January 2013

In 2009, when Kodak announced that production of Kodachrome film would be coming to an end, legendary photographer Steve McCurry saw an opportunity, and asked if the company would give him the final roll. Given his reputation and the many famed photographs he's taken on Kodachrome, it's no surprise Kodak said yes.

As a tribute to this final roll, a crew from National Geographic decided to follow McCurry and document the momentous last 36 frames that would ever be shot on that film -- the video above is the result.

Here's an interesting idea/experiment put together by Adrià Navarro and DI Shin that takes photographing your daily life to a whole new level. Fair warning, if you think that taking pictures of your breakfast or your night out bowling is overkill, you should probably stop reading now...

The Polaroid Cacher is a wireless printer housed inside a Polaroid Land Camera case, and its sole purpose is to take pictures of your daily online adventures.

We hear it all the time: magazine covers aren't real. These models and celebrities are made up, photographed by professionals and, most infamously, airbrushed to perfection. But there's a big difference between hearing about it, and watching it happen with your own two eyes.

In this video, UK DJ Goldierocks plays guinea pig to show you what all goes into creating a magazine-worthy model shot -- from hair and makeup to an artificially constructed waistline.

A year ago, Nikon caused a big stir when the company stopped making repair parts available to independent repair shops. As a result, getting your Nikon fixed became more expensive and cumbersome, requiring you to send it out to an "authorized repair facility" or get your parts second-hand off eBay.

The good news is that now, in a half-hearted step back, Nikon has started selling select (read: extremely limited) repair parts direct to consumers online through the Nikon Parts Store.

There are only a few (two, maybe three) ground-level photographs of the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing in existence, and one of the original prints just surfaced in the archives at Honkawa Elementary School in Hiroshima city.

Google has been working some time now on a camera-equipped device that's worn over (or above) the eye. Olympus has something similar going on, but instead of a full-fledged camera, their device only serves as an external viewfinder for a separate digital camera.

New York Philharmonic trombonist David Finlayson scored an viral Internet hit …

Here’s Shoebox’s humorous take on the difference between film and digital …

For the past five years, photographer Amy Stein has been driving across America and capturing portraits random strangers who are stranded on the side of the road after having their cars break down. She often drives on freeways hours upon hours before coming upon a new subject for the series.

Back in 2009, Popular Photography announced the winning photos of its latest Reader’s Photos Contest. Two of the winners (shown above) had some photographers scratching their heads, due to the fact that they're "Photoshop jobs" rather than non-manipulated stills.

If I get a photography idea, I tend to just go with it and see if it works. I had driven out to my parent's place early in the day and the idea just came to me. I think at first I thought, "Man, I wish I had thought to shoot moon-lit snow the day before when you could make a snow man for the op."

What would Vincent van Gogh's work look like if he had been a photographer instead of a master painter? Would he have created his self-portraits using a camera instead of a brush?

Photographer Tadao Cern recently created an interesting image that explores this question. He took one of the artist's most famous self-portraits and using Photoshoppery to recreate it as a still photo.

The last few days have been rough on BuzzFeed, as a Reddit outcry has gained more and more traction regarding some light painting photos the website used to create ads without seeking permission or giving credit.

Even as we say goodbye to the Jessops chain of retail stores in the UK, it seems that more of the major manufacturers are moving towards establishing a brick and mortar branch. Polaroid will soon be opening 'Fotobars' and now, following in Polaroid and Leica's footsteps, Canon is getting ready to open its own 'Canon Experience Stores.'

The debate over whether or not the US Government should release photos of Osama Bin Laden's body has been going on ever since his death at the hands of Seal Team 6 in May of 2011. Last April, it seemed that the book had closed on the matter when a federal judge ruled not to release the photos for various reasons.

But certain parties -- the conservative legal group Judicial Watch in this case -- refuse to take no for an answer, leading the US Court of Appeals in Washington to take another look at the matter.

Here's a cool little Kickstarter we ran across today, and for once it's not already funded 5-times over in the first few days, so you'll have the chance to be a part of it. The product is a lens holster designed specifically for Nikon that lets you keep an extra lens right on your hip and ready for a quick, no-hassle swap.

We're used to Google frequently improving things on its end -- most recently adding pan and zoom to Google+ -- but a constantly improving Yahoo! is a fairly new thing.

After numerous improvements to Flickr and a new Flickr app, Yahoo! has turned its photographic eye on Yahoo! Image Search. From here on out, you'll be able to search all of Flickr's creative commons images straight from Yahoo!

A couple of days ago, UK camera retailer Jessops entered administration (essentially bankruptcy), appointing PricewaterhouseCoopers as their administrator and putting them in charge of the store's fate.

Admittedly, time-lapses are a bit played out; it seems like every other day another one makes its way across …

Walkthroughs of photographs that aren't easily reproducible (or are impossible to reproduce) might not be very useful to many, but it's still interesting to learn how rare shots come about. An example would be the photograph above, captured by photographer Bryan Hanna last week. Hanna was aiming to capture a long-exposure nighttime photograph of a landscape in the foreground and the night sky in the background, but he accidentally snagged something even better: a fireball zipping across the sky in just the right area in the frame!

One of Pentax's big announcements for this year's CES 2013 was the MX-1, a camera that is designed to compete against other retrotastic compact cameras that are currently generating a lot of buzz (namely the Fujifilm X-Series and the Olympus OM-D).

If how innovative a company is were determined solely by the number of patents received, then Canon is one of the most innovative companies in the world. For an eighth consecutive year, Canon ranked first among all Japanese companies in terms of patents issued by the United States government.

