If you were challenged to a duel by a renegade photographer, how quickly would you be able to draw your lens? Would you be able to Quikdraw?
Wanting a better way to swap lenses on-the-go, Phoenix-based photographer and engineer Riley Kimball came up with the brilliant why-didn't-I-think-of-that idea of a lens holster belt based around lens mounts. His product is called the Quikdraw.
Preparing for a trip to a foreign country where you don't know the language? If you don't have an Internet-connected phone handy, a camera can help you out. Redditor Jhojgaard regularly travels to various countries around the world, and suggests that storing some key photos on your camera can come in handy when you're in a communication crunch.
Things that are useful to store on your memory card include the names of places you need to get to and common things you might need (e.g. a certain subway station, the restroom, a taxi). If you have a smartphone with you, you can toss all of the "translation photos" into a separate album.
Virtually all digital still cameras capture light using either a CCD or a CMOS sensor. Most consumers don't know the difference, and -- given the rate at which CMOS sensors are improving -- both sensors perform equally well in most cases (Leica is rumored to be switching over to the CMOS camp with its upcoming M10).
However, that's not what a PC World store in Ireland wants you to believe. The photo above shows an informational placard that was on display recently in one of its stores. The top image shows a scene shot with a CCD sensor, and the bottom image allegedly shows the "same scene" shot with a CMOS sensor. Hmmm...
The Portland Press Herald has agreed to fork over $400 to a woman named Audrey Ann Slade after its use of one of Slade's photos sparked a furious fair use debate online. The paper published a story last week about Reverend Robert Carlson, a minister who committed suicide recently after being accused of abusing young boys. Specifically, the piece reported on the fact that Slade's photos proved that Carlson continued to engage in on-campus events after resigning abruptly in 2006 from his position as chaplain.
A couple months ago we shared a creative photo project that showed various interior spaces from directly overhead, as if they were photographed by a fly on the ceiling. German photographer Michael H. Rohde has a similar project, except his photographs are shot from the opposite direction: directly below.
Are you the once-proud owner of a Canon Rebel T4i DSLR? Has your camera's grip changed from black to white? Have you developed a rash from touching the white grip? Apparently there's at least one of you out there, because Canon has issued a voluntary recall on nearly 68,200 of its T4i DSLRs. As we first reported last month, some of the DSLRs were loaded with too much "rubber accelerator", which can lead to a chemical reaction that causes allergic reactions.
The company issued an advisory at the time and offered free repairs, but is now cooperating with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in issuing the recall -- despite the fact that it has only received a single report of a "minor rash".
iPhone users who want to flaunt their inner photography geek can buy special skins or cases that transform their phone into a camera look-alike. That option wasn't awesome enough for photographer Jake Potts of Bruton Stroube Studios, who recently decided to use his phone's glass back to create an ambrotype photo using the wet plate collodion process!
The next time you're out in a non-light polluted place with your family and your camera, try using our galaxy as a backdrop. Hawaii-based photographer John Hook shot this ridiculously awesome photograph of him, his wife, and his daughter staring up at the Milky Way. As if that weren't perfect enough, there's also a shooting star photobombing the portrait in the lower right hand corner!
Recognize the warning message above? It's what Windows XP would show whenever you tried to rotate a JPEG image 90° using the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. If you're like me, you probably didn't think twice about it (and checked the checkbox), since you had done it many times already and hadn't noticed any difference in quality. After all, how hard can it be to turn a digital photo sideways? You just move the pixels around right?
Well, not really. The fact of the matter is, JPEG is a "lossy" compression algorithm that's geared towards storing and sharing photos without taking up too much disk space. Rotating these compressed images is usually done by decompressing, rotating, and then re-compressing. Since the re-compression is lossy (i.e. data is thrown away), this process results in slightly degraded photos (hence that warning).
As we shared last week, being a sports photographer at the Olympics is a difficult task: battling a round-the-clock schedule and a sea of competing photographers, hauling around a boatload of gear from venue to venue is just the least of your concerns.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That's the quote by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke that you'll find on Cardiio's homepage. It's a quote that is quite appropriate, given what the app can do.
The app is a touch-free heart rate monitor that can accurately tell you your pulse by simply looking at your face through your phone's camera.
Filmmaker Daniel Mercadante and his team at Everynone created this short film titled "Ball" using hundreds of photographs of spherical objects found through Google Image Search. The images are grouped by themes that beautifully transition from one to another.
