Have you ever wished you could remotely control your smartphone’s camera with a trigger remote disguised as a 35mm film canister or a mini twin-lens reflex camera? If so, then your wish has been granted by the Japanese company Gizmon. For a small price, you can pick up one of these cute and colorful gadgets and pair it with your iOS or Android smartphone.
Kaleta Bartosz was on a boat with his girlfriend off the coast of …
A while back, I came across an article about using a super cheap CCTV lens. The results to me looked something like a Voigtlander f/0.95 but for a tiny fraction of the cost. I picked one up off eBay for something like $20 a year or so ago.
Before getting on a plane for a vacation in Monaco recently, I knew that I wanted to do something different from the previous ‘holiday highlight’ videos that I've done before. We were only in Monaco for a few days and despite having an amazing time, the footage I got wasn't particularly exciting. I decided that I probably wouldn't end up doing anything with it unless I thought of an 'edge'.
Then I had an idea: to play off of the absurdity of how lavish the few highlights I caught on camera would look when strung together and make the video akin to the zeitgeist defining 80s pop music videos I've always loved (see Duran Duran - Rio).
If you're a fan of both retro cameras and instant photos, you may be delighted to learn of a new camera called the InstantFlex TL70. It's designed to look like a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera, but it's a fully functional instant camera that takes Fujifilm Instax film.
Looking through photographer Robbie Augspurger's portrait portfolio is like digging up a yearbook from the 1980s. Taken using a 30-year-old light kit he stumbled upon a few years back, the images look incredibly authentic as the subjects dress up and play the part to a tee.
Lo-fi and limited edition lovers alike have something to celebrate today, because there's a fun new digital camera on the block. A world's first by creator Greg Dash's estimation, the father the "little cyclops" fisheye cam and head of Cyclops Cameras has just announced his newest undertaking: a Digital Diana.
This is pretty cool, and might just give you a good laugh at the same time. Go back in time and see what a photography 'holiday camp' (read: photography workshop) was like back in 1961, as what look to be a bunch of very amateur photographers try and learn to better compose and set up shots of beautiful women.
It's no secret retro and vintage cameras have made a come back in the last few years. But, this is getting a bit meta, isn't it?
In an attempt to make retro cameras look even more retro, camera accessories manufacturer Anchors and Anvils is fitting some of the 35mm film shooters they refurbish with wood paneling.
Don't expect Canon to come out with any retro-styled cameras. According to a brochure on the design process that went into the recently released Canon G1 X Mark II, the company prefers function to form, which is why it has 'kept its distance' from the retro design movement.
In an insightful essay about the "graying" of photography, Kirk Tuck opines about seeing 50-year old men proudly displaying their huge DSLRs while hanging out at the counters at the Photo Plus Expo in New York last month. The generation that obsessed over pristine primes, low noise and 16×20 prints has been supplanted by a gaggle of Snapchatting millennials for whom photography is no different than a text conversation.
First comes hype, then comes the announcement, and last comes the post-release marketing. In regards to the Nikon Df, we've officially moved into the last of those three steps, and right on cue, Nikon has released three videos of big time photographers endorsing the Df by talking about their experiences shooting with it.
If the Nikon "Pure Photography" teaser videos left you wanting a lot more in terms of info or pictures of the upcoming Nikon DF retro full-frame, you're in luck. Less than 24 hours before we expect the camera to finally make its official debut, several press pics of the shooter have leaked.
Whether or not the camera will live up to the hype, we won't know until we've gotten our hands on it. But if there's one thing Nikon is doing right regarding the soon-to-be-released retro-styled full-frame, it's building a crap load of hype.
We've already had one teaser trailer (which you can watch here), and now, Nikon has released another, this one giving us tantalizing split-second glances of the camera that we didn't see at all in the previous ad.
There's no denying that the Sony a7 and a7R made quite the splash in the photographic industry both before and after their official arrival. With full-frame sensors, a mirrorless design and price tags that make at least the a7 cheaper than even the most affordable full-frame alternatives, Sony hit the trifecta.
But a new rumor seems to indicate that Nikon, at least, wants to get in on some of the action by releasing a new retro-styled full-frame that will compete directly with Sony's offerings.
It seems the retro design movement has finally begun to infiltrate something other than the mirrorless market. In a move that makes its Instax line of instant cameras look a lot more like the X-Series line, Fujifilm has just announced the retro-styled Instax Mini 90 seen above.
What would we think the surface of Mars looks like if NASA had equipped the Curiosity rover with a smartphone loaded with Instagram or Hipstamatic instead of the advanced scientific cameras they chose? Greek photo enthusiast Nikos Kantarakias decided to find out.
Getting your camera noticed if it's not also a smartphone or a high-end shooter is getting harder by the day. And phones such as the newly announced Galaxy S4 Zoom are quickly shrinking the quality gap between the camera phone and the regular old camera.
Last month, a rumor emerged saying that Olympus' upcoming E-P5 flagship Micro Four Thirds mirrorless camera would have a design inspired by the old Olympus PEN F. Today the first photograph of the camera leaked on the web, confirming that it will indeed carry a sleek new retro styling.
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.
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!
One of Pentax's big announcements for this year's CES 2013 was the MX-1, a camera that is designed to compete against other retrotastic compact cameras that are currently generating a lot of buzz (namely the Fujifilm X-Series and the Olympus OM-D).
More and more camera companies are giving their products vintage camera-inspired designs these days, and Pentax wants to join in on the fun. The company announced its own retro-styled camera earlier today called the MX-1.
It's a fixed lens compact camera that features a sleek metal body, a fast lens, and a 12-megapixel sensor.
