If you’ve been jostling with crowds today over Black Friday deals and are heavy laden with shopping bags, take a look at this sweet deal that won’t be any extra hassle: Amazon is currently selling the full boxed version of Adobe Lightroom 4 for just $79! It’s regularly priced at $150, and sometimes dips down to $100, but $79 for one of the most popular image editing programs is quite an attractive offer. No word on how long this pricing will last, but we’re guessing that it’ll go back up after today or the holiday season.
You can also find the complete list of camera- and photo-related Black Friday deals offered by Amazon on this page.
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
In 1991, a group of Austrian art students on a trip to nearby Prague found [...] a curious little camera [...] it produced pictures unlike anything they had seen before. The little camera was the Lomo LC-A – Lomo Kompact Automat, built in Soviet-era Leningrad by Leningrad Optics and Mechanics Association (Lomo) – and very soon a craze was born. It was an analogue Instagram in the days before digital photography.
This Lomo craze may have ended up helping save film photography from an untimely end. In 1992, the students set up Lomographic Society International, exhibiting shots taken on unwanted Lomos they had bought up from all over Eastern Europe. Then, in the mid-90s, having exhausted the supply of left-over Lomos gathering dust in Budapest, Bucharest or East Berlin, they went to the camera’s manufacturers [...] and persuaded them to restart production. The negotiations were helped along by the support of the city’s then deputy mayor, Vladimir Putin.
According to Dowling, there is speculation that Lomography is a potential suitor for Kodak’s film business that is currently for sale.
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. Read more…
