January 2013

Earlier today, we shared a couple of leaked photographs of the soon-to-arrive Fujifilm X20, which replaces the X10 but looks virtually identical in appearance (except for the fact that it comes in silver in addition to black).

Not to be outdone, the X100s has gotten itself leaked as well. Photos and specs for that camera have emerged, and reveal that, like the X20, the camera is nearly identical in form to its predecessor.

Photographer Wendi Riggens has been receiving a good deal of attention in social media channels for her recent photo shoot of a 9-month-old girl, Miss Maddie. It was a fairy tale-themed shoot, with Maddie wearing the outfits of characters from famous Disney movies, including Cinderella, Alice, Wendy, and Snow White. The series is titled, "Once Upon a Time."

We can no longer ignore smartphones as legitimate photography gear. As smartphone cameras have gotten better we've seen everything from hipstamatic war photography to iPhone fashion shoots, and here comes yet another first.

Over the last year, almost every time we've heard the word "acquisition" it's been preceded by the word, or rather company, Shutterfly. That's because Shutterfly has been very busy buying up companies and galleries and, fortunately for users, putting them to work in real ways.

It was less than two weeks ago that the new Shutterfly Mobile app was announced, a result of its Penguin Digital acquisition. And now, in time to steal a little bit of thunder from all of the CES rumors, sources claim that the photo storage and sharing site is acquiring yet another start-up.

Reviews of the new entry-level full-frame Canon 6D DSLR are starting to make their ways onto the Web. While …

Yesterday we wrote that multiple sources were confirming that Fujifilm will be launching an X10 successor called the X20 at CES 2013 next week. Now, less than 24 hours later, we now know what it looks like.

We've been seeing more and more of this concept lately, but this one is still nicely done: Springfield, Missouri-based photographer Kent Frost created this 6.5-minute recap of his life in 2012 using one second of footage recorded each day. It's titled, "Just a Second."

For his project "Un printemps à New York," photographer Fred Lebain visited and photographed various locations around New York City. He then printed the images as poster-sized prints, revisited those locations, and shot new photographs with the old prints blended into the new scenes.

If you're looking for a fun and cheap gag gift that's somewhat photography related, check out Paper-Kit. It's a simple, and easy-to-use web app that lets you turn your portrait photos (probably better described as mug shots) into nifty 3D heads that you print, cut, and assemble yourself.

If you ever find yourself wondering what it's like to be hunted by a hungry polar bear, just ask filmmaker Gordon Buchanan. While shooting wildlife imagery in Svalbard, Norway for a BBC series titled The Polar Bear Family and Me, Buchanan was approached by a giant 1,000lb, 8-foot-tall polar bear. Luckily for Buchanan, he was in a tiny Plexiglas enclosure. Luckily for the BBC, Buchanan was able to capture the 45-minute ordeal on film.

One of my favorite recent projects was a deceptively simple image of an ant on black. Black is easy enough to arrange for the upper portions of a photo. Just make sure foreground lighting is powerful enough to overwhelm the ambient light. Black all around is a challenge, however.

CES 2013 is just around the corner, and along with it about a gagillion (official number) announcements, but the first major announcement comes 5 days early courtesy of Samsung. The South Korean tech company has officially announced the NX300 -- a 3D capable successor to the NX210 -- alongside a 3D lens that Samsung is calling the "world's first one-lens 3D system."

The New York Times has published a recently-discovered interview photographer …

Photojournalist John D. McHugh was sick of having his photos stolen and infringed upon the moment he posted them online. And even though he can, of course, put watermarks on his photos in Photoshop, he found himself wondering if maybe he couldn't come up with a better way. Enter Marksta, an app that allows you to watermark photos right on your iPhone before posting them to Facebook, Instagram, and other places where they may be easily stolen.

Photographer and master Photoshopper Agan Harahap has an interesting new project called Garden Fresh. Each of the 'shopped photographs shows wild creatures exploring the inside of a grocery store.

Tommy Edison is an incredible person. Born blind, he has managed to lead a successful, fulfilling life as a film critic, receiving national attention for his spot on reviews of movies like "Water for Elephants." But in addition to successfully reviewing a genre most would consider to be in the domain of the sighted, Mr. Edison is also a prolific Instagram user.

Rumors are heating up regarding Fujifilm's camera announcements at CES 2013 next week. Mirrorless Rumors writes that while Olympus, Panasonic, and Sony won't have anything major to show in the way of mirrorless cameras, Fujifilm has a number of unveilings that will have some photographers salivating.

Motion image photography is a new name for an old concept: pulling stills from video. In fact, famed headshot photographer Peter Hurley took a stab at it last year, pinning the 5K Red Epic against his Hasselblad to see if he could recreate his work in video. The issue there, even ignoring price, was that the sheer size of the Red Epic makes it far too bulky for anything but studio work.

Judy L. Thomas over at the Wichita Eagle has a piece on why some photographers should spend a little extra time and money to register photos with the US Copyright Office, even though photographers own the copyright to photos the moment they're created.

