David Becker

Articles by David Becker

NYC Mayoral Candidate in Hot Water After Campaign Ad Used Swiped Flickr Shots

New York Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota may be running as a law and order guy, but apparently the "law" part doesn't cover intellectual property.

Turns out nine of the images used in a recent Lhota campaign ad -- an ad meant to illustrate what a mess the Big Apple used to be -- were taken without permission from Flickr users, several of whom are not too happy about it.

Photographer Captures Amazing Shot of a Lucky Seal Narrowly Escaping a Shark

"You should've seen it! I was that close to the dude's teeth!" No doubt there was some pretty excited talk going around a South African seal colony recently, after a young pup narrowly escaped a shark attack by balancing on the great white's nose.

Irish wildlife photographer David "Baz" Jenkins captured the decisive moment in an image that's quickly gone viral worldwide.

How to Quickly & Easily Set Up a Webcam to Take Perfect Midair Shots Every Time

Getting shots of people in midair can be a source of fun and fascination, but making them requires either a fair investment in remote triggers or a surplus of time and luck.

With a little bit of ingenuity, however, mechanical engineer Andrew Maxwell-Parish (aka Electric Slim) has made the process easy, cheap and reliable using a laptop, webcam and open-source software.

The Instagram Diet: Looking at Pictures of Food Curbs Appetite, Study Finds

Believing the world cares what you had for lunch may still be a symptom of narcissism, but a recent study seems to indicate that it could at least be a useful form of narcissism.

The study, which was conducted by marketing researchers at Brigham Young University, found that the more time people spend looking at pictures of food, the less interested they become in actually eating that same foods. Results were published recently in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

Indian Project Trains Muslim Women to be Photographers, Defies Fatwa

An educational project in India is encouraging Muslim women to take up photography, in defiance of a controversial fatwa issued earlier this year that said the practice was "unIslamic."

Woman's advocacy group Aawaaz-e-Niswaan -- which is based in the Mumbai suburb of Kurla -- has trained more than a dozen women in photography skills, going against of regional customs and, now, this particular fatwa.

Are Selfies Killing the Photo Album?

Young people love to take selfies and don't really care about printing photos and putting them in albums. That might not be the biggest shocker of the year, but a new British survey at least puts some numbers to this amateur photography trend that's leaving us with a lot fewer prints and a lot more digital clutter.

Miley Cyrus’ Post-Hannah Montana Plans Once Included Photography School

Mystery semi-solved. Singer and recently-infamous celebrity Miley Cyrus' baffling sale of a used Nikon N80 SLR on eBay last week might have been part of her plan to consolidate into a digital, Canon-based workflow.

At least we can surmise as much from a recent Rolling Stone interview in which the former teen queen revealed that she considered going to photography school as part of a career reboot after her smash run on Disney's "Hannah Montana" show ended in 2011.

Newspaper Editor Says Posting a Photo to Facebook Makes it Public Domain

Normally, we wouldn't give much attention to the thoughts of an editor/publisher for a small community newspaper. But the response to photographer Kristen Pierson's notice of copyright infringement and invoice for payment is such a classic compendium of bad thinking on intellectual property that it would be a disservice not to share it ... just so you know what you're up against.

Magnum Photos Trying Paid Fan Club to Court Copyright Infringers

Prestigious agency Magnum Photos says it is about to roll out a paid membership system in hopes of turning illegal downloaders into paying customers. The move comes a little more than a year after the agency did away with watermarks on its main site, reasoning that they did little to discourage determined downloaders.

Lady Flips Off Engagement Photo, Couple Finds it Hilarious

I suppose we all owe a small cultural debt to this anonymous older lady at a recent Colorado Rockies game. Thanks to her, we now know what the exact opposite of a photobomb looks like.

That would be having a cranky grandma type show up in the money shot of your carefully arranged proposal, flipping the bird at the camera to show exactly how she felt about the interruption.

New Camera Tech Combines Ultra-Wide View with Fine Detail Capture

Researchers at the University of California-San Diego are fine-tuning some new tiny camera technology that could dramatically boost the detail and field of view of smartphone cameras. Joseph Ford, a professor in the university's Jacob School of Engineering, describes the system in a paper to be presented next week at the Optical Society of America's annual meeting.

