This post could also be titled "How Not to Photograph Endangered Male Animals." The video above was uploaded to the Web by the BBC back in 2009 and shows photographer and zoologist Mark Carwardine finding and photographing a rare parrot in a New Zealand forest. Unfortunately for Carwardine -- and hilariously for the rest of us -- he gets closer to the bird than he was planning to.
Photographer Bertrand Kulik was standing at his window in Paris last week when he noticed something peculiar about the horizon. Although his view is ordinarily quite beautiful because of the Eiffel Tower dominating the cityscape, this time it had something he was treated with a bright and colorful horizon rainbow painted across the sky in the distance.
Did you know Instagram's mobile app can be used to view movies? Okay, okay, you won't be able to watch the latest Hollywood blockbuster on it, but it's possible to enjoy glimpses of old school silent films.
The clever idea was discovered Canadian advertising agency Cossette to promote the upcoming Toronto Silent Film Festival, and involves using the app's slideshow view to zip through still photos as if they were images in a flipbook.
Sunday morning: time to survey the damage from last night's party. As I walked around the apartment picking up empty beer bottles and cups, wiping up spills, and putting the furniture back, I remember having a distinct feeling that something was amiss. A quick survey of the apartment, and it hits me. My DSLR was missing.
Even as I frantically searched every nook and cranny of the apartment I knew the answer: someone had stolen my camera.
Back in 2010, we shared how artist Luke Jerram had created a wedding ring that can project tiny slide photographs when placed in front of a light source. After seeing that idea, Cambridge-based engineer John Ding decided that he wanted to make something similar for his sweetheart, Becky.
Ding spent the next two years designing a silver pendant that can project a photograph. He ended up creating what he calls the "Projecting Pendant."
Photographer Jesse David McGrady has a super simple trick for adding a hazy, ethereal effect to your photographs: wrap a plastic sandwich bag around your lens. It sounds ridiculous and silly, but the results you get are actually quite nice!
In this post, I will share some of my techniques and experiences of backing up photos using a tablet while traveling.
Like most other landscape/nature/travel photographers, when I am on a multi-day or multi-week photo tour, I face the problem of backing up my photos from the memory cards. A laptop computer is a nature choice for most people. With a laptop, we can copy files between the memory cards, laptop disk drive, and external disks. We can even do some light editing.
Russian photographer Vitaliy Raskalov recently visited the Great Pyramid of Giza with two of his adventuring photography buddies: Vadim Mahorov and Marat Dupri. Unlike most camera-toting tourists visiting the famous site (the pyramid is the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), the trio was not content with sticking to visitor-approved areas: they decided to risk prison time by sneaking to the top of the pyramid and photographing that rarely-seen view.
Here's a tutorial on how to capture an exploding water balloon in the precise moment the balloon pops, while the water still holds the shape of a balloon. I didn’t want to invest any money in laser barriers or something similar, so I built a very simple mechanism. It doesn't give me perfect timing, but it produces acceptable results.
By all accounts, a job at one of the major tech or social giants is to be envied. With atmospheres focused on camaraderie and innovation, you would expect that working for Google or Twitter would be pretty fun -- and now Twitter has the office cam to prove it.
Put together by Mo Kudeki (an International Engineer at Twitter) as part of one of the company's quarterly hackweeks, the camera is set up in an oversized bird house at Twitter's new San Francisco office where it takes pictures of willing visitors and employees.
I'm Google is an interesting Tumblr blog started in 2011 by Baltimore-based artist Dina Kelberman. It's a running blog collage comprising Google Image Search photographs and YouTube videos. Kelberman writes that the content is compiled into a "long stream-of-consciousness": as you scroll down through the seemingly-never-ending flow of imagery, you'll notice that the sections of similar images flow seamlessly from one to another based on form, composition, color, and theme.
This camera is a poor man's large format camera. It is made with a simple shoebox acting as a dark room.
French photographer Julien Mauve has always been fascinated by light, and his project "After Lights Out" is an interesting study of the subject. The series is based on a simple idea: what would it look like if darkness overtook our world, and only a single source of light were present to pierce the darkness?
Each of the scenes seen in Mauve's photos are completely devoid of artificial light except from a single source, through a single window.
Retro filters are still doing their steady march toward becoming ubiquitous across camera and photo-sharing mobile apps. Today, Google announced a new update to its iPhone and Android Google+ apps that adds these filters for people who want to make their photographs look "retro."
