April 2012

Sohail Mamdani

Gear Doesn’t Matter — Except When It Does

If you follow any part of the photographic blogosphere, you’ve heard folks repeat this mantra over and over and over again: “Gear doesn’t matter.”

The basic premise of that dictum is as follows: making great pictures is about the photographer, not the camera or the lens or any other piece of gear. A good photographer can make a great image with a point-and-shoot that an amateur armed with a Nikon D4 and an 85mm f/1.4 lens can’t match.

DL Cade

Stealthy Street Photography by the Czech Secret Police

In the 1970s and 80s the Czechoslovak secret police, among other things, were charged with surveying the population without their consent or, for that matter, knowledge. Taking pictures from under coats or inside suitcases, the secret police kept tabs on the goings on of the general public. And while the act itself is voyeuristic and creepy, the pictures turned out surprisingly well.

Michael Zhang

Woman Aims to Meet and Photograph Her 626 Facebook Friends in Real Life

After amassing 626 friends on Facebook two years ago, Tanja Hollander began to wonder how many of them were actually friends in the conventional sense. She then set out to answer the question by meeting each one of them and photographing them in their homes. The portraits are published on a website set up for the project, titled The Facebook Portrait Project, and each photo includes some information about the subject and their relationship to Hollander.

DL Cade

Canon Defends 5D Mark III, Claims “Light Leak” Doesn’t Affect the Captured Image

Over the last couple of weeks we've covered every aspect of the Canon 5D Mark III "light leak" issue. Starting initially as a rumor, Canon eventually confirmed that the camera's top LCD did, in fact, alter the exposure reading by 1/3 of a stop in dark environments. A week ago the company even put shipments on hold while they investigated the issue more extensively.

Michael Zhang

Ruined Polaroid Pictures as Abstract Art

While many photographers aim for technical perfection, photographer William Miller goes the opposite route. After "rescuing" an old and barely functional Polaroid SX-70 instant camera from a yard sale, he began taking advantage of its glitches by viewing the resulting photographs as abstract art. He states,

The camera sometimes spills out 2 pictures at a time and the film often gets stuck in the gears, exposing and mangling the images in unpredictable ways.

Over time I’ve figured out how to control and accentuate aspects of the camera’s flaws but the images themselves are always a surprise. Each one is determined by the idiosyncrasies of the film and the camera.

The images look like landscapes taken on strange alien planets. He has titled the project Ruined Polaroids.

Michael Zhang

Images That Magically Appear Through Long Exposure Photos

Here's amazing concept: use a seemingly random display of dots (like the static you see on a signal-less television set) to share photographs that only a camera can see. The International Federation of Photographic Art created this clever interactive video that asks you to grab your camera and follow the instructions. Set your aperture to f/5.6 and your shutter speed at 1s. Snap a photo of the screen filled with static, and prepare to be amazed!

DL Cade

Olympics’ Security Guards Trained to Hinder Photographers

The Olympics are a big deal, and an even bigger opportunity for the country's photographers. From the moment the next Olympic city is announced, preparations begin and an endless number of photo ops present themselves. That is, if the security guards don't start harassing you.

DL Cade

Couple Pays £750 for “the Worst Wedding Photos Ever”

When Thomas and Anneka Geary paid professional -- and we use the term lightly -- photographers Ian McCloskey and Nikki Carter of Westgate Photography £750 to capture the happiest day of their lives, they were probably expecting something a little bit better than what turned out: blurry and poorly framed shots captured from terrible positions that are being called "the worst wedding pictures ever". Not one of the photos showed the groom's parents.

DL Cade

Adobe Announces CS6, $50/Month Cloud-Based Subscription Service

Adobe is currently holding the launch event for the highly anticipated Creative Suite 6 in San Francisco today, making it a big day for Photoshop enthusiasts everywhere. Official release will be coming "within 30 days" according to Adobe, but the event has revealed enough to whet our appetites and give us some pricing options we can chew over.

Michael Zhang

LEGO Rooms Photographed to Look like Full-Sized Spaces

Remember those beautiful macro photos that showed the inside of musical instruments as giant rooms? Sao Paolo, Brazil-based photographer Valentino Fialdini did something similar, except instead of musical instruments he used small chambers created out of LEGO blocks. With some clever lighting and camera trickery, Fialdini captured the tiny rooms and corridors as to look like giant architectural spaces.

DL Cade

Nikon Refutes Greenish Tint Issues, Says LCD on D4/D800 is More Accurate

Over the past week there have been several complaints lodged against Nikon claiming that the LCD screen on the D4 and D800 has a green cast when compared to the older models. Nikon, however, has responded by claiming that the D3s and D700 models were in fact the less accurate pair. According to Nikon Rumors, Nikon tech support is blaming the LCD on the D3s and D700, asserting that its higher display color temperatures leads to blue tinted images.

DL Cade

iPhone Telescope Adapter Lets You Instagram Stars and Microbes Alike

If you've ever found yourself wishing you could take an iPhone picture of the night sky -- or a cool slide under the microscope for that matter -- than your wish could soon become a reality. The startup Arcturus Labs are in the process of funding a new product called Magnifi, an iPhone case/adapter that allows you to attach your phone to a microscope, telescope, binoculars, or any other optical instrument.

DL Cade

Nikon D3200 Sample Images Show Noisy Low-Light Performance

The first sample images of the Nikon D3200 have just come out of Nikon France; and although they look great for the most part, the one low-light image confirms suspicions that Nikon may have gone too far putting 24.2-megapixels in the camera. More noticeable on the full-resolution photographs, you can tell that once the ISO is cranked up to about 1600, noise begins to play a significant role.

DL Cade

ADay.org Aims to Inspire Generations to Come by Capturing One Day in Our World

On July 24th, 2010 tens of thousands of people captured a video snipped of their life that day and uploaded it to YouTube where director Kevin Macdonald and executive producer Ridley Scott edited the lot of them together into a 95min feature film -- which you can now watch for free. On May 15th, it's the photographer's turn.

DL Cade

A Fateful Hike: The Story Behind Craig Walker’s Pulitzer Prize

How does a Pulitzer Prize worthy photograph come into existence? For most of us the photos that are considered the best of the best each year seem somewhat untouchable; as if one has to be in the right place at the right time, and when they look down find that they also happen to have their camera on them. The truth,  however, is rarely so unanticipated. In the case of Craig F. Walker's 2012 Pulitzer Prize winning series, it all began with a hike.

DL Cade

Zuckerberg Flew Solo – Lowered Instagram Asking Price by $1 Billion

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook took everybody by surprise when they acquired Instagram; the massively popular -- though not yet profitable -- photo-sharing application. A few days ago we learned that they may have only just beat Twitter to the punch. Now rumors are flying about that Mark Zuckerberg not only acted on his own -- without the Facebook board's knowledge -- but managed to lower Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom's asking price from $2 billion to the reported $1 billion that Facebook shelled out.

DL Cade

Photographs of Michael Jackson Tribute Artists and Impersonators

The Michael Jacksons, by photographer and social scientist Lorena Turner, is a study of people who make a living or perform as the late great Michael Jackson. In her own words:
It is an index of the refraction of Michael Jackson's public persona within the culture by exploring issues of fantasy, reality and representation as influenced by and filtered through cultural experience.

DL Cade

Google Adding User-Created Balloon and Kite Imagery to Google Earth

Innovation is why we love companies like Google. Several times a week, it seems, the company comes out with another program or product idea that makes us all smile (and secretly wonder how long we have until they've achieved world domination). Their best ideas, however, involve their user base -- and their latest expansion idea for Google Earth does just that.