December 2012

Give James Bond, Jack Bauer or Chuck Norris a spork, and they'll figure out a way to overpower bad guys wielding guns. What happens when you give a seasoned photographer a cheap digital camera designed for toddlers?

That's what Kai Wong and DigitalRev did recently. They flew in David Hobby of Strobist and gave him a 2-megapixel Buzz Lightyear camera and three cheapo flash units. Hobby was then tasked with shooting 5 challenges in 5 locations of 5 subjects, using his resourcefulness to make the best images he could with the uber-low-end gear.

Looking to put together a sexy camera bag? Already have a messenger bag you want to carry your camera in? Love the look and feel of waxed canvas bags but don’t want to fork over the money to buy one new? This tutorial is for you!

French photographer Serge Ramelli made this short 30-minute tutorial that teaches the basics …

I recently captured the macro liquid splash photograph above, and found that it came out looking like it was computer generated. Here's a brief description of how the photo was created.

Wowzers. Time flies! As we come to the end of another year of blogging about the wonderful world of photography, here's a roundup of the top 10 most popular posts of the past 12 months. It's a list of advice, inspiration, creativity, and interesting news stories.

Electronic viewfinders have become all the rage as of late through the rise of the mirrorless camera, but many photographers still prefer optical viewfinders due to certain weaknesses of EVFs. One major drawback is the fact that the scene is often laggy, especially in low-light situations, making it difficult to track a moving subject.

Nikon is apparently trying to combine the best of the OVF and EVF worlds by developing a new giant viewfinder that's see-through.

A couple of weeks ago we featured a Google Chrome extension for overlaying "rule of thirds" lines over any online photograph. Now we have a different tool for examining other photographer's photographs: Image Histogram.

Created by developer/photographer Nick Burlett, it's a Chrome Extension that can quickly bring up the histogram of any online photograph.

Emio Tomeoni often plays with his toddler son Xavier while his wife Stephanie is at work, due to her often irregular hours. Recently, he decided that instead of simply telling his wife what transpired over the course of a day, he would show her through pictures -- many, many pictures.

Tomeoni set up a camera in the corner of his living room and created a time-lapse video of a day of their play, showing himself and Xavier moving about the room, tinkering with different toys and structures, and enjoying hours of loving merrymaking.

A camera can be many things. A tool, to produce an image. A bridge, to start a conversation. An observer, to record an event, or bear witness to something. A shield, to distance and separate the photographer from the scene he or she is attempting to capture.

There’s a big difference between being part of the action, and just being a witness to the action. Which do you think makes for stronger images? Unquestionably, the former. However, it’s not that simple: photojournalism is like quantum mechanics.

We've shared several articles featuring the camera obscura and the many uses it has been put through over the years. From a roaming camera obscura used for photography workshops, to the possibility that some of painting's greatest names used them as an aid, the "technology" has really gotten around.

We've even shared videos and kits you can use to turn any windowed room in your house or apartment into your very own camera obscura. But what happens when a professional photographer grapples with the concept? If Cuban-born photographer Abelardo Morell is any indication, some pretty amazing inverted landscapes.

The video above is only 44 seconds long, but we'll bet it'll take up at least a minute and a half of your time -- you'll just have to watch it twice. It was created by British psychological professor Richard Wiseman, and demonstrates the power of perspective. It's titled, "Assumptions."

We’ve shared a few pretty cool cross-section light painting projects before, but none of them were ever very... shall we say... cheery. Both projects -- 21:31 and Andy Leach's hologram photo -- were created using the same eerie video of human slices from the Visible Human Project. But for those who wanted to toy around with cross-section light painting and re-creating 3D light objects in their photos, that’s all they had.

Well, not anymore. Photographer Hugo Baptista has put together a Vimeo group called "Cross Section Objects for Light Painting". It contains a number of videos that you can load onto your tablet or smartphone and use to create 3D light painting objects.

Canon has been putting a date code on its lenses since the 1960's, but ever since 2008 the company has been transitioning to a 10-digit serial system, sans date code. At first this caused quite a stir, as many a conspiracy theory began popping up; but not to worry, the code is there, it's just been incorporated into the new 10-digit system.

