August 2012

Back in July of 2011, Netflix announced that it would be separating its movie streaming and DVD rental services into two separate subscriptions, increasing the cost for customers who wanted both by about 60%. The news was met with a massive customer backlash online, and over the next three months, more than 800,000 customers canceled their subscriptions and the stock price took a huge hit. The story became a lesson for corporate executives on how not to do price increases. Apparently SmugMug didn't get the memo.

This fascinating behind-the-scenes video shows what it's like to work as a sports photographer for the New York Times. It follows around Barton Silverman, a photographer who has been working at the Times since March of 1962. Over the past 50 years, he has covered many a championship game and has photographed many a legendary athlete.

As far as camera naming conventions go, Sigma's is pretty wacky. First off, we'll start with the news: the company announced today that its new DP1 Merrill compact camera will be available starting mid-September for a street price of $999.

Good, now that that's out of the way, lets talk about the name and the camera. Basically, it's a clone baby of the DP2 Merrill announced back in July, except the DP1 Merrill features a 19mm (28mm in 35mm terms) lens instead of a 30mm (45mm in 35mm terms) one. That's it.

How do you capture 5050 years of life in a single 150 second video? By capturing portraits of 100 people representing ages 1 through 100.

In October 2011, Dutch filmmaker Jeroen Wolf began roaming the streets of Amsterdam with a Panasonic GH2, asking strangers if he could film them stating their ages. Wolf's goal was to collect 100 people with every single age between 1 and 100.

Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama has spent the past 25 years documenting man's interaction of nature in factories, quarries, and mines. One particular subject that he has given a great deal of time and attention to is Japanese limestone mining. His beautiful large-scale images show the destructive blasts used to break up the rocks, and the man-made landscapes left behind in their wake.

Update: We've removed both leaked photos from this post at the request of photographer Michael Yamashita.

Although the two cameras were leaked together, Sony's NEX-5R and NEX-6 mirrorless cameras are being announced separately (the Wi-Fi-equipped 5R was announced this past Wednesday). Now, detailed specs for the NEX-6 are emerging ahead of its September 12th announcement. We're also seeing some "sightings" of a second major camera that'll be announced on the same day: the high-end A99 DSLR.

For its 2010 lookbook, Swedish fashion brand Courtrai Apparel created some gravity-defying shots of a guy floating in a featureless room. Rather than use fancy computer trickery, they used the same perspective trick as the Carl Kleiner project we shared a couple days ago.

Phil Wright got his hands on the Sony RX100 -- the camera David Pogue was raving about -- shortly after it was released back in June. It didn't survive very long.

Earlier this month, Wright was rushing to work in the darkness of the early morning when he placed his coffee and his black camera bag on top of his car. When he arrived at work 22 miles and 25 minutes later with coffee in hand, he suddenly realized that his camera was nowhere to be found. After panicked call to his wife back home, she made the discovery: camera roadkill 300 yards from their house.

Bad news for photographers in Southern California: the Los Angeles Police Department issued a notice regarding its official terrorism handling policy earlier this week, and the document still identifies photographers as potential terrorists.

Hyperspectral cameras are those that can capture information in the electromagnetic spectrum, far beyond what the human eye — …

Samsung's new Galaxy Camera will be the first point-and-shoot to which you can add a 3G or 4G data plan when it arrives on store shelves in October. One of the major benefits of being connected to the Internet all the time is that the camera will be able to take full advantage of cloud-based services. Services like Dropbox.

New uber-high-resolution HiDPI displays like Apple's Retina display are amazing to look at, but aren't very useful unless 3rd party software makers optimize their programs to support the technology. If you're a photographer that has already shelled out a few G's on a Retina-equipped Macbook Pro, you're probably disappointed with the fact that Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom aren't optimized for the display. In fact, some photographers are finding the display unusable for professional photo editing due to the difference in detail between apps optimized for Retina and those that aren't.

If that's you, Adobe's announcement today will be music to your ears: Photoshop CS6 will support HiDPI displays in the next few months, and Lightroom 4 support is on the way as well.

A one-point perspective photograph is one in which there exists only a single vanishing point. Parallel lines in the scene all converge on that single point, leading away from the viewer. It can be used for interesting compositions, especially if that vanishing point is placed at the intersection points of the rule of thirds.

