The stated goal on "the Kick" is that they're trying to "help you take better pictures, make better videos and have fun doing it." But what they've really done is re-imagine, and maybe even revolutionize, portable lighting. That's because the Kick, in particular the Kick Plus, can do so much: use it as a strobe, as a continuous light source, or to generate different colors or effects.
Aviary -- the online photo editor that replaced Picnik as the official editor for Flickr -- is expanding their scope by releasing an Android and iOS app. Up until now iOS users had no Aviary to speak of and Android users had only a "plugin," but as of yesterday, full-blown apps for both operating systems are available in the iTunes App store and Google Play.
Inspired by Cesar Kuriyama’s monthly video summaries created with one second clips, …
Security camera clips that make the news usually show bad things, but Coke decided to “look at the world …
Back in the days before every photo was tagged and shared with family, friends and strangers alike, a photograph was a rare, prized possession. In the Civil War era it wasn't uncommon for soldiers to carry a small tintype of a family member into battle, and if they died, sadly so did all of the information about that photo. That's why the Museum of the Confederacy needs your help.
Those of you in the US who were salivating over the 41-megapixel camera in the Nokia 808 PureView were given a small ray of hope when you found out that the smartphone was possibly going to make it stateside unlocked. But if the camera was what you were pining for then you have no reason to fret, because according to Nokia USA President Chris Webber, future Lumia Windows Phones will be sporting the same tech.
Did you know that more photos are created every two minutes than in the entire 1800s? HighTable created this infographic that gives a quick overview of the state of the photography industry and the rise of mobile photography.
If you use older versions of Nikon's ViewNX or Transfer software listen up, because Nikon Europe has issued a warning that applies directly to you. RAW images captured using an unsupported Nikon DSLR and transferred, viewed, or edited using earlier versions of either of those programs can become corrupted by the software.
Here’s a video overview of some interesting research that’s being done in the area of video processing. By taking …
Blind Spot is a new photo project by photographer John Clang in which he had people pose for portraits with their eyes closed while a previously captured portrait was projected onto their faces. The resulting images fall somewhere in the uncanny valley.
The largest photo book ever published sold yesterday at the Bonhams Book, Maps, Manuscripts and Historical Photographs sale in London. The book is made up of 20, un-enlarged prints of Egypt, Sinai and Jerusalem taken by renowned English photographer Francis Frith that each measure a colossal 30in x 21in. To give you some perspective, we've superimposed a picture of Canon's new T4i (to scale) onto the picture from the book itself. As you can see, these are some big prints.
Screamotron3000 is a creative photo booth hacked together by photographer Billy Hunt, who writes,
The Screamotron3000 is an converted boom box that takes a photo when you scream. Think Rube Goldberg meets the Wizard of Oz. By using a machine, I hope to offer a window through the inherently artificial process of portraiture into real human emotion.
It's a brilliant way to cause inner turmoil for his subjects. On one hand, a scream is needed to activate the camera, but on the other hand, subjects have a natural desire to look presentable in photos.
Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde creates indoor clouds using a smoke machine and uses dramatic lighting to make them look realistic. He calls the project Nimbus.
With most camera companies moving towards robotic assembly lines and online storefronts, it shouldn't come as a shock that the one company resisting this revolution is Leica. Not only do they still make many of their products by hand, but they also recently released plans to increase the number of worldwide Leica retail locations from 37 to 200 by the year 2016.
Recent news coming out of Rochester yesterday points to the fact that Kodak will be selling off its two massive patent portfolios sooner rather than later, and regardless of any progress made in the suit against Apple and RIM. In accordance with the June 30th deadline outlined in their lending agreement, Kodak has already filed a motion with the bankruptcy court -- to be approved at a hearing on July 2nd -- petitioning for a closed bids auction due to the "special nature of the assets."
After Facebook launched its own iOS camera app last month, many people were surprised that the app …
Chemin Vert is a project created by Italian artist …
For his project titled All Look Same, San Francisco-based photographer Howard Cao photographed celebrity impersonators in Las Vegas and then had Sugar Digital do some post-processing magic to transform their race. The result is a series of images that is meant to ask the question, "Would celebrities be as interesting to American culture if they were Asian?".
After buying a Yongnuo flash and finding its wireless capabilities “hit and miss”, Marcell of …
Here are some uncropped (or "unzoomed") versions of iconic photographs that show more context than their famous cropped counterparts. It's interesting to see what photographers and photo editors chose to keep and what they chose to throw away. The image above is an alternate view of Tank Man.