It's not easy to remember life before Photoshop. When we do, we think of a world where picture were straightforward, always showing exactly what happened to be in front of the lens when the exposure was taken. But that's not entirely the case.

Trick photography has been around for centuries, and even though the folks in Victorian times weren't nearly as concerned with artificially slimming down, they did like to have some photographic fun once in a while. This set of headless photographs from the 19th century is a great example of the kind of 'fun' we're talking about.

A few months ago, we told you about a neat, open-source attachment created by modder Andy Rawson that could instantly turn your smartphone into a thermal imaging camera. At the time, Rawson was intending to sell the production models for $150 and otherwise open source the project for the DIYers out there. Well, add about $25 to the price tag and a ridiculously successful Kickstarter campaign and you've got the IR-Blue.

Photographs captured by astronauts on the International Space Station are in the public domain, so they're often remixed into gorgeous time-lapse videos. Italian filmmaker Giacomo Sardelli went a step beyond many of the ISS time-lapses we've seen by adding in more than just epic music: he included short audio messages recorded by the astronauts who worked in the space station.

There are well over 100 million users on Instagram (assuming a quarter of them didn't just up and leave), and even though the typical Instagram photo stream consists of food and the family pet, there are certain places that show up more often than others. Times Square, The Eiffel Tower, Disneyland, the Bangkok Airport... wait... that last one seems out of place doesn't it?

As it turns out, no. Not only is Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport the number one most Instagrammed location of 2012, but Bangkok's massive shopping mall, Siam Paragon, took second. Only then does the list become populated by the locations you might expect to see.

What would the world's major cities look like if they were plunged into complete darkness? Some photographers gave us a taste of it when New York City suffered major power outages during Hurricane Sandy, but those scenes were coupled with an overcast sky.

Since 2007, Jen Bekman’s 20×200 has become one of the leaders in the …

Part awesome party-trick, part brilliant idea, the new Cycloramic app from Egos Ventures is about the coolest thing you can get for one dollar on the iTunes app store at the moment. The app -- which will only work with the iPhone 5 -- triggers your phone's vibration at the exact right frequency to make it spin around in a perfect circle. Just stand your phone up, hit go, and keep an eye on your friend's faces (several reviewers called the reactions "priceless").

Faking the look of old films is becoming ubiquitous in the world of mobile photo sharing apps, but so far the popular apps have stuck with various films and not older photographic processes. If you want to create a photograph that mimics the look of a wet plate, it's actually pretty easy to do in Photoshop.

All over the Internet today, reports have spread like wildfire that the Instagram Policy Backlash has cost the picture sharing service as many of 25% of their active users. All of these initial reports stemmed from data collected by app metrics firm AppData, an analytics firm that keeps track of daily, weekly and monthly active users for any given app -- and the company's most recent readouts on Instagram showed a decline of nearly 25% in daily active users (from 16 million to 12.5 million).

Seeing the massive metrics drop, AppData immediately told The New York Post that it was "pretty sure the decline in Instagram users was due to the terms of service announcement." As people have taken a closer look at the numbers, however, they've begun to realize that something doesn't quite make sense.

Canon France has published a mysterious teaser ad to its Facebook page that shows a woman pointing some kind of invisible camera at a couple of ping pong players. The short (translated) message states, "Soon, we will share information that will change the way you look at the world…"

For his project titled Reflexion Autour du Bassin, French photographer Alain Laboile created fantasy photographs of his children, seen through the reflection of a small pond.

If you've been thinking about buying a copy of Apple's Aperture 3 for your post-processing work, you might want to hold off for a bit. A replacement may be on the near horizon -- at least according to a new book listing that has popped up over on Amazon Canada.

When photographer Mark Meyer wakes up every morning in Alaska, the first thing he notices is the view through his room's windows. Over time, he began to notice that this view took on a wide range of appearances across different times and seasons (mostly cold weather). He then started capturing a casual series of photographs that show the abstract, minimalist views that appear due to the rain, snow, and fog. The project is called An Alaska Window.

