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. Read more…

NBC recently received some criticism for distributing the above photo of Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon to several news outlets — some of which used it on their front page — without disclosing that the background and road in the image were fake. Being an entertainment outlet, however, they were granted a pass; the fakery was obvious and it was the news outlet’s job to figure it out and disclose it to their readers.

But one particular newspaper has drawn more fire than the rest. The New York Daily News was one of the papers that used the photo on their front page, but on top of not disclosing the initial fakery, they further ‘shopped the photo and kept that part to themselves as well. Read more…

Once upon a time there was an industry largely dominated by two companies. Their domination, over some 30 years, was so nearly complete that they became understandably a bit arrogant. After all, their products were the biggest, the best, and by far the most popular.
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Could Panasonic be planning to jump into the action camera market and compete against the likes of GoPro? A recently published US design patent suggests that it might be the case. The patent, first spotted by 43 Rumors, was filed in December of last year but published a week ago. Simply titled, “Digital Camera,” it contains a series of simple illustrations showing what appears to be a pocket-sized durable action camera.
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Devin Coldewey of TechCrunch created this helpful diagram showing the relative sizes of various sensors, including the one found inside the Lytro light field camera (a camera that lets you focus after shots are taken). The FCC published photos of the Lytro camera’s guts last week, revealing that the sensor inside is roughly 6.5×4.5mm (smaller than our previous estimate). This means that it’s slightly larger than the iPhone sensor and slightly smaller than the one in most point-and-shoot cameras.

Another interesting finding is that the chip inside supports Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. The company says that they’re working on wireless connectivity, but doesn’t have it enabled in the initial Lytro camera.

Lytro Teardown Shows Potential Wireless Capability, Smallish Sensor [TechCrunch]

L.L.Bean recently decided to celebrate its 100-year anniversary by having commercial photographer Randal Ford recreated a classic 1933 catalog cover as a photograph. It’s amazing how faithfully Ford and his team was able to recreate the illustration — some of the vintage clothing had to be purchased off eBay!
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Here’s a helpful illustration that shows acceptable places to crop when shooting portraits. Cropping at green lines should be fine, while cropping at red lines might leave you with an awkward looking photograph.

Image credit: Don’t Chop at the red by J. Southard Photography

Spotted this shirt, titled “Analog Retirement”, over at BustedTees. The design might be cute and creative, but it was obviously created by someone who isn’t a photographer. Sure the photographic film industry hasn’t been doing so hot over the past decade, but you can’t compare film with cassette tapes, VHS tapes, and floppy disks. Those technologies offer no advantages over the ones that replaced them, while analog photography does. As long as there are people passionate about shooting film, the medium should do just fine.

Here’s a neat image showing the different field of views offered by focal lengths ranging from 16mm to 200mm. It’s not simply lines overlaid on a single photo — the different focal lengths were actually used to capture what the scenes looks like through the lenses.

Vimeo recently partnered up with photographer Vincent LaForet for a new educational series called Behind the Glass. If you’re just getting into photography, the videos are great primers on the subject of camera lenses.

Behind the Glass: An Introduction to Lenses (via Photoxels)

Image credit: Screenshot by Vimeo

dpreview forum member Jorginho created a couple side by side images showing the recently leaked Nikon mirrorless camera sensor next to other sensor sizes. It gives us a visual look at how big a 2.7x sensor actually is. Above, we see the Nikon sensor next to the tiny Pentax Q sensor, which has a crop factor of 5.7x.
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