November 2012

Christopher Bonanos, author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid, has authored …

If you’ve been wondering how the Canon 6D compares to the 5D lineup in terms of size, control layout, …

Reuters photographer Jose Miguel Gomez was recently covering the 121st anniversary of the National Police in Colombia when he spotted a cadet lying face down amidst her peers. He photographed the apparently unconscious policewoman with his 400mm lens for five minutes before she was finally carried away, and wondered why it took so long for help to arrive.

For his project titled Take Refuge, Los Angeles-based photographer Kevin Cooley shot nighttime landscape photographs with an interesting choice of lighting: military-grade flares -- the kind you find in emergency kits. Each image in the series features the same red glow, whether the flare is held in a subject's hand or hidden behind a feature in the landscape.

Photographers often scour eBay listings in hopes of snagging a good deal on camera equipment, but usually they're not expecting to find gear worth hundreds of dollars sold for the same price as McDonald's Dollar Menu items. Well, that's exactly what one lucky eBayer discovered a couple of weeks ago. The person stumbled upon a strange listing: reputable camera retailer Calumet Photo was selling a brand new Sigma EX 10-20mm f/3.5 lens for Canon DSLRs -- worth about $590 -- for just $0.99! And not just one lens, but three!

Today Facebook finally launched the photo sync feature that it has been privately testing for smartphones over the past couple of months. The feature is built into the social network's official mobile app for Android and iOS, and makes it easier to automatically sync your phone photos to the Facebook cloud.

The amount of dedication required for the time-lapse video above is astounding. Titled "Fall," it shows the colors of New York City's Central Park changing with the seasons over a period of half a year. Here's what its creator, photographer Jamie Scott, says about it:

One of the most striking things about New York City is the fall colors and there's no better place to view this then Central Park. I chose 15 locations in the park and revisited them 2 days a week for six months, recording all camera positions and lens information to create consistency in the images. All shots were taken just after sunrise.

Last week, New York City-based photo retailer Adorama launched a new VIP program to reward regular customers with some sweet perks. If you regularly buy your gear from the company's website, you'll be glad to know that membership in the program is currently free. It's a $149 value that's available for a limited time.

An interesting photographic first has been announced by a scientist at the University of Genoa in Italy. Enzo di Fabrizio revealed the world's very first true photograph that shows the double helix structure of DNA, shown above.

During the earlier days of 35mm film photography, many of the popular cameras had distinct design elements that defined the look of that period -- the things that come to mind when people hear the words "vintage 35mm camera": a shiny body seemingly crafted out of a single chunk of metal; a textured covering that gives the camera style and grip; all the manual controls you need, placed in well-thought-out locations at your fingertips.

Imagine you were a newspaper photo editor back in 1963, and Swiss Magnum photographer René Burri handed you the contact sheet above filled with portraits of revolutionary Che Guevara. Which photograph would you select for publication?

You might recognize one of the photographs, since it has become one of the most iconic portraits created of Che.

Last week, Sports Illustrated magazine published the above photograph by US Presswire photographer Matthew Emmons. Found in the "Leading Off" section, the photo shows the Baylor Bears football team celebrating after their upset victory over the #2 ranked Kansas State Wildcats.

The image has many people talking, not because of the unlikely event that it captures, but because it appears to be heavily manipulated. And it's not just the fact that the picture looks like it passed through an HDR program, but that the Baylor football players didn't wear green jerseys during that game. They wore black.

Candid snapshots that go viral online are often spread because they show people doing something embarrassing or stupid, so it's refreshing to see a photo of a different sort taking the web by storm. The photo in question is of a police officer's random act of kindness, snapped by an Arizona woman named Jennifer Foster when she was visting New York City back on November 14th.

