July 2012

German photographer Falk Lumo has an interesting post on his blog regarding full …

LZRTAG is a free Android app that lets you generate QR codes associated with uploaded images -- mostly animated .gif images. The codes can be printed out and placed on walls and other surfaces. When scanned with the Android app, the codes call up the associated image and display it in an augmented reality on your phone.

As you already know, we're pretty obsessed with Polaroids, and all the creative photography we can get our hands on. This tutorial will teach you how to make a pop-up Polaroid camera card that "prints" out a miniature Polaroid picture.

The pieces of card stock for this project are about 7-1/2 inches long by 4-1/2 inches wide. To create a mini Polaroid you can print, we recommend using the Shake It Photo iPhone app. Send the image from your phone to your email, drop it into Preview, Photoshop or Word to resize, and you're good to go.

Up until now XQD cards have had a bit of a tough time getting off the ground. With only one compatible camera option in the Nikon D4, one manufacturer in Sony, and prices as large as the speeds they offer are impressive, people may have been starting to wonder if the format is here to stay. The answer, it seems, is yes -- due in large part to Lexar's newly announced interest in producing the cards by later this year.

Photographer David Nemcsik of Budapest, Hungary has a beautiful project titled the "Levitation Project" that features surreal images of people floating in midair in a lying up down position. The subjects are Nemcsik's friends, and the locations were picked by asking them this simple question: "where were you in your last dream?".

Photographers and designers alike salivate over a Wacom tablet on occasion, but more often than not the cons (in way of cost) outweigh the pros. The new addition to the Wacom family, however, comes with a few more bells and whistles to tempt those with some disposable income and an itchy wallet finger -- and they call it the 24HD Touch.

My mind is a strange and dangerous place. I shouldn’t go in there alone after dark. But the other night I was thinking, just me and myself, about all the new camera releases this year. Which had made the biggest impact? Was it the Canon 5D III with that world-class autofocus system? The Olympus OM-D bringing mirrorless cameras up a notch in image quality and usability? Should I mention the excellent Samsung NX20, just because no one knows it’s really good? Give the Fuji X-Pro an award for best concept most poorly carried out? Consider the Sony NEX-7 for putting full-frame resolution on an APS-C sensor?

Randall Munroe over at XKCD posted this …

It's nearly impossible to find a photograph in China taken before 1970 -- most images were destroyed or removed to other countries during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.

A professor at Bristol University in the UK is running a project in search of these lost images, the BBC reports:

Such photographs are exceptionally rare in China. The turbulent history of the 20th Century meant that many archives were destroyed by war, invasion and revolution. Mao Zedong's government regarded the past as a "black" time, to be erased in favour of the New China. The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s finished the job.

"If you were at all savvy," says (Professor Robert) Bickers, "you realised early on that you had to destroy your own private family records, before the Red Guards came and found evidence of your bourgeois, counter-revolutionary past, when you might have drunk coffee in a café bar, à la mode."

Back in 2010, we shared a video showing Canon’s 1200mm lens — a giant piece of glass …

Pictures do a lot for humanity. They compress 1000 words into one simple photo, capture special moments and freeze them in time, put us back in touch with our history and, more recently, when 36.7-million of them are taken every second by one of the world's fastest cameras, pictures can also help cure cancer by catching it early. That last part is due to the brilliant minds in a lab at UCLA who have created what they are calling "The World's Fastest Camera."

Mexican photojournalist Julian Cardona has lived in Ciudad Juarez since 1960 and began documenting the city in the early 1990s as a photojournalist for the local newspaper, El Diario. He says he's seen Juarez shift from an idyllic postcard-worthy border town to the city known as the homicide capital of the world.

If you're human then you've probably looked at a portrait of yourself at some point and been dissatisfied for one specific reason or another. Most of the time, though, it just comes down to an unexplainable "I don't like it" or "I never look good in pictures" or, in extreme cases, a sound effect similar to gagging. But according to this short TED audition, the problem isn't with your expression or your looks, it's in your head.

Photographer Shawn Van Daele has launched a beautiful (and meaningful) photo project called "The Drawing Hope Project" in which he shoots magical photographs based on the drawings of children living with health conditions. The photo shoots take 1-2 hours, but combining the images in post-production takes up to 8.

