Articles

What Instagram Can Teach Us About Bird Photography: The Most Photogenic Bird and Color Preferences A research article by: Katja Thömmes Cognitive Psychology Group, Department of Psychology, University of Konstanz, Germany Gregor Hayn-Leichsenring Experimental Aesthetics Group, Institute of Anatomy, University of Jena, Germany Abstract What makes a great bird photo? To examine this question, we collected over 20,000 photos of birds from the photo-sharing platform Instagram with their corresponding liking data. We standardized the total numbers of Likes and extracted information from the image captions. With this database, we investigated content-related image properties to see how they affect the ubiquitous online behavior of pressing...

Humidity means moisture in the air. It is water vapor and can't be seen or felt or smelled. But it is always present in the air around us. Usually the water vapor is about 2 or 3 percent of the air by volume. That's not very much, but that little bit can make a big difference to how the air behaves. Air can hold only a certain amount of humidity at a given temperature. When the air is full, we say the Relative Humidity is 100%. This is a pretty common condition. It happens on cold mornings when there is dew on cars and on the grass, or when it is foggy or raining. It can happen indoors too, for instance in a bathroom where you are taking a shower, or in a butterfly house where water is sprayed into the air. Most of the time the air...

We tend to refer to the image area a camera can capture by the lens Focal Length (FL) alone. However, this does not serve us well as what is captured is a combination of what the lens projects onto the sensor, and what the sensor captures. In fact, the two differ: what the lens projects is an Angle of View (AoV) - (although I personally prefer Angle of Projection), and the sensor captures is a Field of View (FoV). Angle of View: A simple lens FL is defined as the distance from the lens' Optical Centre to the Centre of Focus (#5). In the more complex modern lenses, it's taken as the distance from the Centre of Focus to the Focal Plane...

Diffraction softening is a phenomenon that happens when we shoot at narrow apertures. The image sharpness suffers. The narrower the aperture, the more softening occurs. It’s due to the wave nature of light, and is inherent to picture taking. It is possible to calculate the effects of diffraction. When the size of the blur approximates the size of a pixel in a particular sensor, the system is considered to be at the diffraction "limit". This sounds kind of scary, but it is important to know that the diffraction limit doesn't limit you at all. At the diffraction limit, the effect is hardly visible even if you pixel-peep. The Canon R7 with 32.5 MPx has a high pixel density; thus its pixels are small. Because of that, its diffraction...

I've been waiting a long time for this release. I absolutely loved my original EF 35L, and the 35L II equally as much. They were my goto glass for low-light wedding receptions and often attached to my camera around the house and for day trips. I got a chance to use this new RF 35L lens for about 30min at a local camera shop. While this doesn;t allow me to do an in-depth longterm usage review, I can tell you upfront that I lost any desire to add this to my bag. Here's the easy part: Sharpness, contrast, flare resistance, color rendering, and AF accuracy/speed are on par with what I would expect from an RF-L lens. Great, that's what we all expected anyways. Here are my issues: Distortion: First and foremost, I immediately noticed how...

Circa 1990 I worked at newspapers for 10 years back last century. I went to college for that. I shot everything, and a lot of it. I'd shoot and develop 3 or 4 assignments a day, 6 or 7 days a week. Paying the bills. So I learned what worked for me, if nothing else, from just pure brute force. And a lot of that meant learning the rules of composition, or at least being able to see the concepts while being a little fuzzy on their exact definitions. I hear photographers say, "I'm an artist, a rebel. I don't need no stinkin rules holding me back." I'm all for that. Stretch your vision, stand apart. That's the definition of art and I'll applaud with heart when you pull it off. We remember the people who can do it consistently. Strive for...

There has been a perennial question as to whether a photographer is considered talented, or more accurately a success, if their work is not seen, recognized and critiqued during their lifetime. In much like the question as to whether a photograph is really complete unless it is printed (and that's not the focus here), the issue of debate has been that if one takes photograph, if no-one apart from the photographer sees their work, are they 'successful' as a photographer? Even more intriguing, why would someone take images and not even process the film? Would it be just a matter of economics, or was the imperative the actual act of capturing the image? Garry Winogrand, while famous and successful, left behind, unpublished, 300,000 images...