Supercuts of movies are all the rage these days; here's one that'll be of interest to photography and camera enthusiasts. Simply titled "Photographers," the video was created by English artists Mishka Henner and David Oates, who spent hours upon hours watching more than 100 movies. The duo extracted short snippets from each one and spent months turning them into the giant whirlwind tour seen in the video above (warning: there's a dash of language, violence, and risqué business).

Back in August, Adobe announced that HiDPI display support -- including for Apple's Retina displays -- would be coming to Photoshop CS6 sometime this fall. If the rumors floating around are true, we may only be about two weeks away from the official announcement date.

Photography satirist Missy Mwac of the web series MWACattack (whose tongue-in-cheek advice videos made the rounds last year) created this monopoly board that imagines what the board game would be like if it had originally been designed to reflect the life journey of photographers.

Earlier this month, we wrote that the world's first 3D photo booth had popped up in Japan. The studio looks like it's designed for ordinary portraits, except the "photographers" capture you with fancy handheld scanners and then turn your into miniature sculptures instead of photographs. Since then, more information has emerged that provides a better look at how the whole thing works.

Programmer and photography enthusiast Roderick Lee Mann snagged quite the time-lapse video earlier this week. He had originally set up his camera to snap photos of a beautiful Hawaiian sunset, but afterward he discovered that he had captured something that you can't really plan for: the perfectly-framed formation of an end-to-end rainbow.

It may be hard to believe, but all the amazing slow-motion clips you see in the video above were created using individual still photographs. Joe Fellows of London-based film production company Make Productions gathered photographs of wildlife and people from the WWF archives, and then Photoshopped and animated the images using parallax.

A week after acquiring a 2-man mobile-app-developing team, photo-sharing service 500px has launched an official app for the iPhone, which joins the iPad version that was launched about a year ago.

This past Thanksgiving, Brooklyn-based photographer Navid Baraty attended and photographed the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. However, he didn't shoot the festivities in the way that most people do (from the ground). Instead, he went high overhead to the roof of a tall building to capture everything from a birds-eye-view.

Of all the photography-related novelty products we've seen so far, this one has to be one of the most bizarre. It's a hand-held vacuum cleaner designed to look just like a Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G VR lens. The device can draw its power from either the cigarette lighter socker in your car or the USB port on your computer.

Last week we reported that Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am was planning to launch an iPhone attachment that would boost the phone's resolution to 14 megapixels. That launch happened today, and we have our first look at how the artist plans to turn iPhones around the world into more-formidable cameras.

If you've been dying to take a gander at the video recording quality of the new Canon 6D, today's your lucky day. BBC freelance cameraman Johnnie Behiri got his hands on one of the cameras to test out, and created the above sample video that profiles a small Austrian chocolate shop called Xocolat.

It has been a long time since I have asked for something photo related for my birthday. I usually don’t ask, just because I’m very particular about what equipment I use, and my friends and family know it. But this year, it was different. I thought about dabbling in some old school photography, so I asked for a Polaroid 600 camera. My fiancée stepped up to the plate and delivered, gifting me an awesome 1983 Polaroid Sun 600 LMS. I had some fun with my first pack of film, but then it was time to start pushing the envelope.

An idea hit me one day, and I knew I had to try something that I’ve never seen done before: shooting off camera flash with an older Polaroid 600 instant camera.

Here's a photo project so profound that it might make you weep (you might also cry for other reasons). Artist Will Vincent has a project titled "Two Thousand, One Hundred and Ninety One." His artist statement is a single sentence: "Every day for six years I took a photo of myself with the lense cap on."

There are plenty of options to choose from if you're in the market for a new photography-themed T-shirt, but an unexpected player entered that market today: Flickr. The photo-sharing service announced that it has partnered with BustedTees to launch its very own T-shirt collection.

Back in October, Roger Cicala shared some first impressions of the Canon EOS M with us, and stated that he believes the camera is "a firmware update and a price drop away from being a great camera." While we haven't seen any major price cuts to the camera so far, a firmware update may be on the near horizon.

