November 2012

Nikon D600 Speck Issue May Be Limited to First Few Thousand Shots

Photographer Kyle Clements' time-lapse showing specks accumulating on the Nikon D600 over the first 1000 shots has been seen by nearly 200,000 people around the web in less than a week. Through the exposure his experiment has gotten, Clements received a good deal of feedback and suggestions regarding further experiments and what the specks might be. He has since done two new time-lapse experiments that sheds a little more light on the issue.

Gone in 30 Seconds: Photog Holds Show and Invites Strangers to Steal His Photos

Copenhagen, Denmark-based photographer Lukas Renlund recently came up with a neat way of drumming up some excitement over his photographs. He held a public photo exhibition called "Steal My Photograph!" that turned out to be possibly the world's shortest show. After hanging up 40 framed photographs on a wall outdoors, Renlund invited passersby to take any single photograph they desired, with one condition: they had to hang it up, photograph it, and then email the photo and description to Renlund.

Funny Stop-Motion Animation Shows the Canon EOS M at the Mirrorless Party

Jordan Drake of Canadian camera shop The Camera Store just published this great hands-on field test of the Canon EOS M. Even if you don't have 10 minutes to watch the entire review, you've got to check out the two short stop-motion animations that start at about 21s and 7m50s. They're a hilarious (and accurate) sketches that poke fun at how "the Canon EOS M is a little bit late to the mirrorless party" and how the camera has a pretty shoddy autofocus system.

‘The Photographer’: A 1948 Documentary on the Life and Work of Edward Weston

Here's an interesting 26-minute documentary about the life and work of 20th-century-photographer Edward Weston, a man who is considered to be one of the most influential American photographers and one of the masters of photography during his era. The 1948 film, titled "The Photographer," was shot by American filmmaker Willard Van Dyke, an apprentice of Weston's, who went on to become a very notable photographer in his own right.

Using a Floor-to-Ceiling Pegboard as a Portrait Backdrop

During Halloween a month ago, we shared a simple portrait idea by photographer Nick Fancher that involved firing a flash through fog and a perforated hardboard for a backdrop filled with beams of light. Since that initial experiment, he has taken the concept and developed it even more.

Fancher recently built a "white room" in his basement using sheets of white pegboard and hardboard. It's essentially a white cube without side walls.

Viral Hoax Facebook Update is Powerless to Protect Your Photo Copyrights

One of the big stories in the tech world at the moment is Facebook's effort to do away with its public voting system for approving changes to the service's policies (yup, Facebook is a democracy). Pranksters are taking advantage of the controversy to stir up some FUD among Facebook users. One of the things that has been circulating over the past few days is a bogus "chain letter" that people are posting as status updates, believing that their photograph copyrights are at risk. The message is spreading like wildfire -- many of you have likely seen it already -- but there's one big problem: it's all a complete hoax.

Canon Has Not Started Bundling Hoods and Cases with Non-L Glass

Lens hoods and protective cases are nice accessories to have, but they're generally only bundled with professional L glass when it comes to Canon lenses. Canon USA almost never includes them with lenses that don't carry that distinctive red ring (or a green ring). Last week, Bryan Carnathan over at The Digital Picture recently noticed that the pre-order pages for the new Canon 35mm f/2 IS over on B&H and Adorama listed a hood and case as part of what's included. The news surely got many a Canonite wondering, "will bundled hoods and cases be included with non-L lenses now?"

Unfortunately, the answer is no -- at least for photographers in the US.

PetaPixel Photography Gift Guide 2012

With Christmas and the holiday season just around the corner, here's our annual roundup of the latest, greatest, and phototastic-ist gift ideas. The items are listed by price, so there should be something to fit every budget.

Humor: Photographs of Cars with Their Namesakes

Art director Jim Lasser and his friend, photographer Ray Gordon, have a humorous ongoing photo project titled Namesake Motors. They observed that car makes and models often have names inspired by (or similar to) famous people or people groups, so they decided to shoot a series of images that play on words by pairing the cars with their namesakes (using the term very loosely).

The photograph above is titled, "Homer’s Odyssey."

Google Turns Times Square in NYC Into a Photo Gallery for Everyone’s Pictures

If you've always wanted your photography prominently displayed in New York City's Times Square, Google can help make it happen -- as long as you're okay with adding some text to your picture and participating in a marketing effort. To show that its new line of Chromebook laptops is designed for all kinds of users, the Mountain View-based company has launched a new campaign called For Everyone. It's a giant photo gallery that invites the world to upload photos that answer the question, "who are Chromebooks for?"

