The MoMA Store used to sell these nifty salt and pepper shakers made from 35mm film canisters for $35 a pop. You might not want to make your own though — we hear you shouldn’t keep any food products inside used canisters because film rolls leak poisonous chemicals that can’t be washed out. Shucks.
(via Live Great on Less)
The Midnight Shot NV-1 Night Vision camera by ThinkGeek is a compact camera specially designed for infrared photography. Instead of permanently removing the IR filter from a traditional digital camera, the Midnight Shot allows the filter to be retracted when you want to use it as an IR camera. It shoots 5 megapixel stills, VGA video, and has built-in IR illumination that lets you shoot and film in complete darkness.
Read more…
Slate magazine just published an interesting article on David Hobby and his popular blog Strobist, and shared this interesting example of how the photography industry is drastically changing due to low barriers of entry:
To get a sense of just how bad things are for professional photographers right now, the story of Robert Lam is instructive. When Time needed a photo to illustrate its “New Frugality” cover story in late 2009, it purchased Lam’s image of a jar of change from stock-photo agency iStockphoto. The going rate for a Time cover had typically been $3,000 to $10,000. Lam was paid $31.50. Nevertheless, Lam declared, “I am happy”—the payment was more than he’d expected the photo to generate, and he was delighted to have a Time cover in his portfolio. Veteran professional photographers were livid, calling Lam an “IDIOT,” among other unkind words.
The article also mentions how Robert Lam earns just $4,000 from his stock photography hobby, and that the Time cover photo was shot using DIY equipment purchased from a local sign store. What are your thoughts on the changing landscape for professional photographers?
Perfect Layers is a new plug-in by OnOne Software that brings layers functionality (e.g. image layers, blend modes, layer masks, etc…) to Lightroom and Aperture. The program is currently in Public Beta right now available as a 30-day free trial, meaning you can download and try and a free preview version for Lightroom.
Perfect Layers (via Scott Kelby)
Update: Wow, that was fast. Looks like the program isn’t in Public Beta anymore. Instead, you can try it for 30 days or pay $500 for the full suite of programs/plugins.
This is the instruction manual for the Kodak Petite camera, which was made between 1929 and 1933. It shoots 127 film, and came in five different colors.
(via KEH Camera Blog)
Image credit: Photograph by BlondeShot Creative and used with permission
If you’re the kind of person that constantly misplaces your lens caps after removing them to shoot (Psst! You can ditch them in favor of UV filters), the LensCapTrap can help you hold on to them. It’s an uber simple kit that allows you to attach your lens caps to your camera strap using Velcro, avoiding the annoyance of having your caps dangle like they do with the popular string-style holder. The standard kit costs $6 and provides Velcro patches for two lens caps, though creating your own do-it-yourself version shouldn’t be too difficult either.
Copywriter Jean Saxon Morrow created with these clever advertisements for Canon’s Digital ELPH compact cameras. The tagline is “Remember your story”.
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The Common Camera Project is a neat experiment started in 2009 by a group of Berkeley students led by Kevin Huynh in which hundreds of disposable cameras are being passed around the world with these simple instructions on the back of each one:
Step 1: Take a picture of something that inspires you.
Step 2: Pass the camera on to someone you trust.
Step 3: If you’re last, mail the camera back to us.
Over 300 are currently in the wild, and they have a special page tracking their progress on a map. The resulting photos will be published to the Common Cam website and possibly in a book or exhibition as well.
This “Sky Aperture” t-shirt is a nice way to sport some photography-related apparel without being too geeky. You can grab it now for $20 over on Threadless, though if you wait you might be able to grab it for $5 or $10 during a sale.
Did you know that 1 out of 255 women and 1 out of 12 men have some kind of color vision deficiency? X-Rite has an interesting online “Color IQ” test that helps you find out how well your eyes see colors. You’re given four strips with color chip squares, and are tasked with arranging them in order by hue, starting from the fixed chip on the left side and ending with the fixed one on the right. It’s an online version of the Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue test, which has been used by the government and in industry for more than 40 years to test color vision aptitude. If you finish the test, leave a comment letting us know what you got!
