When we launched back in 2009, I decided to host PetaPixel on the same hosting plan as my personal website at 1&1. Their plans are cheap (~$7/month) and they offered enormous amounts of storage and unlimited bandwidth, so I decided to try hosting PP with them.
In 2007, Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten conducted a social experiment in which he recruited one of the world's great violinists, Joshua Bell, to play in a Washington D.C. subway station. Just two days prior to the experiment, Bell had played in a sold-out Boston theater in which ordinary tickets sold for $100 apiece.
Last week Olympus began running a teaser for what appears to be a new camera that will shortly be announced. The teaser featured a mysterious image of a camera hidden behind a hand, and a form for collecting emails to be contacted immediately at launch.
Israeli singer-songwriter Oren Lavie teamed up with photographer Eyal Landesman to create an imaginative music video for "Her Morning Elegance", which was recently nominated for the Best Short Form Music Video Grammy award.
A judge announced this past Tuesday that artist Shepard Fairey is under criminal investigation for the improper use of Obama's photograph in his iconic "Hope" poster. Fairey has spent months locked in a legal battle with the AP and photographer Mannie Garcia, who captured the original photograph. The AP demanded credit and compensation for the photograph, while Fairey believes his poster fits the definition of fair use.
Above is a trailer for Betrayed, a new short film shot entirely with the Canon 5D Mark II. It's co-written and directed by Joshua Grossberg, and the cinematography was done by NYC-based photographer Robert Caplin.
Launched less than a week ago, SpiderPic is a new image search engine for those looking to purchase stock photography. The same stock image is often available through multiple agencies and varying prices, and SpiderPic allows you to compare these prices to choose the cheapest deal.
Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple iPad today, igniting tech news with excitement, skepticism, and prolific ragging on its name.
Canon doesn't seem to want Nikon to have all the fun with articulating LCD screens. After Nikon included such a screen on D5000 back in April of 2009, Canon seems to be ready to embrace the feature in its own DSLRs.
In 1836 Louis Jacques Daguerre, a French artist and chemist, invented the first practical camera, the daguerreotype. Shortly thereafter, Daguerre's brother-in-law Alphonse Giroux began to produce the cameras that Daguerre invented, and one such camera has now surfaced and will be auctioned.
Update: This giveaway is now over. We've randomly selected a winner and posted the announcement here. Thanks for participating! …
Last Friday an anonymous poster on the photography board of 4chan sparked a discussion that rippled into the blogosphere after freezing their camera to see whether ISO performance improves at lower temperatures.
Have an ugly thermostat in your home that you wish you could hide when not in use? Hanging photographs on your wall could help you make it much less noticeable. Apartment Therapy suggests hiding it in plain sight by using framed photos that are similar in appearance: …
Nikon just announced the winners of the Nikon Festival short film (140 seconds or less) contest a few hours ago, with the grand prize winner going to Marko Slavnic for his Chicken VS Penguin film embedded above. The win comes with a cool $100,000 and a Nikon D5000 DSLR kit.
Our jaws dropped when we came across Matthew Albanese's work. He uses everyday materials to create astonishingly detailed small-scale miniatures of stunning landscapes, and then photographs them using forced perspective techniques.
Based on patents recently filed with the United States Patent Office, Canon seems to be working on technologies that could have a huge impact on how you photograph.
This past Saturday, over 2,000 professional and amateur photographers gathered at Trafalgar Square in London to protest recent cases of anti-terrorism laws being used to stop public photography. The protest, organized by the group I'm a Photographer, Not a Terrorist!, was against section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which allows officers to stop and search photographers without needing any "suspicion" if the photography is occurring within certain areas.
Asian American blogger Joz Wang, of jozjozjoz.com wrote a post titled "Racist Camera! No, I did not blink... I'm just Asian!" last year when she discovered a user-unfriendly feature on her Nikon Coolpix S630.
This past Monday, Japanese lens corp Tamron launched a new 12 week video series on their YouTube channel geared towards helping beginners understand their equipment. Each video is 1 minute long, and will cover topics such as white balance, RAW vs. JPEG, and more. Once this introductory series is complete, they plan on posting intermediate and advanced videos as well.
Can't wait for Polaroid to make its grand comeback this year? You can use your current camera like a digital Polaroid camera with the Portable Photo Printer by Pandigital, announced at the end of last year. It uses Zero Ink (ZINK) technology for ink-less, instant 4x6 printing, and is the first ZINK printer at this print size. The ZINK paper used by the printer has dye crystals embedded inside the paper itself, and is activated by the printer using heat.
On January 15, 1885, a Vermont farmer named Wilson A. Bentley combined a bellows camera and a microscope and became the first to photograph the beauty of snowflakes with what become known as photomicrography.
In early 2008 Sony unveiled a new technology called TransferJet that allows wireless data transfer. Now, Sony has begun incorporating the technology into its Memory Stick memory card format, enabling owners of Sony digital cameras to transfer data without needing any cables.
Here's a novel idea: using an audiovisual slideshow as a medium for poetry. Journalists at the Knight Digital Media Center created a project for the Oakland School for the Arts, featuring a student's poem, The Eternal Sea. Check it out here.
3D technology was featured somewhat prominently this year at CES, with companies unveiling televisions and cameras built for capturing and displaying 3D media. If you can't wait to get started with 3D media, you can do so right now with just two photographs.
About a month ago we reported that José Luis Rodriguez had come under fire after winning the prestigious Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year award. The winning photograph depicted a rare, Iberian wolf hopping a fence to reach food placed outside by the photographer, but rival photographers soon began to question whether the wolf was indeed a wild wolf.
