to the unfamiliar landscapes of the Australian Outback, passing by spectacular glaciers, volcanoes, mountains, beaches…,” the contest page reads, “always with the Milky Way shining in the sky....

I always say that macro photography helps us reveal a whole new world even in the most mundane, everyday objects. But if you pair extreme close-ups with video and slow motion… Well, you get a whole new level of beauty. Macrofying, a 21-year-old macro photographer from Germany, combines all of these techniques. They zoom into the depths of everyday objects to reveal whole new worlds and show us things like candles, lighters, sand, or popcorn in an entirely new light....

Have you ever thought about how cool it would be to watch your dreams as movies after you wake up? Or maybe have your thoughts turned into pictures? It sounds like something from Black Mirror, something that can’t possibly be real. However, turning your thoughts into images now actually exists! Researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands have developed a technology that turns your brainwaves into photographic images. And it does it with so much accuracy that it’s creepy and extremely impressive at the same time....

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a deep learning method that only needs a single photo to make a believable video. If you have a photo of a waterfall, a river, smoke, or clouds, it predicts the previous and the next frame and creates a pretty cool animation. The team described their method in a paper and will present it at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition on 22 June....

As photographers start to explore alternatives to Adobe’s suite of applications, Capture One is a piece of software that’s often recommended as an alternative to Lightroom. While it may be arguably superior in certain aspects, and very similar in others, the workflow is a little different to Lightroom. So, it can take a while for new users to get used to it. In this video, Michael Comeau at On Portraits walks us through his 20 top tips for beginners to Capture One to help newcomers get to grips with the software quickly and speed up their overall workflow....

The company that brought us such amazing sequences as Jean Claude-Van Damme’s “Epic Split” and Super Bowl 2014’s Jaguar – Rendevous commercial seem like the perfect people to need a vehicle like this. As one didn’t already exist, they built their own. London based, The Mill recently announced the Blackbird, a vehicle that can transform in length and width to match any car commercially available (and probably most of those that aren’t)....

Well, YouTuber Neon Airship decided he didn’t want to spend all that much on one, so he set himself a mission to see if he could build something himself that would do the job for around £10 (~$13). Did he manage? Well, you’ll have to watch the video to find out. The short answer is sort-of. He built a pretty decent looking RGB light for lighting effects for a pretty low budget just using a 5v RGB LED strip, a couple of plastic food storage containers, a USB power bank and a whole mess of gaffer tape....

Other than being superhumans, the ISS astronauts are also darn good at photography. They not only have the most amazing view, but they also have the skill required to turn that view into epic photos. One of them is Don Pettit, a veteran of three spaceflights who spent over a year on the ISS. He recently joined Reddit and shared his photo of star trails which quickly went viral. And no wonder, as it’s not only a photo taken in space – it’s also a super-creative one....

My favorite kind of trolling is self-trolling, and Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has already shown us that they’re really good at it. Now they’re back with a new set of stock photos that cover pretty much all stereotypes about Canadians. They are hilarious, free for you to download and use in your projects… Or you can just browse the gallery and have a good laugh. So, what does Series Two of the stock photo gallery contain?...

One of the “fun facts” I remember from my photography classes was that “wide-angle lenses are not for portraits”. Of course, you can always experiment and photograph people with wider focal lengths, but the truth is – it does make them seem a bit weird in the photos. This fun gif shows precisely how the change of focal length affects the face of a person you’re photographing. Lenses with smaller focal lengths distort the face so it looks thinner, while those over 50mm make it more realistic and wider....

If you spend some time scrolling through Instagram feed, I’m sure you’ve noticed that many people post same or similar types of images. The woman behind @insta_repeat account has noticed that as well, so she has decided to create an Instagram account mocking this trend and pointing out to the lack of originality. The person behind @insta_repeat is a 27-year old woman, a filmmaker and an artist living in Anchorage, Alaska....

Should you blur people’s faces when covering protests o should you not? This has been a heated debate lately, and opinions are largely different. But if you’re in the “blur the faces” team and you use an iPhone, now there’s a simple way to do it. A new shortcut lets you blur faces and strip all metadata from images in just one tap. The shortcut is named “Blur Faces” and the man behind it is Noah Conk....

Fujifilm has released some amazing lenses. In fact, there is not really a lens that is not capable, or not sharp enough to please even the toughest critics. However, because Fujifilm have an XF range and an XC range, targeting quality build and higher price over lower price and not so good build quality (compared to the XF premium lenses), some Fujifilm users dismiss the XC series of lenses outright....

Most of us are guilty of babying our camera gear at some point. We want it to look pristine from day one until the day we die (or sell it). But camera gear – and cameras in particular – are made to be used. They’re designed and built to be able to handle the rigours of whatever daily working life can throw at them, at least once you get past a certain price point....

I saw a post from a fellow light painter that grabbed my attention. It implanted itself into my brain and I haven’t been able to let go of it. He pondered “We know that by looking at painters brush strokes how they were feeling at a certain time. In light painting, we “paint” with light. I would be curious to see if emotion could be shown in the brush strokes of light painting too....

On July 2nd around 5 p.m., a drone was spotted flying near Gatwick Airport in the UK. We all know it’s forbidden to fly drones near airports, but maybe we’re not aware how much of a chaos it can cause. A recent visualization from NATS shows exactly how big the disruption was. The runway was closed for 14 minutes and all the arriving flights were directed away. Although 14 minutes may not seem much, when you look at the visualization, you can realize how much mess a single drone near the airport can cause....

Whenever DIYP heads out to cover an event, we get a lot of people asking what gear we’re using to do it. Our kit evolves over time, though and changes from show to show. So, for some events, we shoot new show gear update videos. We’ve decided to do make one such update in Las Vegas at NAB 2019 this year, and here it is. Camera – Sony A7IIILens – Sony Vario-Tessar T* FE 24-70mm f/4 ZA OSSCage – SmallRig 2087Monitor – Aputure VS-5Tripod – Manfrotto 190X Video & 500 fluid headSlider – Syrp Genie II 3-axis kitHandheld Mic – Rode RODElink Newsshooter kitLav Mic – Saramonic UwMic9 Dual wireless lav kitField Recorder – Tascam DR-100...

I’m a big fan of gimbals. I have several from companies like Zhiyun and Moza. For my needs, they’re awesome and fit into my different workflows wonderfully. But in the grand scheme of things, the gimbals most of us own pale in comparison to the $50,000+ Arri Trinity – the world’s most advanced camera stabiliser. Potato Jet got the chance to go speak with one of the masters of the Steadicam, Ari Robbins (before this whole quarantine thing) at the Arri store in Burbank California to check out the Trinity rig that allows him to get some of the most amazing shots you ever saw....

We have seen a fantastic visualization that shows us the chaos a single drone can cause when flying near an airport. But what would happen if a drone actually hit an airplane? Researchers at the University of Dayton Research Institute teamed up with Sinclair College National UAS Training and Certification Center to find out. In this video from Aviation International News, you can see what happens to both the drone and the airplane when they collide in mid-air....