Here's a neat birthday card idea for the Polaroid or photography lovers in your life: make a hand-drawn Polaroid camera spit out a real instant photo! Kayla Davis received this card from her friend Chrissie for her 19th birthday.
Pacific Star is a photography project by Colin Rich in which he sends programmed cameras up to epic heights using homemade weather balloons. This is an interesting step-by-step look into what went into the second launch. After purchasing two Canon compact cameras on eBay, Rich programmed them to take 3 photos every 3 minutes, and shoot a minute of video every fourth minute. The cameras were then insulated in styrofoam, and sent up to 125,000 feet before the balloon burst. With the help of a parachute, the cameras descended for 35 minutes and landed about 15-20 miles away.
Here’s a “duh” idea that might not have crossed your mind: you can …
Sylights (short for “Share Your Lights”) is a …
Nintendo just unveiled the 3DS yesterday, an upcoming portable game console that has …
Thom Hogan is the writer and photographer behind bythom.com, a website that provides extensive information about Nikon gear. He has written over 30 books on computers and photography.
PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Thom Hogan: I’ve always had a weird half-and-half personality: half science/technology, half art. To some degree, that may have been what led me into an undergraduate degree in telecommunications (filmmaking and television production). It let me play with technology and art simultaneously ;~). But I’ve always taken a circuitous route to where I’m going. I went from architecture to music to filmmaking to television to statistics to management to Silicon Valley, with stops at many magazines along the way. The only thing that was constant was that I wrote about what I was doing and what I knew, I taught it to others, and I often photographed alongside that writing. When I dumped my high tech career in the 90’s to run Backpacker magazine, it was the start of emphasizing just those two constants: writing and photography. When I decided to leave Backpacker and Rodale, it happened to coincide with the mass migration from film to digital in photography, and my long tech career, which included designing some early digital cameras, suddenly came back into play.
Five years after acquiring the photo sharing service Flickr, Yahoo has finally obtained ownership of the domain name Flicker.com.
One of the common characteristics of Web 2.0 companies is the use of misspelled words in their name, since the correctly spelled words are typically too pricey for a bootstrapped web startup to purchase early on.
Flickr was one such company, settling for the now ubiquitous name after being unable to purchase Flicker.com.
As you might expect, the enormous popularity of Flickr has led to an absurd amount of traffic for Flicker.com, as people often type in the domain name either as a typo or being ignorant of the "correct" spelling".
Apple has just announced the new Mac mini, which has been redesigned with a sleeker, unibody enclosure that’s 1.4 …
On May 16, Coast Guard investigator Paul Shultz was walking along a Key West, Florida marina when he came across a red Nikon L18. Although the underwater housing surrounding the camera was battered from what appeared to be a long period at sea, the camera was in tip top shape.
LoveLeeSoaps on Etsy has some neat soap …
This beautiful video shows world champion freediver Guillaume Néry plunging into Dean's Blue Hole, the world's second deepest underwater sinkhole. It was filmed by Julie Gautier, a French freediving champion, using a Canon 5D Mark II. Gautier filmed the video while freediving herself, and the stunts were filmed over four afternoons.
I've been dying to take a look at the Canon lens coffee thermos and mug since I first wrote about it back in the beginning of March, but didn't want to buy a set just to take a look. Luckily for me, the nice people over at canonmugs.com sent me some samples to check out and play around with. In this post I'll be sharing some photographs and thoughts about these unique items.
Classics in Lego is a super creative project by Mike Stimpson in which he recreates famous photographs using Legos.
Dalí Atomicus
Here’s an amazingly awesome idea for business cards if you’re a photographer or photo enthusiast. Brooklyn-based photographer and designer …
Editor's note: We came across Duncan McNicholl's work a while back and found it interesting, so we invited him to write a guest post regarding his project. His work has been featured by quite a few publications and websites in recent times.
Many people only experience sub-Saharan Africa through photographs. The teary-eyed child in rags is familiar to all of us as the portrait of poverty charities use to communicate a hopelessness in need of our pity and charity. I reacted very strongly to these images when I returned from Africa in 2008 after a 4 month volunteer placement in Malawi, working with Engineers Without Borders Canada. I compared the images I saw to my Malawian friends – people who embodied intelligence, resilience, and compassion – and I felt lied to.
This stop-motion video will blow you away. Students in Japan created this video of Super Mario for a school …
Flickr has just announced a new feature that allows you to connect your …
Portuguese photographer Antonio Simoes was in South Africa to shoot the World Cup when …
The Spinner 360º is a new plastic camera by Lomography that lets you …
Two weeks ago we posted on the Geotaggers' World Atlas, a project by Eric Fischer that shows heat maps of where photographs are taken in big cities, created using geolocation data from Flickr and Picasa photos.
Fischer now has a new set of maps called Locals and Tourists that distinguish between photos taken by inhabitants of the city and others who are simply passing through.
Some people interpreted the Geotaggers' World Atlas maps to be maps of tourism. This set is an attempt to figure out if that is really true. Some cities (for example Las Vegas and Venice) do seem to be photographed almost entirely by tourists. Others seem to have many pictures taken in piaces that tourists don't visit.