If you'd like to receive a regular injection of photographic inspiration, you should consider following along with photographer Brock Davis' Instagram feed. The Minneapolis, Minnesota-based artist regularly shoots conceptual photos with his iPhone that have the same creative touch as photographs Davis shoots for major commissions.

Canon Singapore has published a first photograph of the long-awaited Canon …

For their Chicago-based rent-a-photobooth business Fotio, event planners Nick Harvey and Theresa McMullen created a custom camera rig that looks like a vintage view camera. The ingredients -- besides the wooden shell and bellows -- included a DSLR and an iMac.

The photograph above is reportedly the world's largest piece of long-exposure light art. It was created by light painter Michael Bosanko in a 35,000-square-foot aircraft hangar in Coventry airport in October 2012.

A week ago we shared some reports that Toshiba was developing a re-focusable smartphone camera, but it looks like its sights are set on bigger fish than just Lytro's market. While the photo world was focusing on the tiny re-focusing camera, Toshiba officially announced a new line of high performance CF cards that should blow the competition away and, the company hopes, secure one third of the CF market by 2015.

The new cards -- dubbed the Exceria Pro series -- are set to launch in Spring of this year and bring with them read and write speeds very near the theoretical 167MB/second max provided by the CF's UDMA 7 interface.

If you ever have enough patience and dedication to capture one photograph of something each day for an entire …

Several mugshot websites -- including Just Mugshots, Busted! Mugshots, Mugshots Online, and MugRemove -- are ringing in the new year with a massive class action law suit. According to NPR, hundreds of people who have been exonerated of all charges and had their records sealed are suing the websites for not only keeping their mugshots up and using them in banner ads, but refusing to take them down and "scrub" them off the Internet unless the victims pay a hefty fee.

Here’s a dash of creativity to get your brain juices going today: Melbourne, Australia-based aspiring filmmaker …

Given the digital age, you'd think that companies would shy away from brick-and-mortar stores. But the lo-fi movement has been good to the instant photography giant, and so in addition to releasing a mirrorless camera later this year, Polaroid has decided to open up a chain of retail stores called "Fotobars." The hope is that people will come to these stores and print the photos that have been lost somewhere in the zeros and ones of their digital devices.

Photographer Bryce Hoeper wants to become the Dr. Frankenstein of the camera world. Back in 2011, his experiments with mounting a 102-year-old lens to a Canon DSLR were widely shared across the Web. About a month ago, he created another cam-monster that combines old and new: he combined an old Speed Graphic 4x5 large format camera with a modern Fujifilm X-Pro1 mirrorless camera.

Back in July, after witnessing what essentially amounted to a high-speed car chase down the 101 between paparazzi and Justin Bieber, city councilman Dennis Zine predicted that these practices were "a tragedy waiting to happen." In an attempt to prevent similar incidents in the future, one of the photogs involved was even taken to court, charged under a new anti-paparazzi law.

Engadget and gdgt founder Ryan Block has published an op-ed over at The …

If you've never shot with an old manual focus film SLR, you've probably never experienced the joys (and pains) of focusing with a split screen and microprism ring. YouTube user ttcalan created this short video that demonstrates how the system looks and works. He writes,

Just a demonstration of how manual focus works on a Minolta X-700. It's shot through the viewfinder and shows how the split prism and microprism ring help the photographer focus. I also show how stopping down the lens causes the split prism to go dark.

The term "bokeh" is often used in the world of photography to describe the quality of the out-of-focus blur in photographs. Do you know how it's pronounced?

In the latest issue of Japanese magazine Impress, there's a two-page section that predicts the new DSLRs that Canon and Nikon will be unleashing in this upcoming year. Alongside each model name, design illustration, and spec list is a percentage that indicates the likelihood of the rumor coming true.

Happy New Year to all our of our awesome readers! As we move into this new year of photo blogging, we'll take a moment to look back at how this blog has grown over the past year.

Here's an interesting idea to try: if you ever find yourself shooting fireworks and it starts to lightly drizzle, keep on shooting instead of putting your camera away. The tiny drops of rain that fall on your lens can add some bokeh to your shot!

Hanging a camera from a weather balloon and using it to snap photographs from the edges of space has become quite a popular project for space and photography enthusiasts as of late. If you want to try your hand at it, but don't have the time, energy, creativity, or resources to create the space vessel yourself, NYC-based industrial design company Quirky is working on a product just for you.

For a New Year's greeting ecard this year, Paris-based photographer Noël Bourcier decided to put his camera equipment to good use, but not in the way you'd expect. He gathered up some of the camera equipment at the EFET School's photography program, recruited a couple of photography students, and turned the equipment into the simple stop-motion ecard seen above.

Photographer and photography student Eric Omori has an interesting project that combines the modern with the historical. He has been capturing paintball wars using wet plate photography. The project is titled Weekend Warriors.

When consumer electronic products have photographs leaked to the world prior to their official announcements, they're often blurry shots that appear to have been taken with a quick snap of a smartphone camera by some not-so-loyal employee or factory worker. Blackberry maker RIM wants to help companies who value privacy plug up these leaks, and has created a smartphone feature that is meant to make snapping stealthy shots a much more difficult thing to do.