By "update," we mean "third-party firmware enhancement." Magic Lantern has announced that its firmware add-on will indeed work with Canon's mirrorless camera, and that they've begun the process of porting it.

Some photographers have made names for themselves by creating and photographing extremely detailed dioramas: miniature tabletop scenes that are so realistic that viewers often mistake them for the real world. Belgian photographers Maxime Delvaux and Kevin Laloux of 354 Photographers have put an interesting spin on the diorama photo concept by Photoshopping real people into their miniature scenes. The series is titled "Box".

Olympus currently offers a $144 adapter called the MMF-2 for photographers who want to use an existing collection of Four Thirds-mount lenses on a Micro Four Thirds camera. The accessory makes the lenses mountable and acts as a middleman between the lenses and the cameras, but its features pretty much end there. It appears that Olympus is working on a much fancier adapter: one that actually contains lens elements and contains focusing/stabilization features as well.

YouTube illusion and science channel Brusspup recently did an anamorphic illusion project in which he photographed a few random objects resting on a piece of paper (e.g. a Rubik's cube, a roll of tape, and a shoe), skewed them, printed them out as high-resolution prints, and then photographed them at an angle to make the prints look just like the original objects.

Behold: a box set of Nikon prime lenses. This unique kit is a limited-edition item currently being sold by Nikon exclusively in certain European countries (it's available in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK). Inside the Nikon-branded aluminum case are three f/1.8 lenses: the 28mm, 50mm, and 85mm. Oh, and you get the manuals, lens hoods, and soft cases as well.

We all know Instagram as an app for retro-filtered photos, but have you ever considered using it to film a video, one photo at a time? That's what director Arturo Perez Jr. did for the video above. It's the official music video for the song "Invasión" by Mexico City-based band The Plastics Revolution.

What does Nikon have up its sleeve for 2013? According to Nikon Rumors, it may be at least one pro-sumer DSLR early in the year, possibly followed by a beastly high-megapixel flagship DSLR later in the fall.

On the night of April 14th, 1912, the Titanic collided with a massive iceberg and sank, ending the lives of more than 1,000 people and becoming one of the deadliest maritime disasters in history. Now, one hundred years later, a photo that may the only surviving print showing that infamous chunk of ice is going up for auction. It's expected to fetch up to $10,000.

Photographer Nick Cool came up with one of the strangest pieces of do-it-yourself camera gear that we've seen so far this year. He took an ordinary stainless steel sink filter -- yup, the thing that catches food at the bottom of kitchen sinks -- drilled various-sized holes through it, and stuck it into a filter ring after taking out the glass.

You know those Photoshopped optical illusions that involve combining two photos of a person's face -- one straight on and one looking to the side -- into a single bizarre shot? Quebec, Canada-based photographer Ulric Collette put a spin on that concept with his new portrait series titled "Facade." Instead of using negative space and two completely different angles, Collette had his subjects turn their heads slightly to the side for the second shot, and then merged the two photos together by aligning one eye from each shot.

Tough news coming out of France this week: Sipa Press, the country's leading photo agency, has filed for bankruptcy protection. Michel Puech of the Le Journal de la Photographie reports that the filing came on November 22nd, and can lead to two possible outcomes: reorganization or liquidation.

If you've ever had to take traditional camera straps on and off your camera, you probably know how annoying the task is. Peak Design, makers of the Capture camera clip system, wants to change the way people think about and use straps. The company has unveiled a new strap called the Leash, a versatile accessory that can take on different configurations and be used for multiple purposes.

After seeing the story of the DSLR-stealing lion that we published last night, Zurich, Switzerland-based photographer Alessandro Della Bella sent in an unusual camera theft story of his own. While shooting time-lapse photographs of the night sky using three intervalometer-trigger DSLRs, one of the cameras was stolen by a thief. What's interesting is that the camera documented the whole event through time-lapse photos! The video above shows the time-lapse that resulted.