May 2011

Camera innards are often shown in cross section diagrams, but here’s a Sony Alpha camera and lens that were …

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 …

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 Mark II.

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 …

Photographer Laurence Kim wrote an interesting article titled “ …

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 iPad 2 as a camera.

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 …

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 …

Photographer and blogger Thomas Hawk has an ongoing project called …

Panasonic has announced its latest Micro Four Thirds camera, the …

Update: This giveaway is now over. The winners were randomly selected and announced below.

This week we're having a giveaway for a lesser known but pretty nifty product: the Pogoplug Video. It's a device that hooks up your external hard drives to the Internet to create a "personal cloud", allowing you to access your photographs and files from anywhere. We're giving away three (3) of them, with each one worth $199.

Hong Kong-based camera enthusiast TM Wong has 1000+ instant cameras in his collection -- possibly the world's largest collection. That's enough cameras to use a different one each day for nearly three years!

Back in February 2011, Leica Camera and …

In mid-2010, Time Magazine showed off a demonstration of a slick tablet app they were making in collaboration with The Wonderfactory. As it became widely shared across the web, HDR photographer Trey Ratcliff of Stuck in Customs started receiving messages from fans who spotted his work in the video demo. Problem was, he had never given the magazine or the agency permission to use his work.

Dutch consumer product website Beste Product ("best product") decided to set up a royal rumble between the two heavyweights of the camera industry: Canon and Nikon. They created an infographic comparing the two companies in things such as expert and user opinions, popularity, and sales. Even if you're sick and tired of the endless comparisons and debates (as you should be), the infographic provides some interesting facts about how the two companies are doing.

Ever wonder what the fees involved in doing photography for an ad campaign look like? Jess Dudley, a producer …

Redscale is a technique where film is exposed on the wrong side -- rather than having the light hit the emulsion directly, you expose the film through the non-sensitive side.

The name "redscale" comes because there is a strong color shift to red due to the red-sensitive layer of the film being exposed first, rather than last (the red layer is normally the bottom layer in C-41 (color print) film). All layers are sensitive to blue light, so normally the blue layer is on top, followed by a filter. In this technique, blue light exposes the layers containing red and green dyes, but the layer containing blue dye is left unexposed due to the filter. [#]

The two main ways for doing this are loading the film upside down (if your camera allows it), or by purchasing film that has been "converted" already. A third way is to make DIY redscale film by going into a darkroom, pulling out the film, cutting it, flipping it, taping it back together, and then winding it back into the canister. Messy, but it works!

Videographer Michael Justin Porco walked around Central Park in NYC a few days ago snapping photographs, after starting to shoot photos for a time-lapse of Bethesda Fountain, it began drizzling and he only shot ten frames (one every 5 seconds using an intervalometer). When he reviewed the frames, he was amazed to discover that he had accidentally captured a sequence of photographs showing a man proposing to his girlfriend.

The Rolleiflex MiniDigi AF 5.0 is a tiny 5-megapixel digital camera designed to look just like the Rolleiflex 2.8F …

Since launching in 2008, TwitPic has been at the center of quite a few copyright controversies and legal battles, especially when disasters strike and Twitter users are able to publish photos of things that are happening well before major news outlets. Back in early 2010 photographer Daniel Morel had an iconic photograph taken during the Haiti earthquake widely republished in newspapers across the world without his permission after he uploaded the photos to TwitPic, then later that year Twitter's decision to display TwitPic photos directly on their website caused a brouhaha. TwitPic has finally decided to update their Terms of Service to make it clear that users of the service retain the copyright of everything they upload.

Check out this wacky-looking custom lens cap designed by Japanese corp UN for …

Deal of the day website Groupon is the fastest growing companies in web history and a popular way for local businesses to generate some buzz in their areas, but some independent photographers are finding out the hard way that offering special deals through Groupon might be the worst marketing decision they ever made.

Learning how to control depth of field with your camera isn’t too difficult, but do you know the science …

What you see in this photograph is the most flashes ever used to light a single photograph. Photographer …

Urban Outfitters is selling these Embarrassing Photo Protective Sunglasses that make you look …

Cars can have pretty creative paint jobs, but it seems like the best anyone can do with a DSLR is do a messy DIY repainting or buy a Pentax with ridiculous or nasty-looking designs. Sherwin Sibala came up with these unique design concepts showing what a DSLR (specifically a Nikon D7000) might look like if people chose to personalize the body.

Ever wonder what happens when you drop your camera off at a repair shop? This time-lapse video shows a …

Pete Souza's iconic photo of Obama and his national security team in the Situation Room has become extremely well known in the span of a week, so it's unlikely that any reputable media outlet would dare alter the photo in any way -- but that's exactly what one newspaper did. Orthodox Hasidic newspaper Der Tzitung has a policy of never publishing photographs of women, and decided to publish Obama's situation room photograph with Hillary Clinton and counterterrorism director Audrey Tomason Photoshopped out of the frame.