June 2012

Fiery Multiple Exposure Shoot Produced In-Camera

Photographer Benjamin "Von Wong" has pulled of a flashy feat with fire: a multiple exposure shoot of a pyrotechnician at work -- all photographed and produced in his Nikon D800. That's right -- all in-camera, no stacking in Photoshop.

Creative Portraits of a Man in a Money Suit

One day photographer Jimmy Hickey decided to do a photo project capturing "money problems personified", so he withdraw everything from his bank account in one dollar bills and created a money suit. The resulting project is titled "What Have We Done?".

Wedding Photographer Loses Memory Card After Pub Brawl

A UK couple is very displeased after their wedding photographer lost all the images from their wedding during a scuffle in a pub.

Jackie and Anam Sanderson enlisted a friend, Ben Fagan, to take wedding photographs -- mostly to his benefit, they said, to boost his portfolio. But after the wedding, Fagan placed the card in his wallet and lost it a week later -- though he doesn't have a clear memory of when or where. Unfortunately for the couple, who had a small wedding service with just 60 guests, Fagan was the only one taking pictures, save a few blurry photos taken by guests.

Instagram Update Scraps Popularity for Explore Tab

Instagram's latest 2.5 update has swapped out their "popular" tab for a new "explore" feature which allows users to browse photos based on users and hashtags -- it's a more functional search system. Now, instead of seeing photos that have the most likes, users can search for hashtags based on events and topics, which also makes it possible for users to have wider circulation of their images.

5 Simple Tips for Holding a Successful Photo Exhibition

At some point or another, as a creative professional, you will have the option to exhibit work to the public. Exhibitions are a great tool to market yourself, and your work to potential clients and art buyers.

What Else Can I Do For My Clients?

In a world where everybody wants more for less, it’s hard to justify spending money on things which may or may not make your clients happier. I have always been a believer in the idea that you need to spend money to make money, yet I find other photographers are very split on this subject. I know photographers who are proud that they use the same camera and laptop they bought 5 years ago citing that their clients aren’t complaining so it must be working just fine.

Interview with Javier Manzano

Editor's note: This post contains graphic photos that some readers may find disturbing.

Javier Manzano is a freelance photographer currently based in Afghanistan -- no stranger to documenting conflict. He received a 2011 World Press Photo award for an image from his 2010 work in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The border city has been embroiled in a drug war since 2008 when the Sinaloa cartel moved to take over Juárez -- located just over three miles from El Paso, Texas. Violence broke out between warring cartels, gangs and police. In 2010, Juarez recorded over 3000 homicides.

PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Javier Manzano: I was born and raised in Mexico and moved to the United States at the age of eighteen. Soon after graduating from college I landed a job at an advertising agency where I worked in for several years. The events that unraveled early on the morning of September 11, 2001 would change our lives forever. For me, it meant quitting my job and returning to school for what I believed was my calling in life – journalism. After completing several newspaper photography internships y became employed at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, CO. The paper folded in 2009 and over 200 people were laid off. Since then, I've worked as a freelance photographer producing a wide range of material, from editorial and commercial photography, to news and documentary films.

The Rashomon Effect and My Small-Camera Choice

Way back in the day, when the first mirrorless cameras were released, I was on them like white on rice. I desperately wanted to love, well, any of them: the Sigma DP-1, Panasonic G1, Olympus E-P1, Leica X-1, and more all passed through my hands. Many people loved having a small camera that delivered high image quality. I loved that idea, too, but I didn’t love those first cameras because of what they couldn’t do. They couldn’t shoot high ISO. There weren’t many lenses. Autofocus times reminded me of loading pages on dial-up Internet connections. But at the time (way back in 2009) I thought this was the future of consumer imaging. I predicted that by their third generation, mirrorless cameras would eventually take over the intro-level SLR slot.

Ritz Camera Files for Chapter 11 Again, Nikon, Sony and Fuji All Cringe

Ritz Camera and Image LLC officially filed for bankruptcy last Friday for the second time in three years. And while bankruptcy and financial trouble in general are, unfortunately, not uncommon in the world of photography these days, Ritz is making headlines because of their major unsecured creditors. Amon the biggest names on the list are Nikon, Sony and Fuji, all of whom stand to lose quite a bit of money as Ritz prepares to restructure.

Light Pen Bringing Easy, Colorful Light Painting to an iPhone Near You

Typically, light painting requires a little bit of photography know how and some camera equipment that's up to the task. But a new product by Tomy may change all that, or at least give non-photographers and kids something to play around with when they're bored. Tomy's new light pen and app combo, which will retail for $30, allow the user to create rudimentary light paintings using nothing more than the pen and a free iPhone app.

Iris: A Concept Camera That’s Controlled Using Your Eye

Using the human eye to control cameras isn't a new idea -- Canon used to offer eye-controlled focusing in its SLRs -- but designer Mimi Zou's Iris concept camera takes the concept one step further by having the camera be entirely controlled by the eye. Shaped like a lens, the photographer uses the camera by simply looking through it. Focusing, zooming, and snapping photos are done by looking, narrowing/widening the eyes, and blinking (respectively).

