July 2012

Imagine you're a staff photographer for a morning news show and you're told you will be photographing hilarious movie stars Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis for a piece on their upcoming movie The Campaign. Yipee right? Well, now imagine the next sentence you hear from your photo editor is that you'll have only three to four minutes before they have to move on, and the whole shoot has to take place in the hotel room where you're meeting them. Excitement gone; panic sets in.

There's always been a general consensus that there is an actual reason behind the "No Flash Photography" signs we see plastered all over the place. In some places it makes sense -- not flashing photosensitive animals at the aquarium speaks for itself -- but what about art galleries and museums? Why exactly do we have to rely on natural light there? According to Steve Meltzer on Imaging Resource, no good reason at all.

Car photography isn't nearly as glamorous or talked about as portrait, wedding and landscape photography, which is probably why you probably have never heard of John Jackson. But well-known or not, he happens to be a great example of the free, "doing what you love" (and taking pictures of it) lifestyle that so many people look for photography to give them.

Falling just slightly outside of photographically-relevant but square in the middle of awesome, this short video is just plain cool. Shot by the Copter Kids using Sony's FS700, the super slow motion video they get of their motocross friends flying through the air makes for some of the most entertaining aerial footage we've laid eyes on. Enjoy the music, enjoy the footage, and enjoy the guy pouring an entire beer on himself in slow motion... that last part they just did for the heck of it.

If you've ever flipped through a surf magazine and wondered how some of those incredible barrel riding pictures were taken, then this two part Momentum documentary on surf photographer Zak Noyle will be particularly interesting to you.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo recently developed a new system that they can use to track superfast moving objects in real time. Although high-speed tracking isn't anything new, where their system differs is that instead of moving the camera itself they move two separate mirrors. One mirror controls the horizontal-axis of the image, the other the vertical.

Here's a cool video showing what went on behind the scenes when photographer Sasha Leahovcenco was asked to shoot a drum stick ad for Vater Percussion. His subject was drummer Mike Johnston and everything from his choice of venue to the ideas that led to the final two shots make for an awesome ad. In fact rock band photographers may want to store this away for future reference, especially the main ad shot with all the drum sticks, which was created using only natural light.

Back in November of last year, we featured a project by photographer Max de Esteban titled Proposition One that consisted of pseudo-X-Ray photos of deconstructed gadgets. Max carefully deconstructs old gadgets, coats them with white spray paint, and puts them back together while photographing each step. He then spends 2-3 weeks combining all the different layers together to create a see-through view of each gizmo. The behind-the-scenes video above shows one of his images being made.

Did you know that Atari was once in the "photo" making business? In 1975 -- 3 years after it's founding -- the young video game company launched the Compugraph Foto, a large coin-operated machine that snapped photos and printed them out as ASCII portraits. Subjects stood in front of a monitor showing their face and then pressed a series of buttons, triggering the 950-pound machine to print out the portrait as a 14x11-inch "photo" on computer paper.

Have you ever learned that you should autofocus on the same point twice in a row to achieve optimal focusing? Apparently it's a tip that's often taught to beginners.

Here are some more leaked photos of Canon's upcoming mirrorless camera (here's our post from earlier today). Canon Rumors published a couple covertly taken photos of the camera, while Canon Price Watch released a bunch of new product shots. These images confirm that the first leaked photo wasn't some Photoshop job that had us all fooled.

The iPICS2GO Negative to iPhone Scanner is a simple device that lets your iPhone double as a scanner for photos, both film and prints. It works with 35mm negatives and slide film, as well as 3x5 and 4x6 prints.

This behind-the-scenes video by the Associated Press gives a neat look at the various robotic cameras the agency will use at the London Olympic Games (earlier this month we shared some of Reuters' rigs). Fancy remote-controlled rigs will allow for many photographic firsts, as cameras will be found in locations that were previously inaccessible. Wired writes that despite their usefulness, robotic cameras are causing some human photogs to sweat: …

Stop-motion projects often require mind-blowing amounts of work and preparation. Just how mind-blowing? Music duo Daniel Larsson and Tomas Redigh (AKA Rymdreglage) recently poured out 100 boxes of LEGO pieces that each contained 650 blocks. They then had two cameras snap a photo every 20 seconds as they spent a whopping 71 hours sorting by color. The time-lapse video was created using the 12,775 photos that each memory card ended up with.

Like most people, your kitchen at home is probably littered with various items collected over the past months, years, or even decades. Photographer Erik Klein Wolterink has a project titled Kitchen Portraits in which he captured portraits of the kitchens of various ethnic groups within Amsterdam. Rather than photograph them from one angle, he opened up the cupboards, drawers, fridges, and ovens, and photographed each space individually. The images were then combined afterwards into detailed …

"Photography" was featured as a category on last night's episode of Jeopardy. Here are the 5 questions that were asked. If you consider yourself a photography buff, see if you can answer all of them (answers at the end).