Back in April, there was a small hoopla amongst Nikonians who purchased the Nikon D4 or D800 and discovered that the LCD screen had a greenish tint when compared to the D3s and D700. Nikon denied that anything was wrong with the new cameras, and stated that it was actually the older models that were too cool. A couple of months later, it was rumored that a soon-to-arrive firmware update would address the issue. That update has yet to arrive.

There's now some good news for those of you looking for a fix "change". Photographer Noah Bershatsky is reporting that Nikon's service center will actually do the correction "change".

Painter Norman Rockwell's illustrations graced the covers of countless magazines over the course of the 20th century, becoming a much-loved piece of American culture for their simple snapshots of life. You might recognize many of the works, and even the name behind the paintings, but did you know that virtually all of the images started out as photographs?

Lytro is currently the only camera on the market that lets you refocus photographs after they're shot, thanks to its fancy schmancy (and proprietary) light field technology, but it won't be the only one for long. Toshiba is reportedly developing its own Lytro-style camera that will target a different segment of the photography market: smartphone and tablet photographers.

You might recognize this iconic photograph of Michael Jordan flying through the air during the 1988 NBA Dunk Contest in Chicago. It was captured by renowned Sports Illustrated photographer Walter Iooss Jr., a man who has created some of the most memorable photographs of athletes over the past fifty years (another of his iconic photographs is "The Catch").

Photographer Michel Jones has one of the most unique photography-related tattoos we've seen yet. While most photography enthusiasts who get inked may choose designs that are easily recognizable by the general public (e.g. cameras, lenses, photos), Jones went with a design that is enigmatic to most people and even foreign to many photographers. His tattoo is based on the backing paper that comes with 120 film.

For her project Sworn Virgins of Albania, photographer Jill Peters visited to the mountain villages of northern Albania to capture portraits of "burneshas," or females who have lived their lives as men for reasons related to their culture and society.

In a recent interview with Quesabesde, Miguel Angel Garcia, the CEO of Olympus Spain, dropped another "official" hint at what the camera company is cooking up to replace the E-5. The subsequent article, which initially said that the camera would be compatible with both Micro Four Thirds and Four Thirds Lenses, has since been reworded to state simply that the replacement for the E-5 will be "capable of harnessing the full potential of Four Thirds lenses."

Here's a primer for beginning photographers on the concepts of aspect ratios and compositional theories.

We’ve written a number of posts regarding the NASA Curiosity rover’s photography on Mars, but have you …

Researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium are embarking on an interesting mission, and they need the help of willing photographers. What they're attempting to do is create a database of photos based on how they make the viewer feel. The project and website, dubbed Pictures With Feelings, can then be used to further our knowledge about human emotion and how specific moods come about. Where you folks come is in providing the most emotionally stimulating images buried in your archives.

After Instagram backpedaled and removed some of the more controversial language in their new privacy policy agreement, it seemed the worst was over for the Facebook-owned company. The service has surely taken a hit, but when you have over 100M users, you can probably withstand quite a few. But in the words of Yogi Berra, "It ain't over till it's over," and if Instagram user Lucy Funes and San Diego-based law firm Finkelstein & Krinsk have anything to say about it: it ain't over. Those two parties have launched a class action lawsuit against the popular photo-sharing service.

Dereck and Beverly Joubert have spent the past 30 years living among lions in the African country of Botswana, capturing incredible photographs and footage of the majestic creatures that have garnered widespread praise. They are considered two of the world's preeminent experts on the big cats, having created tens of films, books, scientific papers, and articles in National Geographic magazine (along with a list of filmmaking awards, including five Emmys).

CBS' 60 Minutes recently paid a visit to the Joubert's, creating the fascinating video above that shows how the duo live and work, and how they've dedicated their lives to documenting and protecting the cats from human threats.

Remote shutter release cables are extremely simple devices, but they can cost quite a bit if you buy the official accessories sold by major camera manufacturers. Instructables user nk dtk has an awesome makeshift alternative that's dirt cheap: all you'll need is a cable and a can of soda!

When photographer Jess T. Dugan picked up her luggage after a flight from Chicago to Boston on December 18th, something didn't feel quite right. It felt a bit lighter than it should have. She opened it up, and, lo and behold, several thousand dollars of camera equipment was missing -- oops.