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California wildfire ‘selfie’ arsonist gets 20 years and a $60 million fine

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Selfies are just a part of our culture today, whether stills or video, but they have been known to land people in hot water a time or two.  Sometimes the consequences are simply a little embarrassment, sometimes very severe (and rightly so).

In what seems more suited to ridicule on America’s Dumbest Criminals, California resident Wayne Allen Huntsman captured a video selfie with the beginnings of what would become known as the King Fire, a wildfire that scorched over almost 100,000 acres of land in El Dorado County, California in 2014.

Is Travel Photography the latest victim in the Photoshop manipulation saga?

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We’ve covered the “evils of Photoshop” as it pertains to human subjects a number of times, but the use of some photography and Photoshop techniques in travel photography are starting to cause concerns to grow that tourists will become disappointed upon arriving at their destination.

Social Media’s constant pressure for “Shares” and “Likes” is only fuelling this trend towards making destinations appear more attractive by intentionally warping our vision of the world.

Scientists have learned how to store images in DNA and then perfectly retrieve them

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As our data creation and acquisition requirements soar, so must the technology to store it all, and a team of computer scientists and electrical engineers from the University of Washington have seem to have made a bit of a breakthrough.

In a paper presented in April at the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages an Operating Systems (ASPLOS), the team detailed one of the first complete systems to encode, store and retrieve digital data using DNA molecules, capable of storing information millions of times more compactly than existing storage technologies.

Model & Photographer couple travel the world creating amazing images as they go

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Originally based on Florida, and drawn together by a common love of photography, Victoria Yore and Terrence Drysdale took their first trip together in June 2015 to Europe, and have been hooked ever since.

Armed with little more than a couple of backpacks, some camera gear, and a one way ticket to Europe, the model & photographer duo set out on their journey to see, experience and photograph everything the world.

Use this time stacking technique to create surreal landscapes

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Stacking photographs made from a locked off tripod over a given duration is not a new technique, and has been commonly used for creating star trail images where single super long exposures can be troublesome, but this application of the process is particularly interesting and beautiful.

An extension of timelapse photography, the Time Stack technique’s goal is to show the passing of time in a single photograph, rather than through a moving video.  In this video tutorial, Canadian photographer Matt Malloy guides us through the creation process.

The new Hasselblad H6D boasts 4K video, 100MP sensor and a touch screen

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When Hasselblad founder, Victor Hasselblad was approached by the Swedish government in 1941 to see if he had the skills to produce a camera identical to one they had captured, his famous reply was “No, but I can make a better one”.

Today, rather than taking the typical route of camera releases and simply updating the model that preceded it, Hasselblad still looks even at their own products with this same mindset and philosophy in order to develop cameras like the all new H6D from the ground up.

Advertising Standards Authority bans Gucci ad after ruling that the model looks “unhealthily thin”

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The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), an advertising watchdog in the UK, yesterday presented a ruling upholding a complaint about a Gucci advert from December last year which describes the model as appearing “unhealthily thin” and “gaunt”.

The complaint about advert labelled by the ASA as “irresponsible” mentions two models.  One model sat down on a couch and the other appearing to lean up against a wall, the images appeared as stills at the end of a video on The Times Website in December 2015.

This photographer needed 17 square meters of mirror to create this image

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When photographer and retoucher Erik Johansson decides to create an image, he certainly makes an effort to push the boat out, quite literally in this case.

In a project that took several months to complete, Erik used 17 square meters of mirror to help produce this extraordinary scene, and while there’s certainly a lot of post and retouching going on here, it was a lot of work in the camera, too!

How to approach strangers on the a street for a portrait

Seeing a random person on the street that you’d love to photograph can rapidly become one of the scariest scenarios out there for many portrait photographers as soon as they start to consider how to approach them.  With “Don’t talk to strangers!” being drummed into us from a very young age, it’s just one of those things which seems hard wired into our system.

If the thought of asking a stranger if you can create their portrait puts you in a frozen panic, New York based portrait photographers Miguel Quiles and Jeff Rojas are here to help with some tips on approaching people you don’t know in order to get them in front of your camera.

This photographer filled a house with sand to exhibit her photos of houses filled with sand

Many of us have seen photographs of the abandoned mining town of Kolmanskop in Namibia.  Even if you don’t remember the name of the place, it’s difficult to forget photographs of houses, being reclaimed by the surrounding desert, flooded with sand.

For most of us, that’s about as far as this story goes, but for Australian photographer Emma McEvoy, this was the beginning of a journey.  Not content with simply seeing photos of this location, Emma made it her mission to visit one day, and to photograph it for herself.

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