Photographer and photography student Eric Omori has an interesting project that combines the modern with the historical. He has been capturing paintball wars using wet plate photography. The project is titled Weekend Warriors.
It was about this time last year that the world was introduced to the Holga iPhone case: a strange-looking gizmo complete with a rotary wheel packing 9 separate lo-fi filters for the toy-camera, retro lover in you. Well, much like the Swivl we reported on yesterday, Holga has decided that bigger is better, and is attempting to break into the DSLR market with a new rotary wheel lens for DSLRs.
Well that was fast... Just hours after Instagram launched a major update to its popular photo sharing app, Twitter dropped a bomb on the industry by finally unveiling its own long-awaited and recently-leaked retro filters. The move brings it into direct competition with what Instagram offers -- the two services virtually offer the same product now, except Instagram is solely focused on images while Twitter lets you Tweet text as well.
Instagram officially ended Twitter's ability to display embedded Instagram photos this past weekend. Twitter users aren't pleased, but Instagram is now trying to divert their attention away from what they no longer have to what they do. The company announced a major update to the iOS version of the app today, which includes a sleeker look, faster speed, and a brand new filter for Instagrammers to play with.
The mobile photo sharing wars are heating up, and two of the big players, Instagram and Twitter, are in the process of trading blows. Back in November, it came to light that Twitter is currently working to build Instagram-style retro filters into its smartphone apps. Instagram retaliated this week by announcing that its photos will soon no longer be embeddable on Twitter. The latest news now is that Twitter is trying to spoil Instagram's holidays by pushing out its new filters by year's end.
Back in 1998, PC World magazine published a review of the Sony Mavica …
Facebook wasn't content with beating out Twitter in the pursuit of Instagram: the company has now beaten Twitter in launching photo filters in its primary mobile app as well. Just days after The New York Times reported that Twitter will be adding retro filters to its mobile apps in order to compete against Instagram, Facebook has gone ahead and added Instagram-style filters to its official Facebook iOS app.
Photography purists, you might want to look away. For the rest of you: remember that Craiglist listing we shared a couple of months ago posted by a couple looking for Hipstamatic wedding photographers? Among the hoards of enthusiastic Hipstamatic shooters who responded were Keith and Marc, hosts of the iPhoneography podcast TinyShutter. After being chosen for the gig, they drove down to Connecticut from Massachusetts and New Hampshire to capture the wedding with their iPhones.
Watts Martin of Coyote Tracks has an interesting piece titled “Iconic” that discusses …
Fujifilm is a camera company that's going all-in on the idea of "retro design". We're not complaining. Its new XF1 compact camera brings the sleek design of X-Series' cameras to the world of "point-and-shoots", featuring a minimalist aluminum body that's covered with faux-leather. The camera feels very nice and solid in the hand. It's not as compact as other point-and-shoots (the Canon S110 is around 30% smaller and 20% lighter), so I'd say it's purse-sized rather than pocket-sized. What it lacks in portability, however, it makes up for in beauty and brawn.
We had a chance to play around with the new Fujifilm X-E1 at Photokina 2012, at a meeting attended by people who were the brains and hands behind the camera. Announced back on September 6, the X-E1 is the more affordable counterpart to the well-regarded X-Pro1. It's an interchangeable lens mirrorless camera with the same beastly APS-C sensor, shedding 30% in size, 21% in weight, the fancy hybrid viewfinder in favor of an all-electronic one, and 41% in price (from $1,700 to $1,000).
If you want a 50mm f/1.4 lens for your DSLR, you'll need to shell out at least a couple hundred bucks, even if you buy one made by a third-party manufacturer. For those of you who don't mind losing autofocus, you can get the same focal lengths and apertures for much cheaper by buying some old glass and an adapter. By much cheaper, we mean as low as $10-$20! India-based photographer Brock Whittaker recently did this after seeing an auction on eBay for an old Mamiya camera kit.
DOGHOUSEDIARIES created this humorous glimpse into what the Fortune 500 company list will look like 18 years from now, in the year 2030. We see that "Undo Instagram Filters Inc." leads the pack with $2.88 trillion in annual revenue.
It's obviously satirical, but it does cause you to think... What is the world going to do with the unfathomably large pile of filtered photos if/when the fake retro look goes out of style?
Fujifilm has uploaded a video to its Japanese YouTube account showing its not-yet-announced XF1 (or XP1) retro-styled compact camera. The video shows that there's a twisting feature that's used to turn the camera on and off. Turning on the camera involves twisting the lens to unlock it, pulling it out of the camera until it clicks, and then rotating it some more to open up the lens cover. Turning it off involves doing the same things in reverse.
Fuji already introduced retro, Leica-style design to the world of mirrorless cameras with its gorgeous X series line, and now it appears that the company wants to do the same thing for the world of point-and-shoots. New leaked photos, first published on Digicam-info, show an unknown compact camera by Fujifilm that features a slick leather wrap and an elegantly minimal UI -- a camera that definitely wouldn't embarrass fashion-forward folk.
Want to mimic the look of Instagram's filters using Photoshop? We're happy to announce that we have a set of Photoshop files that allow you to do just that.
Designed exclusively for PetaPixel by Eric Öhman of Skellefteå, Sweden, the pack comes with 20 filters that imitate the look of the popular mobile photo sharing app.
Tired of your boring Nikon point and shoot? Does the sleek modern silver clash with your vintage threads? Breathe easy: German company PimpmyDigicam offers these sticker "leather kits" for Nikon J1 cameras for a retro look that will pair impeccably with your vintage Oxfords.