In 2007, Lindsay Scallan of Newnan, Georgia took her camera -- complete with underwater housing -- on a trip to Hawaii. It was on that trip, during a nighttime scuba dive in Kaanapali, that Scallan lost her camera to the deep blue. Understandably, she didn't expect she would ever see it again.
But as we've seen in the past, the rule is "never say never" when it comes to finding long-lost photographs. Six years later, the Canon Powershot washed up 6,200 miles away on the beaches of Taiwan where a China Airlines employee picked it up, and began searching for the owner.
Dear Getty Images: I quit.
I just sent Getty Images the email above, which, I think, is how I terminate my relationship with them. Hopefully. I’m not 100% sure, but I can’t seem to figure out any way to do it online, so I’m hoping that email works.
One half of the face above is a photograph, and the other half is a highly detailed computer generated rendering created using a program called KeyShot by Luxion. Can you tell which is which? If you can't tell, why should we? (Okay, to be honest, we're not sure either).
Joseph Flaherty over at Wired writes that KeyShot and other programs that can generate photorealistic renders are being widely used for product photos these days, and are quickly killing off jobs that were once held by photographers.
About a month ago, the fact that Australian customers pay so much more for Adobe CS6 that it's actually cheaper to fly to the US and get it went viral on the internet. At that point, Adobe had already been summoned in front of Parliament to explain the "price gouging," and had even dropped their monthly Creative Cloud subscriptions to reasonable rates in response.
Now, Adobe -- alongside Apple and Microsoft -- have finally been forced to keep that appointment. And during the meeting, each of the three companies gave the Australian Parliamentary Committee a few reasons as to why exactly Australian customers have to pay so much more for some of their products.
With the cost of my local neg scanner in London being £40/hour for a Hasselblad Flextight, I have been digitising using a DSLR for a quite a while. The results can be extremely good as long as a little time is put into the setup to begin with.
Hunger Pains is a very... different series of portraits by NYC-based photographer Ted Sabarese. For each of the photographs, Sabarese asked his model one simple question: "What are you craving at the moment?" He then took the food described, had them turned into clothing items, and photographed the models wearing the things they'd like to eat.
When Google acquired Nik Software back in September, the photographic community took it as a sign that the internet giant was focusing more intently on our passion. But last week, when Google announced it would be pulling support for the desktop version of Nik's popular mobile editor Snapseed, the same people wondered if this spelled the end of the rest of Nik's well-respected suite of plugins.
Fortunately, the opposite is the case. Google may have pulled their support for the desktop version of Snapseed, but the remaining offerings from Nik are not only still available, they will be sold in a record-low-priced bundle.
Photographer Váncsa Domokos created a neat do-it-yourself camera accessory that uses optical fibers to control the direction and intensity of a flash unit's light. Instead of having light come directly out of the flash unit, the accessory redirects it through a thick bundle of optical fibers, allowing you to point the light in any direction -- and in different directions if you'd like.
The hearts of many a film photographer sank last June when it was reported that Fujifilm would soon be killing off most of its Velvia film lines, including all off the sheet film lines, leaving only 35mm and 120 format films for Velvia 50. If you're one of the people who went out and began stockpiling the film for future use, here's some good (and perhaps bad?) news for you: reports of Velvia's death were greatly exaggerated.
For his most recent project, French photography collector and editor Thomas Sauvin has been spending his time digging though illegal silver recycling centers in Beijing. He's doing this because buried within piles of X-Rays and CD-ROMs are hidden millions of discarded film negatives that Sauvin is intent on preserving.
"Skywalking" is a photo fad that gained quite a bit of publicity last year, and many of the crazy images were created by thrill-seekers in and around Russia.
A Ukranian daredevil who goes by Mustang Wanted is taking the concept one step further: rather than simply climbing to high locations and photographing his feet on the edge, the 26-year-old man poses for portraits while hanging off edges by his arms and by his legs. The concept could be described as, "skyhanging."
On March 16th, a massive solar flare at sunspot AR1692 -- a spot roughly the size of our quaint little planet -- sent a huge burst of solar wind headed our way. On March 17th, when it came into contact with the Earth's magnetic field, several hours of breathtaking aurora borealis resulted.