Feast your eyes on Canon's upcoming mirrorless camera. This image was first published by Japanese camera site Digicame-info, and was reportedly leaked by a camera shop. From the image, we see that the camera's name is EOS M, and that it comes with an EF-M (a new mount type!) 22mm f/2 STM pancake lens. If the rumors about the camera having an APS-C sensor are true, then the lens is effectively a 35mm lens on the camera -- perfect as a kit lens!

This past Monday, someone posted a photo to imageboard 4chan showing a Burger King employee stomping on two tubs of lettuce. The caption read "This is the lettuce you eat at Burger King." Other tech-savvy vigilante users immediately pounced on the case in hopes of identifying the poster. Unfortunately for the lettuce defiler, the photograph was taken with geotagging enabled, allowing the EXIF data to be used to zero in on the precise restaurant where the image was created: 1475 Worton …

The latest issue of Sports Illustrated magazine features 18 baseball photographs by sports photographer Brad Mangin across 6 of the opening pages. Not just any photographs, mind you, Instagram photos.

Hey Internet... Flickr heard your plea for improvement and has responded with its own standalone page titled "Dear Internet". The page is an open invitation to the Internet to help make the service better by applying for a job. We hear the site is looking to expand, and is looking for new rockstar employees to help it do so.

Vivian Maier, Photographer is a beautiful short film about the life and work of Vivian Maier, the unknown amateur photographer whose massive collection of street photographs was discovered at an estate sale after her death.

If the concept of spending real money on a like, comment or follower on Instagram seems downright strange to you, then join the club. But a couple of new websites seem to be capitalizing on people who are willing to do just that. Both Buy Instagram Followers and Buy Instagram Likes sell packages of tens, hundreds and even thousands of likes, comments, and followers that desperate seekers of Instagram popularity can purchase given they've got enough dough to spend.

This year hasn't been very friendly to Fujifilm's film lineup. The company has already announced the discontinuation of APS films, the cutting of some less popular films, and a worldwide price increase. The bad news doesn't end there: the British Journal of Photography is reporting that the company is making major cuts to its popular Velvia brand, a film known for its resolution and color saturation.

The Mirror is a highly acclaimed and incredibly creative short film by Swiss directors Ramon and Pedro. It shows a journey through life in one take, with everything taking place in the reflection of a bathroom mirror.

The Sartorialist might be a big name in street fashion photography these days, but snapping impromptu photos of the latest clothing trends is nothing new. Over a century ago, a photographer named Edward Linley Sambourne did the same kind of photography on the streets of London and Paris using a concealed camera. His images form a beautiful historical record of what people wore that deviates from what people typically think of when they hear "Edwardian fashion".

Flickr users have made quite a commotion in the past couple days begging new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to make the photo sharing site "awesome again", but how does one go about doing so? Mat Honan of Wired says that one of the site's big weaknesses is user engagement, and conducted a test to prove his point: …

If you regularly send emails containing links to your photographs, perhaps you've wondered whether the recipients actually viewed your images like they say they did. Was It Viewed? is a website that helps you easily make your links trackable. Simply provide the link and your email address for notification purposes, and the app will generate a special link you can send out. Whenever the link is clicked, you'll receive an email notification informing you of the fact (along with some details about …

Unlike the fabulously rich, those living at or under the poverty line in countries around the world have to make tough choices regarding what they eat on a daily basis. "The Poverty Line" is an ongoing project by photographer Stefen Chow and economist Lin Hui-Yi that shows how much food people living at the poverty line in various countries can buy.

When people think of models they typically think of people like Natasha Poly. Even with her "missing arm" on this month's Vogue Russia, she still fits the stereotype: stunning, skinny and tall. But those aren't the kinds of models UGLY MODELS Modeling Agency is interested in. No, according to the agency's website, UGLY MODELS prefers "a look with true character."

There's a question floating around the internet regarding the August cover of the magazine Vogue in Russia. Because of either a poor angle on the shot or an unfortunate Photoshop mishap, model Natasha Poly looks as if one of her hands doesn't come attached to the rest of her.

YouTube just announced a useful new feature: an easy face blur option. The announcement says the feature is aimed for news and human rights agencies to protect privacy and identities especially if posting images of activists who may need to remain anonymous or if minors are present in the videos and privacy is a concern.

Professor and self-proclaimed cyborg Steve Mann created an eye and memory-aid device he calls the EyeTap Digital Glass. The EyeTap, worn by Mann above on the left, is a wearable device that is similar to Google Eye, pictured right, but he's been making them at home since the 1980s. The goal of his project is to use images to aid memory, or even to augment the memories of people with Alzheimer's Disease or who simply want to preserve their memories more permanently. However, a recent …

Over the past month there has been a back and forth going on in the background of the photographic community between writers/photographers Joerg Colberg and Edward Rozzo. The discussion -- which has turned into a fascinating debate on the static present and uncertain future of contemporary photography -- was sparked by an article by Colberg entitled "Photography After Photography (A Provocation)," and provocative it was.