Artist Chris Fraser creates beautiful light displays by turning rooms into giant camera obscuras. Rather than use a single pinhole as the lens, he bores numerous holes into the walls to create layered patterns of light. He writes,
My light installations use the ‘camera obscura’ as a point of departure. They are immersive optical environments, idealized spaces with discreet openings. In translating the outside world into moving fields of light and color, the projections make an argument for unfixed notion of sight.
Last year I did a lecture about how to get commercial assignments by photographing and promoting personal photography projects at the Event Space at B&H Photo in NYC. It was a wonderful lecture discussing how to come up with tests shoots that are artistic, enjoyable to shoot, and could be marketable to potential clients. Most of the images I was showing that day were from a portrait project I had shot a couple years earlier which ended up getting me some great advertising jobs. The portraits I was showing were very much about personality and were by no means a great technical feat being that they were shot in the studio on a black background.
Nikon found themselves at the center of a controversy this last weekend after they decided to cancel a sensitive photography exhibit without giving a reason why. The exhibit, a photographic documentary on the theme of "Comfort Women" (Korean women used as sex slaves during WWII in Japan), was put together by Korean photographer Ahn Sehong and set to start on June 26th at the Nikon Salon in Tokyo -- until Nikon cancelled it.
Super slow motion footage captured by high speed cameras usually shows slow movements (if any), but German studio The Marmalade came up with a brilliant way of speeding up the movements: a high-speed robot camera operator.
Our groundbreaking High Speed Motion Control System 'Spike' brings the creative freedom of a moving camera to the world of high speed filming and so enables us to create shots that would be impossible to achieve otherwise. 'Spike' can freely move the camera with unparalleled speed and precision, thereby removing the previously existing creative limitation of having to shoot high speed sequences with a locked camera.
By marrying the hardware of a sturdy and reliable industrial robot to software that was built from the ground up for the demands of motion controlled high speed imaging, we developed a unique system for creating real life camera moves with the ease of use normally associated with 3D Animation.
The system does camera moves that are exactly repeatable, allowing them to be slightly tweaked until the shot is just right.
Here are a few videos showing the new Canon Rebel T4i/650D's touchscreen LCD in action. The navigation options (e.g. pinch to zoom and swipe to change) are very similar to controls found on smartphones.
Here’s a random but interesting piece of photo-related trivia: did you know that Kodak used a calendar that had …
A couple of weeks ago, reports confirmed that Olympus ex-CEO Michael Woodford would be settling with his former employer out of court rather than taking them to task for his unfair dismissal. Woodford was let go after blowing the whistle on Olympus' financial scandal, but now it seems he will have the last laugh as The New York Times has finally put a figure to the settlement: $15.4 Million.
Rounding out a day packed with Apple announcements and general excitement at the WWDC 2012, here's one final Apple tidbit coming from rumor site Apple Insider. According to them, recent job postings at Apple hint at the possibility of an Aperture mobile app coming in the near future. After receiving a tip from an anonymous user, Apple Insider found that the Aperture team is looking to fill quite a few manager and developer positions, many of which require experience developing on the iOS platform in one form or another.
It looks like previous rumors about an updated photo stream in iOS6 were right. Apple has officially announced what they're calling "shared photo streams," which are exactly what they sound like: mark certain photos or albums as "shared," choose who you would like to share them with, and you're done. The folks you chose to share the album with will get a notification (if they have an iOS6 device or a Mac with Mountain Lion) and be able to browse, like and comment on your pictures in iPhoto, Aperture, or even on AppleTV. Non-Apple users will have to settle with browsing your shared photos on the web.
Laptop bag straps make for pretty comfortable camera straps since they’re designed for carrying a good amount …
Big updates coming at you from Apple's WWDC for the MacBook Pro line today, the most impressive of which was their super thin, "next generation" 15-inch MacBook Pro that now boasts a retina display. With 220 pixels per inch, and over 5 million pixels overall, the screen will offer 4-times the resolution of previous models -- needless to say we're impressed with the photo edition possibilities here.
Ever wonder what the f-number of your eyes are? It can easily be calculated using the human eye's focal length (~22mm) and physical aperture size.
Eye-Fi cards have seen their fair share of competition, but a new product from memory manufacturer PQI could pose a bigger threat than they're used to. The Air Card, as PQI are calling it, made its debut at Computex 2012 and, for the most part, offers exactly what we'd expect from a WiFi memory card: it creates its own WiFi hotspot when the camera is turned on, at which point photos appear automatically on whatever tablet, phone or PC you happen to have connected. The card can even connect to three sources at once, although this will slow down the transfer rate quite a bit. One specific feature, however, makes the Air Card stand out.
