Mobile Photography

You've not mastered your DSLR until you can shoot in manual mode. Here we answer the common questions about shooting in manual mode, as well as the advantages it can give you.

The Bonzart Lit should look somewhat familiar since we shared its big brother, the Ampel, with you back in June. But even though the toy camera-style design is the same, the two cameras offer very different experiences. The Ampel was a not-quite-toy camera with a tilt-shift lens built in, whereas the Lit is a very-much-toy camera that offers a fun and strictly non-professional photo experience on the cheap.

In some ways, Bonzart made this little digital shooter as simple as they possibly could. It comes equipped with only 3MP of resolution and a fixed focus pinhole lens that translates into slow shutter speeds and noticeable vignetting.

Given all that, it’s fascinating that Bonzart would see fit to equip the tiny toy cam with exposure control (up to + or -6); a choice between spot, center or multi metering modes; Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Flourescent and Tungsten white balance settings; a timer, tripod mounting hole and burst mode.

Additionally, the expected filtering options are also available, including B&W, Sepia and Negative, as well as Red, Green or Blue tints.

French photographer Julien Coquentin's series Please Draw Me a Wall is a curious combination of street art and photography. By having his subjects (sometimes himself) interact with wall art as if it were real, he creates fantasy worlds using only a few props and drawings that come call art and others defacment. 

Please Draw Me a Wall doesn’t concern itself with issues of reality, however. Instead, the characters in the photos — most often a little girl — are transported into an imaginative wall art world

Manual focus can be useful in situations where auto focus struggles. Your camera's auto focus can struggle to find something to lock on to when it's dark. At dusk and dawn too, autofocus might make getting a great photo hard. Switch to manual focus and you'll guarantee that what you want to be in focus is. Autofocus can sometimes struggle to lock on to fast moving subjects such as horse racing or motorsport. Manual focus will work better here as you can pre focus on a spot that you know the subject will pass through, and all you have to do is press the shutter at the right time to ensure an in focus shot. 

"Photography can be a little difficult to understand. Often times, the reason for this is that finding honest advice about photography can be difficult. This article will give some pointed tips and advice that will hopefully put you on the path to taking great pictures. Keep your photographic techniques simple and uncomplicated.

Learn the uses of the different shutter speeds. Your camera will have setting indicators for S, M, A, and P modes. “P” means program mode.

Purchase a memory card large enough to store the many photographs you will take on your way to becoming a better photographer. When you have a spacious memory card, then you will be able to save all of your pictures. Composition is an important factor that every beginning photographer should consider and educate themselves on. If composition is lacking, your photograph as a whole will feel as if it’s lacking something."

Photos taken from a hot air balloon are not as common as aerial photos taken from the window seat of an airplane or helicopter, but they’re just as majestic, if not more so. An airplane usually cruises above the clouds, and while that scene is beautiful in itself, you can’t fully appreciate nature’s many spectacles from so high up with a thick blanket of clouds in between

The Camera app’s new vision: Apple completely overhauled the Camera app’s interface in iOS 7, giving it a different look, feel, and style of operation, with slick performance throughout. Using the text-based swipe interface is much easier than poking at tiny buttons, as in previous versions, and it lets you access the different camera types much more quickly and easily. Just swipe to the Photo camera and tap, and you have a picture.

It’s hip to be square: The new Square camera is Apple’s answer to the Instagram-style cam that has become ubiquitous since Instagram arrived on the scene and square photos became uber-cool to a generation born too late for the original Polaroid era. With iOS 7 anyone can take a square photo—with or without the obligatory filter. For some snapshooters, that capability may be enough to entice them away from Instagram altogether.

Map this: When you’re constantly snapping images, remembering where you took each shot in the Camera Roll becomes a chore. Although iOS 6 did have a photo mapper, that mapper wasn’t nearly as specific as the new Collections feature. Collections sorts through all your photos and organizes them by date and location. When you tap the location, it automatically moves you to the map.

From classic headshots to light-hearted Facebook snaps, we have 6 quick and easy self-portrait ideas to liven up your photography. 

Self-portraits don’t have to be shaky instant shots taken with a smartphone. Since the earliest days of photography, self-portraits have been taken seriously as a way of expressing a photographer’s creativity, improving camera skills and practicing techniques.

Most photography students are now regularly given self-portrait tasks and coursework, as it’s a brilliant way for them to hone their skills. It can seem a little intimidating to plan and take a shot of yourself, but our six simple, easy-to-set-up self portraits are a great way to get started.

You don’t need more kit than your DSLR, a kit lens and a tripod, but the latter is essential as you’ll need to compose your photos carefully in advance and have freedom to move about in front of the camera.

When it comes to taking a self-portrait from a distance, a wireless remote makes focusing and shooting a whole lot easier. Don’t worry too much if you haven’t got one, though – we’ve got all the info on how to take shots with a self-timer or intervalometer instead.

Two years ago, I paid for a professional photo shoot of my son, Keane. He was 4 months old at the time. The results were good but I had a huge "itch" to achieve studio-quality photos on my own.

Good or bad, photography as a medium is closely tied to the technological heritage of our cameras. As a result, technological developments often influence the tyoe of gear we use and the type of photographs we take. With that in mind, here are some areas of innovation that are likely to create even more change in the way we take pictures and the way manufacturers design cameras in the future. 

The liquid lens uses electrical signals to shape a drop of liquid to focus light on the film plane. According to some, liquid lenses offer the potential for an 85% size reduction in lenses, and they’ve already been used in a number of imaging devices like security cameras and barcode scanners.

So far, no one’s been able to build a liquid lens large enough and sharp enough for use on a high-end digital camera, but the potential isn’t lost on lens manufacturers. Olympus, Sony, Samsung and Canon have all filed patents for liquid lens systems

Tech savvy camera-owners have already found plenty of ways to tinker with their gear on the back-end. The folks at Magic Lantern, for example, have already figured out how to grab RAW video from certain Canon DSLRs, and have even put a simple video game on the Canon EOS 7D.

But just recently, Sony released the Application Programming Interface (API) for a small portion of its camera lineup, allowing developers to build apps for smartphones that can communicate with wireless Sony cameras. It looks like Sony hopes third parties will use this information to build wi-fi remotes for its cameras. It’s a positive sign that Sony is open to distributing proprietary data to the public, just like Apple did for its iPhones back in 2008.

If Sony, or another camera manufacturer, continue down this path and open up more of their private development tools, they’re sure to see new and inspired programs created for their cameras.

The world's most popular free resource for learning how to use off-camera flash.

For me, the first thought of social media headshots was in an email exchange a while back with fellow blogger Ben Popken. He was sporting a cooler-than-thou avatar pic, and I asked him about it.

He told me that he "had it done," by photographer Nikola Tamindzic [NSFW]. In an instant, this made total sense to me. We register visual impressions in a fraction of a second, and Ben was smart enough to make the most of that for his online presence. Think of the number of images that hit you on a given day, and how efficient you are at making subconscious assessments based on image content and style.

Aerial landscape photography and fashion photography hardly go hand-in-hand in most peoples' minds, but that might change once you've taken a look at Joseph Ford's uncanny series of Aerial mashups. As you might imagine, creating these photographs was no easy feat. Although they selected landscapes and clothes that would go well together, the clothes had to be lit and set up just right to match the landscapes.

"One such shot is the ring shot. It is what’s known as a detail shot, and while this may not be the most important shot of the wedding, it is one of the shots that helps sets the tone of an album, and can allow for a lot of creativity if you have the time.

Welcome to "Moving Image," our roundup of the best photos from around the world this week.