January 2013

Nikon has released some pretty interesting patents in the past. As recently as October of this last year we saw a patent for a camera attachment that blows air into the tripod mount to keep your sensor cool. Just days before that another patent showed that the company might be building features specific to "camera toss" photography into its compact and mirrorless cameras.

Nikon's most recent patent isn't quite as out there, but still unique as far as we can tell -- it's a dual lens hood.

Here's a creative project by visual artist Andrew Knapp and his puppy (all dogs are puppies... no matter how old) Momo. Remember those 'Where's Waldo' books that used to keep you unendingly entertained and frustrated in the waiting room of your local doctors office as a kid?

Getting noticed for quality landscape and wildlife photography is difficult enough, but try doing it on an iPhone. That's what photographer Kevin Russ has been doing, traveling the great American West and capturing stunning photos using nothing more than an iPhone 4S and 5.

Jessosps, one of the last of the UK's national photography retailers, may be entering into administration by the end of the day, according to recent reports. The major retailer managed to narrowly avoid administration in 2009 after an unpopular deal with HSBC, in which the bank "forgave" some 34M pounds of debt in exchange for a near %50 stake in the company.

In May of last year another ray of hope appeared in the form of a potential $16M investment by Canon, but no such deal ever came to official fruition, although some sources report that an investment was made. Now, Jessops seems to be out of options, and administration may be just around the corner, with rumors pointing towards PricewaterhouseCoopers as the potential administrator.

For those of you who can't stand what paparazzi photographers do with their cameras, know this: it's not just the professional celebrity photographers who do such things. When a celebrity is spotted in public, ordinary people all around pull out their cameras and do exactly the same thing.

The video above shows what happened recently when Tom Cruise and his daughter Suri tried to watch a show at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Florida.

The Library of Congress has an extensive collection of daguerreotype photographs captured over the past two centuries. In addition to browsing the technically perfect ones that document history and people, it's also interesting to look at metal plates that are flawed.

Here's a quick demonstration of what Fujifilm's new focus peaking looks like on the freshly-announced X100s and the X20. When manually focusing the lens, the feature uses white pixel highlights to indicate the high contrast areas of the scene. This is one of two new features -- the other being split image focusing -- designed to make manual focusing a much nicer experience on X-Series cameras.

There's a few ways to handle a problem, one of the more popular of which is to eliminate the source entirely. That's what Facebook has decided to do about the little AppData hiccup last week that cost the company nearly 2% in the stock market. They simply pulled user count data out of Instagram's Developer API entirely -- problem solved.

Toshiba is really getting invested in the world of cameras. First, they draw some attention by jumping into the CompactFlash game, claiming that theirs are the fastest CF Cards, and setting a goal to capture 1/3 of that market by 2015. Now, according to Chipworks, it looks like Toshiba has managed to get their APS-C sensor inside Nikon's D5200.

The war between brick and mortar stores and online retailers ended a long time ago -- online retailers won. "Showrooming" was born and the B&M store became no more than a place to try before you went home to buy online. Worst case scenario you needed something right away that you would then return once your online order arrived. It's not pretty, but that's the reality of it.

This last holiday season, in an attempt to win back some traction in the fight, Best Buy offered to match online pricing on any item. This offered a great "have your cake and eat it too" scenario for consumers; but now the holiday season is over and people are back to shopping online. Well, Target is looking to change that, and not just during the holidays.

Some people use dream journals to record and remember their imaginary nighttime escapades. Israel-based photographer Ronen Goldman uses photographs. Whenever he has a strange dream that he'd like to document, he goes out and recreates that dream as a surreal photograph. The project is titled "Surrealistic Pillow".

Back in July, Lexar vice president of products and technology Wes Brewer confirmed that the company was going to jump into the XQD game in Q3. This was good news for the technology, since only one camera was taking them and one company was making them at the time.

Well, the Nikon D4 is still the only DSLR capable of using the cards at the moment, but now Lexar (a couple of quarters late, but here nonetheless) has officially made the leap with its new 1100x pro series cards.

We've shared some awesome photographic finds before -- from the surprising to the downright amazing. On the surprising end you have things like the memory card with wedding photos still intact found a year and a half after an earthquake. On the amazing side you have the Kansas teen who bought a Polaroid camera at a garage sale and found a photo of his long-passed uncle inside.

This story falls somewhere in between. On the glass plates inside of a Jumelle Belllieni stereoscopic camera that photographer Anton Orlov bought at an antique store, he found some old negatives. And we mean old... like WWI France old.

For a fleeting, wonderful moment, it seemed that all of our Instagram popularity dreams were coming true. Released two days ago, the app Firegram used some automatic magic to get your photos way more attention than they would ever have gotten on their own. When Roi Carthy of TechCrunch tried it out on one of his photos he got a whopping 56 likes (%1500 increase) in no time.

Alas, if it seems too good to be true, that's because it wasn't meant to last. As of now the app has been "discovered" by Instagram and denied access to its API -- no likes for you.

After a substantial leak in mid-December, we expected that Polaroid would unveil its android-powered J2 (or is it J3 now?) look-alike at CES. And here it is, officially announced in all its pre-production glory alongside a few other, less-impressive products.

For his project "Trace Heavens," James Nizam found an abandoned property in Delta, Canada, and, with the government's permission, sliced gaps and holes into a couple of the rooms. He then allowed sunlight to stream into the space in the middle of the day, and then used small mirrors attached to ball joints in order to direct the light beam around the room in various patterns.

A couple of weeks ago we reported on rumors that Nikon was going to be announcing two new mirrorless cameras at CES -- the S1 and the J3. Now that CES has finally started it looks like the rumors were true, both cameras have indeed come to fruition with each sporting the specs we expected.