We'll preface this by saying that this is very dangerous and if you choose to attempt it you do so at your own risk -- we don't recommend anyone try this at home. That being said, this is also one of the coolest "backyard" special effects we've ever seen, and one that would make for some kick-a photography backgrounds or slow-motion video.

What you see here is the first image ever uploaded to the World Wide Web. It’s a graphic featuring …

Niniane Kelley of PhotoboothSF -- the SF photo shop that still shoots tintype portraits -- shot a series of tiny tintype photographs using a 110 camera. The images are likely the world's first 110 tintypes, and the world's smallest tintypes as well (each one is about half the size of a standard 35mm frame).

Getting potential clients' attention in the world of photography can be a difficult task, but photographer Gordon Stettinius has been doing quite a good job at it. So good, in fact, that one studio owner asked him to "never send anything to them again. Ever." His secret? Sending bizarre studio portraits as a follow-up.

Alex Dainis of Boston first recorded herself lip-syncing the song “Aaron’s Party” by Aaron Carter back when she was …

The University of California has agreed to dish out a $162,500 settlement to David Morse, a 43-year-old photographer who was arrested back in 2009 while covering a student protest.

Canon is sending out the above invitation for a press event on July 23rd (translation, anyone?). This date is …

The "Smashing Booth" is a contraption that shatters objects and snaps photographs at the moment of impact. It was created by designer Henrietta Jadin, who created it as part of a school project titled "Breaking Point." The wooden device catapults an object at the back wall of its box, and a photo is captured by an open shutter, sound sensor (made from an Arduino controller), and strobe.

Here's a top ten list, in no particular order, of Nikon movie roles! Often appearing as uncredited extras, these Nikon SLRs have been present at some of the greatest moments in movie history.

Vince Devlin over at the University of Montana has the fascinating story of …

Vancouver-based photographer Eszter Burghardt creates miniature landscapes using food (e.g. seeds, powders, milk) and wool, and then photographs them using a shallow depth of field. Her images show everything from volcanos to icebergs. The projects are titled "Edible Vistas" and "Wooly Sagas".

Here’s a promotional/educational video by Canon that explains both how digital cameras work and how it manufactures them. Interesting …

While there are ample resources available on portfolios, websites, leave behinds and promotional materials, there’s one important subject that I’ve found little helpful information on: the photographer’s bio.

Almost always found on a professional photographer’s site, the bio can make or break you. In a world where creatives often only have a couple of minutes to view your site, the bio can play a significant role. A biography is a glimpse into your personality and gives the reader a sense of what you might be like to work with. Creatives will often seek out the bio to help them make quick judgements. Therefore, just having great pictures isn’t enough. Many people will quickly abandon a website to jump to the next, so you have to make sure your entire site is not only engaging, but successfully portrays your personality. With bios being one way to express who YOU are, I’m always surprised at just how many dreadful ones I find. So, after reading one too many boring, exaggerated, absurd, grammatically incorrect and simply over the top biographies, I decided to come up with a few Dos and Don’ts.

Here's a cool video that shrinks down the process of building a massive egg-shaped studio (also known as a "full egg cyclorama") down to about 3 minutes and 30 seconds. A cyclorama this size is used to photograph anything from multiple cars to full-sized busses or, in this case, an antique fire truck. And in case you wanna know the exact specs, the dimensions of this behemoth, built by The Good Egg Studio in Sydney, come out to 12m in width, 17m in length and 4.8m in height.

Want to add some custom tints to your photos without resorting to digital trickery? …

There are plenty of stories out there of photographers allegedly being mistreated at the hands of the police; unfortunately, this mistreatment often includes the destruction of any evidence of the altercation. But the New Jersey ACLU is hoping that their new Police Tape app helps people more discretely record these interactions for future use in court.

Postrgram is a new service that turns your Instagram and/or Flickr photo collections into photomosaics, or giant photos composed of tiny photos. The process involves a few simple steps: tell the service your username (make sure you have at least 50 photos in your stream), specify the image you'd like as the main image, and the rest is taken care of.

