September 2010

Mysterious and Fishy Nikon Q Photos

The above photographs were anonymously emailed to Nikon Rumors recently, and appear to show Nikon presenting some sort of upcoming "Q" camera. The fact that Nikon has begun including the text "F Mount" on their rear lens caps seems to indicate that we might see a new mount introduced soon, possibly for a new EVIL system and in time for Photokina.

Wiggle Stereoscopy 3D Video of Yo-Yo Tricks by Doctor Popular

Super nerd Doctor Popular recently did a wiggle stereoscopy experiment using two Flip video cameras and $10 in nuts and bolts, filming himself doing yo-yo tricks at AT&T Park in San Francisco. Wiggle stereoscopy is when images from two slightly offset points of view are quickly alternated, resulting in a 3D effect that does not require special glasses to view. A few months ago we shared the world's first music video that utilized the technique.

Bicycle Delivery of Impossibly Large Loads in Shanghai

Totems is a series by photographer Alain Delorme that imagines an augmented reality of Chinese migrant workers in Shanghai transporting monstrous shipments from place to place using bicycles. Delorme captured 6,000 photographs over the course of 44 days while biking around Shanghai, and then created these photo-manipulations using Photoshop.

Make Adjustments in Lightroom with Physical Sliders

Lightroom adjustment sliders are nice and all, but wouldn't it be neat if fine adjustments could be made using our hands and physical sliders rather than a mouse and virtual ones? There's an open source program called PADDY for Lightroom that allows you to map adjustment settings in Lightroom to external devices, including MIDI faders with sliders and knobs. Here's the description:

Long Exposure Photographs of Facebook Albums

These photographers were taken by Phillip Maisel as part of his project, "A More Open Place". He made long exposure photographs of Facebook photos while flipping through albums, creating this surreal, layered effect.

Photographer Offers Groupon Deal Using Stolen Photographs, Chaos Ensues

It looked like quite a deal -- a photographer with an impressive portfolio of photographs offering a $500 photo package for $65 on the social buying website Groupon. The offer was so enticing that all 1,175 packages quickly sold out, generating over $76,000 in revenue. That's when people started noticing something fishy about Dana Dawes and her photography.

Thousands of People in 21 Countries Walking in Stop-Motion

life.turns. is a creative crowd-sourced stop-motion project by photo sharing service Blipfoto. By dividing the motion of a human walking into eight simple frames, they invited contributors to submit photos of people in one of the eight poses. 1025 photos were submitted in 40 days. After putting the submissions in sequence and aligning them, what resulted was a stop-motion video of thousands of people in 21 different countries walking.

Migrant Workers Photographed as Superheroes

Superheroes is a project by photographer Dulce Pinzon in which she shoots Mexican migrant workers in New York City as well-known comic book characters while they're on the job. In addition to creating the photographs, Pinzon documents the worker's name, the hometown in Mexico, and the amount of money they send back to their families each week.

Introducing the Leica Look-Alike Skin for the iPhone 4

Remember the awesome Leica M9 iPhone 4 skin that we featured back in August? If you desperately wanted one, today is your lucky day -- we've created our own and it's for sale in the PetaPixel Store for $13 with free shipping within the US!

The super detailed plastic skin is designed to protect your iPhone 4 while making it look just like a Leica rangefinder camera.

Nikon Officially Announces the D7000, Two Pro Lenses, and a Speedlight

Nikon has officially announced the D7000, a camera that we've know about for quite some time now through various rumors. The camera replaces the Nikon D90, and has a number of interesting upgrades: 11 autofocus points has been increased to a whopping 39-point system, the megapixel count has been increased from 12.3 to 16.2, the 96% viewfinder coverage has been replaced with pro-level 100% coverage, parts are now beefed up with magnesium alloy, one SD card slot has been increased to two, 4.5 fps has been upped to 6fps, ISO can be boosted up to 25,600 (up from 6,400), and the camera now does 1080p video recording at 24fps.