Miami Heat Owner Sues Blogger Over Unflattering Photo

Minority owner of the recently-crowned national champion Miami Heat, Raanan Katz, has been making waves all over the Internet the past few days over a controversial lawsuit regarding a photo of himself that he has deemed unflattering (seen above). The lawsuit is directed at both the originating blogger and Google (who refused to take down the photo), and according to paidContent, Katz is requesting that damages be paid him by both parties.

Dropping Your DSLR Down a Mountain Can Be Bad for Its Health

One of the questions that comes back most often when people learn what I do for a living is: how do you manage not to drop your camera? Up until Saturday, I could (somewhat smugly) answer that I am being very careful and have been lucky so far.

Tokyo Court Orders Nikon to Allow Ahn Se-hong’s “Comfort Women” Exhibit

A couple of weeks ago Nikon became the center of a heated debate when, without explanation, they cancelled Korean photographer Ahn Se-hong's Comfort Women exhibit. The exhibit, which was scheduled to begin tomorrow on June 26th at the Nikon Salon in Tokyo, was complied by Se-hong over the course of 11-years, and brings attention to Korean women who were used as sex slaves or "comfort women" for Japanese soldiers during World War II. Needless to say, the decision came as quite a shock, especially given the lack of adequate explanation.

Is Your Browser Color Managed?

Is your browser color managed? If not, the photographs you are looking at are distorted versions of what their creators intended them to be. Is the car above rendered in school bus yellow, or in a jarring purple?

Why Plexiglass is Used to Protect Art

A 22-year-old Houston artist named Uriel Landeros made news this past week after walking into Houston’s Menil Collection museum and vandalizing a priceless 1929 Picasso painting titled Woman in a Red Armchair. A fellow museum patron captured cell phone footage of Landeros spray painting the word "conquista" onto the painting using a stencil. The painting was rushed to the museum's conservation lab for an emergency restoration, and Landeros was just arrested and charged with two third-degree felonies.

Unscrambling The Egg: The Leica M9 Monochrom

When Leica announced “Henri”, the M9 Monocrom on May 10th, it caused a lot of fervor on blogs and photography websites. The all black camera, named after the legendary black and white Leica photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson was devoid of almost all Leica markings and seemed niche even for the niche camera maker.

The Care and Feeding of Your Tripod

Being a good photographer, you have a tripod. Maybe two tripods. Maybe even a big, heavy duty one for your big lenses, a standard one for everyday use, and one of those small, cool ones that folds up like a roadmap and you can carry it in your back pocket.

116 Hollywood Stars in One Group Picture

To celebrate its 100th year anniversary, Paramount Pictures gathered together 116 of Hollywood's most famous stars for an epic group picture. Photographer Art Streiber used 57 strobes to light the scene, and spent just under 6 minutes snapping 63 frames using a Hasselblad H2 and 150mm lens.

The Bastards Book of Photography: An Open Source Primer on Using Light

Typical photo books and resource books for photographers come printed and bound, which is not a bad thing. Digital as our photography has become, displaying it, or teaching people how to replicate it, are two areas in which ink on paper still rule. Dan Nguyen's The Bastards Book of Photography, however, breaks these rules, and in the process becomes both a great resource for beginners, and a re-think on book distribution and creation.

How To Develop Photo Paper With Your Favorite Vintage of Merlot

Around this time last year, we featured a video on developing film using coffee and vitamin C. And now, the folks behind the Caffenol blog (which was named after the nickname given to the "home brew" developer) have put together a video showing that it's possible to do something similar using red wine instead of coffee and photo paper instead of film.

Yahoo! Mail Unveils New Photo Sharing Tool

There's an overabundance of ways to share and organize your photos these days. From Flickr and 500px, to Facebook and Shutterfly, you can store and share your photos in many places. But according to Yahoo!, many people still use good ol' fashioned e-mail. Yahoo!'s senior director of product management Dave McDowell said that over 500-million photos are sent through Yahoo! Mail every day, and so in an attempt to streamline that process and better cater to the needs of their 300-million users, Yahoo! has released a new photo sharing tool made just for Yahoo! Mail.

Olympus in Final Stages of $623M Sony Investment Deal

Ever since their financial scandal, Olympus has been looking to bring on a big name investor to help get them out of trouble. Earlier this month that investor seemed to be Panasonic, but when that fell through everybody looked to the remaining three possible investors -- Sony, Fujifilm and Terumo -- to see if anybody was going to make the leap. According to Japanese business daily Nikkei, that investor is Sony.

Striped Double Exposure Photos Created Entirely In-Camera

The photographs in Isabel M. Martínez's Quantum Blink project look like they were stitched together using Photoshop, but they were actually all created in-camera. She writes,

The photographs in Quantum Blink are composed of two exposures taken instants apart. The striped pattern is the result of masks placed in-camera, this feature allows me to blend two images together and at the same time keep them from fully fusing onto one another. Each photograph holds a brief sense of continuity, almost like an animation, slightly cinematographic. Though they provide a notion of movement and progression, their beginning and end is ambiguous and indistinguishable.