October 2010

Update: This giveaway is now over. The winners were randomly selected and announced below. HDRSoft recently released version 4.0 …

American NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless II is suing British singer Dido over the photo used for the album cover of "Safe Trip Home". The photo shows McCandless "free-flying" hundreds of feet from the Orbiter using a Manned Manuevering Unit (MMU). McCandless was the first person to do an untethered spacewalk.

Editor's note: The checklist presented in this post is also available as a text file for you to print out and carry along for reference. This post was first published here.

Almost all of the camera equipment I have ever owned was purchased used. While this isn’t something to be proud of, I do like to think I know a thing or two about cameras and lenses. I have run into the occasional problems with lenses, but I made sure I had the option to return them if they had issues. I have also purchased a few lenses and cameras from people on Craigslist as well and as long as you know what you’re getting and tried it out when you made the purchase, you should be covered. There are a few things that I always check and I’m putting them up here in the hope that you might find some of it useful.

The Internet was abuzz yesterday due to a secret meeting at Adobe's offices between the head honchos of Microsoft (Steve Ballmer) and Adobe (Shantanu Narayen). The New York Times reports:

The meeting, which lasted more than an hour, covered a number of topics, but one of the main thrusts of the discussion was Apple and its control of the mobile phone market and how the two companies could team up in the battle against Apple. A possible acquisition of Adobe by Microsoft were among the options.

Whoa. Acquisition. That's a pretty deal. So big, in fact, that the rumor drove Adobe's stock price up 11.5% yesterday, adding about $1.5 billion to their market cap.

When Jon Martin found an old Kodak Ektar 101mm f4.5 lens from the 1940's at work, he decided to try it on his D700 by freelensing to testing and see if it was compatible. After finding that it was, he began on building a rig to use it as a tilt-shift lens. He ended up building a rig using old camera gear and some custom wood parts.

Some battery chargers (e.g. those that come with Canon's pro and prosumer cameras) plug directly into the wall and have prongs that fold into the charger, while others (e.g. the Canon T2i charger) connect to the wall via a removable cable. Though this may be more space efficient when connecting to a socket or surge protector, the extra chord takes up space and can be a hassle. CheesyCam has a clever solution: use an Apple wall plug duck head adapter to transform the charger into a wall charger.

This has got to be one of the saddest uses of imagery ever. The Daily Mail …

Update on 12/9/21: This video has been removed by its creator.

Back in August a photo from a commercial shoot leaked onto the Internet showing a mysterious white camera rumored to be the Samsung NX100.

If you're sick of having your precious photographs ripped off and digital watermarking isn't your thing, you can use this translucent copyright symbol to embed an obnoxious copyright symbol in all of your photographs! The mysterious Martin Nachtwey tells duckrabbit,

What I do is use a perspex © symbol that I dangle in front of the lens. It works a treat. No man, big or small, is stripping that mofo out of the image…I don’t see any problem in letting your readers in on the secret…all you need is a sheet of perspex, a jigsaw, a stick and some thread.

I have written all the small print onto the sign, so it is only readable under enlargement/reproduction. Another benefit of my method is that it works for film as well as digital!

The above photo of a defiant Herring Gull braving a wave has won this years …

It was only at the beginning of the year that the megapixel race for cell phone cameras hit 14.6 megapixels, but now Sony has unveiled a 16.41 back-illuminated CMOS sensor that can shoot 15 frames per second at full resolution, and is capable of HD video recording (30fps at 1080p and 60fps at 720p).

Pixilation is the stop motion technique in which humans are used as the subject, moving through slight changes in pose and position in each successive frame. Eric Hanus, a recent graduate from Indiana University, created the above video (titled "Day Drunk") using the technique, and doing it with a old, hacked film camera to boot. Hanus tells us,

The Internet viral sensation "Double Rainbow" video was captured on January 8th, 2010. About two weeks later on the 23rd (and long before that video went viral), I saw a double rainbow myself when looking out my window. I quickly grabbed my camera (a Canon 40D at the time) with my 16-35mm lens (I wanted the widest shot possible) and ran out to shoot the rainbow.

Here’s a pretty clever ad by Panasonic promoting their Lumix G2 camera. It’s fun seeing photographic terms appear in …

Instagram is a new iPhone photo app developed by Stanford grads Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger that offers Hipstamatic-style filters for your photos, easy uploads to popular services, and a Tumblr-esque community built right in. While photo sharing apps in the App Store are a dime a dozen, there are a few things that set Instagram apart.

This video is hardly new (appeared back in 2008), but could be helpful for those of you who haven’t …

SonyAlphaRumors received a pretty interesting tip yesterday regarding the design of the upcoming Sony Alpha A77 (which is still a rumor at this point). The anonymous tipster wrote that the camera -- successor to the A700 -- will have an innovative design that boasts a hybrid viewfinder by blending optical and electronic images:

Yesterday Sony explained the new system that will be used for the incoming a77 (the a750 will use a regular SLR design). Practically the are using two semi-transparent mirrors and a high-resolution EVF to reinforced the live image. They are using a reflexive technology design called 70/30, between each semi-transparent mirrors.

The final image in the viewfinder will have 30% of original image and 70% of electronic reinforced image through the new EVF.

UK-based designer Chrissie Macdonald was commissioned by Marque Creative to create art for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Among the things she made was a neat camera and flash created entirely using card stock. It almost looks like it's a digital creation done using Adobe Illustrator.

