April 2013

In 2010, then BU journalism student Johannes Hirn put together a photo essay titled "Will Box for Passport." The essay was based around a boxer by the name of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, better known now as "Suspect #1" or the "Black Hat bomber" from the Boston Marathon bombing.

According to an NPPA report, once Tsarnaev and his younger brother were listed as suspects, several publishers both large and small found and began using content from the essay without ever ascertaining Hirn's permission. All the while, Hirn was on the phone with his former BU professor Peter Southwick to figure out how he could properly license the images before websites and blogs began stealing them -- it was already too late.

If you're planning to attend the Kentucky Derby early next month, you might want to make sure you'll be content with capturing your memories with a smartphone or point-and-shoot. Churchill Downs, the racetrack that hosts the famous horse race, has unveiled new security measures that will prevent attendees from bringing certain items onto the grounds. Among them: all interchangeable lens cameras.

More and more photographers are attempting to build their own DIY lightboxes these days as they look for ways to easily digitize their film at home using a digital camera. However, a common problem that plagues these lightboxes is vignetting -- lighting is uneven and shadows form gradients near the edges of the surface.

Photographer Rafał Nitychoruk of Gdynia, Poland tells us that he has solved the problem with his own custom lightbox. The trick? Make your lightbox short, and stack multiple layers of glass.

Marta Crass of Knoxville, Tennessee is quite handy with cardboard. She runs an Etsy shop called CisforCardboard that's dedicated to her custom cardboard art. She handcrafts signs, wall hangings, letters, and anything else you can dream up... including cameras.

What you see here is a replica of Crass' grandfather's 1960's era Nikon F SLR, created using ordinary pieces of cardboard.

This beautiful video shows three years in the life of the Sun in three minutes. The photographs are shown at a pace of two photos for each day. Thus, there are a little over 2000 photos in this video that are shown at around 12 frames per second.

If you're ever in England and come across an old camper van with the words "Camper Obscura" splashed across the side, knock on the door and say hi to photographers Jonathan Blyth and Matthew Pontin. Since the summer of 2010, Blyth and Pontin have traveled widely around the South West of England, teaching people about photography from the rear cabin of the vehicle.

Having your laptop and photographs stolen usually isn't a good thing, but for photographer Melanie Willhide, it actually helped her career move forward.

From most angles, it looks like a bunch of lights flickering at random. But stand in just the right spot, and you’ll perceive moving bodies. Jim Campbell’s installation for Light Show – a new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London – is a powerful antidote to the high-tech obsession with performance, the endless competition to pack more megapixels into a smaller screen or sensor. It also provides fresh insight into human vision.

One of the big trends in the camera industry these days is the stuffing of "big camera" sensors into "small camera" bodies. After all, if you can get the same image quality from a camera that's smaller in size, why wouldn't you want to? (That's the idea, at least).

The quality and portability of cameras these days would be quite astonishing to photographers from back in the earlier days of photography -- the days in which you needed both hands and a strong back to work as a photojournalist. In this post, we've compiled photos from those "good ol' days" to see how far photography has come.

F-Stop Gear has decided to put together a miniseries of inspirational shorts about the pro photographers they sponsor. These f-stop pros are some of the best outdoor photographers in the business, and the company would like to give its fans some insight into the men and women behind the epic shots.

In an attempt to speed up its sizable network and lower costs, Facebook recently decided to begin using Google's WebP image format. The format was designed by Google as a space-saving alternative for PNGs and JPEGs. WebP provides lossless and lossy compression, support for an alpha channel, support for animation and more -- all at much smaller sizes and almost identical image quality.

But all of these advantages come at a price, support for the WebP image format outside of your browser is far from universal. Google set it up as a Web format that, for now, is not supported by any of the major operating systems natively. And so, after the switch, when Facebook users tried to download a funny photo or the vacation pics their friends decided to share through Facebook, they wound up with un-viewable WebP files.

Last week was full of horror, disbelief and touching compassion. It was also a week driven by photographs and discussion about photography. From the iconic photo by Boston Globe’s John Tlumacki on the cover of Sports Illustrated, to the hundreds of citizen photos turned in to the FBI, the story and the events that followed were driven by photography.

Do you ever have those times when you look up or around you and you see something like the scene above?

