February 2013

Last week we reported that HTC is preparing to launch a new camera sensor technology called Ultrapixels, which aims to improve image quality using a Foveon-style stack of three sensor layers. The smartphone imaging war is heating up, after all, an rivals like Nokia are investing heavily in photography technologies of their own (e.g. PureView).

We're reportedly just days away from seeing the official launch of the new HTC phone (which may be named the M7 or the HTC One), and leaks are beginning to spring. There's a good chance we now have the first product shot of the phone and the first published shot captured with the phone.

Earlier today, we showed you a number of time-lapse videos of Winter Storm Nemo that were created by people who were stuck indoors due to the heavy snowfall. New York-based photographer Brian Maffitt was also stuck indoors and he also turned to photography, but instead of shooting time-lapse photos, he turned to a different technique: long-exposure light painting.

His technique is rather interesting: instead of a flashlight, Maffitt projected a movie onto the falling snow in order to light up the snowflakes.

People on the East Coast of the United States was battered this past week by heavy snowfall and hurricane-level winds thanks to Winter Storm Nemo. The multiple feet of snow recorded in many areas were among the highest totals recorded in history (one town in Connecticut saw 40 inches!). Although the storm kept many people indoors, many of them decided to point cameras out their windows, creating beautiful time-lapse videos that show how quickly the snow piled up.

The time-lapse above was created by YouTube user miges3111, who captured 22 hours of the storm from his home in Connecticut using a GoPro Hero.

Jack over at the astrophotography blog The Landingfield has published a series of photographs showing what a digital camera's CMOS sensor looks like when viewed through a microscope. The sensor (seen above) was taken from a broken Nikon D2H -- a DSLR from back in the early 2000s.

A new controversy is brewing in the world of stock photography. Just last month, it came to light that Getty had agreed to license 5000 of its stock photos to Google while paying the creators of the images a meager one-time fee of $12. Now, one of Getty's most successful stock photographers is claiming that his account is being terminated in the aftermath of the first hoopla.

For a recent Music Issue of ESPN Magazine, photographer Mattias Clamer created portraits of 14 famous athletes in the style of iconic album cover photos. Clamer paid a huge amount of attention to detail, which resulted in many of the photos looking nearly identical to the covers they were meant to recreate.

Improperly handling people's photos is a huge faux pas that can generate a lot of furor. If you need an example, look no further than Instagram's policy debacle. But Flickr recently messed up, and the company is trying to apologize and clean up its mess as quickly and quietly as possible before it gets in the way of what has become a pretty remarkable renaissance.

According to Barry Schwartz of Marketing Land, due to a software bug, his and many other users' photos that were set to private were actually publicly accessible for nearly a month.

Here's another curious photography-related novelty item for those of you looking to fill your house with them (i.e. those of you who purchased the lens shaped vacuum cleaner and lens-shaped humidifier that we featured recently): it's a lens shaped pepper mill.

We've seen photography of the Moon, and photography taken on the Moon; people have even left photography gear up there. But this is the first we've heard of a photo from Earth, not only making it to the Moon, but staying there.

Fortunately, it was left there on purpose (Can you imagine? "Uhhh ... John ... we need to turn around, I forgot something..."), and the story behind the picture goes something like this.

Photographers are usually trying to get closer to their subjects, be that in the wild or on the street. The photographers of MUMUȘ Photo Hub in Bucharest, Romania, however, decided to take a step back ... actually quite a few steps back.

Smartphones are being used more and more to capture daily life photography, but many of its loyal users are perpetually stuck at the point-and-shoot level of photographic know-how. If that describes you, and you'd like to add a little more technical understanding to your brain, Photojojo has a new service designed just for you. It's called Photojojo University, a new educational service that teaches you photography lessons through bite-sized tutorials and assignments delivered into your email inbox.