According to Ford, his team will soon have the system -- seen above next to a Canon 5D Mark III setup -- refined to a camera assembly with 85-megapixel resolution, 120-degree field of view and f/2 aperture, all in a package about the size of a walnut.

New Anti-Paparazzi Technique: Attempted Murder

Boy, is Kanye West going to feel like a wuss when he hears about this. Turns out that if you're really serious about putting paparazzi in their place, nothing short of homicide will do anymore.

At least that seems to be the way it works in Costa Rica, where three former bodyguards for supermodel Gisele Bundchen are on trial for attempted murder after they opened fire on a couple of uncooperative photographers.

Photog Sets Out to Document US National Parks With Her Pinhole Camera

For most photographers, names like "Yosemite" and "Yellowstone" likely conjure impeccably detailed images in the Ansel Adams tradition. San Francisco photographer Ashley Erin Somers, however, thinks there's something to be said for a more low-fi aesthetic.

She's started a project to photograph some of the biggest attractions in the National Park system with a homemade pinhole camera, with the end goal being to produce a fine-art photography book documenting her work.

Student Wins Photography Contest with Filched Photo

It's one thing to swipe a photo and slap it on your website, and quite another to enter that stolen image into a high-profile photo contest passed off as your own work.

That is exactly what Mark Joseph Solis, a graduate student at the University of the Philippines, is discovering as he becomes a subject of international ridicule for winning several thousand dollars worth of prizes with a purloined portrait.

USA Today Drops Sports Photographer Over Misrepresented Baseball Photo

Any professional photographer who's been working long enough has experienced the humiliation of missing the big shot, so it wasn't that big a story when two sports photographers missed Ichiro Suzuki's landmark 4,000th base hit at a recent New York Yankees game.

It's what happened afterward, when USA Today Sports Images photographer Debby Wong passed off a photo of another Suzuki swing as the iconic moment, that turned the incident into a significant photojournalism ethics fail.

Viral Photos from the Navy Yard Tragedy Don’t Show a Shooting Victim

Update: The Associated Press has re-released the photos, and is now confirming that they DO show scenes related to the Navy Yard shooting.

A widely distributed image used to illustrate stories about Monday's horrific shooting at the Washington Navy Yard likely had nothing to do with the tragedy, offering a cautious tale of modern media overreach.

How to Make a DIY Point-and-Shoot with a 3D Printer and Parts from RadioShack

Hey, not everybody wants a homemade gun. So how about using that 3D printer you've borrowed to make your own home-brew point-and-shoot digital camera?

DIY portal Instructables now has directions to do just that, thanks to creator Randy Sarafan's plans -- including a downloadable template to print the body -- and RadioShack's mighty JPEG Color Camera Board to go inside. The final product would make a fine companion to the OpenReflex 3D-printable film SLR for those ready to go digital.

Photog Helps Disaster Victims to Rebuild their Lost Photo Albums

Of all the items that can be destroyed in a disaster, few are as valuable or hard to replace as family photo collections. Photographer Brian Peterson saw that first-hand while living and working in Japan two years ago, when an earthquake and even more devastating tsunami swept away everything many families owned.

Sensing that photography could be a way to help them heal, Peterson started the organization Photohoku (named for the Tohoku region devastated by the tsunami) to help families rebuild their photo albums.

Victorian Era Detective Cameras and the Birth of Privacy Concerns

It's more or less a given these days that cameras are everywhere and privacy is a quaint notion from the past. But it turns out that people were already starting to feel that way in the 1880s, when advancing technology allowed the production of cameras small and fast enough to be hidden by the user and produce shots of unprecedented candidness.

Iconic NASA Space Walk Photos Continue to Inspire

One of the key challenges in environmental portraiture is finding the right balance between subject and setting. Zoom in too close, and you lose the magic of location. Too wide, and it's not a portrait anymore.

There are times, however, when you have to forget the rules. Like when you're orbiting 150 miles above the Earth and one of your colleagues is about to take the first ever untethered space walk.

1996 is a Perfume Based On a Photograph and Created by Photographers

Here's an intriguing new potential revenue stream for photographers: turn a favorite shot into a signature fragrance.

That's what Dutch fashion photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin -- known for their work for major design houses and magazines -- are doing with their portrait "Kirsten, 1996."