One of the interesting technologies Sony introduced into its line of NEX mirrorless cameras last year (starting with the NEX-C3) was "focus peaking", a feature from the video recording world that highlights in-focus areas of an image to aid in manual focusing. You know those colorful pixels that image editing programs use to indicate blown out or underexposed areas of photos? It's like that, except for focus. What's awesome is that you can adjust things like focus, focal length, and aperture, and then see the depth of field adjust on your screen in real time. Check out the 10-second video above for a demo.

More details are emerging about Nikon's affordable full frame DSLR, the D600. Nikon Rumors reports that the camera will almost certainly be on display at Photokina next month, which means that the announcement will likely come around the time the show opens on September 18th. The camera is said to offer a full frame sensor at a price previously unseen in the market -- possibly as low as $1500. To put that in comparison, Canon's crop sensor 7D hit the market at $1700 when it was released back in 2009. $1500 for a full frame would be ridiculous and game-changing.

It pays to be a top user on Instagram. In addition to having hundreds of thousands of eyes glued to your stream of photos, marketers for the world's top brands are constantly trying to think of ways to incorporate you into their advertising campaigns. Case in point: at the US Open this year, there will be three Insta-celebs covering the event alongside the photojournalists from major national media outlets.

In June of last year, we reported on an unsettling patent filed by Apple that would allow certain infrared signals to remotely disable the camera on iPhones. It showed the potential downsides of bringing cameras into the world of wireless connectivity, which appears to be the next big thing in the camera industry. Now, a newly published patent is rekindling the fears of those who don't want "Big Brother" controlling their devices.

Earlier this week we shared a series of photographs by photographer Dinah Fried showing notable meals found in famous novels. It's difficult to catch the meals when reading the books, especially if they're only mentioned once or twice, so major props to you if you recognized more than one or two of the meals.

French photographer Candice Milon's project La Mode en Grand Écran, or "Fashion on the Big Screen", is much more accessible. The series shows famous outfits worn by main characters in well known movies, from the snazzy skater style of Marty McFly in Back to the Future to the droog look worn by characters in The Clockwork Orange. The clothing items are arranged neatly on backgrounds of various colors. See how many you can recognize (answers at the end).

Bandoliers are pocketed belts made for holding ammunition. They’re often seen in action and war movies, slung over the …

If you've visited the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada anytime during the past five years at night, you've likely enjoyed the dazzling light show that appears on the side of the tower. The 1,330 uber-bright LED lights (which cost a cool $2.5 million) were installed in the elevator shafts back in 2007, and are turned on from dusk every day until 2 the next morning. What you might not have known, however, is that the seemingly random colors that appear are really not so random after all: they're actually pieces of photographs!

The 14 frame per second continuous shooting speed of the Canon 1D X DSLR probably isn't a feature you'd associate with studio-lit portraiture, but that's exactly what Australian fashion photographer Georges Antoni demonstrates in the short clip above. Using the Broncolor Scoro for stobe lighting, Antoni unleashes the full FPS potential of the camera in order to capture a model dancing in as many still frames as possible.

Recognize this photograph? It shows 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio screaming and kneeling over the body of 20-year-old Jeffrey Miller, shot during the Kent State Massacre. Kent State photojournalism student John Paul Filo -- just 22-years-old at the time -- captured the image, and was later awarded the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography.

Fujifilm's soon-to-arrive X-E1 mirrorless camera is one slick-looking camera. The more affordable sibling of the X-Pro1 leaked itself some more today. New photos, originally published on Digicam-info, shows the pop-up flash that extends from the top of the camera, as well as clear views of the top plate and back. If you thought the front of the camera was beautiful, the good news is that the beauty extends all the way around.

Earlier this month, when we were exploring why the NASA Curiosity rover's cameras are so lame, we mentioned that the total amount of data the scientists can transfer on a daily basis is only around 31 megabytes. As anyone with a restrictive cell phone dataplan can attest to, having a small data cap makes you think carefully about the data that you choose to download.

GIMP, the image editing program that's a popular open-source alternative to Photoshop, is now easier than ever for Mac users to start using. Though it was completely free, installing it has long required that X11 also be installed -- a major pain in the butt. That changes with the latest version of GIMP: the app is now a self-contained native app that's a breeze to install. It's as simple as dragging and dropping.

Photographer Carl Kleiner, the man behind IKEA's beautiful baking recipe and kitchen item photographs, has a delightful new series of images that features things neatly arranged in mid-air instead of on a table. More specifically, each of the shots uses simply trickery to make household objects look like they're floating in a blue room.

