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What’s new for 2022? From June 8 through June 22, NANPA encourages members and interested photographers to participate in NANPA’s 2022 Nature Photography Day iNaturalist Bioblitz and help document biodiversity in your neighborhood and across the continent. A bioblitz is an event where individuals go out to find and identify as many species as possible in a specific area over a short period of time. For example, a group of volunteers could spend three hours one morning exploring a meadow or repeatedly visit a woods over the course of a week. In either case, they’re creating a snapshot of the...

Candid photos may conjure up that really unflattering picture your uncle took at your wedding with his shiny new camera. The angle is wrong, he’s somehow added 50 pounds to everyone, and the facial expressions…well, we don’t need to say any more about that. However, great candid images do exist—case in point, the body of work by Henri Cartier-Bresson, known as the father of photojournalism. He believed so strongly in what he called the “decisive moment” that he wrote an entire book on the subject. Cartier-Bresson proves that with a little luck and mastery of composition, candid photos are a...

Children and dreams 13, owned by SpiderFamilyChildren and dreams 16, owned by @TorokuroApe“You know, children have an irrepressible urge to draw on walls and floors,” the artist and educator Leyla Emektar admits. As a visual arts teacher in Kocaeli, Turkey, she’s learned to celebrate that impulse rather than discourage it. Once, when she and her pupils were working en plein air, a student was struck with inspiration and decided to draw, with chalk, on the wall of the school’s garden. Seeing the illustration–a picture of a small house–Emektar had an idea.  Since that day, she’s collaborated with several of her...

The Luminosity Mask is a versatile image-editing tool, enabling you to make selective tone-based adjustments to specific portions of an image. In other words, you can modify highlights, shadows, or midtones in one area without affecting other parts of a photograph. This technique can be used to dramatically enhance all sorts of images, from portraits to nature and landscape photos. There are a variety of ways to get the job done, and today we’ll show one of the easiest and most effective. Nino Batista is a photo-retouching expert; known for straightforward tutorials that simplify seemingly complicated editing tasks. This episode...

Assignments are brought to you by mpb.com Bowfiddle Rock is iconic in the Northeast of Scotland. It can be visited at any time of the year as the Moray coast has a special weather system that can deliver great (or equally, but slightly devastatingly, poor) light. There are multiple vantage points - a tiny rocky beach, which is where my camera and tripod were located for this picture, but also headlands to the east and west that provide unique and interesting views. Care needs tio be taken going down the short steep path and onto the stony beach - its...

Motorola is set to release a new smartphone in July. And if the fact that Motorola is still releasing smartphones at all wasn’t surprising enough, this one’s going to contain a 200-megapixel camera, the company has confirmed through a post on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. It’s expected to be the long-rumoured Motorola Frontier and is being touted as a “new benchmark for image experience”.The timing of the announcement is interesting after announcing just last week that it will be making use of the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 CPUs in an upcoming smartphone. There’s been no word on...

By Staff Updated May 22, 2022 Today’s Photo Of The Day is “The Calm Before The Storm” by Christopher Mills. Location: Littleton, Maine. “A huge shelf cloud forms above the backroads of Littleton, Maine,” describes Mills. “As it went over, it was so still and quiet before we got hit with heavy rain and wind. It was really eerie.” Want to get your images in the running for a Photo of the Day feature? Photo of the Day is chosen from various galleries, including Assignments, Galleries and Contests. Assignments have weekly winners that are featured on the website homepage, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. To...

Nikon announced this week that marketing data showed the Nikon Z9 was the “top-selling professional flagship full-frame mirrorless camera in the First Quarter of 2022.” It’s a pretty big deal for a much-storied brand that has, so far, shown some signs of struggling with its transition from DSLRs to mirrorless cameras. Owning a niche Related: Nikon plans to expand its Z-mount lens lineup to 50+ lenses by 2025 Nikon’s announcement comes with a few caveats. The data is from market research consultants, The NPD Group, and is based on US sales over the first three months of this year. It...

We like to throw in a curve ball every now and then! Paper sounds dead easy, doesn’t it, and really it can be – here’s a piece of paper, here’s my photograph of it. But to make a photograph of ‘paper’ interesting, you really do need to go that extra mile. You need to think about the following things to add interest to your photograph. TextureLighting (Doesn’t need to be expensive)ColoursAngles and shapesEdges and leading linesLots of options and things there to get you started! There are some amazing examples on the interwebs of what people have made with paper,...

Living in small (seven to twelve birds) family colonies, acorn woodpeckers exhibit some of the most extreme social behaviors found in the birding world. First and foremost is each colony’s diligence in establishing communal “granary trees” packed with acorns. Each fall during the peak of oak mast production, a colony of these woodpeckers begins drilling thousands of storage holes in the soft wood of large pines. Then — working cooperatively — the birds begin transporting acorns to their selected granary trees and carefully tucking them into the drilled holes. Often supplemented by fruit, insects, and sap, the acorns sustain the...