Fujifilm held its CES 2013 press conference yesterday, revealing some facts about the state of its camera business, sharing its vision moving forward, and offering a closer look at its two new fixed-lens cameras: the X100s and the X20.

If you have your 35mm film processed and printed at your local lab, have you ever wondered how it's done? In this post, I'll take you on a behind-the-scenes tour on the entire process.

When doing trainspotting photography, it pays to be extra alert and aware of your surroundings. The video above, captured at the Thurston, Suffolk train station, shows how one camera-wielding trainspotter almost learned (or didn't learn) that lesson the hard way.

More and more camera companies are giving their products vintage camera-inspired designs these days, and Pentax wants to join in on the fun. The company announced its own retro-styled camera earlier today called the MX-1.

It's a fixed lens compact camera that features a sleek metal body, a fast lens, and a 12-megapixel sensor.

National Geographic has announced the winners of its 2012 Photo Contest, which received over 22,000 entries from photographers around the world. The photograph above, captured by Ashley Vincent and titled "The Explosion!," was chosen as the Grand Prize winner and the top image in the "Nature" category.

We were just able to get some hands-on time with the new Fujifilm X100s immediately after the company's press conference. In addition to blazin' fast autofocus speed, the company has also introduced a couple of new features that manual-focusing photographers will love.

One is something many photographers are already familiar with (and have been clamoring for): focus peaking. The second hasn't been received with as much fanfare, but is actually quite fantastic. It's split image focusing -- something rangefinder users will appreciate very much.

Earlier today, pictures and specs for Sigma's soon-to-be-announced DP3 Merrill leaked in an article that has since gone missing on the Spanish camera site DSLR Magazine. Of course that wasn't before all of the info contained in that article was copied and pasted on several rumor sites, bless them.

Pentax newest goal is, and we quote, "Heightening Individualized Photographic Expression." So if that just happens to be one of your New Years resolutions, and you also happen to be in the market for the "world’s smallest and lightest interchangeable lens camera system," you're in luck -- you can now pick from 100 different color combinations for the Pentax Q10.

We've known for a while that Kodak is jumping out of the digital camera game, focusing its attention on printing and, thus, ending an era. But, as it turns out, we haven't seen the last of the Kodak digital camera -- it just won't be made by Kodak anymore.

As smartphones have risen to compact supremacy, slowly killing the point-and-shoot market as a result, every company has tried one thing or another to somehow save the compact. Now, it's Canon's turn. But instead of adding a gimmicky feature, or doing away with compacts all-together in favor of mirrorless systems, the company has decided to re-invent the wheel... okay, the point-and-shoot.

The result is the new PowerShot N, a compact camera that has no top, bottom, left or right -- it's an incredibly thin square with a center-mounted lens and articulating screen you can use however you see fit.

Want to know how much film you and your camera are chewing through? John Sypal over at …

Here's some potentially huge news from the photo-editing software industry today: Adobe may be giving away its older Creatie Suite 2 for free. This includes Photoshop CS2.

Every so often, we come across a creative video created by someone who decided to mount his or her …

Here's a gallery of 83 of the best photographs captured by Pete Souza, the official White House photographer for President Obama. You can view thumbnails of the entire set here.

Photographer Maciej Pietuszynski has posted a (hopefully tongue-in-cheek) …

There's no end to the fun and creativity you can pour into a great light painting session. And the more techniques you have in your photographer's utility belt the more interesting and professional your light painting can become.

In recent weeks we've shown you how to add 3D objects to your light painting, how to create light-painting rain, and how combining bullet time photography and light painting can yield some pretty awesome results. Now it's time to put the old saying to rest and create smoke -- without a fire.

Tyler Shields has led a very successful career -- both as a photographer and previously as a skater -- and in his talk at Luminance 2012 he spent some time explaining how he differentiates himself in an increasingly photographed world.

Specifically, he spends time explaining that there is photography that gets you "eyeballs" (viewers and attention for your work) and photography that gets you paid. (Warning: The video includes some strong language and a few potentially offensive PG-13 photos.)

There has been no shortage of leaks, pictures and rumors surrounding Fujifilm's followups to both its X10 and X100 models, but things just got official.

Only two days before the company gets to show off its new stock to the world at CES 2013 (and with little in way of mirrorless competition from Olympus, Sony and Panasonic, apparently) Fujifilm has officially unveiled the X20 and X100s.

Leica made its name a very long time ago by creating the first practical 35mm camera to use standard cinema 35mm film. The rest, as they say, is history. A history filled with successes and failures alike, most of the latter coming in the early 2000s when the company was having trouble moving into the digital age.

In 2013, Leica has a couple of things to celebrate. For one, its no longer in financial trouble; and for another, the company is turning 100 this year. In light of that momentous birthday, here are a couple of short videos (the first one is above) by Deutsche Welle that take a look at Leica's past, present and future.

Photographer John Deprisco of Deprisco Photo has put together two fairly unrelated things and, as a result, created something pretty cool. By combining his love of old, run-down VW buses and the tradition photo booth, he's created the Photo Bus, a rentable photo booth on wheels -- available for whatever soiree you're planning to host next.

When you mention the words "vacation photos," most people might think of trips to the mountains or to the beach. Not Toshifumi Fujimoto. The 45-year-old Japanese trucker is passionate about "war tourism" -- he actually takes on the role of a conflict photographer when on vacation. In recent days, he has been shooting on the front lines of the Syrian civil war, putting his life on the line for images that he keeps as a personal collection rather than sells for reportage purposes.

A week before Christmas last month, Leica launched a contest to spread some holiday cheer. Instead of asking its fans to make photographs, however, the company asked them to bake cookies and cakes.

For her Twins Project, French photographer Julie de Waroquier spent the summer of 2011 shooting surreal, symmetrical, and square portraits of identical twins.