Well, that's one leaked camera certainly didn't take long to become a reality. Less than half an hour after we shared the first leaked photos of the Samsung Galaxy Camera, the camera was officially announced over in Berlin. Here's the basic spec lowdown: Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, a 16 megapixel 1/2.3" BSI CMOS sensor, a 21x f/2.8-5.9 23-480mm (35mm equiv.) lens, a 4.8-inch HD LCD screen, a minimal smartphone-esque design, a 1.4Ghz quad core processor, 8GB of internal storage, ISO of up to 3200, and 3G/Wi-Fi or 4G/Wi-Fi.

Want a phonecamera instead of a cameraphone? It's something that we were joking around about just months ago, but it might soon become a reality. It has only been two days since rumors of a Samsung Galaxy-based camera emerged, but now photos, specs, and details about the camera have been leaked. Portable gadget blog Pocketnow somehow got its hands on a press kit, revealing details about the compact camera that the web has been itching to find out.

Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner was randomly selected and announced below.

For our "giveaway o' the week" this week, we're giving away three copies of Adobe Lightroom 4 worth $150 each. If you went on vacation this past summer and have a boatload of photographs that you need to organize and post-process, this program can help you do it.

After weeks of leakage on the Internet, the Sony NEX-5R mirrorless camera was finally announced today. As the rumors said, the camera features both Wi-Fi and downloadable apps -- two things that look to be huge trends in the camera world this year.

The basic specs for the camera are as follows: it features a 16.1 megapixel APS-C CMOS sensor, a hybrid autofocus that combines phase and contrast detection (a first for the NEX lineup), a max ISO of 25,600, 10 frame per second continuous shooting, 1080/60p HD video recording, and a 3-inch tilting LCD touchscreen.

Not too long ago, I was approached by a newspaper (Journal Le Droit, a large daily newspaper distributing print in the Ottawa-Hull area) asking if I would allow them to print a few of my pictures in an upcoming special feature on a nearby town, Rockland, Ontario. Having photographed much of Rockland in the past three years, I gladly accepted and figured that I could somewhat benefit from some exposure.

Just to make sure, I asked if they were offering monetary compensation. They responded that a photo-credit would be placed at the bottom of the image in lieu of payment. Why not?

Although Adobe Photoshop's introduction in 1990 spawned the term "Photoshopping", the manipulation of photos has been around pretty much as long as photography itself. To show this fact, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will be holding an exhibition titled, "Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop." The show will feature 200 'shopped photographs created between the 1840s and the 1990s, providing a glimpse into how photographers of old use their work to humor and deceive.

XKCD recently published this humorous comic explaining how you should interpret star ratings online. These are the ratings you come across when browsing online stores (e.g. Amazon) and customer review websites -- ratings that supposedly provide an accurate glimpse at how consumers feel about the product. Do they, though?

As the comic shows, the answer is: yes and no.

The veil of secrecy is starting to lift from Sony's upcoming high-end full frame DSLR. sonyalpharumors has published a detailed list of specs that give a pretty complete picture of what we'll be seeing in a few weeks. The camera features a 24.3 megapixel full frame CMOS sensor and Sony's Single-Lens Translucent (SLT) technology.

If the photograph was a living person, what would his Facebook timeline look like? Photo aggregation service Pixable decided to answer this question, creating a giant infographic on the history of the photograph with the layout of a Facebook timeline. It all starts at the very bottom of the timeline, with the photograph's birth at around 1000 AD. Over the years, we see the marriage he has with Kodak, the Kodachrome process born to the couple a few decades later, and a subsequent relationship she has with Digital Camera.

When overhead bins on airplanes fill up, flight attendants will often ask passengers to gate-check their carry-on bags. If this happens to you, be sure you take out your camera gear out of your bag prior to handing it over to the attendant. It's not just for peace of mind in knowing that your gear isn't being thrown around and abused: major airlines generally have provisions in their contracts that keep them from being held responsible for electronics in checked bags. If the camera is damaged or stolen, you might be out of luck.

If you swooned at the Fujifilm X-Pro1's retro design and fantastic image quality when it was announced at the beginning of this year, but then balked when you saw the $1,700 price tag, you might want to keep a close eye on the upcoming Fujifilm X-E1. Photo Rumors has published the specs of the camera, revealing that the camera will hit shelves at a price somewhere south of $1,000.

Children often incorporate things they see in the news and in movies into their playtimes, whether it's soldiers engaged in battle or a superhero saving innocent people. Canadian photographer Jonathan Hobin has a project titled In The Playroom that offers a darker and more troubling look at this truth. The photographs show children at play, except instead of more traditional imaginary ideas, they're reenacting the horrors of things seen in the news -- things like 9/11, Jonestown, and the death of Princess Diana.

