February 2011

Michael Zhang

Ring Flash Add-on for Your External Flash

Photojojo has a new ring flash adapter that allows you to shoot soft, studio-style portraits without shelling out the big bucks for an actual ring flash. It's a plastic add-on with a reflective circle that simply channels the light from your existing flash, so it doesn't require any batteries.

Michael Zhang

Millions of Photos from the Sygma Archive May Soon be Destroyed

In 1999 Corbis -- privately owned by Bill Gates -- paid $20 million to acquire Sygma, a legendary photo agency that was the largest in the world at the time. After the acquisition, the agency bled money and suffered heavy fines due to the mismanagement of photographs, paying $2 million at one point for losing 750 of one photojournalist's photos. In 2010 the new agency, named Corbis Sygma, filed for bankruptcy after its debt had risen to €73m (~$100 million). Now the court appointed administrator of the defunct company is saying that millions of images in the collection may be destroyed after a failed attempt to sell them at auction.

Michael Zhang

Shooting a 300-foot-tall Redwood Tree

If you were given the seemingly impossible task of photographing a giant 300-foot-tall Redwood tree, how would you go about doing so? National Geographic photographer Michael Nichols chose to use raise up a special rig of three Canon 1Ds Mark II DSLR cameras into the air, photographing dozens of photographs that he stitched into a beautiful panoramic tree photo. The photograph was used as the cover photo of the October 2009 edition of the National Geographic.

Michael Zhang

Video Embedded in a Printed Portfolio

In the boring old past, printed portfolios were a great way of showing off your still photographs, but any video you also wanted to show off had to be included and viewed separately from the main portfolio. Now, new technology is allowing photographers to embed video right into their portfolios, with a small LCD screen displayed right on the page.

Michael Zhang

Faking Smoke Photos with a Plastic Bag

In his series "Elastic" photographer Edi Yang shows that you can fake smoke photography by shooting plastic bags a certain way. What you need is a strong backlight and some post-processing mojo.

Michael Zhang

Blazing-fast Thunderbolt I/O May Hit DSLRs Starting with the Nikon D4

Apple just refreshed their line of MacBook Pro notebook computers, and one of the new features is a Thunderbolt I/O port, making the MacBook Pro the first notebook computer to have this blazing-fast interface developed by Intel (it was known as Light Peak during R&D). As the technology makes its way into more and more computers, camera makers will undoubtedly begin offering it in their cameras. Nikon Rumors recently received a rumor that the upcoming Nikon D4 will be the first DSLR camera to offer Thunderbolt.

Michael Zhang

Room Divider Made with Film Canisters

Tiffany Threadgould of RePlayGround had the awesome idea of building a room divider using old 35mm film canisters. She spent three months befriending film processing shops in New York and collecting the 1,000+ canisters needed for the project.

Michael Zhang

Printable Vintage Box Camera Papercraft

Remember the pastel baby box cameras that we featured a while ago? Well the seller, Mel Stringer (girliepains on Etsy), has a new design for vintage box cameras that's inspired by cameras such as the Brownie, Bakerlite, and Ensign. These could make nice table decorations for when you hang out with your photography-lovin' friends. The templates come on A4-sized PDF files and a cost $4 through Stringer's store.

Michael Zhang

Frying Pans That Look like Alien Planets

Upon first glance, the photographs in Christopher Jonassen's "Devour" project might look like pictures of alien worlds. What they actually show are the bottom of frying pans shot against a black backdrop.

Michael Zhang

Creative Portraits of a Cat on the Ground

We've featured this creative style of photography before where the subjects were neighborhood children and a baby, but what about dreaming up scenes with a cat and a dog on the ground instead of a person? That's exactly what Theresa Knudson did with her cat Fluffy, arranging paper props in the scene and using the ground as the backdrop.

Michael Zhang

MI5 Failed at Cropping Intelligence Photo of London Suicide Bombers

MI5 might have missed a golden opportunity to prevent the 7 July 2005 London bombings back in 2004 when they cropped a photograph of two of the terrorists badly before sending it to the FBI. The photograph was of two of the bombers -- Shehzad Tanweer and Mohammad Sidique Khan -- and was shot by an undercover agent at a motorway service station. For some reason, MI5 decided to desaturate the photo, crop Khan (the ringleader) out, and make Tanweer look hardly human with blurry facial features and a blob-like profile.

Michael Zhang

This Camera Van Has Rolling Shutters

In 1993, a guy named Harrod Blank had a dream in which he drove around in a camera-covered car taking pictures of people staring at his camera-mobile. When he woke up, he decided to make the car a reality, and spent the next two years designing and building the thing. In 1995 he completed the Camera Van complete with a working camera to capture the expressions of onlookers.

Michael Zhang

Public Outcry Causes Photographer to Drop Copyright Lawsuit

A Tucson photographer recently found out the hard way that the public doesn't always side with photographers in copyright infringement cases, even if their claims are valid. About a month after the tragic 2011 Tucson shooting, portrait photographer Jon Wolf threatened so sue nearly three dozen media outlets after they showed a portrait he made of 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green -- the youngest victim -- and demanded $125,000 from one newspaper for publishing the image.