Blue points are locals (determined by whether the person has a history of photographing in that city), red points are tourists, and yellow points indicate photos for which it cannot be determined.
San Francisco
Looks like the leaked photos of the Sony A290 we published last month were of the real …
Here’s a fun story that might convince you to snap all the photos you can of your kids: Alex and …
Olympus Japan released a notice to customers yesterday warning that 1,709 of their Stylus Tough 6010 point-and-shoot cameras were accidentally shipped preloaded with a worm. While the camera is not at risk, Windows users may be infected when the camera is connected to their computer via USB.
News agency Reuters is being accused of biased reporting after it was discovered that photographs released by the agency had …
There seems to be a growing trend of professional photographers teaming up with developers to create the "ultimate" photography application for the iPhone. In September 2009, photographer Chase Jarvis teamed up with Ubermind to create The Best Camera, an ecosystem that revolves around the Best Camera iPhone application.
For all you pixel peepers out there, Apple has posted a …
Google has a new feature that photographers may enjoy: you can now customize …
Engadget and MacRumors were covering Steve Jobs' keynote address at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2010 this morning, where Jobs announced the next-generation iPhone that everyone has already seen through the multiple, highly-publicized leaks in the past couple months.
The leaks suggested that the iPhone 4 would have a new front-facing camera as well as an LED flash in the back, and both these things were confirmed at the keynote today. In addition, the phone will feature a 5 megapixel camera, and high-definition recording at 720p and 30 fps.
I came across an interesting post over at The Guardian a while back that discussed whether Google's ranking algorithms are good at gauging art, and whether the top result for an artist accurately reflects the artist's "best work".
I decided to do the same experiment with famous historical photographers. The following images are the top results when typing the photographers' names into Google's image search:
Berenice Abbott
Brenda Priddy is one of the world's preeminent automotive "spy" photographers, whose work has appeared in many of the top automative publications and websites. Visit her company website and Facebook page.
PetaPixel: Could you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Brenda Priddy: 18 years ago this month I was a part-time photographer (weddings / small commercial), bookkeeper at a jewelry store and mommy to 2 young toddlers. Then, in July of 1992, I spotted an early (1994) Mustang prototype and the rest is history. I originally took the photo just to show my husband, but it soon it ended up on the cover of Automobile Magazine (November 1992)!
Light Warfare is a demonstration of what's possible with light painting and stop motion given enough time and dedication. It was created by Freddie Wong, who also published a tutorial for creating light painting photographs on his website. This amazing 1-minute video required a whopping 13 hours of shooting over two days. Each frame needs to be individually "painted" and -- seeing how complicated some of the scenes are -- must have required pretty long exposures.
Here's an interesting behind-the-scenes video by CNN showing Mario Testino in action. Testino is one of the world's most sought after fashion photographers, and this three part series gives a short but interesting peek into Testino's life and work.
Kyle McDonald is a programmer working on building open source utilities for realtime 3D scanning using structured light, a technique that requires only a projector and a cheap camera.
If Nikon sticks to their regular schedule, the Nikon D4 should be announced sometime in the summer of 2011, 4 years after the announcement of the D3. About 24 hours ago, someone on the Nikon Rumors Forum posted a few links to what they claim is the upcoming D4.
If you need to fix some red-eyes in a photo, but don’t have …
Gosh, if I had access to a HD camera capable of ultra-slow motion, …
Just last week we wrote that the Museum of London had released an augmented reality iPhone app …
"I Am Sitting in a Room" is one of the best known works of experimental music composer Alvin Lucier. In the piece, he records himself speaking, plays it back while re-recording it, and repeated until the words become unintelligible and simply "the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself".
After the enormous success of the Canon 70-200mm Coffee Mug, it was only a matter of time before Nikon-branded cups joined the party. Nikoneans can now rejoice -- a 24-70mm coffee cup has just appeared on eBay as a pre-order for $50. It doesn't appear that Nikon has anything to do with this 1:1 replica cup, but those who have been eagerly waiting for such a thing to appear can now pounce on this awesome (but unofficial) accessory.
Zoriah Miller, commonly known as Zoriah, is an award-winning photojournalist and war photographer whose work has been featured in some of the world's most prestigious galleries, museums, and publications. Check out his website, blog, one-on-one photojournalism workshops, and Wikipedia article.
PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Zoriah Miller: I began photography when I was 15 years old and within the first year of shooting I won a national award and was pretty into the idea of becoming a photojournalist. Three years later I was shooting abroad and had all of my equipment stolen...well, actually I had everything stolen and ended up having to spend some time in a homeless shelter until I could get money and documents to get out of the country...but that is another story. The point was that my camera and lenses were gone and I pretty much gave up. I graduated college, moved to New York, was in the music industry for six years, gave that up to go abroad and study disaster management and humanitarian aid to developing countries, hated that and then picked up a used camera and a plane ticket and have been shooting ever since then.