Meet Jim Reed, a Photog Who Grabs His Camera When People Run in Fear

Jim Reed is a photographer that does full-time storm chasing. When normal people are running away from things like hurricanes and tornados, Jim Reed grabs his camera, hops into his car, and sets out on a mission of making amazing storm photographs. The above video is a short segment by Good Morning America interviewing him and promoting his book. It sure takes nerve to head into photo shoots not knowing whether you'll make it out in once piece.

Nikon D7000 DSLR Photos Leaked

What appear to be legitimate photos of the soon-to-be-announced Nikon D7000 DSLR were leaked onto the web today. The camera is expected to replace the D90, occupying a midrange DX sensor spot a step above the recently announced Nikon D3100. The official announcement for this camera, some new lenses, and a new Speedlight flash are expected to come at midnight tonight. Stay tuned.

Iconic Civil Rights Photographer Exposed as FBI Informant

Some of the most raw, intimate and iconic photographs of the Civil Rights Movement were taken by photojournalist Ernest C. Withers. He was present during the entire Emmett Till trial, when Martin Luther King, Jr. rode the first desegregated bus, and in the hotel room where Dr. King was assassinated. Many civil rights activists would cite Withers' images as key to informing America of their plight and fight for equality.

But recent reports by Memphis publication The Commercial Appeal indicate that Withers, who passed away in 2007, was also informing the FBI -- on their payroll.

The Commercial Appeal posted documents indicating that while Withers was photographing key members of the movement, he was also acting eyes and ears for a now inoperative wing of the FBI that heavily tracked civil rights activists.

Due to a clerical error revealing Withers' informant number, reporters at The Commercial Appeal were able to connect Withers' name to informant activities.

Canon Announces the G12 and SX30IS

A week after their rival Nikon unveiled their P7000 compact camera for prosumers, Canon is firing back with their newly announced G12. The cameras are pretty similar actually -- the G12 has a 10 megapixel sensor, 5x lens, 2.8 inch swiveling LCD screen, a special HDR mode, and (most importantly) 720p HD video recording. It arrives in the beginning of October for $500.

Photos of People Switching Places

Look at the above photos. Now look again. The photos are now diamonds! Notice anything? When I saw these photos the first time, it actually took me a few seconds to realize what was going on. I think it was a case of change blindness. Switcheroo is a fun project by Hana Pesut in which she has two people take two photos where they switch places while everything else remains the same -- including the clothes!

Olympus E-5 and Samsung NX100 Officially Unveiled After Much Leakage

Looks like the rumors were dead on. Both the Olympus E-5 DSLR and Samsung NX1000 EVIL cameras have been officially announced by their respective companies with exactly the same design and specs that have been circulating the blogosphere. Camera makers haven't been doing a good job at keeping their news under wraps as of late.

Kate Moss LAX Video Helps Pass New Law Against California Paparazzi

We've covered quite a few stories of photographers being harassed while doing legitimate photography, but what about cases in which photographers are doing the harassing? For many of you, paparazzi likely come to mind. The above video was published by Hollywood.tv back in 2008, and shows supermodel Kate Moss trying to leave Los Angeles International Airport with her young daughter while being hounded by a swarm of paparazzi.

Canon G12 Price Leaked by Print Shop

A print shop in Paris called BK Photo just released a product catalog that includes the not-yet-announced Canon G12 and its price: 549 Euros (~$706 US). Pretty much everything about this camera is known already from various leaks and accidentally published news articles. It'll be a 10 megapixel camera with HD video recording and a special HDR feature that automatically snaps bad photos (just kidding).

Seamless One World Portrait by Jock McDonald

Jock McDonald is a San Francisco-based photographer that has travelled the world, photographing people of different ages and cultures. He recently teamed up with animator Paul Blain to transform his black-and-white portraits spanning decades into a single 17-minute long video. The twist is that the transitions between faces are seamless using morphing, resulting in what feels like a single, dynamic portrait of the world.

Canon EIS Mirrorless System Rumors Floating Around

There's a very improbable rumor floating around about a new Canon EIS (Electro Imaging System) mirrorless system that will be announced in mid-2011. The rumor was first posted to a couple Chinese forums, xitek and 520dc. EOSHD then created the above graphic with a fake logo and non-EVIL camera design.