Forget rings on your fingers or grills on your teeth: Japanese designer Jay Tsujimura thinks your camera is where bling should go. Presumably geared towards people who use pricey cameras as a fashion accessory and status symbol, Tsujimura's premium line of camera jewelry is designed to adorn hotshoes and shutter releases.
Stuff a few thousand dots per inch into a color print, and you have yourself a pretty high resolution image that most people would approve of. What if you could stuff 100,000 dots into that same inch?
By now, you've probably heard about Project Glass, Google's ambitious effort to develop a pair of Internet-connected, augmented reality camera glasses. Well, something similar was being explored for a different clothing item: the t-shirt...
tshirtOS is a concept created in collaboration by whisky-maker Ballantine and futuristic-clothes maker CuteCircuit that aims to build a camera, microphone, headphone hack, and integrated display into an Internet-connected shirt.
Facebook has rolled out a new feature that may make privacy-wary Internet users cringe. It's a link called "seen by" that shows up under photos posted to groups. The link reveals a box that shows exactly who has seen the photographs -- timestamps and all.
Ingrid Lunden of Techcrunch writes that UC Santa Barbara professor Ben Zhao first noticed the feature last Friday after sharing a photograph of his daughter to one of his groups.
The new Leica M10 will almost certainly be announced at Photokina next month, and may have quite a few "firsts" for a camera in the M rangefinder lineup.
In addition to confirming the launch date, Leica reviewer Steve Huff writes that that the camera will likely hit store shelves in late February or early March 2013.
If you were to start a new clothing brand, who would you target? Athletes? Self-conscious youth? People with more cents than sense?
Earlier this year, NYC-based photographer Ted Rybakowski decided to focus on a relatively untapped demographic: photo enthusiasts who love themselves a good T-shirt. His clothing startup, Dodge & Burn, sells a line of T-shirts adorned with classic analog cameras. While we've featured a number of clever photo-centric shirt designs here before, Rybakowski's brand is the first we've seen that focuses entirely on T-shirt fashion for photogs.
Computer generated imagery is becoming ubiquitous in the world of filmmaking, but some people still prefer some good ol' fashioned elbow grease. Los Angeles-based filmmaker Vu Hoang of Westscape Media spent 7 months creating this stop-motion love story, titled "Love Drama". Why did it take so long? Well, Hoang and his small crew of 3 people created all the animation seen using 3,000 photographs -- photos that were shot frame by frame and individually cut out by hand.
San Francisco-based photographer Lee Materazzi doesn't just take pictures of people jammed into uncomfortable spaces. She also photographs people with their heads stuck into random locations for photos that make them look strangely headless. The quirky images have titles that include "Head in Table", "Head in Rug", and "Head in Sand."
For a fun weekend craft, try sculpting your own camera using a chunk of …
We've shared this same topic here a couple of times before, but Jay P. Morgan of The Slanted Lens created this video lesson showing some examples of how profound of an impact your focal length choice can make.
If you want to take Lensbaby-style selective focus macro shots using your phone, go buy a cheap laser pointer. Photographer Zaheer Mohiuddin writes that the lens inside laser pointers (the one that focuses the laser) works well as a macro lens for the tiny cameras found on smartphones. After taking the device apart and finding the small gem-like lens, simply attach it to your camera with some tape to start shooting close-up pictures.
Bruce Davidson is an American photographer who's well known for his photographs of Harlem, New York City decades ago. In the video above, he sits down and talks to Leica about his life and work:
Renowned photojournalist and Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson has been acclaimed for over half a century for his searing images of street gangs, circus performers and the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, all captured with a remarkable directness, truth and power that transcends the concept of style. Here, in his own words, are Bruce Davidson's forthcoming, charming, and revealing insights into who he is, what he's done, and where he's going.
Want to wear your Instagram photographs as jewelry? Instasparkle is a maker of wearable picture frames. They make necklaces, brooches, and rings that hold tiny prints, allowing you to show them off in the real world. The rings, seen above, hold .75x.75-inch prints.
You know the infinitely long tunnel that appears when you look into two mirrors that are pointed at one another? Have you ever noticed that the tunnel becomes more and more green, the deeper you go?
YouTube personality Vsauce has a fascinating new video titled "What Color Is A Mirror?". In it, Mr. Sauce explains that this is due to the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect mirror (i.e. a mirror that perfectly reflects 100% of light). The fact is, a typical mirror best reflects light in the 510nm range, which we perceive as green light.
Back in May, we wrote about a photographer named John Butterill and his brilliant idea of using a Internet-connected phone to share his photo adventures with people whose mobility was limited. Google liked Butterill's story so much that they're sharing it as an example of the different things you can do through Google+ Hangouts. The video above is a neat look at how Butterill came up with his idea, and how the concept quickly spread around the world.
