December 2009

As 2009 comes to an end, here's a look back at 10 of our most popular articles from the past year: …

This video is an interesting compilation of over 4,600 Polaroid self-portraits taken by Marc Tasman over ten years between July 24, 1999 and July 24, 2009. That's a total of 3,654 consecutive days.

Laura Brunow Miner is the former editor-in-chief of JPG Magazine and founder of Pictory.

Light painting is when you use bright points of light and long exposure times to "paint" light into a photograph. You've probably seen numerous tutorials on the technique by now, but if you haven't, we posted a brief tutorial on the technique about half a year ago.

Merry Christmas! It has been a week already since we posted our latest giveaway for a Lensbaby Composer, and this one has been our most popular giveaway so far. We received a total of 584 comment entries and 427 entries through Twitter, for a whopping total of 1011 entries.

Victor Pinchuk, the Ukrainian billionaire who purchased the photograph 99 Cent II Diptychon in 2007 for a record breaking $3.34 million, has launched an international award for artists called the Future Generation Art Prize.

Remember the Nova Concept DSLR? Well this one might be even stranger. Fleximus is a conceptual digital camera that's based on a flexible tube:

About two weeks ago we reported that the "Fathers of Digital Photography" who invented the CCD sensor had won a Nobel Prize in physics for their revolutionary achievement. Now, two colleagues of Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith are claiming that the Nobel committee erred by doing "extremely poor research".

Something you may have noticed when adjusting your camera's ISO setting is that as you increase ISO, the number of remaining shots you have decreases. This is because the size of each photograph increases with ISO, and thus less of them can be stored in the available space of your memory card.

Spanish photographer José Luis Rodriguez recently received the prestigious winning title as the Veolia Environment Wildlife photographer of the year, along with £10,000 (about $20,000 $16,000) in prize money for his image, Storybook Wolf.  The photograph depicts a rare, Iberian wolf hopping a fence to enter a corral where the photographer had placed meat to attract the animal.

Nikon announced today that NASA has placed an order of 11 D3s full-frame DSLRs and 7 Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 lenses. The bodies each retail for about $5,000 while the lenses cost about $1,800 apiece, so NASA spent about $67,600 on this gear purchase. NASA's budget is currently over $17 billion, so they spent roughly .0004% of their annual budget on this camera gear.

Samsung is releasing a new hybrid digital camera system sometime in early January of next year called the NX Series. The idea is that the new series would combine the advantages of DSLR and point-and-shoot cameras. Before we go into some details, here are a couple photographs of the actual camera that were posted to DPReview's forums.

It's quite a coincidence, but two of the largest images in the world were both announced recently. These images were created by taking thousands of individual high-resolution photographs and stitching them together to create gigantic panoramas.

Nikon recently conducted a survey called "Picture Yourself", and released some interesting findings today, a lot of which reveals things about the way people view themselves. The survey was conducted using random telephone dialing, and sampled 1000 Americans 18 and older.

At CES 2010 next year, photography automation company Ortery will unveil the Photosimile 5000, a device that they claim is the "next generation imaging device for the office." Essentially it's like a copier, except for stock/product photography. You can simply walk up to the machine, place what you'd like to photograph inside, adjust a few settings on the parameter, and walk away with a professional looking product photograph. The computer-operated system automatically adjusts lighting to …

Update: This giveaway has ended. The winner was randomly selected and announced here.

FlickrPoet is a neat little web-app built by Thomas Sturm that turns text into photographs using Flickr's API. Though the concept is extremely simple and only somewhat novel, the results can be quite beautiful.

Recovering your camera after losing it is one of those things that most people don't really think about until the situation actually arises. If you were to lose your camera today, would anyone be able to return it to you? …

Canon Singapore recently loaned news photographer Dan Chung two pre-production Canon 1D Mark IV DSLRs to try out.

In a move that might spark another Internet debate, Flickr has added India to the list of countries unable to view content rated moderate and/or restricted.

A recent survey of 200 creative professionals in the UK found that 37% admit to illegally using images found on the Internet.

This interesting collection of images by Indonesian artist Agan Harahap, titled "Super Hero", features famous superheroes (and villains) inserted into iconic war photographs.

Personalized mugs with your mug on it, photo blankets, and good ol' fashioned framed pictures are all fine and dandy, but they can get old fast.