Duesseldorf, Germany-based photographer Jakob Wagner wants to show you how diverse photographs of the Atlantic Ocean can be. The images in his series "Madeiran Weather" are all of the same patch of coastal area, yet they are drastically different from one another due to the weather.

How do you solve the problem of professional concert photographers snapping unflattering photos of you during your live shows? One way is to ban them completely, and that's exactly what Beyonce is doing with her latest concert tour. Policies like hers may be growing in popularity among artists who want to control their image, but the policy is still causing quite a hoopla.

If you thought ordinary iPad photographers looked silly, wait till you spot someone in public with a telephoto lens strapped to the front (er... or back?) of their tablet. The iPad Telephoto Lens is a new external lens attachment for iPad users who would like to squeeze a little extra reach from their tablet camera.

Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how you can make a pretty nice flash diffuser for your macro setup for just a little time and a little money.

This will probably be of limited interest to most of you, but we like to know how things work, not just how well they work. We thought we’d take a couple of pictures when we disassembled a ballhead in case any of you were interested. Our demonstration partner today was a Benro B1 ballhead that had a stripped tension adjustment knob, but all ballheads work basically the same way.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has been serving as one of the International Space Station's resident photographers. Every day he posts beautiful photographs showing what our planet looks like from orbit to his Twitter account, @cmdr_hadfield.

Today the Canadian Space Agency released the video above, in which Hadfield takes the time to explain how to best photograph Earth's landscape from 400km (~250 miles) above the surface.

One of the big gripes people have with the idea of taking pictures with Google Glass camera glasses is that the device requires you to say "ok, glass, take a picture" in order to snap a shot. While this is great for situations when you need hands-free photography and don't mind saying a voice command, it would be highly inconvenient in situations in which you would rather not (or can't) talk.

It looks like Google has been one step ahead of us the whole time: it appears that the company has built "wink to snap" functionality into Google Glass' camera.

Photographer and software developer Kostas Rutkauskas has launched a new mobile app called Helmut. Designed for Android, it's a film scanning app that lets you digitize your old film strips quickly and on the cheap.

Earlier this month, we featured a neat light painting experiment by photographer Matt Holland that involved long exposure photos of rock climbers wearing colorful lights. The climbs resulted in colorful light trails that tracked the course each climber took.

Over the past four years, photographer Neal Grundy has also been working at combining long exposures, light painting, and rock climbing. Unlike Holland, however, his work is more focused on illuminating the faces of large cliffs rather than creating squiggly trails of light.

This is the story of how I fell in love with photography and how I acquired and defeated gear-acquisition-syndrome.

FocusTwist is a new app for iOS devices that lets you shoot Lytro-style refocusable photographs using your phone or tablet. Photographs shot using the app are interactive and dynamic in their focusing: click (or press) any area of the scene to see that area of the photograph come into sharp focus.

In the past, we've shared some interesting experiments that photographers and artists have done, imagining what our photos would look like if something were to be drastically different about out planet or solar system. Today, we're adding another one to that list.

Update: It seems that this rumor was off base. The latest word is that there is indeed a 2/3 sensor coming, but it will appear in a new XS2 fixed lens camera. The upcoming entry-level X-Series camera will continue to feature a APS-C-sized sensor. That makes a lot more sense.

We've heard that Fujifilm is primed to make some camera announcements this summer, and according to Digicame-Info one of those announcements may be a new entry-level X-mount mirrorless camera. The camera is expected to be announced in the summer (possibly June, according to PhotoRumors) and made available in the fall for anywhere between $550 and $700.

But it's not the price, release date, or even the existence of a potential entry-level mirrorless ILC from Fujifilm that has people talking. Instead, it's the rumor that the camera will come to market sporting a tiny 2/3-inch X-Trans CMOS sensor.

Andy Baio has some experience with copyright infringement, especially where iconic photographs are concerned. In case you didn't read our previous coverage on the matter, his story goes something like this: in 2009, he put together an 8-bit version of Miles Davis' album "Kind of Blue" called "Kind of Bloop," and for the cover art he had a friend create a pixel-art version of Jay Maisel's famous cover photo.