Being Brave is a series of portraits by photographer Andy Brown showing children before and after tooth extraction surgery. Brown first photographed each child bright-eyed and smiling in the waiting room, and then captured their faces again as they were waking up from general anesthesia.
Over the last month we've featured two re-interpretations of Robert Frank's classic photo book "The Americans" -- one controversial and minimalistic, another analytical. And now we bring you a third, very different, auditory take on Frank's classic work.
Photographer Andrew Emond's Sounds of the Americans is a re-interpretation of The Americans using sound. By using a specialized software to convert all 83 images into audio, and then using a spectrograph to take that audio and re-create the original image, Emond's work sheds an entirely different light on iconic pictures we've all become very familiar with.
About a week ago, Winnipeg-based photographer Tristan Shea Penner made quite a splash in the DIY world by releasing the above video about his DIY alternative to the Kino Flo lights that iconic headshot photographer Peter Hurley uses. People were intrigued by the quality of the portraits Penner was getting with his rig, while managing to keep it semi-portable at the same time. The only problem was that the video didn't get specific on how to build the rig for yourself, so Penner put together a full set of instructions that he's now posted on his website.
Firmware updates roll out all the time, but rarely are they worthy enough to take serious notice of. A new firmware version for the Canon EOS 7D, however, may bring with it several new features that have the rumor mill spinning at the moment. According to Canon Rumors, a couple of days ago a Canon CPN site briefly posted details on firmware version 2 for the 7D before realizing their mistake and taking them down, but not before plenty of people caught a glimpse.
A great timelapse is a labor of love, and photographer Cameron Michael's Manhattan Project is a result of the love he has for the incredible city of New York, or more specifically the island/borough of Manhattan.
Having just mentioned National Geographic yesterday, it's appropriate that we're featuring a photographer whose work has been used in the magazine many times over. David Doubilet is certainly one of the greatest underwater photographers in the world, and his work in both fresh and salt water, in both black and white and color, really leaves one breathless.
Photographers and cinematographers are infamous (or maybe just famous) for using their children to create sometimes moving, sometimes cute, but always creative photo and video projects. Take, for example, Dutch photographer Frans Hofmeester's time lapse of his daughter from birth to age 12.
Just like point-and-shoots, the camcorder market was also hit hard by the advent of good-quality smartphone cameras. For the average person, all the home video capability they might ever need can now be found in, say, their iPhone. The only problem with that -- besides a higher susceptibility to Vertical Video Syndrome -- is that the videos you take on your smartphone rarely leave your smartphone.
Back in 2010, Lee Morris set out to prove that you don't need expensive camera gear to be a photographer by doing an entire fashion shoot using an iPhone 3G; while people were impressed, many nevertheless said that the use of professional studio lighting and post-processing negated the point he was trying to make.
It seems like almost every time the subject of 4K video cameras comes up, someone inevitably argues that such high resolution is unnecessary. Well, Sony have taken notice, and this week DoP Philippe Ros -- who was hired to shoot a 4K promo video -- jumped to 4K's defense by explaining that it's not all about the resolution.
Here's a great little-known tip coming at you via photographer Dan Carr that has the potential to make using Lightroom just that much easier. If you didn't already know -- and it seems most people didn't -- assuming you have enough card readers, you can actually import multiple memory cards into Lightroom all at once.
A little over a month ago we featured an extended interview with long-time Newsweek Photo Editor Jamie Wellford. It was a longer video than we usually put up but very educational and well worth an hour of your time. And now Photoshelter has put together another long interview/webinar as part of their "What Photo Buyers Want" series, this one with National Geographic Senior Photo Editor Elizabeth Krist.
We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if your company logo showed up in a picture of an alleged killer? Chances are you wouldn't be too thrilled with any of the 1000 words that picture was generating.
George Eastman House released this video recently that provides a quick lesson on …
New York Times gadget columnist David Pogue knows something we don’t. In this …
Nikon D800 vs Canon 5D Mark III videos are a dime a dozen, so the folks over at …
Most everybody's heard of "Draw Something," the app where you are given a word and you have to draw something that will get the person on the other end to guess that word. But we're photographers and photo enthusiasts! We don't draw, we capture moments! Well, now we're also in luck, because app developer Rumpus has just announced a guessing game for the photographically inclined (or just about anyone who likes snapping and sharing pictures) called What The Photo.