If you’re planning to try your hand at solargraphy, it might be a good idea to label the pinhole camera before placing it out in public — when one was spotted at Central Washington University, it was reported as a bomb and caused part of the campus to be shut down for four hours!
[...] a groundskeeper found a cylinder with duct tape on it. Officers closed a street while an Army explosive ordnance disposal team from the Yakima Training Center traveled to Ellensburg to check it out the unidentified object.
The chief says it contained what appeared to be film and could have been a camera made for some project. [#]
Since solargraph cameras are sometimes exposed for up to half a year, there’s probably a solargraph photographer somewhere out there crying right now.
A little boy named Miles was documenting a sledding adventure with his little sister when his new camera slipped out of his hands and disappeared into the snow. As his life flashed before his eyes, the camera kept rolling and recorded the mega-cuteness that ensued.
The P.90 is a limited edition pinhole camera by Kurt Mottweiler, an Oregon-based builder of wooden cameras. It’s constructed using Cherry wood and brass, has a tripod adapter on the bottom, and is loaded with 120 roll film. Read more…
Things aren’t going very well for Sigma these days — just days after the world balked at the $9,700 price tag it’s attaching to the upcoming SD1 DSLR, Nikon is announcing that it’s suing Sigma for $150 million over the vibration reduction technology found in Sigma DSLR lenses. Furthermore, it’s demanding that Sigma put a halt to the manufacturing and sale of lenses that infringe on the VR patents, which might be a large number of OS (Optical Stabilization) lenses.
Here’s an idea for a quick photo activity (perhaps on a rainy day?): pick a random color, walk around your house and collect things that match that color, neatly arrange them, then take a picture.
The superheroes that line Hollywood Boulevard for tourist pictures may have a tiny taste of stardom while on the job, but what are their lives like when they put down their masks and capes? For his project “Super Heroes”, photographer Gregg Segal followed a number of superheroes home to document their not-so-super lives when not on the job. Read more…
You know the “anyone can cook” mantra spoken by Chef Gusteau in Pixar’s Ratatouille? It seems the same can be said about other forms of artistic expression as well, whether it’s photography or painting abstract pictures. Two unusual artists we featured here before were 3-year-old Ruby Ellenby and Cooper the photography-lovin’ cat. The above video shows Aelita Andre, a girl who became a professional abstract expressionist painter at the age of 3 and is called a “prodigy of color”.
Did you know that the world record for “youngest photographer” is currently held by Zoe Fung Leung of Hong Kong? She was only 2 years and 70 days old when she held an exhibition and print sale at Plaza Hollywood. If you have a child that’s younger than that, stick a camera in their hands and hire a good PR representative — the record may soon be yours theirs!
A camera’s sensor size is a very good predictor of how good its image quality is, but understanding and comparing the sensors sizes isn’t very easy. While televisions and computer monitors are usually measured by diagonal length, sensors sizes are listed with its two dimensions in millimeters. Back in 2008, David Pogue of the New York Times wrote an article about this issue, calling for someone to develop an online tool for converting confusing sensor measurements into the diagonal length of the sensor in inches. Within three hours two new websites were born: Sensor-Size and Sensor Size Calculator.
Since we first covered its launch back in October 2010, Instagram has become one of the fastest growing photo-sharing companies and iPhone apps. This week founder Kevin Systrom announced that they now have 4.25 million registered users, and that users are posting 10 photos every second, or around 900,000 photos per day. Not bad for a seven month old service, eh?