Shooting Studio Portraits of Strangers on the Street As If They Were Famous

Philippe Echaroux is a young French photographer who makes a living shooting portraits of celebrities (among other things). Recently, he carried out a personal project that had been brewing in his mind for some time: using his celebrity portraiture experience and style for spontaneous portraits of ordinary strangers encountered on the street. The short video above shows how Echaroux roamed around with his small team and set up makeshift photo studios for each of the portraits.

Facebook Removes Risqué Photograph of Woman Showing an Elbow

Are photo-sharing website content policies based on indecency or the mere appearance of indecency? That's what visual web magazine Theories of the deep understanding of things decided to test out yesterday. It uploaded an innocent -- but seemingly risqué -- photo of a woman sitting in a bathtub with her elbow resting on the edge (warning: it looks inappropriate). Lo and behold, the social network quickly took the photo down for violating the service's terms.

BTS: Photographing a Lyric-Lapse Music Video Over the Course of Six Months

Back in August we shared a mesmerizing stop-motion video titled "Dream Music: Part 2" and created by Marc Donahue and Sean Michael Williams. The team spent 6-8 hours of work photographing every 3-4 seconds of the 8-minute music video. All in all, the project took six months to complete. The video above presents a behind-the-scenes look at how the whole thing was done, with director's commentary, deleted scenes, and a bunch of time-lapses of the time-lapse being shot.

Most Expensive Production Camera and First Leica M Sold at Auction

Back in May, a 1923 Leica O-Series camera became the most expensive camera on the planet after being sold for roughly $2.79 million at a WestLicht auction. That camera was a prototype camera, and just one of 25 made (only 12 of them exist today). If you're wondering what the most expensive non-prototype camera is, look no further than the latest WestLicht auction that was held earlier today. The Leica M3D seen above fetched a staggering €1.68 million, or roughly $2.18 million, becoming "the most expensive camera from a serial production ever."

The Marks of a Leica That Has Not Been Used as a Fashion Accessory

People who collect Leica M rangefinders or use them as luxury fashion accessories take great care to keep their cameras in pristine condition. Photographer Blake Andrews is not one of those people. He has been doing film photography since 1993, and his trusty M6 has plenty of battle scars from seeing heavy use over the years.

If you want to see what a Leica can look like when it's used as a camera rather than an accessory, Andrews has published a series of interesting graphics in which he treats his M6 as an artifact, pointing out various features that you definitely wouldn't see on a babied camera body.

BTS: Creating a Wet Plate Portrait Using an Ordinary Negative and an Enlarger

Slovenia-based professional photographer Borut Peterlin was recently tasked with shooting a portrait of painter/illustrator/author Milan Erič for influential Slovenian magazine Mladina. Peterlin decided that he wanted to create a wet plate collodion photo, but spent weeks worrying about whether he would be able to accomplish it given the tight schedule of the on-location shoot.

Nokia Loses Its Head Honcho of Imaging, Face of PureView Technology

There was some surprising news in the smartphoneography world yesterday: Amateur Photographer reported that Nokia's imaging chief Damian Dinning -- "considered the driving force behind the firm’s smartphone camera technology" -- would be leaving the company for personal reasons at the end of this month.

9 Months of Pregnancy, 1000 Photos, and a 4-Minute Stop-Motion Story

When his wife Osher became pregnant with their first child, photographer Tomer Grencel had the idea of documenting the pregnancy through a stop-motion video. Over the next 9 months, he snapped 1000 photographs at different points and with different creative concepts. After his daughter Emma entered the world, he spent a month combining the images into a single stop-motion animation that tells the story of Emma's journey from the womb into the world..

Gotta Catch ‘Em All: Photog Spends Eight Years Capturing the 39 Birds of Paradise

If you've ever played any of the Pokémon video games, you probably know it feels like to spend hours or days trying to capture a rare monster in order to fill in another entry in your Pokédex. National Geographic photographer Tim Laman knows that feeling through his photography project titled Birds of Paradise. Laman spent a whopping eight years photographing all 39 birds-of-paradise species in the rainforests of New Guinea -- the first time it has ever been done.

Will.i.am to Launch iPhone Add-On That Boosts Resolution to 14MP

Want larger photos from your iPhone? Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am has a solution for you. The entrepreneurial musician will reportedly be launching a new iPhone attachment next week that will "turn your smartphone into a genius-phone" and boost the phone's camera resolution from 8 megapixels to 14 megapixels. Like the man who developed it, the device will have a quirky name: i.am+.

