Did you know that a third of the SanDisk memory cards being used on Earth are actually fake? A SanDisk engineer recently shared this startling fact with a reader over at The Online Photographer: …
Flickr user Betty Ann recycled a photography book by transforming pages into these nifty pillow boxes, with each one showing a different camera. Stick a gift certificate to your favorite local camera shop into one and it'll make the perfect gift for a photography-lovin' friend! You can find a step-by-step tutorial on how to make your own pillow box over on eHow.
Sigma announced today that its flagship SD1 DSLR will be available starting in June 2011 with a hefty price tag of $9,700. The unique thing about the camera compared to its competitors is the 15MP Foveon sensor that uses 3 stacked sensors, giving each photo 46 million pixels of color data -- this supposedly helps provide sharper pictures, truer colors, and fewer artifacts compared to traditional sensors (but also means 45MB Raw files). The camera will shoot at 5fps, use 11 autofocus points, and …
Jonathan Blaustein is the photographer behind the project "The Value of a Dollar", which went viral on the Internet in 2010 and then was subsequently acquired by the State of New Mexico and the Library of Congress. Visit his website here.
As the low-light capabilities of high-end (and even low-end) cameras rapidly improve, it's easy to marvel at technology and forget how amazing our own eyes are, but here are some mind-boggling facts to consider: did you know that the human eye can detect as few as two photons entering the retina, and that, under ideal conditions, a healthy young adult can see a candle flame from 30 miles away? To see how mind-boggling that is, try using Google Maps to find a location 30-miles away from where …
What you see above is the inside of the world's largest pinhole camera measuring 45x160x80 feet. It's an abandoned airplane hangar in Irvine, California that was converted over the course of two months into a gigantic pinhole camera. 24,000 square feet of plastic, 1,300 gallons of foam filler, 1.52 miles of tape, and 40 cans of spray paint went into darkening the hangar.
Reuters photographer Beawiharta was on a short flight from Singapore to Jakarta with his wife and three kids, when one of the engines suddenly exploded into flames. As a sharp burning odor permeated the cabin, the plane began to vibrate harder and harder, and finally the electricity turned off. Accepting the fact that if they died their family would die together, Beawiharta grabbed his DSLR and started photographing: …
If you're a coffee lover (or addict), adbeus is a photoblog that you'll want to feast your eyes on. They visit the best independent coffee shops in Montreal and photograph each cup of coffee in exactly the same way: the coffee on the right side of the frame, the table serving as the background, and the camera viewing from above. The result is a project that shows how beautiful and unique cups of coffee can be!
Spanish blog Duduá organized a fantasy cake contest in Barcelona at the end of April, and found amongst the many creative cakes was this sweet (pun intended) Polaroid Land Camera 1000 cake with an instant photo popping out the bottom.
There have been a number of stories lately reporting that a large number of Flickr users are leaving the site for new photo-sharing services that are cropping up, including Instagram and 500px. Earlier his week, a designer at Flickr named Timoni West wrote a post on her blog that publicly criticized Flickr's usability. More specifically, she calls the "Your contacts" page (the one that shows your contacts' photos) the "most important page on Flickr", pointing out the problems with the page and …
If you have camera gear you'd like to sell, Amazon will now take it off your hands in exchange for gift cards. The new electronics trade-in program currently has a list of about 1,400 accepted cameras along with the dollar values they're worth. Add your cameras to the trade-in list, specify the condition they're in, send it to Amazon using a prepaid shipping label, and gift card credits will be added to your account. With a little more work, you can probably get more money by selling it on eBay …
Leica and Sony aren't the only camera companies that slice their cameras and lenses down the middle to give the world a peek at their guts -- Canon does it too. On the first floor of one of its headquarter buildings in Japan is a small museum that has a cross-sectioned Canon 1Ds DSLR and 400mm f/4 DO IS USM lens on display. Back in the day, the camera had a price of $5,500 and the lens cost $8,900, meaning Canon sliced nearly $15,000 of gear in half for this display.
If you're both a photography lover and a Mac user (there's a lot of you out there, right?), computer expert Lloyd Chambers has an uber-helpful section on his Mac Performance Guide website for photographers who want to learn how to optimize a Mac for Photoshop and other photo editing programs.
Used in New York back in 1938, this revolver camera was a Colt 38 with a tiny camera that would capture a photograph whenever the trigger was pulled. I sure hope those sample photographs taken with this revolver were shot while the gun wasn't loaded...
The Coleman LED Quad Lantern is an area lantern that features four detachable LED panels that function as individual lights, with each one containing six LEDs, a handle, and a rechargeable battery. While it's designed for outdoor use (e.g. camping), it can also be used as a cheap solution for lighting your photos on the go.
Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner was randomly selected and announced below.
Photographer Linhbergh recently purchased a used camera from B&H Photo Video and found a Compact Flash card left inside the camera containing photographs taken from inside the store offices. They offer an interesting glimpse into the operations at the largest non-chain photo equipment store in the United States.
Check out this photograph of camel thorn trees in Namibia shot by Frans Lanting. It looks like a painting but is actually a photograph...
Vodafone recently ran a pretty creative advertising campaign called "Pixel Hunt" for the purpose of illustrating how many pixels LG's 5-megapixel Optimus phone packs. They published a 5-megapixel photograph (presumably taken with the phone) on a website and invited people to zoom in and click individual pixels, with 100 of the pixels "containing" a free Optimus phone. It took 300,000 visitors a whole month to click each of the 5 million pixels.
Ever wonder how photographs magically appear on Polaroid pictures? Photojojo offers a simple explanation of how the process works: …
Photographer Darren Samuelson spent seven months building a massive homemade large-format camera that's about six-feet-long when fully extended. He shoots with 14×36-inch x-ray film that's about 1/12th the cost of ordinary photographic film but much harder to develop.
Inspired by Todd McLellan's photos of disassembled gadgets, electrician and photography addict Kelly Hofer decided to do the same thing with his broken 4-megapixel Canon PowerShot A520. Check out the high-res version, or the behind-the-scenes video he shot while arranging the pieces.
This epic advertisement for The Camera Store imagines what would be like if wars were fought with cameras instead of guns. In this alternate reality, massive telephoto lenses and flash(bang)s sure come in handy!
Samsung just published a followup to the NX lens engineer interview video that we shared a couple weeks ago featuring Q&As with the planners, marketers, and designers behind the lenses. Included on the page was this interesting photograph that appears to show a bunch of prototype cameras developed in the company. Check out the cube-shaped camera and another one with three retro dials at the top!
Here's a short and sweet video in which famed wedding photographer Joe Buissink shares some advice regarding the "psychology" of wedding photography, or how to capture genuine emotions and expressions on camera. The tips he shares are useful for other kinds of photography as well, not just wedding or engagement photography.
Color photography was born on this day 150 years ago in 1861 when Scottish physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell and photographer Thomas Sutton -- inventor of the SLR camera -- shot the above photograph of a colored ribbon.
Last week The Daily Mail published some photographs of British singer Seal passing through LAX airport with his family. While at first glance it might look like the camera hanging around his neck is a Leica MP film rangefinder, look a little closer and you'll see that it's not -- it doesn't have a battery compartment, a film reverse lever, or a film advance lever...
Who says you need a heavy and expensive lens to capture a beautiful shuttle launch photograph from far away? After the Space Shuttle Endeavour blasted off yesterday on its final mission, one of the photographs that went viral was shot from an airplane using an iPhone. Another was this stunning photo made by Trey Ratcliff using a Nikon 50mm prime lens while thousands of photographers around him were holding massive lenses.
Jeffrey Martin, the guy behind the world's largest indoor photo, has done it again -- the founder of 360cities was hired by Wembley Stadium to shoot a massive 20 gigapixel 360-degree panorama of the 2011 FA Cup Final this past weekend. About 1000 photographs shot with a DSLR and robotic tripod head were needed to capture the 90,000 fans in attendance, and the final image was processed with a workstation that had 192 gigabytes of RAM and 24 CPU cores! …
If you've ever tried saving a layered file in Photoshop CS5 that's more than a 1GB in size, you've probably experienced pretty sluggish performance. This is because the program always does image compression on the file that shrinks the file size at the expense of your workflow. If you're rich in hard drive space but short on time, Adobe has released a plugin called that lets you disable image compression, speeding up the saving of large layered files by 20x! …
Camera innards are often shown in cross section diagrams, but here's a Sony Alpha camera and lens that were actually sliced cleanly down the middle (we're guessing a lightsaber was involved). The build quality of the lens definitely looks cheaper than the sliced Leica lenses we shared last week (as it should). Brownie points if you can identify both the camera model and the lens.
Planking (AKA the "lying down game") is a growing fad that involves lying face down in strange places with your arms to the side and snapping a photograph of it.
Here's a quick video tutorial by Olivia Speranza teaching how to create an infinite white background.
