Earlier this year, we featured a project by photographer Sannah Kvist that showed portraits of urban young people posing next to a pile of all their worldly possessions. Jiadang (Family Stuff) by Chinese photographer Huang Qingjun is similar in concept, but very different in content. He has spent nearly a decade traveling around to various rural communities in China, asking families to take everything they owned and carefully arrange them outdoors for a picture. Read more…
You’ve probably heard people say that you should keep your camera gear with you at all times when flying, as there are multiple points in the travel process at which your valuable equipment could get stolen or damaged. In case you’re not convinced, check out the video above showing an investigative report that ABC News recently did.
To test airports that have a history of theft, Brian Ross of ABC’s The Blotter left 10 iPads inside the plastic bins at security checkpoints. At 9 out of 10 airports, the screeners followed protocol and immediately contacted the owner using the contact info prominently displayed on the iPad. In the 10th case, an agent was filmed taking the iPad out of the bin before it vanished. Read more…
Back in 1992, Los Angeles-based photographer Laura London lived down the street from the singer of the rock band. The singer’s name was Axl Rose. The band was Gunz N’ Roses.
Flash forward twenty years, and London is currently holding a photo exhibition for her project, “Once Upon a Time … Axl Rose Was My Neighbor,” at Coagula Curatorial in LA. The show features photographs from the time London spent living a stone’s throw away from a man who is now considered one of the greatest hard rock singers of all time, along with portraits of Rose wannabes and band photo recreations. One particular image in the show attracted the attention of Rose, and not in a good way — it led to a lawsuit threat. Read more…
You don’t need to see the name plate on a Ford Mustang or a Corvette or a Porsche 911 to recognize one. Or a Coke bottle. Or, once you’ve seen one, a Tivoli Audio tabletop radio. Or a McIntosh amp. These products have a design language that’s become part of their brand identity [...] That’s what Apple wants, too: products that look like Apple. They’ve nailed it. You can look at a computer or a tablet or a phone being used in a coffee shop and you can immediately tell Apple or not Apple even if you can’t see the logo. And this is virtually unique in their industry: you’ll usually need the logo to know exactly what the not Apple product is.
This is why trade dress battles are so important to Apple. Try introducing a soda in a container that’s easily mistaken for a Coke bottle and see how far “har har har, you can’t patent curved glass!” gets you as a defense. If somebody makes a product that can be easily mistaken for an Apple device, then Apple is going to do whatever they can to get that product either off the market or changed.
DSLRs are pretty uniform in their appearance, so we don’t see much fuss about trade dress in that sector, but it’s interesting that there isn’t more tension between Leica and Fujifilm — two companies that both offer cameras without front branding.
Bob Ross became a household name a couple of decades ago through his show The Joy of Painting on PBS. His friendly personality, soothing voice, and artistic talent got countless people hooked on oil painting, beating the devil out of paintbrushes, and creating happy little trees and clouds. He’s the kind of guy who could (and did) talk about watching paint dry and make it enjoyable.
Thomas Shahan is the closest thing we’ve found so far to a photographic Bob Ross. In the video above, he introduces us to the art of high-magnification macro photography, which he employs to create vibrant images of all kinds of tiny critters. Read more…
Japanese camera blog Egami found an interesting just-published patent by Epson that was first filed last year. The goal of the technology appears to be to make older vintage lenses more useable on newer cameras. Basically, it seems that the company wants to add a small camera/mirror/lens component to the front of camera that’s designed to track the settings on old manual lenses. The photos in the patent show what appears to be Epson R-D1 cameras enhanced with special arms that are dedicated to spying on the lens’ settings. Read more…
Ithaca College, a small private school in New York, recently conducted a fun photo experiment to capture a day in the life of the students on campus. Instead of sending a photographer around to various student hotspots, the student social media team left ten disposal cameras in five locations around campus with a note that read:
Hey, I just left this camera here for the day. Take some fun pictures with you and your friends! I’ll be back later to pick it up
At the end of the day, all the cameras were collected, all the film was developed, revealing an “authentic view of a day at Ithaca College.” Read more…
Sony made huge ripples in the camera industry earlier this month by announcing a compact camera with a full frame sensor: the RX1. The camera features a bokehlicious 35mm f/2 Carl Zeiss lens, a super compact size, and a price tag of $2,800 that broke many a photographer’s heart.
For those of you who are wondering how the fusion of compact and full frame performs, Sony has uploaded a number of full-resolution sample photographs. Pixel-peepers, prepare to gawk in amazement at the quality that’s now possible with fixed lens compact cameras. Read more…
Living and working in New York City, Canadian writer and producer Christopher Moloney walks past many locations used as settings in movies. This past summer, he began documenting those spots with an awesome “photo in a photo” project. Using a simple black-and-white printer and a cheap digital camera, Moloney visits the exact locations where famous scenes were filmed at, and shoots a photograph of a printed movie still from just the right perspective so that it blends into the background. His website, titled “FILMography” (film + photography) has hundreds of these creative images so far. Read more…
Earlier this month, Nokia found itself in a public relations nightmare after it came to light that photos and videos in a video promoting the Lumia 920 smartphone had been faked. The company quickly began to do damage control by inviting the press to test out the PureView camera against competing smartphone cameras. The Verge’s test was quite promising, and now Engadget is confirming those results after doing tests of their own:
The 920 took the cake, without question, but the iPhone didn’t fare too poorly itself, snatching up nearly as much light as the Nokia device. The 808 PureView also performed quite well, but the HTC One X and Samsung Galaxy S III yielded unusable results.
It’s one thing to snag proper exposure, though — capturing sharp details with little noise and superior color balance is an entirely different beast, and the Lumia managed to do just that [...] The 920 did present some issues with exaggerated shake and other rapid movements, but it offered up excellent results overall, even in scenes that were too dark for us to make out any details with our own eyes
