September 2012

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fighter Renzo Gracie was walking on the sidewalk at 22nd street and 10th avenue in Manhattan last night, when he noticed two shady-looking fellows following him. Suspecting that they were planning to mug him, Gracie began sending live tweets and photos to his 100,000+ followers on Twitter. Once the two men finally approached him, asking for a cigarette, he decided to launch a preemptive strike by beating the crap out of the would-be assailants... while live-blogging the whole thing.

Earlier this week, we shared a funky piece of camera equipment called the Bounce-Wall, which features a large card …

Sorry for the blurriness, but that's what you often have to live with in exchange for seeing cameras before they officially exist. Digicam-info has published leaked photos of the upcoming Q10 mirrorless camera and the K-5 II and K-5 IIs DSLRs.

What does your choice of Instagram filter say about your character and personality? Check out the …

Nokia has already confessed and apologized for faking the optical image stabilization sample footage in a new promo video for its Lumia 920 phone. In case you weren't sure: yes, the sample still photographs in the video were faked as well.

Designer Youssef Sarhan did some investigative work after the story initially broke, and came to the conclusion that the images were almost certainly taken with a camera other than the Lumia 920.

Four years ago, Kai-Huei Yau had an idea. During a presidential election year, why not create a series of high school football preview photographs that tie into the political atmosphere? This year, the Tri-City Herald photographer finally put the idea into motion. His "Football Campaign 2012" series features portraits of local high school football players that make them look like they're running for office rather than preparing for a season of war on the gridiron.

Shepard Fairey avoided jail time after all. The Obama HOPE poster artist was sentenced today to two …

This photograph of Japanese astronaut Aki Hoshide taking a self-portrait was published to NASA's amazing 2Explore Flickr account on Wednesday. It was snapped during a six-and-a-half hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station. The EXIF data embedded in the photo reveals that he was using a Nikon D2Xs with a 10.5mm fisheye lens at f/11, 1/500, and ISO 200.

In daguerreotype photography, the first commercially successful photographic process, a positive image is recorded directly onto a silvered copper plate. Although mercury is traditionally used to develop the plate, there's a way of creating daguerreotypes called the Becquerel method that eschews mercury in favor of non-lethal ingredients.

Photographer Mo Gelber was standing outside the Manhattan Criminal Court on August 16th when he noticed a couple being led in handcuffs toward the courthouse by two officers. Just as they were about to enter the building to be booked, the young man leaned in to his significant other for one last kiss. Gelber instinctively snapped a photograph, resulting in the picture-perfect image seen above.

Did you know that in California, “rights of publicity” are transfered to a celebrity’s heirs after the celebrity dies? …

Last week, a seascape photo I made showed up on link-sharing powerhouse Reddit. It caused a bit of a stir since it is a copyrighted image and was rehosted and posted without my permission. A lot of the photographers in r/photography and r/pics (where it was originally posted by a user) made it known that it was I who had created the work. I’m very grateful for both the exposure that posting gave me, and even more grateful for the support I received from my fellow photographers and Redditors.

After the image was posted, I noticed a lot of people claiming that there was no chance this was taken in Ocean City, New Jersey. I also received a long slew of messages asking me how I made this image. I thought I’d both prove it was and explain my process here for anyone who is interested.

In addition to the new X-E1 announced this morning, Fujifilm has also unveiled its upcoming version 2.0 of its X-Pro1 firmware. Autofocus has been a much-griped-about feature of the X-Pro1 (and the X100, for that matter), and the new firmware addresses that issue by improving the AF capabilities of the camera in different ways.

Shepard Fairey has spent the past few years fighting a messy legal battle with photographer Mannie Garcia …

The bean bag is a tool that photographers sometimes use to stabilize their camera. Plop it down on a …

The final hurdles have been cleared, and Instagram is now officially part of Facebook. The startup's 16 employees will be relocating from San Francisco to Facebook HQ in Menlo Park. In an announcement released through its newsroom, Facebook reaffirmed its commitment to keeping Instagram running as a standalone service:

As we said from the beginning, we are committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Instagram will continue to serve its community, and we will help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook's strong engineering team and infrastructure. We also can’t wait to work with the talented Instagram team to improve the mobile experience.

There will certainly be more resources available at Instagram founder Kevin Systrom's disposal: the photo sharing app is being taken in by a company with roughly 4,000 employees and legions of world class software developers.

San Francisco residents were treated with a dazzling sight yesterday: a double rainbow all the way across the sky, visible from many parts of the city. The San Francisco Chronicle writes,

The mist mixed with golden light from the low-slung sun to cast a beautiful pink glaze across downtown skyscrapers. Thousands at the Giants baseball game took their eyes away from the game to gawk at a double rainbow that formed over center field, perfectly framed by the grandstands. "There was just some very light rain at the game, but it was amazing to see so many people bringing out their iPhones and taking a picture of it," said Mike Pechner, a forecaster with Golden West Meteorology who was at the game. Dozens of motorists pulled their cars to the side of the road to gawk and take pictures of the rare double-rainbow, created when the light refracted through the moisture in the air.

Lets say you find an imaginative kid, put a pen in one of his hands, put a camera in the other, and ask him to create a movie. What would you get?

That's the basic idea behind Kid Snippets, a cute and hilarious new web series by BoredShortsTV. For the short above, titled "Salesman", filmmaker Ryan Haldeman had a couple kids come up with an interaction between a salesman and a customer. He then took the resulting audio, and had actors John and Brett Roberts act it out and mouth the words. What resulted was the humorous sketch seen above.