Canadian photographer Joel Robison regularly creates surreal self-portraits that show what his life might be like if he found himself on the receiving end of a shrink ray. The conceptual photo-manipulations show him interacting with objects that are suddenly the size of trucks. In one image he is seen sitting on a Christmas tree next to some body-sized ornaments. In another, he's exploring a globe while perched on top of a bottle of Coke.

We've written a couple of times in the past on how you can achieve drastically different portrait looks by choosing different lens focal lengths and subject distances. Basically, your choice of glass can make a huge impact on what your subject's face looks like... and how much they appear to weigh.

Reddit user Popocuffs wanted to demonstrate this, but instead of using a human subject, he used his cat.

The image you see above isn't a screenshot from some city-building video game like Sim City. It's a panoramic photograph of New York City captured by Sergey Semenov that recently won Epson's Pano Award for most outstanding panorama captured by an amateur. Check out a high-resolution version of the image here.

We showed you Nikon's video earlier today, now it's Sigma's turn to show what goes into making quality lenses at the company's factory in Aizu, Japan.

Filmed from the same artistic bent as the Nikon piece, this video show the meticulous process that goes into making quality Sigma glass. Unlike Nikon's version, this one doesn't stop until the lens is fully assembled and ready to latch on to the nearest camera.

Russian photographer Stanislav Aristov's matches series has been getting some well-deserved attention lately. To create these sculptures, he bends and molds the matches while they're burning. He then photographs them, as well as the flames and smoke, using a macro lens and studio flash.

Lifehacker featured a great tip today courtesy of Redditor lifedeathandtech that’ll help you …

Winning the 2012 National Geographic Photo Contest is a pretty incredible feeling. Being disqualified 72-hours later for a minor editing decision... that one doesn't feel quite as good. But that's what happened to photographer Harry Fisch who, for a few glorious days, was living every Travel Photographer's dream -- shortly followed by their worst nightmare.

Nikon recently put out this short 3-minute video that offers an interesting glimpse into one of the critical steps of lens making: the production of the optical glass. It steps through the various stages of manufacturing, from combining the raw elements through examining the chunks of glass before they're polished and perfected.

Google tends to play nice with photographers, and yesterday the search giant announced that photos were going to start getting some love on its social network -- love of the pan and zoom variety. With cell phones, point and shoots and SLRs alike all churning out 12MP+ photos (at the very least), Google thought it was time you were able to see all of that glorious detail.

When Fujifilm announced the X100s last week, it made the bold claim that the camera had the world's fastest autofocus system among cameras of the same class. Sluggish autofocus was one of the big complaints owners of the X100 had, so for this latest refresh the company focused its attention on making the camera faster.

Want to see how fast the new AF is? We captured the short video above during a brief hands-on time we had with the camera. It doesn't show an in-depth test or much variety in subject matter, but should offer a taste of what "world's fastest AF" looks like in the flesh.

To make the point that Garnier Fructis' hair products are great for both women and men, advertising agency Publicis teamed up with photographers Billy & Hells for a series of creative advertising photographs.

Upon first glance, each of the photographs appear to show a tough guy with a massively long beard. However, look a little closer and you'll realize that things are not what they appeared to be.

Czech Republic-based photographer Katka Pruskova recently completed her first time-lapse project, and it's quite an impressive effort. Pruskova photographed flowers in front of a black backdrop, using the magic of time-lapse photography to capture them blooming. She shot more than 7100 still photographs using her Canon 5D Mark II over the couse of more than 730 hours.

Canon's attention grabber at this year's CES 2013 is a new compact camera designed to fight against the encroachment of smartphones: the PowerShot N.

The little guy is unlike most point-and-shoots you'll find on the market. It's extremely small, square, and simple. The design may seem gimmicky at first, but pick it up in your hands and your opinion might change.

Samsung camera lovers received some good news via Dropbox today. According to Dropbox's head of mobile business development Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, future Samsung smart cameras are going to come packing Dropbox and 50GB of free storage for 2 years.

The news is nothing new for Samsung Galaxy Camera owners, who already had the service and 50GB built in. But the fact that they're putting Dropbox on all cameras means you won't have to pony up $500 to get the automated cloud storage benefits.

We had some hands-on time with the new Polaroid iM1836 just now. The company is only showing off two of the units at CES 2013. One of them doesn't turn on. The other one can't take any pictures.

Earlier today, an Australian court put an end to a year-old tussle between photographer George Ferris and newlyweds Jarrad and Sheree Mitchell over the quality of the wedding photos he took for them. Although neither side really won, the court did make an interesting statement that could serve as a precedent in the future.

One of the main pillars of the Mitchell's argument was that Ferris had missed several key moments, including their wedding kiss. Ferris, on the other hand, called it "just a peck" and maintained that not all moments could be captured. The court sided with Ferris.

One of Samsung's big reveals at CES 2013 is its new 2D/3D lens, which can be paired with the new NX300 to capture true 3D photographs and video using a single lens and a single sensor. When you're feeling like switching back to 2D, a convenient switch on the side of the lens turns it into an ordinary camera lens.

Getting the perfect shot, from the perfect angle, with the perfect perspective, is an obsession of great photographers and videographers. This is because, although there may not be any one perfect angle from which to capture a moment, a few of them are leaps and bounds more impressive than the others.

In this video from NatGeo's "The Man Who Can Fly" -- a short piece on daredevil adventurer Dean Potter -- filmmaker Bryan Smith and shooter Michael Schaefer found one of those angles, and it only took them a mile away from their subject.