Architectural photographer Brett Beyer was recently commissioned by Cornell University to make a photograph of the interior of its recently completed Milstein Hall. The request wasn’t for a standard interior photo, but for an aerial shot of the 25,000-square-foot studio space that looked as if you were looking down at it with the roof removed (think Google Earth but for the interior of a building). Beyer accomplished this by pointing his Canon 5D Mark II and 17-40mm lens down from the ceiling on a 12-foot boom and then capturing 250 separate photographs of every square inch of the space over three days. He then spent 10 days stitching the images together by hand in Photoshop to create the amazing photo seen above. Read more…
JumpFromPaper is a new line of unique handbags that uses thick outlines and bright colors to look like they popped right out of a cartoon. They look like they’re completely flat and 2D, but they actually have room for things like cameras, laptops, and your everyday accessories. The bag seen here is called “Cheese!” and costs $99.
Silent World is a project by Paris-based artists Lucie & Simon that shows post-apocalyptic views of famous locations around the world. All but one or two of the people in each location are removed from the scene. Rather than use multiple exposures and compositing the images to remove moving objects (e.g. people and cars), they chose to use a neutral density filter — one that’s normally used by NASA for analyzing stars — in order to achieve extremely long exposure times during the day. Read more…
Here’s an oldie but goodie: back in September 2009, photographer Chris Weeks released this documentary about street photography titled Documenting the Human Condition. It’s occasionally preachy and at times feels like a stealthy Leica advertisement, but should be interesting to you if you’re at all interested in the practice of street photography. Read more…
A month after announcing massive losses of $2.9 billion, Sony is taking evasive action to rediscover itself and right its ship. The company announced a new corporate strategy today, devised by its new CEO Kazuo Hirai. Called “One Sony”, the initiative identifies digital imaging as one of the three core pillars of the company going forward:
Sony is positioning digital imaging, game and mobile as the three core pillars of its electronics business, and going forward aims to concentrate its resources in these areas to further reinforce the businesses. Sony also plans to accelerate its efforts to drive innovation and new business creation. [#]
The decision isn’t surprising given Sony’s recent success in stealing market share away from bigger players like Canon and Nikon, largely due to its early entry into the mirrorless camera game.
TrekPak is a new padded camera bag insert that does away with the annoyances of velcro by introducing a new pin system for adjusting dividers:
What makes TrekPak really unique, is that you won’t find any Velcro. When you try to adjust a normal gear bag while out in the field, you know how frustrating it can be. The Velcro sticks where you don’t want it to, is hard to pull apart, and just looks messy and cluttered. Our patent pending system uses anodized aluminum pins and durable padded dividers to offer limitless organizational options. The TrekPak pin system is much easier to adjust, very secure, and straight up, it’s slick.
They’re starting with inserts for Pelican camera bags, but are planning to release generic inserts and inserts designed for other bags as well. Read more…
What would you do if you were given the task of creating a self-portrait within 20 minutes in front of an auditorium packed with people? That was the challenge given to photographers David Hobby, Martin Prihoda, and Gregory Heisler earlier this month at Gulf Photo Plus 2012 in Dubai. The video above shows what unfolded. It’s like watching the photography equivalent of a freestyle rap battle.
According to the UN, one third of the world’s food goes to waste — mostly in industrialized nations — while 925 million people around the world are threatened by starvation. To draw attention to this startling fact, Vienna-based photographer Klaus Pichler has been working for the past nine months on a project titled One Third, which consists of photos of rotting food. The food ranges from simple vegetables to cultural dishes from around the world, and everything is allowed to rot naturally by being stored in large plastic containers in Pichler’s bathroom. Read more…
Sony is reportedly focusing on autofocus as one of the main battlegrounds it’ll wage war on in the DSLR market. According to sonyalpharumors, the company is working on a new A99 SLT camera that’s already being tested by photographers in the wild, and one of the main selling points of the camera is a whopping 102 autofocus points — all of them cross type. For comparison, Canon’s 1D X has 61 AF points with 41 of them cross type, and the Nikon D800 has 51 AF points with 15 of them cross type. Granted, the autofocus performance of a camera is much more than the number of cross-type points it has, but perhaps this is the beginning of a new “cross-type war” now that the “megapixel war” is cooling down a bit.
Here’s a video in which renowned portrait photographer Nadav Kander discusses his approach to photography and portraiture. One thing that’s interesting about Kander’s method is that he tries not to connect with his subjects prior to photographing them:
I really like the connection that human beings have when there isn’t a great knowledge, like when you first meet people. I would find it very, very hard to photograph a friend well, or to photograph somebody that I knew well. I think that that tension when you first meet people allows you to communicate without speaking
He does, however, make it a point to get to know their appearance… for the purpose of knowing who they are when they walk into the studio.