Mug shots and airbrushing are both photography-related, but they aren't commonly found together in stories. Not so with some ongoing controversy over in Greece, though. The police there may soon be under investigation after releasing a number of mug shots that appear to have been Photoshopped.

Why would they 'shop photos of suspected criminals, you ask? The claim is that the images were edited to hide injuries that were inflicted by officers during (or after) the arrests.

A recent study performed by Tim Davies and his team at the Imperial College's Department of Life Sciences discovered that underwater pics taken by tourists can actually help track the movements of individual whale sharks.

In June of last year, we gave you a quick "photo trivia o' the day" lesson on the history of presidential photography. We told you that John Quincy Adams sat for what is currently the oldest surviving photo of a US President, that James Polk sat for the oldest of a US President in office, and that President Obama was actually the first to have his official photo taken digitally. That first of those three facts, however, comes with an interesting story.

Memphis-based photographer Haley Morris-Cafiero has long been aware of strangers making fun of her behind her back due to her size. So aware, in fact, that she has turned the whole concept into a full-blown photography project. Titled Wait Watchers, the series consists of Morris-Cafiero's self-portraits in public in which strangers can be seen in the background giving her strange looks and/or laughing.

Approximately 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women suffer from some form of color blindness. Given those statistics, it might not be a bad idea for photographers to occasionally consider how their work is being viewed by those who can't see the entire spectrum. And right on cue, a new online simulator from Etre is here to help.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is a bit of a space celebrity. Some of his hobbies include tweeting back and forth with William Shatner, posting recordings from space on SoundCloud, and even beaming down the occasional video of himself playing the guitar.

It's safe to say that paparazzi aren't exactly adored in most photography circles. Given the comments we typically get on most paparazzi stories, you could say they're loathed. But that doesn't mean they don't fascinate us all the same.

So if you've ever wondered what's inside a paparazzo's photography bag (or bags), today's your lucky day. In this video, paparazzo Henry Flores took the time to show Photoinduced what you'll find in his.

Here's an interesting bit of photography/movie trivia that surfaced recently. Remember the infamous HAL 9000? HAL 9000 was the AI villain from Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey series, and the main bad guy in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

When tasked with making the music video for the song HAVOC by While You Slept, Frokost films decided to get a little creative. In addition to shooting the whole thing in slow motion, they managed to shoot the entire music video using just one 18-second continuous shot.

When we run into issues regarding photo usage, the photographer is typically involved in one way or another. A company may be trying to use their work without paying, or they might find derivative works of their photography in an art show.

But in this case, neither of the two people involved actually took the photo in question, they were in it. David Bowie is leaning on EMI UK to change the cover art on the re-release of Morrissey's 1989 single The Last of the Famous International Playboys, because it features a previously un-seen candid photo of the two musicians hanging out in New York.

Photographic history doesn't get much classier than this: above we have what may very well be the first ever photograph of someone giving the middle finger. In a team picture of the Boston Beaneaters, pitcher "Old Hoss" Charles Radbourn was caught flipping the New York Giants the bird in the top left hand corner of the photo.

The IMAGO1:1 is the largest life-size self-portrait camera in the world. Exposing beautiful black and white self-portraits on 2ft x 6.5ft silver gelatin photo paper, it's a photographic marvel that is currently housed and used in an art gallery in Berlin.

Susanna Kraus, daughter of IMAGO1:1 co-inventor Werner Kraus, now runs the camera, taking photos for clients and exhibitions alike. But her dream is to respond to the many requests she gets from all over the world by taking the IMAGO1:1 on the road -- for that, she needs your help.

Here's an interesting project by multi-media journalist Rebecca Davis that captures what you might witness while riding the New York City subway over the course of one year. It's a 'flip book' put together using Instagram photos of everything from the bored commuter to the intimate couple.

Paparazzi working in the state of Hawaii might have to pack their bags and move back to the mainland. That's because a new bill requested by Aerosmith lead and part-time Maui resident Steven Tyler may soon ban celebrity photography in the 50th state all-together.