There's a crazy storm hovering over New York City, and a few hours ago ex-NFL player Dhani Jones shot this epic Instagram photograph of it from 10,000 on a Delta airlines flight. It's crazy how the downpour is so concentrated that it looks like a giant tornado tearing through the city.

PIX magazine is a newly launched digital magazine that has women photographers in mind.

It may not have been the best day to release a new compact camera, given that Panasonic announced five of them (if you count superzooms), but Samsung powered through anyway, unveiling its new addition to the compact world: the stylish looking MV900F. Unlike most of the compacts we've seen coming our way in the past month, this isn't a technical powerhouse with a superfast lens or a huge sensor. What the MV900F offers is a bunch of cool, if not a little bit random, features that try to entice …

Want to learn more about your Canon DSLR without leaving the comfort of its LCD screen? Canon has a series of "on-camera tutorials" that you can load and watch on most of its latest DSLR models. The video tutorials, which cover everything from AF modes to multiple exposure shooting, are meant to be loaded onto memory cards and viewed on-the-go using your camera itself. To find your camera's tutorials, find and click its model on this products page, and then select "On-Camera Tutorials" at the …

Photographer Dallas Nagata White shot this ridiculously awesome photograph while visiting a Kilauea lava flow in Hawaii. She writes, …

Rich Kids of Instagram is a website that collects Instagram photographs taken by young people who "have more money than you". It's a filtered look into the lives of people who zip around in private jets and receive Porsches as presents.

Time-lapse photography has become more and more popular in recent months, and even though you can find cheap intervalometer solutions to take care of the basic triggering of your camera, there really isn't anything outside of the DIY category that will allow you to add smooth motion to your time-lapse on the cheap. Fortunately, innovations happen every day, and a new intervalometer and motion control unit over on Kickstarter is just the innovation to solve this problem.

Canon is reportedly working on a followup to its popular 50mm f/1.4 lens. Canon Rumors reports that it has received tips on the lens being tested in the wild and published on some equipment price lists. Unlike the reasonable ~$370 price tag found on the current version, this new lens will reportedly hit shelves at a price of $849. Hopefully that price is a typo though, or thrifty fifty diehards won't be upgrading to it anytime soon.

It looks like the massive Panasonic leak we reported on yesterday was like garden vs fire hose when you compare it to the announcement spree that the company went on today. In addition to the the Lumix DMC-G5 mirrorless camera that we had the most details on yesterday, Panasonic also announced five new compacts including the FZ200 superzoom and high-end LX7 compact.

For his surreal series titled "Beibeees", artist Alberto Seveso blended photos of women with smoke-like photographs of ink in water. To recreate this kind of look, try shooting smoke or ink against a pure white background and then use the cloudy formations as a layer mask on a portrait.

Of the 5 people to take over the job of Yahoo! CEO over the last 5 years, Marissa Mayer is making the biggest splash. Maybe it's because she's six months pregnant and firing up the "working moms" debate, maybe it's because she's worth an approximate $300 million, or maybe it's because she was Google's 20th employee who's been doing great work over there since 1999. From a photography perspective, however, the Dear Marissa Mayer movement isn't hurting either.

Okay -- maybe it's trying to reinvent the wheel, er, ring flash, but this could be an interesting gadget: Chinese company CononMark has unveiled a flash system that looks like a cross between a ring flash, speedlights, bracket flash and modeling lights.

Why My Photographs Are Bad is a photography book for beginners first published in 1902 by a man named Charles Maus Taylor. The book contains many of the same basic tips that can be found in introductory books these days, but also many that are very specific to the way photography was done at the time. Here's a selection of common mistakes that newbie photographers were making over 100 years ago.

This may be a rare case in which a $695 class might actually save your life: Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is offering a safety course for journalists who cover war, conflict and disaster zones.

Aerial photography isn't something just anyone can afford to do; even the "cheaper" systems out there have you spending quite a bit of money to make it happen. Fortunately, a company that goes by the name Rotary Robotics is trying to remedy the situation with a project they're calling "Drones for Peace."

In 2000, photographer Noah Kalina started his everyday self-portrait project that spawned a viral video (and countless copycats) six years later. He's now twelve and a half years into the project now, and shows no signs of slowing down. The image above shows the 4,514 pictures he snapped of himself between January 11, 2000 and June 30, 2012. Kalina is also planning to release an updated version of the video that runs 7:41 min -- 10 frames per second and 1 month every 3 seconds.

A week ago, a short TED talk by Duncan Davidson called "Why do we hate seeing photos of ourselves" went viral in the blogosphere. While I agree with Duncan's main premise that part of the issue is that we are used to seeing a mirror image of ourselves, I think it goes deeper.