How creative could you be if you could only photograph through a single window your house? That's the kind of self-limitation South Korean photographer Ahae placed on himself. His photography, titled Through My Window, features a million nature photographs captured over the past two years through a single window in his studio. He snaps a staggering 2,000 to 4,000 from his window every single day, rain or shine, documenting the story of the landscape and wildlife through that single point of view.

After the viral success of Noah Kalina's self-portrait-a-day video everyday, there has been no shortage of people copying the idea and creating their own versions of the project. However, not many come close to the awesomeness and creativity of the video above, created by a guy named Mike (Thisnomyp on YouTube).

Almost exactly one year after Kalina's video hit the web, Mike began taking one self-portrait each day, starting on August 25, 2007. Five years later, this past weekend, Mike was able to compile all the photos into the video seen above, titled "Jump Man."

Want to light your nighttime photographs with something that can be mistaken for a portable sun? Check out this monstrous homemade flashlight composed of 513 separate LED lights. Created back in 2008 by Ledcreations, the device offers a whopping 3500-4000 lumens of light -- way more than the hundreds of lumens offered by other powerful flashlights on the market.

Stamps, coins, comic books, and baseball cards. Those are some of the popular things people around the world collect as a hobby. Not Ying Nga (Cecilia) Chow. She collects unprocessed photographic camera film.

Neil Armstrong passed away this past Saturday at the age of 82. In addition to being the first man to walk on the moon, he was also the first photographer to set foot on that hunk of rock 238,900 miles away. Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin snapped a total of 122 70mm color photographs using modified Hasselblad 500EL cameras during their short visit on July 21, 1969. However, not all of them were pretty.

American Photo magazine writes that the photographic record left by those two men shows a very human picture of that first landing. Some of the "dud" photos show accidental shutter preses, focusing errors, lens flare, and even photobombed landscape shots.

What if there existed a high-profile, high-powered, and high-art photographer who worked exclusively in Instagram? That's the premise of this sketch by comedy webshow K-LOL. It offers a glimpse into the life of a fictional photographer named Flam Wenders, who's called the "Andy Warhol of Instagram".

Designer Andrew Kim thinks that point-and-shoot cameras aren't simple enough for many ordinary consumers. After all, if you're only looking to take snapshots of everyday life, having buttons and dials that can toggle undesired functions is more of an annoyance than a benefit. Taking a page from Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa's book, Kim created a concept camera that he calls the Pentax Si.

Photographer Dinah Fried has a series of photographs titled Fictitious Dishes that features the the meals described in five famous novels: The Catcher in the Rye, Oliver Twist, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Moby Dick. Working off a few lines of text in the books describing what the characters ate, Fried cooks up the food herself and then photographs the meals from above (the perspective reminds us of IKEA's recipe book photos).

The worlds of digital photography and cloud storage have been colliding as of late, with industry players such as Adobe and Apple coming out with services (Revel and Photo Stream, respectively) that synchronize your photo collections with the cloud.

Mosaic View is one of the newest entries in this increasingly crowded space, offering a product specifically geared for Adobe Lightroom. Launched a couple weeks ago, the desktop and mobile app allows photographers to carry their Lightroom catalogs with them wherever they go.

There's a fascinating rumor floating around in the gadget world today. Apparently Samsung is planning to introduce a point-and-shoot camera that's powered by Android OS and based on the popular Galaxy S smartphone. GSMArena, which first published the rumor and created the mockup seen above, reports that the camera will be named the "Samsung Galaxy S camera" (creative, I know). It's said to feature a giant 4.8-inch screen and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Photographer David Johnson recently captured a beautiful series of firework photos while attending the International Fireworks Show in Ottawa, Canada. During the Spanish fireworks performance, Johnson decided to deviate from the standard long-exposure style that pretty much everyone uses when shooting firework displays. Instead of fixing his focus at a certain point in space, Johnson introduced refocusing as part of the equation.

NASA's Curiosity Rover snapped photographs at 5 frames per second as it descended onto the face of Mars a few weeks ago. The footage that results when the images are combined into a 15 frame per second HD video is pretty amazing, but apparently not amazing enough for a YouTube user named hahahaspam. He spent four straight days taking the 5 fps footage and interpolating it to 25 frames per second. This means that instead of a video showing the choppy landing at 3 times the actual speed, his video shows the landing smoothly and in real time!