So what's in the rumor? The new Canon EIS 60 mirrorless camera will supposedly have a sensor nearly identical in size to the Micro Four Thirds system that captures 22 megapixels. Continuous shooting goes up to a whopping 20 frames per second at 5.5 megapixels. HD video recording is included, and ISO is expandable up to 25,600.

Olympus Set to Unveil the E-5 DSLR

The above teaser was leaked late last week, revealing that Olympus has a E-series DSLR announcement on September 15th. It is rumored to be the E-5, which will succeed their E-3 flagship DSLR, and comes about three years after the E-3 was announced. Rumored specs include a 12.3 megapixel sensor, HD (720p) video recording at 30fps, 5 fps shooting, in-body image stabilization, swiveling LCD display, 11 autofocus points, build-in wireless flash, and ISO that goes up to 6400.

BBC Series from 1983 Featuring Masters of Photography

In 1983 the BBC aired a series called "Master Photographers" in which they interviewed some of the biggest names in photography at the time, including Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The series can't be found anywhere on DVD, but luckily many of the episodes have been uploaded to YouTube. If you're at all interested in learning how historical greats worked and thought, this is a video series you have to bookmark and chew through.

Everyday South Africans and Their Bikes

Nic Grobler and Stan Engelbrecht have a great photography project in which they examine the bicycling culture in South Africa.

[...] we are not photographing people who ride purely for exercise or recreation, but instead we are focussing on those who use bicycles as an integral tool in their day-to-day existence. We've noticed that in South Africa, especially in the major centers, very few people use bicycles as mode of transport. This is very strange since we have no proper public transport infrastructure, and that which does exist is expensive and unsafe.

The duo raised $15,000 through social funding website Kickstarter in 55 days, and traveled around South Africa meeting and photographing the cyclists they met. They're currently working on raising an additional $7,500 to have 3,000 copies of their Bicycle Portraits book published.

Use Your Webcam as Scanner Camera

Texas A&M graduate student Roman Kogan has written an interesting program that turns your webcam into scanner camera.

This program turns your webcam into a scanner camera, similar to the ones used to record photo finishes, but much, much, much slower. With it, you can create images like the ones on this page with ease and with no digital manipulation! It works by taking one pixel line at a time and arranging those slices in a line to produce the image. Thus one dimension of the image is spacial, and the other is temporal.

Strange Contact Sheet Self Portraits

Remember the contact sheet art we shared a while back? Photographer Karl Baden does something similar -- he creates strange contact sheet self-portraits. These images were all created back in 1980. How a roll of film is exposed needs to be carefully planned out in order to know exactly where each shot will appear on the resulting contact sheet.

Each photo is a pretty normal shot of some area of Baden's face or hands, but when combined into a contact sheet, the resulting image is quite... unique.

Enlightening the Capture and Processing of Lightning

Living in the Southwest United States gives me a great opportunity to capture lighting. Every summer “Monsoon Season” arrives, officially June 15 through Sept 15th, in Arizona. Prevailing northwesterly winds carry humid air north out of Mexico where it meets the hot air of the desert, resulting in powerful thunderstorms nearly everyday. The thunderstorms often produce localized areas of heavy wind, thick blowing dust (Haboobs), rain, and most importantly, lightning. I regularly track the storms on the local Doppler radar feeds and try to guess where the best shooting will take place.

Canon 7D Footage Slowed Down to 1000 Frames per Second

If you don't have the $2,500 needed to rent a Phantom camera for a day but would like to have super slow motion in your videos, you can fake the effect using special software designed for the task. The above video by Oton Bačar was recorded on a Canon 7D at 60 frames per second, but was slowed down to mimic 1000fps in After Effects with Twixtor, a plugin that allows you to speed up or slow down footage smoothly. It uses warping and interpolation to provide smooth results, avoiding the choppiness that you see when you play normal video back in "slow motion".

Unbelievably Realistic Camera Tour of a Computer Generated Classroom

If you were reading PetaPixel earlier this year, you probably remember the jaw-dropping CGI animation titled "The Third & The Seventh". Here's another extremely realistic and detailed computer-generated animation that simulates a camera traveling through a classroom (with lens flares and all). It was created by Israel-based Studio Aiko.