German film director and photographer Wim Wenders created this short film for Leica that captures his passion for photography in a beautiful and powerful way. It's sure to inspire you, and may rekindle your love for the art if it's grown cold.
Samsung recently announced five new digital cameras due for release sometime in February. Two of these cameras, the ST60 and ST70, have a pretty interesting and unique digital effect mode called DeFog Clear/Fog Lifting that the company claims "cuts through the haze to take clear photos".
Hasselblad has had a cryptic countdown displayed on their promotions page for a couple weeks now, and we're about two weeks away from the date being counted down to. The text on the page doesn't provide any hints: …
Abandoned is an iPhone application by design group FORM that allows you to find modern day ruins to explore and photograph. There are many people who enjoy photographing abandoned and run-down locations, and can easily find and share such locations using this app.
Remember the days when a 5 megapixel digital camera was considered top-of-the-line? I do. Remember the days when 570 megapixel digital cameras were the size of cars? That's a question people might ask years from now, when the most basic pocket cameras boast hundreds of megapixels, and when we have petabyte external hard drives.
A few days ago we came across this brilliant trick for protecting your valuable camera gear while flying. Most airlines don't allow you to fly with your luggage locked, but there's a clever way around the rule -- bring a gun.
American Pixels is an experiment by Jörg Colberg that uses a special kind of image compression algorithm to create a distinct look. Here's Colberg's statement: …
SnapSort is a new web application that's super simple but surprisingly useful. Give it two camera models and it will give you a side by side comparison of the specs, as well as pick a winner for you. In addition, it lists pros, cons, and similar cameras for each camera.
Back in 2005, a student in England named Alex Tew launched The Million Dollar Homepage, through which he sold the pixels of a 1000x1000 grid for $1 each. Although it was an extremely simple idea, the unique project attracted enormous amounts of press coverage, and eventually earned $1,037,100 in a matter of months. It also spawned countless copycat websites that virtually all failed, since the idea was no longer novel.
Freezelight is a Russian group that creates light painting photographs and animations. They have a pretty interesting blog showcasing their work, and opened up a Vimeo account a few days ago to showcase their films.
David Baker is the photoblogger behind milouvision.
Update on 12/18/21: This video has been removed by its creator.
Photographers often go through hours, days, or weeks of work to achieve certain photographs, and the dedication is usually reflected in the end result. That might seem like a lot of work to you if you typically only spend a few seconds framing and snapping a photograph, but what if I told you that a crew from BBC spent two years working on a 60 second clip?
Job portal careercast recently released a ranking of 200 jobs from best to worst for 2010. The Wall Street Journal republished the data in a nice, sortable chart as its Best and Worst Jobs 2010 list. Since you're reading this, you probably want to know how jobs involving photography rank on the list. The answer: pretty low.
Here's a dose of creative inspiration: a hand animated video of parkour. Created by Serene Teh and Noel Lee, parkour motion reel is a pretty unique take on the flip book style of animation.
If the entire Calvin and Hobbes collection can be found in a complete set, then why shouldn't National Geographic? Well now it can!
Camera phone photography has been exploding in popularity in recent times -- pretty much every new phone is equipped with a camera nowadays, the iPhone is the most popular "camera" on Flickr, photographer Chase Jarvis has launched a mini-empire around the slogan "The Best Camera Is The One That's With You", the sensors for mobile phones are approaching absurd numbers of megapixels, etc... -- so it's not surprising that a UK-based photography school has launched a course dedicated to cell phone …
ffffl*ckr is a new Flickr web application that's based around the idea that the people whose work you like probably also like photographs that you'd like as well. The app aims to make finding quality photography less of a chore: …
Update: This giveaway is now over. The three winners were randomly selected and announced below. Thanks for participating! When Udi Tirosh over at DIYPhotography launched the Bokeh Masters Kit a few weeks ago, we said we'd be giving away a couple kits here on PetaPixel in early January 2010. Well, here it is! We're giving away three (3) Masters Edition Bokeh Masters Kits that each normally cost $35. Over 500 of these bokeh-customizing kits have been sold since they were introduced. To enter, …
Award-winning portrait and landscape photographer Nadav Kander recently launched a new YouTube channel that you might want to check out if like viewing high quality work and listening to the thought process behind the photographs. The above video features Kander discussing his project, Yangtze, The Long River. The channel only has two videos so far, but it's worth keeping an eye on.
There hasn't been much directly photo-related news at CES 2010 today, but the announcements of newly redesigned e-readers might be key to drawing in a wider e-reader audience and -- dare we speculate? -- might bring some vigor back to traditional print publications.
LEGO recently released a free iPhone app that turns your photographs into photomosaics made with 1x1 LEGO pieces. The app obviously isn't limited to faces, but can turn anything into a LEGO mosaic.
We're on a roll with controversial advertisements today. New York garment company Weatherproof has gotten the attention of the White House after illegally using a photograph of President Obama's visit to the Great Wall of China on a billboard in New York City (41st St. and 7th Ave.)
Harry Potter actress Emma Watson recently appeared in a Burberry advertising campaign with her brother Alex, and one particular image in the series has created quite a hoopla. In the image above, it appears as through most of her right leg has been completely edited out of the photograph. When I first saw the image, I thought the leg was simply hidden behind her brother's left leg, but the image continues to cause a stir around the web. Do you think this is an example of Photoshop taken too far? …
Polaroid has been getting some viral attention today, partially from its addition of Lady Gaga to its staff, but also because it's new nostalgic line of instant cameras. That's right, folks, Polaroid's back in the instant business -- it couldn't let such a good cash cow run away, after all. Several models of the PIC-1000 were displayed today at CES in Las Vegas, including this nifty wooden body camera:
