June 2012

Back in 1967 Yoko Ono said that it was her ultimate goal "to make a film which includes a smiling face snap of every single human being in the world." And now that the 21st century has arrived she's one technological step closer to achieving that goal. Her new app, #smilesfilm, compiles all of the pictures of people's smiles taken and uploaded to either Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #smilesfilm into one easy-to-browse place.

If you’ve ever wondered when, or how, or why you might use a ring light or ring flash, this …

You'd think the biggest name in DSLR online buyer satisfaction would be someone like Nikon or Canon, but according to J.D. Power and Associates, it's actually Pentax. J.D. Power and Associates released their 2012 DSLR Online Buyer Report a couple of days ago, and it was Pentax that took the crown, scoring 899 our of 1,000. The runners up, in case you're interested, were Nikon with an 891 and Canon with an 888.

Where the action cam market is concerned, GoPro is king. For the last few years if you wanted to go sky diving, snowbording, mountain biking, or any other extreme sport and video tape yourself doing it, you'd probably be strapping a GoPro to one of your appendages. Sony and JVC, however, are looking to get in on some of the extreme sports action -- and both are doing it in style with new action cam offerings.

Falling somewhere in the "really cool idea" category, this fully-automatic, working photo booth is made entirely out of cardboard. Everything from the outside to the gears, cogs and belts that make up the innards is all cardboard and 100% automatic. To use the machine all you have to do is insert your cardboard token and then sit perfectly still while the box exposes, develops and fixes a silver-gelatin photograph of you and yours.

Flickr announced today that it has partnered with Nokia to overhaul its geotagging …

“Science can be beautiful. Art can be scientific.” This latest episode of the PBS series …

This idea came to me after I had shot this photo in the daytime. I had been seeing a lot of celestial-type shots on the Internet, but most were just landscapes with no action. My main focus is action sports, and I love a challenge. I figured I would give it a try.

If you're creating a short film that requires a "through the viewfinder" clip, there's an easier way to create it than pointing your camera through an actual viewfinder (does anyone actually do that?). In the short tutorial above, Luke Neumann of Neumann Films shows how you can simulate the look of a viewfinder by overlaying your footage with some focusing screen images. All the necessary image and audio files are available as a free download.

Love to zoom? Samsung has launched a new camera for you. The WB100 is a new superzoom camera that features a 16-megapixel sensor and 22.3-579.8mm equivalent lens. Features include dual image stabilization (i.e. both optical and digital), 3D photography, live panorama creation, 720p video recording, ISO 80-1,600 and the option of being powered by either AA batteries of lithium-ion rechargeable ones.

Massive wildfires in the Rockies have destroyed hundreds of homes and scorched tens of thousands of acres over the …

Ever wonder how much you’re paying to keep your rechargeable camera batteries juiced? The answer: probably around a buck …

I often ask myself, “When and how it is it that I decided to become a commercial photographer?” The answer to this question is usually a long drawn out tale that goes back to when I was a junior in high school back in Miami. I’ll save you the long story and only share the story of my favorite photography class and assignment and why it was so great.

UK-based nothinghereok purchased an old engine off eBay to replace his old one …

Artists Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen have a two-year-long project titled 100 Posterworks that features B&W portraits in various locations, with standard compositions, featuring witty messages on hand-painted signs.

Watch out, Flickr — Instagram is coming for you. The popular photo sharing …

To celebrate Google+'s one year anniversary, photographer Alex Koloskov and retoucher Genia Larionova teamed up on a photo project to recreate the Google logo using photographs of paint. They tossed paint matching the colors of each letter into the air multiple times and picked out the best shapes, which were then combined in Photoshop.

When Picnik bit the dust several months back, it handed the web-editor baton, in large part, over the the Aviary photo editor. Since then Aviary has been running on all cylinders making consistent improvements and otherwise trying to get you to forget about that one Pic-something editor -- and it doesn't look like the company will be stopping any time soon. Having launched full-blown Android and iOS apps less than two weeks ago, Aviary has now secured $6-million in capital from several different investors, including Amazon's Jeff Bezos.

Here's a tutorial by photographer Stephen Davies on how you can create a pseudo double exposure photograph using a couple simple steps in Photoshop.

Music photographers in the UK have organized a boycott of indie band The Stone Roses reunion concerts (to be held this weekend) over a contract that they say is unfairly strict with their image rights. All press and music photographers are familiar with the typical restrictions that come with photographing an event or band, but the Stone Roses have asked the photogs to "assign to the Group, with full title guarantee, all Rights in perpetuity throughout the world..." A request for which the band was going to allegedly pay only £1 according to the first draft of the contract.

If you're the owner of a Fujifilm X-Pro1 and you've been yearning for a little bit of zoom capability out of your lenses, then it looks like relief isn't far off. A couple of days ago Fujifilm announced the lens roadmap for the X-Pro1 (seen above), which shows that we'll be seeing a few zoom lenses added to the family, one of which will be here as early as this Fall.