Seeing as the Voyager-1 spacecraft has been in the news recently, here's the story of a very special photograph that it took 23 years ago known as "The Pale Blue Dot".
In 1990, 13 years after Voyager-1 left Earth on its mission to visit two of the gas giants and their moons of our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, one last command was sent to the spacecraft as suggested by Carl Sagan who was then part of the Voyager-1's imaging team. That instruction was to turn back around and take one last photo of our solar system before continuing on its epic journey away from the Sun and the planets.
Faced with another birthday party at Chuck E Cheese, a place my daughter loves but low ISOs do not, I decided to get creative. I shot a collection of photos with a set of three Yongnuo YN-560 and YN-560 II flashes with a diffuser cap/"omni bounce" inside of small lampshades placed along the table.
One of the most entertaining events that photographers get to enjoy each year is the annual Gulf Photo Plus shootout, in which 3 photographers each get 20 minutes to take a photo from concept to completion. In 2012, the shootout pinned David Hobby, Martin Prihoda, and Greg Heisler against each other. This year, John Keatley, Lindsay Adler and Zack Arias are the victims participants, and one of last year's contestants is actually the subject.
New cameras are like new computers. Both of them depreciate quite quickly as new technologies and new models are churned out year after year. This presents a perpetual problem for photographers, as many constantly grapple with the question of whether to upgrade their camera to a more recent model, or whether to purchase a higher-end model so that it keeps its value longer.
Market research software company Terapeak recently did a study that looks at depreciation in Canon EOS DSLRs. The results are pretty interesting.
Photographer Brian Bowen Smith learned his craft at the feet of legendary shooter Herb Ritts; and now, many years and many star-studded photo shoots later, he's sharing some of his wisdom with the rest of us as part of Chicago Ideas Week.
In the above video, he uses three photo shoots to exemplify the versatility and creativity required to be one of the best. From Hillary Swank in a studio, to Matthew Fox in an airplane hangar, to Gabrielle Union on the beach, each shoot exemplifies a different lesson that Smith hopes you'll walk away with.
Canon shook up the photography equipment rental space last Wednesday when the company announced that Canon Singapore would soon be launching a lens-rental program of its own, dubbed "Try and Buy." Overlooking the slightly presumptuous name, the program will allow pros and amateurs alike a chance to try out lenses that might otherwise land beyond the boarders of their budget.
For its H5D ad campaign, Hasselblad approached underwater photographer Henrik Sorensen, knowing that he would put together something worthwhile. What he came up with is a "twisted take" on Denmark as a fairytale country that he's calling "Not Just a Fairytale," and the above video takes us behind the scenes at the underwater shoot.
Storage and backup solutions are increasingly moving to the cloud, and in keeping with the photography mantra to always "backup, backup and backup again!" new kid on the block Picturelife is offering a cloud-based solution to your picture storage and syncing needs.
In this short conclusion to his instructional DVD, Norwegian photographer Erik Almas gives 10 basic "steps" to becoming a photographer that caught our eye. It's not that they're groundbreaking; in fact, you've probably heard most of these at least once before.
But put all together, and following on the heels of the humorous Onion article on pursuing your dreams, they make for a great set of inspirational steps to follow if you're trying to go from hobbyist to professional.
According to Reuters, Shutterfly has officially filed court documents in an attempt to shut down Kodak's My Kodak Moments app. Shutterfly -- who purchased the Kodak Gallery from the bankrupt company for $23.8M last year -- is claiming that the app is in violation of the terms of that sale, and demanding that it be taken down.
Here's a pro tip: if you ever find yourself with a strong desire to photograph crocodiles in their natural habitat, don't do it like the photographer in the video above (warning: it contains a bit of strong language).
Photographer and director Greg Jardin made this creative music video for the song "New York City" by Joey Ramone. It's a stop-motion video that features 115 people (some of them random pedestrians yanked off the street) traveling backwards through various locations in New York City.
On the morning of December 14th, 2012 I found myself scanning the redundant array of social media apps on my phone. Just as I was about to pry myself out of bed, I had come across a recent twitter post by one of my fellow graduates of Newtown High School. In just a few minutes I would learn that my former hometown elementary school had become the site of one of the most horrific school shootings that this country has ever seen.
From time to time I post plots of color gamuts like the one above. Each time, I get emails asking how I make them, leading me to assume that the world's thirst for color nerdiness is going unquenched. I'm setting out to fix that in this post.