Photography lovers in Canada may soon be caught in the crossfire of the music industry's fight against piracy. The Canadian Private Copying Collective is pushing for a new tax on memory cards that would be based on the capacity of the cards -- $0.50 for 1GB or less, $1 for 1-8GB cards, and $3 for any card with over 8GBs. Law professor Michael Geist writes, …
Reddit user Bryce Hoeper recently broke an old Zeiss Ikon Contina L he purchased for $7 from Goodwill after it took a nasty tumble down some stairs. After being bummed for a while, he stumbled upon Timur Civan's experiment with sticking a 102-year old lens on a modern DSLR, and decided to attempt the same thing. He spent a few hours taking apart the camera body to extract the lens, then super glued it to a Canon body cap that he cut a hole in, allowing the lens to be mounted to his Canon 5D …
If your house was going up in flames and you only had a few minutes to gather up a few things to save from the fire, which of your possessions would you choose? The Burning House is a neat photo project by Foster Huntington that asks this question, with photographs submitted by various people showing their most valuable possessions neatly arranged. Unsurprisingly, cameras and photographs are at the top of many peoples' lists.
Portrait-a-day time-lapse videos show the passing of time in a pretty striking way, but so does this project by a guy named Sam Klemke.
Last week we showed you some photographs of Leica lenses cut cleanly down the middle. This week we have some interesting photographs of what a Leica M6 rangefinder camera looks like when the outer layer is removed.
PetaPixel turns two today. I won't bore you with statistics like I did last year, since those are shared at the end of each calendar year, but our readership continues to grow at a pretty healthy clip. This marks the end of my first year of publishing PetaPixel as my full time job -- I haven't really used my computer science education at all, but I would take blogging about photography over a programming job any day! …
Photographer Laurence Kim wrote an interesting article titled "The Photography Business and the American Dream" in which he takes a look at the economics of doing photography as a career, coming to the conclusion that it's one of the worst things you can do from a wealth creation standpoint.
When the iPad 2 was announced a couple months ago, it was called "the first 'camera' to have a sensor resolution lower than the display resolution." Commenters were quick to point out that Apple never intended for the device to be used as a camera like the iPhone is, and therefore was probably able to keep costs down by limiting it to a 0.7 megapixel sensor. Now, with millions of the devices in consumers' hands, Flickr's camera statistics confirm what we suspected all along: no one uses the …
If colleges offered camera equipment anatomy classes, this Leica lens cutaway might be one of the things you'd be examining in the lab. It's a Leica Tri-Elmar-M 28-35-50mm sliced cleanly down the middle, revealing all the glass and pieces inside that go into making the lens.
Frank Oscar Larson was an auditor living in Queens back in the 1950s who had a passion for street photography. Every weekend he would travel around the city armed with his Rolleiflex camera, photographing the things that caught his eye. After Larson died of a stroke at the age of 68 in 1964, his photographs quietly sat in a cardboard box for 45 years before finally being discovered by his son's widow in 2009. They offer a beautiful look into what life in NYC was like half a century ago.
Photography lens manufacturers use all sorts of abbreviations and acronyms to explain the features of their lenses. In an effort to educate use, the photography lens manufacturers really just confuse us. Hopefully you’ll understand a bit about the different lens feature abbreviations by reading this post.
Photography studio StaudingerFranke created this mind-boggling image of a Polaroid OneStep Land Camera exploding into pieces. Reminds us of Todd McLellan and his exploding Pentax Spotmatic F photograph.
Here's a old-fashioned wooden camera tape dispenser that would make a cute gift and addition to a photography-lover's desk.
Everyone knows that mail carriers and dogs don't mix very well. San Diego mailman Ryan Bradford decided to document his encounters with the canine adversaries along his route using a disposable ISO 400, 35mm camera purchased from Rite Aid. The delightful photo essay that resulted, titled "All the Dogs Want to Kill Me", shows dogs glaring and barking at Bradford from the other side of fences, doors, and mail slots.
The White House is ending its long-running practice of reenacting speeches for still photographs after the controversy was rekindled last week by President Obama's Osama bin Laden speech.
The Canon EOS-0 is what you get at the Apocalypse when all the major camera, software, and operating system companies get together to unleash unspeakable evil into the world. It's a camera with a little bit of everything: support for every major lens mount, a drive for various kinds of discs, Windows Vista as the operating system (shudder), Photoshop available on the giant widescreen LCD, etc... Pretty much the only thing you won't find on this camera is a toaster.
Cindy Sherman's "Untitled #96" from 1981 has become the world's most valuable photograph after selling for a staggering $3.89 million at a Christie's auction yesterday (it was estimated to be worth up to $2 million). The winning bidder was Philippe Segalot, a private advisor to some of the world's wealthiest art collectors. The photo takes the top spot away from "99 Cent II Diptychon" by Andreas Gursky, which enjoyed five years as the world's most valuable photo after selling for $3.35 million …