Who says you can't make money selling photos taken on your iPhone? Certainly not the creators of a new app dubbed Foap, which allows you to do just that. The app is pretty easy to use: just download it for free off the iTunes store, upload your best pics, tag them so they're easier to find, and submit. After that every photo will have to be manually approved before it's put up on the Foap Marketplace for $10 a pop, $5 of which goes to the photographer.

Remember the mysterious camera NYTimes columnist David Pogue was gushing over earlier this month? Turns out it’s …

Video game developers have learned over the years that socially-shared achievements are a great way to encourage beginners to learn new tasks. Taking a page from their book, Adobe has a neat new game called LevelUp that encourages Photoshop learning using the same tricks. Available for CS5 and above, the extension encourages exploration and assigns missions to introduce features and tools that player might never have seen before. Tasks include removing redeye, whitening teeth, and replacing the colors in a photo.

It's a shame that the digital age brought with it such widespread copyright infringement and, sometimes, downright theft, but it's a reality we have to live with. Fortunately, there's a new website up on Tumblr that is looking to help expose the people who are taking credit for other's work, and in the process help to cut down on some of the blatant infringement many photographers deal with week in and week out.

Here’s the live demo of Google’s Project Glass that was given by co-founder Sergey Brin yesterday at the company’s …

Earlier this month we reported on rumors of a significant Canon EOS 7D firmware update that was possibly in the works, and today that update became official. Not surprisingly, the rumors seem to have been spot on, as firmware v2 for the 7D brings many of the highly-anticipated and frequently-requested features that users of Canon's flagship APS-C SLR have been pining for.

Google demoed its much-hyped Project Glass at its I/O conference today, showing how the sleek camera-equipped "goggles" could one day allow point-of-view photos and videos to be beamed directly to others through the Internet. Four skydivers wearing the glasses beamed footage of their jump live through Google+ to the attendees in the SF conference center (see above video). They then "passed the baton" onto a group of bikers who did some tricks on the roof and then biked into the center, showing that the footage was in fact live.

Thinking about recording video with your Canon DSLR? stillmotion put together this short …

After seeing hashtags for a TV show featuring a "Psychic Wayne" all over Twitter, Irish student Alan Rice decided to see what all the fuss was about. Of course, within a few minutes he had already decided that the show was, in his words, tripe. But after watching a little while longer he noticed something else: the pictures of the other off-air "psychics" that people could call looked a lot like stock photos.

We've all been there. Anybody who has ever done any work in the creative industry has had to deal with clients who have no understanding of basic business practices, or photography, or a little thing called payment. The above video was put together by the website Clients From Hell, where creatives can go and upload their most entertaining horror stories anonymously.

It's worth noting that the video is from the perspective of a graphic designer (as are many of the stories on the website) but many a photographer has dealt with similar problems.

The camera in your smartphone is good for a lot of things, and we're not just talking about Instagram and causing the sad yet inevitable demise of the point-and-shoot; now it can also be used to send and receive secret messages using light. A new Casio camera app called Picapicamera encodes messages or graphics using a sequence of red, green and yellow flashing lights, which another user of the app can then point their camera at to decode.

Everyday People is a photo project for Oklahoma newspaper Tulsa World by photographer John Clanton. The goal is to meet one new person in the community every day of the year, create a portrait of them, and display the image along with a short blurb about who they are.

In both still photography and video, camera work should generally be invisible to viewers, allowing them to focus on …

Recently, Microsoft has been showing off many of the new features we'll be seeing in the much-anticipated official release of Windows 8, and the most recent sneak peek Microsoft gave us was of the new Photos app. The app offers a native way for Windows users to organize, view and share all of their photos regardless of what they were taken with or where they're stored.

Water drop photographer Corrie White creates pretty neat “time-lapse” videos of water drops …

Polaroid lovers will be happy to know that it doesn't look like the company is slowing down where the instant camera game is concerned. Late last year they unveiled the Z340 -- a futuristic digital instant camera in the classic Polaroid style -- and now they've officially announced their newer, sleeker Z2300. The Z2300 falls somewhere in-between Polaroid's big and bulky Z340 and the dinky (and somewhat unwieldy) PIC-300. In many ways it combines the best of both worlds in to a much more stylish point-and-shoot package.

Brazilian artist André Feliciano creates beautiful gardens that look rather ordinary from afar, but step a little closer and you'll notice that each individual flower is quite peculiar: it's shaped like a camera. Feliciano's colorful displays feature hundreds or thousands of tiny plastic cameras.

After we published our browser color management PSA yesterday, those of you reading this site on your …

If you’re a fan of hearing from photography greats and have some free time, check out his awesome documentary …