Tech companies often like to create mini-documentaries featuring creatives who use their products — last year both Intel and Brother made videos about fashion photographer Scott Schuman (The Sartorialist). Well, it appears that some creatives are trying to troll Dell by spreading this ridiculous short video that explores the work of “renowned photographer Clayton Sotos“. It’s supposedly part of a new “Visual Innovators” series by Dell, and has amassed tens of thousands of views already since being uploaded yesterday. The most common comment left on the video is, “…”. Be warned: Soto’s subject matter may be disturbing to some of you and probably isn’t work safe for most of you.
Photographer Noel Myles has been working for the past 15 years on “still films” of trees across the countryside of eastern England. He originally created platinum/palladium prints of the trees around the year 2000, and then photographed the trees a decade later using color film. He then combined pieces from the different photos into single mosaics, which he tells us are “the antithesis of the notion of a decisive moment”. Read more…
Last year MIT grad Justin Jensen raised nearly half a million bucks through Kickstarter to launch CineSkates, a camera slider system that adds wheels to GorillaPod Focus tripods. Now Jensen and his startup Cinetics are back again with a new product called CineSquid, which provides a strong suction cup mount system rather than wheels. This allows cameras to be mounted onto things like cars, boats, and even airplanes. Read more…
If you’ve ever tried shooting in a dark location without using flash or a tripod, you probably know how difficult it can be to remove camera shake from your photos. Alex Jansen — a photography enthusiast who’s an officer in the US Army — has written up an awesome tutorial on how you can apply some of the tricks used by rifle shooters to shooting with a camera:
I am by no measures a “pro,” but I understand my fundamentals very well, and this specific set has been drilled into my head so many times that it is now second-nature. I am going to teach you how to “shoot” your camera like a high end rifle because at the end of the day, the fundamentals stay the same in every aspect.
Photographer Thomas Jackson has an ongoing project titled Emergent Behavior that consists of surreal photographs of swarms of various things (e.g. leaves, plastic cups, ping pong balls) in various locations. The images aren’t computer generated, but are rather composite images combining a number of photographs — probably similar to the “flock of phones” tutorial that we featured a while back. Read more…
This amazing photograph of sailor Alex Thomson walking on the keel of an 8-ton yacht was created with courage rather than Photoshop. It was an ad for fashion house HUGO BOSS, which has sponsored Alex Thomson Racing since 2003. The conditions for the shot had to be just right, and the skipper had to carefully keep the yacht at a 45-degree angle for up to a minute to avoid crushing Thomson and the jet ski driver. Read more…
Flickr is reportedly set to push out a number of major design updates across the photo-sharing service’s website. Adrianne Jeffries of Betabeat recently met up with Flickr senior product manager Markus Spiering, who gave her a sneak peek at a number of extensive changes to the interface that will be rolling out at the end this month.
He then opened a new tab to show the spread, completely revamped. Suddenly the photos look more than four times their current size and lie neatly justified on the page, somehow jigsawing together without cropping or changing the order in which they appear.
The new photo view will hit on Feb. 28, Mr. Spiering said, and with it comes a new upload interface. Flickr’s uploading page now looks more like an app than a website. Goodbye, retro blue links. Hello, swoopy drag-and-drop.
Sounds a whole lot like Google+ photo sharing, huh? Betabeat reports coming away from the meeting “with the impression that Yahoo is not sleeping on Flickr” — great news for the faithful members of the service.
After seeing the LEGO large format camera we featured last year, Norway-based photographer Carl-Frederic Salicath set out to create his own LEGO camera. Rather than go with large format, he decided to build a more complicated Rolleiflex-style twin-lens reflex camera that uses 120 film. Aside from LEGOs, he also used some matte ground glass, a mirror, and lenses taken from a binocular. Read more…
Photographer Rachel Hulin has a cute project titled The Flying Series that consists of photos of her infant son Henry flying. Hulin tells TIME,
Speaking to some of the unusual body positions of her flying offspring, Hulin said, “I never throw him, and I never move him into a place in the frame that he wasn’t in to begin with. I like Henry to fly the way he feels like it, I never pose him in a specific way. Sometimes he’s graceful and sometimes he’s a little hunchback. I think telling you more would ruin it.” [#]
While she’s keeping quiet on her technique, which she says is “more subtraction than addition”, we think it’s similar to Pat David’s bouncing baby technique that we featured a while back. Read more…
If you’re a fan of learning things through Khan Academy, then you might enjoy learning about how ISO works in this similar-styled tutorial by Dylan Bennett. Bennett might not have Salman Khan’s soothing voice, but he does his best to break down the magic of digital camera sensors into easy to understand ideas. For a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of how things work, check out Cambridge in Colour’s excellent tutorials.