While working as a fishing guide in Tofino, British Columbia, Matthew Thornton captured this wild photograph of a humpback whale calf leaping out of the water an extremely short distance away (estimated at 10-30 feet). In his submission to the National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest, Thornton writes,
On our way in from fishing for halibut we noticed a few humpback whales playing in the distance and we stopped part way in to watch. It was quite an experience to see something completely airborne so close to the boat. The lucky thing was I got the photo I submitted. A fellow boat also got a picture of the whale close to mid air and it was also all caught on video. Was an amazing day.
Slit-scan cameras are used to shoot finish line photos due to the fact that recording a moving subject along a strip of film makes it impossible to miss any frames. Engineer and photographer James Guerin was interested in the distinctive look, so he went about building his own slit-scan film camera using an old Pentax SLR.
He ended up with the heavily modified camera seen above: a Pentax ME Super SLR that's equipped with a special winding system that automatically moves film across a narrow slit as the photos are being exposed.
Filmmakers Derek Kwok and Henri Wong of Parabucks created this ridiculously awesome stop-motion short film titled "Batman: Dark Knightfall" using highly-realistic 1/6-scale collectible action figures by Hong Kong toy company Hot Toys. Be sure to turn on HD when you watch it.
The cinematic lighting and sound effects give this film a realism that you'll be hard pressed to find in a stop-motion video -- at times you won't believe that what you're seeing isn't showing real actors.
California-based entomologist Shaun Winterton was browsing Flickr back in May 2011, when he discovered a new species of insect.
That's right: he made a scientific discovery by simply looking at pictures online.
Wanting to see how she and her siblings have changed over the years, Helsinki-based photographer Wilma Hurskainen decided to gather her three sisters together and recreate photographs of the four of them taken by their father decades ago.
The man in the moon and the face on mars. These are both the result of a psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia, which involves the brain trying to perceive random signals as significant. It's one of the brain's face detection mechanisms, and causes us to see faces where they don't actually exist -- the Virgin Mary's face on toast, for example.
Programmer Phil McCarthy decided to play around with the idea of paredoila in artificial intelligence, and created a program called pareidoloop. It uses face detection algorithms to "see" human faces in randomly generated polygons.
On Monday, a group of four friends went on a fishing trip in the Pacific Ocean. Taking their boat "A Salt Weapon" 20 miles west of Santa Cruz, Mark Peters, Jeremy, Dave, and William were expecting a fun-filled day of albacore tuna hunting. What they ended up capturing was so much more.
Wanting to save some memories of their trip and film their battles with tuna from underwater, Peters decided to bring along a GoPro Hero 2 camera fitted inside a $50 custom-made torpedo.
When shopping for a new computer, online shops often allow you to customize the computer and choose the individual components that go into it. If the computing world can offer that, why not the photography world?
Turns out you can with Leica cameras. The company has a website called "Leica à la carte", through which you can configure a film Leica rangefinder to suit your tastes and needs.
Here's a video that offers a peek into the life of a Reuters photographer covering the Olympics. It features photographers and editors on the Reuters team talking about the joys and challenges of shooting the biggest sporting event in the world.
Big bulky cameras can be pretty intimidating when they're used to photograph young children. For a cheap and simple way to make yours a little more child-friendly, consider using a PEZ candy dispenser as a fun, attention-grabbing hotshoe accessory.
The photographs in photographer Gail Albert Halaban's series Out My Window are unsettling and beautiful at the same time. Each of them shows people framed by open apartment windows in New York City -- quite creepy if the images are actually of unsuspecting strangers. At the same time, the voyeur is quite a photographer, as each shot perfectly balances the lighting of the subject inside with the cityscapes and brick walls outside.
The scenes were actually all staged, and are intended to share something that Halaban says New Yorkers can relate to: "connecting" with neighbors through apartment windows.
You know the major firmware update that just rolled out for the Canon 7D? The purpose of it might have been to hold Canonites over through a couple months of DSLR-less news. Northlight Images is reporting that Canon will not be unveiling a new DSLR at Photokina, but will instead be waiting until October to unleash a new full frame DSLR on the world.
Over the past year, Instagram has been the most talked-about photo sharing service and one of the most talked about social networking services. Logically, more and more brands are joining it and trying to figure out ways to reach potential customers through filtered photos.
Social media analytics company SimplyMeasured published an interesting report earlier this week that explores how popular Instagram currently is among the world's most valuable brands.