Maisel wound up suing Baio for over $100,000 for the infringement, and despite an offer for free representation, potential court costs still forced Baio to settle out of court for $32,500. Baio wound up writing a long blog post about the matter, and now, a couple of years later, he's expanded on that post in the above talk he gave at Creative Mornings in Portland.

Sony clearly felt there was a gap in the action cam mount market that needed filling. And so, in addition to providing mounts for everything from surfers to scuba divers, Sony Japan had just debuted an action cam mount for man's best friend.

For his project "Happy End," German photographer Dietmar Eckell has travelled all over the world to find and photograph abandoned airplane wreckages with positive endings. That last part may seem like a paradox, but all of the 15 wreckages Eckell has shot actually do have happy endings: no one on board died, and they were all rescued from the remote locations where they crash landed.

Now, after completing this mammoth project and producing some extraordinary pictures, he wants to put together a coffee table photo book that tells and (obviously) illustrates these stories, and he's turned to crowdfunding site Indiegogo for help.

After posting a before-and-after of a concert photo she had taken and edited in Lightroom, photographer Kohl Murdock received several requests to post a tutorial on how exactly she edited it.

The photograph was taken at a Shiny Toy Guns concert and is a great straight on portrait of lead singer Carah Faye Charnow with the exception of the massive amount of red fill light plaguing the snap. This is a common problem with concert photos, and so we're as glad as everyone else that Murdoch obliged and created the tutorial.

What would it look like if the retro filters found in smartphone camera apps were turned into a real filter you could slap onto the front of your lens? A couple of Stanford product design students think they have an answer.

Olivia Vagelos and Martin Bush have started a new camera filter brand called Mount July, which features the world's first multi-color, radially graduated filters.

At the end of May, a signed copy of one of the most iconic photos ever taken, and the camera that took it, will both go on sale at the WestLicht Photographica Auction. The photo is a signed print of the iconic V-J Day "Kiss in Times Square" photograph taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt, and the camera is the Leica IIIa rangefinder that he used right up until the day he died.

Most time-lapses involve long pans over vast landscapes with gorgeous star-filled skies in the background. And while we love those -- if you haven't seen the New Zealand time-lapse we shared recently you're missing out -- we don't see equally stunning urban time-lapses nearly as often. This is one of the exceptions to that rule.

Over the course of your comings and goings on the internet, you've probably spotted at least a few of those mind-bending GIFs that loop perspectives rather than a snippet of time.

Well, it turns out that making them yourself isn't that difficult, just as long as you have a 3D camera and some time at your disposal. And in the how-to video above, The Creators Project enlists the help of half the Mr. GIF team, Mark Portillo, to show you just how easy it is.

Film footage from the early 1900's, when hand-cranked cameras were all the technology available, aren't exactly high-quality. Choppy, jumpy, and sped-up, the people in these films look anything but natural.

One YouTuber, however, has taken it upon himself to enhance some footage from this time period and, in the process, produced something much closer to today's standards of clarity and stability.

Photographer Ray Demski recently teamed up with climber Alex Luger to shoot a project he's dubbed "Ice Nights." Shot entirely at night using several powerful flash units and a medium format camera, the shoot looked to take ice climbing photography to a whole new level.

If you've never heard a basic overview of the history of photography, then this cute little animated video from TED-Ed is here for you. It covers everything from the invention of the camera obscura, to the battle between the calotype and the daguerreotype, to the rise of portable cameras.

In 1991, photographer Brian Masck took one of the most iconic photographs in all of sports. Known forevermore as the "Trophy Pose," it captured then Michigan Wolverine Desmond Howard striking a Heisman pose IRL. Since it was taken, the photo has been used by everyone from EA to Nissan to Sports Illustrated, and several of them are now being sued by Masck for using the photo without his permission -- including Desmond Howard himself.

Need a pick-me-up? Check out the project "Your Pet and You" by photographer Tobias Lang of Hamburg, Germany. The series is composed of beautiful portraits of all kinds of pets and their loving owners.

You know those sometimes stylish, sometimes dramatic, and often funny pictures of the celebrity hosts that come up every time Saturday Night Live takes or comes back from a commercial break? Well, ever since 1999, it's photographer Mary Ellen Matthews who has been in charge of putting those together each week. And in this short video, Plum TV catches up with Matthews to ask her about her daily life at SNL.