Photos of Makeshift Soccer Balls Used by Children in Africa

Soccer, known as football around the world, is played by hundreds of millions of people in hundreds of countries, making it the world's most popular sport. However, a large percentage of its enthusiasts are unable to afford actual soccer balls to play with. Instead, they fashion their own makeshift balls out of things they have on hand -- things like socks, rubber bands, plastic bags, strips of cloth, and string. The DIY balls may be difficult to use and ugly in appearance, but each one is a treasured possession of its owner.

Belgian photographer Jessica Hilltout decided to turn her attention and her camera lens on these one-of-a-kind creations, documenting "football in its purest form" in Africa. The project is titled AMEN.

Fujifilm Baby Box: Capture the First 365 Days of a Baby’s Life with Instant Photos

Fujifilm is selling a cool Instax Mini instant camera kit over in Japan that makes it easy for new parents to do a 365-day photo project documenting the first year of their child's life. Called the Fujifilm Baby Box, the package includes an Instax Mini 25 camera (in either pink or blue), a photo album for holding the prints, a 5-pack of Instax film containing 50 shots, and a sheet containing 365 round stickers with hearts containing the numbers 1 through 365.

Over the course of a year (and a little over 6 additional packs of film), parents can snap daily pictures and label the instant prints with the day it was taken on by sticking a heart to it.

Interview with Action-Sport Photographer Tim Kemple

Tim Kemple is an action-sport and lifestyle photographer based out of Salt Lake City, Utah. Visit his website here.

PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Tim Kemple: Sure. I'm a photographer and film maker based in Utah. I grew up on the East Coast and spent my weekends as a kid climbing, skiing and wandering. I started carrying a camera to document my adventures.

Mind-Bending Reflection Portraits Shot Using a Wet Plate Camera

Last week we issued a challenge asking readers to shoot a creative mirror self-portrait using an alternative style of photography. Reader Agustin Barrutia took us up on that challenge, and created a pair of wet plate photographs that take the concept of "mirror self-portrait" to a new level (they're unlike anything we've seen before). Both photographs are straight-out-of-camera wet plate photos that weren't manipulated digitally. Barrutia simply used "mirrors" (one doesn't involve a mirror, per se) and "reflections" in clever ways.

The wet plate above is a self-portrait of Barrutia shooting the wet plate. That camera in the frame is the camera that captured the wet plate.

Nikon: Get a Cleaning if You’re Bothered by the D600’s Sensor Dust

The whole situation surrounding Nikon's D600 dust issue is turning out to be eerily similar to Apple's iPhone 5 purple haze problem. In both situations, there are people who are very bothered by the "flaw", people who wonder what all the fuss is about and believe the complaints to be overblown, and a slow response from the companies. Now Nikon is also doing exactly what Apple did: respond to complaints saying that what users are seeing is normal.

Funny Canon Commercial Shows What Photogs Will Do for the Perfect Shot

If you were watching the Thanksgiving Day NFL football games on TV today, you may have seen the above commercial promoting the Canon Rebel T4i entry-level DSLR. It's a humorous ad that asks "When was the last time something inspired you to be creative?" and shows a number of photographers putting themselves in uncomfortable (and unsafe) situations in order to capture the photograph they have in their minds eye.

Two-Week-Long Cross-Country Road Trip Captured in 3 Minutes and 5000 Photos

A Seattle-based couple named Mike Matas and Sharon Hwang recently went on an epic cross-country road trip and documented it in a cool way. The duo, both product designers at Facebook, rented a car from a national rental company and spent two weeks driving from San Francisco to New York City. Over the course of their journey, the two snapped thousands of photographs documenting their adventures. After flying back home to the West Coast, Matas took 5,000 of the photographs and turned them into the time-lapse video above that shows their entire trip in 3 minutes and 30 seconds.

Theory: Nikon D600 Sensor Dust Problem Caused by Scratches in the Mirror Box?

It has been widely reported that the new Nikon D600 full-frame DSLR suffers from a higher-than-normal amount of dark spots appearing on the sensor. Yesterday we shared one photographer's time-lapse video that demonstrates that the issue occurs right out of the box without any lens swaps.

Photographer Daniel Gaworski has been experiencing the same problem, and decided to take a closer look at his D600. He discovered that his camera's shutter curtain contains scratch marks on the bottom flap (see above), particularly in one corner of the camera.

Nikon Announces a 1 Series Digiscoping Adapter for Using Telescopes as Lenses

Digiscoping is when a photographer attaches an optical telescope to a digital camera and uses it as a super-telephoto lens. Although the image quality isn't as good as an actual camera lens with the same focal length, it's a much cheaper option for people who already own high-powered telescopes -- bird photographers, for example. Nikon is no stranger to the digiscoping game, having released adapters for its DSLRs and compact cameras, but today it announced new accessories that bring digiscoping to the 1 Series mirrorless lineup.