For the past two years, 37-year-old photographer Tou Chih-kang has been capturing the last moments of dogs at Taoyuan …

After scorching over 18,000 acres and burning down 346 homes, the Waldo Canyon fire near and around Colorado Springs, CO has left scars that are both literal and metaphorical in nature. And while it would be impossible to capture an image of the metaphorical scarring left by the most destructive fire in Colorado history, NASA's Terra Satellite was able to get this false color image (which includes both visible and infrared light) showing the very literal scar the fire left in its wake.

Unlike most photographers, I hate my camera. I have read hundreds of stories on the Internet in which photographers argue about which cameras are the best and why. There are stories trying to prove that Canon is better than Nikon, or that 4x5 film is better than medium format digital. Camera review websites show scientific-style photographs displaying how much detail they have captured in a dollar bill, or pictures of color checkers and skin tones. They will also show “real-world” and studio tests illustrating how camera A is better than camera B and write long narratives about why.

Inspired by his father's obsession with adding new shelves to walls, photographer and furniture design student Darragh Casey decided to shoot some family portraits that featured family members themselves shelved alongside some of their prized possessions. His project spans three generations of his family and is titled "Shelving the Body".

There's good news coming out of the Nokia camp if you live in the US and you've been wanting to get your hands on the 41-megapixel camera in the company's 808 PureView smartphone. Not only is the 808 itself now available to purchase on Amazon unsubsidized for $699, but the camera technology inside it may soon be available without the hefty price tag.

Orrin Hastings spent three months creating this stop-motion music video for the song …

U.S. Army soldier Alex Jansen is currently stationed in Afghanistan, and besides taking …

If you keep up with the world of photography, chances are you have at one point or another read The British Journal of Photography; if it's one of your main reads you may even have their popular iPad app. And now you've been given a smaller, more portable option, because the magazine has officially released its first iPhone app, an app that the creators say will "change your expectations about how a magazine should look on an iPhone."

It doesn't look like Canon's T4i can catch a break lately. Just days after issuing a somewhat entertaining product advisory explaining why some Canon T4is were showing up as EOS Kiss X6is in EXIF data, Canon has had to issue yet another. This one, like the last, only affects certain serial numbers -- in this case those with "1" as the sixth digit (e.g. xxxxx1xxxxxx) -- but unlike the last, it could potentially be both harmful and aesthetically upsetting.

It wouldn't be the weekend without a behind the scenes look at a photo shoot, and if we can also inject a little bit of humor into it, well, in that case everyone wins. This behind the scenes comes courtesy of The New York Times and an assignment they gave to legendary sports photographer Walter Iooss Jr. The assignment was to shoot comedian Andy Samberg as several of tennis' most iconic champions in poses they themselves were famous for.

Some rumors are more far-fetched than others, and while this may be one of those it's still worth mentioning. According to Canon Rumors, some preliminary talk has come down the wire that Canon might be replacing the current EF 50mm f/1.4 with a smaller form factor 50mm f/1.8 IS.

A few days ago the people over at CERN -- the guys behind the biggest particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -- made what has been called "the biggest advance in knowledge about the cosmos for over 30 years," they discovered the long-sought-after Higgs Boson.

Here’s a great, short video by nature and culture photographer Art Wolfe in …

Any sort of portrait photographer is intimately familiar with the huge variety of skin tones represented by us homo sapiens, but until now nobody had thought to document them all. That's the mammoth task that Brazilian artist and photographer Angelica Dass has taken upon herself with her portrait project Humanae.

One of the most important things a photographer must do is advertise and sell their services. All professionals have a good grasp on how to take great photos and edit them in post to make them look even better, but fewer have the time, expertise, or funds to put together a quality portfolio that will catch a client's eye and bring them business. That's where the Iconify platform comes in.

It's true that many (if not most) people these days think that a smartphone plus a decent camera app equals enough equipment to create great photography. Sure, they'll hire a professional to do their wedding, but when it comes to less momentous occasions -- like that trip to the Caribbean -- they tend to take the photographic reins in their own hands. According to The Wall Street Journal, however, more and more people are deciding to hand the vacation reins over to a professional photog.

In this B&H Event Space seminar, David Brommer takes you “Beyond The …

In this tutorial I will share how I shoot "liquid flow" photos -- smoke-like abstracts done by dropping cream colored with food dye into a small tank of water, then rotated 180 degrees.

McLean Fahnestock of Long Beach, CA took high definition video of all 135 …