Chrysler hit a home run this past Super Bowl with its photographic "God Made a Farmer" commercial... so let the spoofs begin. Photo backup service Mosaic create the parody above titled "God Made a Photographer."

24-year-old photographer Sébastian Dahl is quite the adventurer. Back on September 15th, 2012, Dahl left his home in Oslo, Norway and began a hitchhiking journey that ended nearly three months later and thousands of miles away in Beirut, Lebanon. He snapped photographs along the way, creating a beautiful travel photography diary documenting the trip.

Want to win the most prestigious press photo contest in the world this year? It's okay if you don't shoot with the latest camera gear -- just make sure your work stands out from things that have come before.

Last August, we wrote about how renowned photojournalist David Burnett was spotted using a large format camera at the London Olympics. If you've been wondering how the photographs turned out, today's your lucky day.

Here's an inside look at how Burnett's project came to be, and the beautiful images that resulted.

The space agencies that run the Hubble Space Telescope may have some of the most powerful photographic equipment at their disposal, but every now and then they can still use a little help from amateur astrophotographers.

Amateur astrophotographer Robert Gendler created the beautiful photograph above showing the spiral galaxy M106 by compositing existing imagery captured by the Hubble telescope with his own photos captured from Earth.

One of the big emerging ideas in the camera world is the idea of wearable cameras that automatically capture your memories for you. Memoto is the wearable camera project that caused the biggest splash in 2012, but a month before it was announced, there was another camera that made a quieter entrance. It was the Autographer, a camera shaped like a pack of gum that uses a number of different sensors to intelligently snap photos during interesting moments in your life.

To demonstrate its potential for documenting life's memories, the company asked renowned photographer Rankin to document a photo shoot using its prototype cameras.

What do you get when you combine a Lomography Diana F+ camera with a remote controlled Tricopter? Answer: the Lomo-Copter!

It's what the clever folks over at FliteTest recently built, giving them a unique way to capture lo-fi analog aerial photos.

Cameratico is a new "humanized camera recommendation engine" that's being developed by Brasília, Brazil-based photographer and programmer Fábio Pili. Sick of camera comparison websites that only dealt with specifications, Pili decided to create one that takes into account real world usage experiences.

Want a perfect example of the Streisand effect in action? Look no further than what happened this week involving Beyonce's publicist, some unflattering Super Bowl performance photos, and a single email requesting that photos be taken offline.

Here's a series of clever pictures by Stockholm-based photographer Christian Åslund, who turned the ground of various city locations into a backdrop by having his models lie on their sides. By taking advantage of patterns, structures, and objects, the subjects look as though they're strolling on platforms, hanging from ledges, and resting on walls.

We've shared photographs of neatly arranged camera gear before, but they've generally been cameras disassembled into its individual components. Photographer Jim Golden took the whole "neatly arranged" concept to a whole new level recently: he shot the photograph above after arranging more than 190 cameras, lenses, and accessories in his studio.

One of the big stories in the business world today was that Nikon's stock took a historic fall of nearly 19%. The company is weighted so heavily in the Nikkei Stock Average that the news had a rippling effect across the market, causing most Asian shares to drop.

Look what we have here -- it's the first leaked photograph of the upcoming Sony NEX-3N mirrorless camera. The leaked photo, first published by sonyalpharumors, shows a camera that may be arriving sometime over the next couple of months alongside an (also rumored) Playstation 4.

The camera will reportedly feature the same 16-megapixel sensor as the current Sony NEX-F3, but with one major difference: an electronic zoom dial.

For his project Transform, Hungarian photographer Bence Bakonyi scouted out colorful locations around his city and found clothing that matched each of the main colors in the scene. By dressing up models and having them stand in just the right location, Bakonyi was able to create photographs that look as though his subjects are blended into the background.