German student Hans Findling has some interesting architectural photos captured deep underground in subway stations around Europe. The images, snapped in Germany, Austria, and Spain, are generally devoid of the hustle and bustle you usually find inside a metro system. Findling chooses to focus on capturing the eye-catching patterns, lines, and symmetry built into many parts of these stations.

Photo printing company PhotoBox recently conducted a survey of 1,000 women aged 18-65 to find out how they feel about being in photographs. An interesting finding was that the women generally cared much more about how other women view the images than how men view them. Only 10% of women care about what men think of their photogenic-ness. Of the other 9 in 10 women, it's the 36-45 demographic that cares the most about being judged by other women.

Nokia faced the heat of the Internet yesterday after it came to light that a promo video for its …

While taking part in a contest to design an unconventional business card, artist …

Fuji has announced its new, much leaked, X-E1 mirrorless camera. It features the same high-quality CMOS sensor as the X-Pro1, but packs it into a smaller and lighter body for increased portability. Specs include a 16.3 megapixel APS-C sensor, a 2.8-inch LCD, a pop-up flash, ISO of 200-6400 (expandable to 100-25600), shutter lag of just 0.05 seconds, focusing speed of up to 0.1 seconds, and RAW and built-in RAW conversion.

Over the past decade, many airports around the world have adopted special thermal cameras that can determine whether or not a passenger has a fever. The goal of these cameras is to prevent infectious diseases from spreading and causing an epidemic (or pandemic). Greek scientists Georgia Koukiou and Vassilis Anastassopoulos recently came up with a similar concept, except their thermal camera is used to detect drunk people instead of contagious people.

Since launching back in 2007, Gunnar glasses have received a considerable amount of …

This promo video for Nokia's new "floating lens" image stabilization technology is causing a lot of discussion... and not for reasons Nokia should be proud about. After we included the video in a post today about the Lumia 920's PureView camera, commenters pointed us to a post over on The Verge revealing that the video was faked.

After Nokia unleashed its 41-megapixel 808 PureView phone back in February, most people thought that it would set the bar for future phones branded with the PureView monkier. "PureView" came to mean, "a ridiculous number of megapixels in a phone camera." Turns out that's not the case.

The company unveiled its new Lumia 920 phone today, which also carries the PureView name. It features a much more modest 8-megapixel camera, showing that PureView isn't about the megapixels after all.

As we first reported back in June, Ritz Camera is putting itself on the auction block as …

Fractal-like patterns are found widely in nature, "in phenomena including clouds, river networks, geologic fault lines, mountains, coastlines, animal coloration, snow flakes, crystals blood vessel branching, ocean waves and many others." The fact that it appears on a large scale in geographical formations means that many of these beautiful patterns can be captured as photographs from space.

Paul Bourke, a professor at the University of Western Australia, has a webpage dedicated to Google Earth satellite photos that contain these patterns.

For those of you who need to snap eye-level photographs of giraffes: Taiwanese gear manufacturer …

DOGHOUSEDIARIES created this humorous glimpse into what the Fortune 500 company list will look like 18 years from now, in the year 2030. We see that "Undo Instagram Filters Inc." leads the pack with $2.88 trillion in annual revenue.

It's obviously satirical, but it does cause you to think... What is the world going to do with the unfathomably large pile of filtered photos if/when the fake retro look goes out of style?

We're in the year of the camera's app. Not the camera app, which you use on your phone, but the camera's app, which is found on your camera. A boatload of new cameras this year will have Internet connectivity and app support built right in, giving photographers access to all kinds of custom features and functions that weren't easily available in the old age of cameras.

While Android is one of the big operating systems manufacturers have gravitated towards, Sony has decided to go the Sony way and make its system proprietary. Instead of running Android, the Sony NEX-5R and the NEX-6 will offer apps through the PlayMemories ecosystem.

If you think male and female photographers sometimes have very different styles, the reason might go beyond their tastes and approaches to shooting. Men and women see the world differently -- literally. A new study by vision researchers have found that the two genders have different ways of collecting visual information.

According to the findings, men are more sensitive to moving objects and seeing small details, while women tend to be sharper in seeing color changes.

Did you know that LCD screens and live view didn’t arrive until a number of years after digital cameras …

As people snap more and more digital photos, being able to organize those photos into useful sets is becoming …

Need to bounce your flash but don’t have a suitable wall nearby? Bounce-Wall is a new lighting accessory that …

Photographers sometimes put themselves in harms way in order to capture the perfect shot, but there's a fine line between taking calculated risks and foolishly putting your life in danger. This 16-second-long video clip shows a guy doing the latter, nearly earning himself a Darwin Award while trying to photograph drifting cars at the Karpacz 2012 races in Poland.

Photos and details of Nokia's upcoming Lumia 920 smartphone leaked earlier this week, revealing that the new flagship Windows phone will feature a 8-megapixel sensor, a 4.5-inch display, 32GB of storage, and wireless charging via a special pad.

Although the camera specs seem rather pedestrian compared to the 41MP 808 PureView, patents published last month reveal that the company is working on some special sensor tech for future devices. More specifically, Nokia is working on developing camera sensors that use layers of graphene -- one-atom-thick layers of carbon -- for big performance advantages over existing sensors.

If you’re as passionate about cooking and baking as you are about photography, then the GAMAGO Telephoto Kitchen Lens …

If you're a street photography-loving New Yorker who's worried about being stopped and harassed by the New York Police Department, check out this official memo that was sent out to officers back in 2009.