Over the past 4 years the New York City Department of Records has been compiling an online database made up of rare photographs of “the greatest city on earth,” and now that database is available to the public. The compilation consists of over 870,000 photos ranging in subject matter from landmarks to crime scenes put together from a Municipal Archives collection of over 2.2 million photos. Read more…

Washington DC-based photographer Sam Hurd has a series titled “Epic Portraits” that consists of portraits of famous individuals captured using techniques such as the Brenizer method, freelensing, and compositing. What’s neat is that each photograph has its own behind-the-scenes page detailing how it was created (the gear, goal, vision, story, and lesson learned).
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On Monday Adobe officially announced its upcoming Creative Cloud subscription service, which will allow users to “rent” CS6 for $50 a month or Photoshop by itself for $20 a month. Whitson Gordon over at Lifehacker did some calculations on whether subscribing is actually worth it. Here’s his conclusion:

If you’re upgrading from a previous version of the program, it’s quite a bit cheaper to just grab the upgrade from Adobe instead of subscribing. And, if you can get a student discount (which nearly anyone can do), that’ll be cheaper too—at least in the case of Photoshop, which doesn’t seem to offer a subscription for students. In the case of the Master Collection, the student subscription is cheaper than the regular student version, but still not cheaper than upgrading from a previous version. However, once you get past the two year mark, all bets are off—the subscription is more expensive than buying, even if you plan on upgrading every two years.

[...] our official recommendation is to stick with the retail versions unless you only plan on using your Adobe product for under two years. The subscription is great for the short run [...], but it’ll cost you quite a bit more in the long run.

Adobe’s John Nack also writes that one of the huge benefits of the new model is that it drastically reduces the barrier to entry. Previously you had to pay $700 to get started with using Photoshop. Now the cost is $20.

Is Adobe’s Creative Cloud Subscription Cheaper than Buying Photoshop? [Lifehacker]

If you’re afraid of heights you may want to look away, and you should certainly never make friends with these daredevil photographers from Russia. We here in the U.S. have memes, young Russian photographers, it seems, have “skywalking”: the newest extremely dangerous photography fad to hit the Internet. Read more…

One year ago today I took a photograph that would change my life. A single frame turned my whole world upside down, and brought on a storm of media attention, praise, criticism, confusion, wonder, and doubt. After one hell of a ride this past year, I think today is a good day to finally tell this photo’s story…
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Many photographers enjoy receiving feedback about their created images. Services such as Flickr and even Instagram are built at least partially around sharing your images and, hopefully, receiving some comments and praise in return. There’s something fascinating about having your work interpreted though someone else’s lens, and when Matt Richardson invented his “Descriptive Camera” he kept this in mind. Read more…

Two days ago we shared Frans Hofmeester’s wonderful time-lapse video of his daughter aging from birth to 12 in three minutes. That video has gone viral on the Internet, receiving a whopping four million views in less than a week. Hofmeester is actually doing the same project for his son Vince: the video above shows the boy aging from birth to age 9 in two minutes.

Buried inside photographer Jon Duenas‘ extensive portfolio are a set of double exposures that seem to focus on the theme of nature blooming through portraits of young women. Sometimes the technique itself is novel; such was the case with the mix of light paining and bullet time we posted yesterday. But that doesn’t mean that a photography technique that has been used time and again can’t still produce fresh, unique, and inspirational results. Case in point: Read more…

The folks over at NoFilmSchool recently did a low light comparison of the Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 5D Mark III, and Nikon D800. The cameras were used to film the same dark candlelit scene with the same settings, and the ISO was slowly pushed up to the cameras’ respective limits. It’s pretty striking how big of a difference in low light/high ISO quality there is in the cameras, especially in light of DxO Lab’s test results for the cameras’ sensors…

(via NoFilmSchool via Fstoppers)

Two years ago, we reported that an extremely rare Nikkor 6mm f/2.8 fisheye lens had been put up for sale on eBay for a cool $34,020. If you balked at that price, get this: another copy of the lens has turned up in London, and this time the price tag is a staggering £100,000, or roughly $160,000. The lens became the world’s most extreme wide angle 35mm lens when it was released in 1970, and boasts a field of view of 220º — it can literally see behind itself! If Grays of Westminster does manage to sell off the lens at that price, you can bet collectors will be kicking themselves for passing up on the eBay deal two years ago.

(via Grays of Westminster via Amateur Photographer)