Two days ago, Sankei News in Japan reported that a Nagoya Institute of Technology team led by Professor Yojiro Ishino was certified by Guinness World Records as having built the "Camera With The Most Lenses". The camera boasts a staggering 158 separate lenses.

Some members of the photography industry have been up in arms the past few days over an internship offered by the private studio of seasoned pro photographer James Nachtwey.

If for some reason you're against carrying extra batteries around for your digital camera, then this might be just the gadget for you. YoGen is a human powered charger that generates power when you pull on the lawnmower-style ripcord.

The holiday season is upon us! In celebration of the season, we've compiled our first holiday gift guide! Each year, we'll feature 20 a number of awesome photo gifts, ranging from functional to fun. Whether you're searching for a stocking stuffer or affordable gear for your favorite photographer, we hope our guide comes in handy. We've arranged our gift ideas from cheapest to most expensive. Enjoy! …

Editor's note: This post contains landscape photographs with a trace amount of artistic nudity.

According to a patent filed in June 2007, Nikon is looking into adding an email client directly into their point-and-shoot cameras (DSLR users can breathe a sigh of relief). This would allow people to quickly email photographs from their cameras, rather than have to transfer them to a computer first.

In a post published on their blog yesterday, Tumblr revealed some interesting data on cameras and Canon lenses uploaded to the blogging service, presumably harvested from the EXIF data of each photo.

Here's yet another interesting camera accessory that might make a good present this Christmas season.

The technology behind DSLRs, video cameras, web cams, and even astrophotography and medical imaging would not be where it is today without the combined ingenuity of Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics today in Stockholm.

Here's your daily dose of (semi)photographic inspiration: Musical duo Gloobic put together this creative video in which Eric Gunther, one of the two members, dances to a Gloobic track in timelapse.

Back in September we wrote an article discussing how difficult it is to keep digital photographs safe for a really, really long time. We mentioned that storing your images with a reliable service like Amazon is probably much safer than trying to archive data yourself, since you're probably not an expert at doing so.

Here's a little DSLR accessory that might be a great Christmas present for a photographer you know. The Aputure Gigtube is a "remote viewfinder" that allows you to use the "live view" functionality of your camera off-camera. You can either mount it on your hot-shoe, or use it separately as a remote shutter release.

Just came across this hilarious animation of two guys discussing "thinking outside the box". Now, I guess these guys could be anyone from philosophers to painters, but I like to think they're photographers who are trying too hard to be "artistic". Enjoy.

Strobox is a new iPhone application that allows you to easily create and share lighting diagrams. It's completely free, and you can download it now from the App Store.

Just launched today, FocalPop is a new online marketplace that tries to harness the power of crowd-sourcing. The concept is very similar to thematic photo competitions such as Photo Friday or DPChallenge, where a keyword or theme is provided, and photographers submit suitable photographs to the competition.

Google announced a pretty awesome new product today called Google Goggles that has the potential to completely change the way we think about search. It's basically an application that will tell you all sorts of information based on photographs you take with your camera phone.

On December 3rd, Epson announced the PictureMate Show, the "Ultimate Two-in-One Digital Frame and Compact Photo Printer".

Nonja, a 33-year-old orangutan in the Vienna Zoo, is quickly becoming one of the most popular photographers on the web. Her recently launched Facebook page is regularly updated with her most recent photographs, and has amassed tens of thousands of fans in the first week of being online.

If you're a tennis player in the San Francisco bay area, check out ahathereitis. This interesting new web application (though it lacks a logo and design) aims to find things for you through satellite photographs and image recognition technology.

Here is a quick look at some interesting photography projects that present a manipulated view of reality, along with thoughts on how they were done and how you can accomplish the same thing.

Keep your eyes peeled for a DSLR camera with a touchscreen interface by Canon sometime in the near future. Photography Bay is reporting that Canon filed a patent in April 2009 containing images that seem to clearly depict a touchscreen interface.

Aside from having a good eye and using correct technique, another way to make it more likely you'll capture the perfect photograph is by shooting a lot. When acclaimed street photographer Gary Winogrand died in 1984, he left thousands of undeveloped rolls of film and unprinted negatives. This isn't uncommon among both the historical greats of photography, and the best photographers today.

According to an email sent out to affiliates, Digital Photography School has sold over 3,000 copies of their first ebook, The Essential Guide to Portrait Photography, in the first week of sales.