A French book titled “Obtenez le maximum du Nikon D800” (translates to “Getting the most from the Nikon D800”) …

Joe Wigfall is a photo enthusiast and street photographer that won WNYC's Street Shots Challenge back in 2008.

I have a small obsession with cameras, also, a slightly smaller obsession with film cameras. My favourite camera is Lubitel 166B. It is a medium format camera, this basically means it has a large image area to capture photos, using the larger 120mm film. The Lubitel's were twin lens reflex (TLR) cameras. They have a little pop up cover on top, you then look down through the viewfinder. The nature of holding the camera like this will getting the settings set up for the shot can sometimes be a pain, so having a nice camera strap to hold it at the correct height, and nice and steady is a great idea.

Cassandra C. Jones created the above tribute to Eadweard Muybridge's horse motion studies by sifting through 5,000 digital photographs to find 12 that matched the frames in his study. Jones then looped the 12 images in an animation, resulting in a "snap motion" video of a horse galloping.

Panasonic has pulled the wraps off its new Lumix branded phone that we first reported on last week. The website set up for the phone now has photos and diagrams, though it's in Japanese. We now know that it's a slider phone that looks like a stretched out compact camera, with "13.2 Megapixels" etched on the front to remind everyone that your cell phone packs quite a punch.

This watch has a maximum aperture of f/2. Wait… What? That’s right, this novelty watch for uber photo geeks …

We've featured quite a few gigapixel photo projects here on PetaPixel, but this one's a bit different. HAL9000 is a project out of Italy that takes famous paintings and shoots gigapixel photographs of them, allowing you to get up close and personal with the masterpieces through a special online viewer.

Fancy camera bags and backpacks are nice, but they’re often thief magnets that broadcast the fact that they contain …

Behold -- A Leica M8 camera created using Lego bricks! Schfio Factory this awesome toy camera using a $50 pink Lego digital camera and carefully building bricks around it to turn into Leica look-alike. It shoots at 3 megapixels and holds up to 80 photographs on its internal memory. Sweet.

What was supposed to be a routine press preview of the Turner Prize exhibition in London turned a two-hour standoff between photographers and Tate Britain gallery contract-wavers.

Press photographers refused to sign a problematic form at the door that required them to guarantee their images would not "result in any adverse publicity" for the host gallery and reportedly signed away permission sans-royalties for gallery publicity.

Instead of securing a monopoly over the favorable images produced at the event, the gallery succeeded in the opposite, mucking up press relations in a very public way.

Erin Hannon, the receptionist on The Office, explains why you should always use real cameras and not disposable ones when taking pictures of important events you want to remember.

A fun story over the weekend was the crazy photograph that Mail on Sunday photographer Mark Pain captured while covering the Ryder Cup. Tiger Woods was attempting a chip shot, and launched he ball directly at Ryder, who had his camera up to his face. Without flinching, Pain snapped the above photo moments before the ball struck his camera, bounced off his chest, and landed at his feet.

This foam core 8x10 camera was created by Daire Quinlan, the same guy that attached a 90 year old lens to his camera with homemade bellows.

The lens is an Industar 37 Russian large format 300mm designed for their FKD cameras. The shutter is a Sinar, takes standard 8x10 film holders.

Quinlan exposes onto photo paper instead of film, and focuses the camera by sliding the rear box forward and backward.

Photographer Mike Collins created this simple video that gives you a visual look at the difference between full frame sensors and crop frame sensors when using the same lens. The video uses a Canon 5D Mark II for the full frame shots, and a Canon 7D (1.6x crop factor) for the crop shots.

Surf wear maker Rip Curl recently teamed up with Timeslice Films for an ambitious project of shooting surfers in "bullet-time", the effect that many people first saw in The Matrix. They used a crazy camera array of 52 Canon 5D Mark II Rebel DSLRs in order to capture the same shot from 52 different angles, stringing them together for the final footage.

An interesting story that popped up a couple days ago is that Sony …

Dentsu London, the same ad agency that recently experimented with iPad …

Jason Lee is a California-based wedding photographer who's quite popular on Flickr for the creative portraits he makes of his daughters.

Remember Sid, the "disturbed, hyperactive, sadistic 10-year-old boy" in Toy Story that abuses his toys? This viral ad for Samsung SD cards shows what it would be like if Sid grew up and became interested in photography.

We might soon have a hard time distinguishing between camera phones and phone cameras. Next week Panasonic will be …

Photographer Clint Davis was previously the Art Director at a national magazine, so he has first hand experience on the type of photographer promo that grabs the attention of clients. Recently he himself needed to do some self-promotion, so he decided to get creative and create promo mailers filled with awesomeness. He writes,

Most of the promo pieces [Davis used to receive] were 4×6″ postcards with a picture on one side, and printed addresses on the other side. Stale, non-personalized, and probably frayed at the edges, the postcards rarely made it from the mail room to my desk. But a box?!? A freakin’ box??? NOW you have my attention. Maybe it’s just me, but when I get a box in the mail with a hand-written address, a slow fuzzy feeling comes over me and my eyes open 43% more than usual. YOU good box are coming back to my desk for a thorough dissection.

Above all I wanted to make a self-promotion mailer that wouldn’t get tossed in the trash right away. Considering the caliber of ad agencies, magazine photography editors, athletic teams, and select others that will receive this mailer, that is a tall order to accomplish.

Google Street View now covers all seven …

Flickr user vamapaull tells the story of …

Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner was randomly selected and announced below. Our previous giveaway …