Sometimes it’s easy for photographers to take for granted our skill set. It becomes natural to forget, from time to time, all of the elements rattling around in the synapses of our visual cortexes in the few tenths of a second it takes to put in motion the mechanics that make a picture. Like any professional of a trade, eventually you get to that point where you can begin to make it ‘look easy’, like anyone can do this. And with digital cameras and software readily available everyone sure is trying. The major problem comes when they start charging for their self-perceived craft and simply can’t perform... or don’t care to for that matter.

This is how I ended up photographing my own wedding.

If you're constantly on the prowl for new sources of photographic inspiration, there's a pretty sweet deal going on over at National Geographic. The magazine has long been praised for its focus on delivering high quality photography showing all kinds of subjects in all kinds of locations around the world, and now it's offering its complete collection of issues between 1888 and 2011 for just $25. The set of 7 DVDs normally costs $80, so it's a savings of almost 70%.

Drive across the west end of the Burnside Bridge in Portland, Oregon, and you're bound to see the iconic Portland, Oregon sign, commonly known as the "White Stag sign." It's an oft-photographed sign that was named a historic landmark back in 1977.

If you were planning on featuring it in a photo shoot, however, you'll now want to bring your checkbook in addition to your camera -- the city of Portland is now charging fees for anyone who would like to use images of the sign commercially.

If you think about it, any digital photograph is simply a finite collection of pixels, with each one showing a specific color. There are also only a finite number of colors each pixel on a display can be. Thus, there are only a finite number of photographs that could possibly exist. An unfathomably large number, but finite nonetheless.

That's the basic idea behind artist Jeffrey Thompson's Every Possible Photograph project. Thompson has created an installation that, given enough time, will generate every possible photograph by stepping through every possible combination of pixels.

Mobile photo sharing has become one of the big photography trends over the past couple of years, and smartphone makers are now working hard to win the affections of smartphoneographer by developing better cameras and sleeker features. Two of the big players in the game, HTC and Nokia, are both generating some buzz this week through reports that they have some big photo-related plans in store for their upcoming phones.

The two (proprietary) technologies that are making headlines are: HTC's "Ultrapixels" and Nokia's "PureView."

As we wrote this past Monday, Chrysler scored a major advertising win during the Super Bowl with the commercial above, titled "Farmer." It's a simple photo slideshow with Paul Harvey's "So God Made a Farmer" speech playing in the background.

Despite its simplicity, it has become one of the most talked about ads over the past week, and now new details are emerging regarding its creation.

Director Cesar Kuriyama received a good bit of attention on the Internet last year for capturing 1 second of video on each day of his 30th year of life, and then turning the snippets into a beautiful recap of his year. The video premiered during a TED talk Kuriyama gave in March. That talk has just been published by TED, and can be seen above.

Alexander Semenov is an underwater photographer who doubles as a zoologist specializing in invertebrate animals. He recently decided to use macro photography to explore something you've probably never seen before in photographs: the rough surfaces of different species of starfish.

Behold, the coolest photography-related toy we've seen so far this year: War Journalist: Battlefield Hero. It's a 1/6-scale Toymaster-brand action figure that lets kids play make believe with their very own conflict photographer!

Back on September 17, 2012, Leica held a launch party in Germany to unveil its new Leica M full-frame digital rangefinder, which does away with model numbers in favor of simply using the model name. People are referring to the camera as Leica M (Type 240).

Glimpses of the camera's performance have been hard to come by so far (we did see some high ISO samples back in November 2012), but now Leica has officially released seven full-resolution sample photographs showing the camera's image quality.

Astronaut photographers on the International Space Station have been beaming quite a few photographs of Earth as of late, but have you ever wondered how they manage capture relatively sharp photographs of Earth's cities at night?

The speed at which the ISS hurtles around our planet is indeed a major challenge for low-light photography, and astronauts in the past have tried to overcome it by using high-speed film or by doing some manual tracking (which is very hit-and-miss). Luckily, space shooters nowadays have a new special tool up their sleeve: the NightPod.