February 2010

The Sandpit is a beautiful short film by Sam O'Hare that shows New York City in miniature using a shallow depth-of-field. In an interview on Aero Film, O'Hare says,

Online entertainer Ze Frank has an interesting gallery called young me / now me, which features user submitted "before and after" photographs.

"Save Our Earth, Let's Go Green", an electron microscope photograph created by Harvard scientists, was recently awarded first place in the Science And Engineering Visualization Challenge 2009 put on by Science Magazine and the National Science Foundation.

It's amazing what simple photography and tons of time and dedication can produce. This stop motion video was created using 25,000 pieces of paper and a 10 foot wall.

Dean Blotto Gray of BLOTTO PHOTTO is the Burton Snowboards Principal Photographer.

Back at the beginning of the year, Wired stirred up some fierce debate when it published an article titled, 5 Reasons to Ditch Your Digital SLR.

Here's a photograph of paparazzi taken back in 1932. Looks like some things never change (paparazzi), while others do (check out those beastly cameras!).

Showzey is a web app that helps you collect and organize your photographs from various places on the web in once place.

This isn't related to photography, but it's something that I'm working on, so I thought I'd share it with you all.

These glasses might look like typical geeky photo dad gear or something your eccentric uncle might wear, but if your eyes have uneven prescriptions, they can come in handy while shooting. That is, unless you're classy enough to have a monocle (or contacts).

Underwater housing units for DSLR bodies can cost upwards of $1499 at most distributors. Waterproof cases for point-and-shoots already average $150. But this year, a major trend in most camera companies is the point-and-shoot designed for underwater use and toss-around durability at a competitive cost.

Around the show at PMA 2010, almost every major point-and-shoot manufacturer had a new array of cameras ready for surf, sand, snow and hard falls.

Here's a sampling:
Olympus …

Fotobabble is a newly launched service that allows you to add a short audio clip to photographs via either your computer or iPhone (using their free application).

Here's an amazing and unique project by Adam Voorhes, titled Exploded.

Here's a neat idea I came across yesterday: tossing a coin to explore your city or town.

Yesterday we posted a mind-boggling video of water drops at 2000 fps. The above video is pretty neat in a different way - it shows the Cabrini-Green building in Chicago being demolished over a period of months using stop motion.

Vans and the places where they were is an ongoing project started in 1996 by Joe Stevens, a filmmaker and photographer based in New York City.

There are some pretty amazing photographs of the Olympic games coming out of Vancouver these days. If you're wondering what photographers are shooting with, Pocket-lint has the lowdown on what Getty provides its photographers: …

There will one less millionaire paparazzo in the world.

We've been seeing this idea floating around in concept cameras and new camera accessories, so it might be a coming trend in digital photography: detached LCD screens.

The vast range of the new Fujifilm camera lines might explain how Fujifilm, the imaging-specific company placed 19th on the list of top US patents filed in 2009. In addition to its existing line of point-and-shoots and digital hybrid bodies, Fujifilm has also been developing a 3D camera paired with special 3D photo and video digital viewers, an improved instant photo line, and a new medium format camera. A booth rep said that Fujifilm's major selling point is their "commitment to photography in …

One thing I love about photography and videography is that it often allows us to see things in different ways, whether it's macro photography or slow motion video. The above video is absolutely stunning and will probably blow your mind. It shows an experiment in which a water drop is filmed at 2000 frames per second, revealing something you probably never knew about the behavior of water.

SanDisk just released its 64GB Ultra SDXC (extended capacity) memory card, the largest capacity for the Secure Digital format. It has a read speed of up to 15MB/second, stores up to eight hours of high-definition video, and costs $350. The new card uses the SD 3.0 specification, which allows capacities up to 2TB (2000GB).

Last December an amateur photographer named Bob Patefield was in Accrington town center shooting photographs of the Christmas celebration when he and his friend were stopped by police for suspicious behavior. He and his friend refused to provide the police with personal details (since they were not obliged to), and were stopped a total of three times before Patefield was finally arrested. His friend complied, provided his personal information, and was released on the spot.

Despite what your eyes tell you, the above image is a photograph of a real person, not a painting. It was taken by Peter Kun Frary, a music professor at the University of Hawaii. He tells us, …

PMA is off to a hot start down in Anaheim, Calif., with Sony announcing a new line of bodies and lenses, aiming to assert itself in the DSLR + video market thus far dominated by Nikon and Canon.

Today at PMA, Sigma announced a wide range of new lenses, including a prime 85mm f1.4.

There's no school like old school, Think Tank Photo's newest line of bags says. Today, Think Tank announced and showed off two new soft-sided camera and lens shoulder bags in the Retrospective line have a touch of class and color.

I'm down in sunny Anaheim, California at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) 2010 Sneak Peek.

Even if you haven't heard of Roger Hagadone, chances are you've seen his work before.

In 1987, a PhD student at the University of Michigan named Thomas Knoll wrote a program on his Macintosh to display images, and named it Display. His brother John Knoll, an employee at Industrial Light and Magic, convinced him to turn it into an image editor. Taking a break from school, he worked on the software with his brother for six months in 1988, and renamed it ImagePro. In September 1988, Adobe decided to license the software, now called Photoshop.

What do you get when you attach magnets to the Joby Gorillapod? The Gorillapod Magnetic, of course. It's one of the two new products Joby is unveiling at PMA starting this Sunday (Jessica will be there covering it), with the other being the Ballhead X. The magnets allow the flexible tripod to be anchored to things like poles and doorways, supporting up to 11.5 ounces. However, you probably don't want the magnets to come too close to your camera equipment, since magnets usually don't get along …

Photographers have been buzzing about the Digital Economy Bill, which is expected to shortly become law in the UK. The controversy revolves around the vague provisions for "orphaned works", which many claim will give the government control of licensing for any photograph deemed "orphaned" after a reasonable search for the owner has been conducted. In the section "Licensing of Orphan Works", the bill reads, …

SixthSense is a wearable gesture device being developed by PhD student Pranav Mistry at the MIT Media Lab that allows the wearer to interact with their environment, treating the real world as a computer display. The above video is of the demo that was given at TED that generated international attention. What we found interesting is how the device allows you to photograph with hand gestures (at 6m25s), and the ability to work with your images on any wall.

Update: This giveaway is now over. The winners were randomly selected by the giveaway system we used. Here they are: @sam_decker, @jdenham, and @gregoriusness.

ImageStamper is an online tool that acts as your witness when it comes to image rights.

Here's a bizarre combination of old and new: a photo album that looks like a gigantic SD card. It holds 60 4x6'' prints, and will be available from Spinning Hat starting in April for £9.99 (~$16). What would be awesome is if prints from the shop always came in these things.

We posted a while back on how to sharpen your photos like Flickr for smaller resolution images. The technique used "Unsharp Mask", but today we'll quickly describe how you can ensure sharpness using a simple setting.

Most of you probably know the astronauts on the ISS use a lot of Nikon gear for their photography. The video above shows American astronaut Jeff Williams use one of the cameras onboard as an accelerometer during a reboost, through which the ISS maintains its orbit. It's pretty neat seeing the camera floating around.

If you're an amateur photographer looking to go pro, finding clients is often a difficult task. Snapm aims to make it easier by offering comparison shopping to people looking for high quality photography by amateur photographers.

Just as the Winter Olympics are heating up international competition in Vancouver this week, the U.S. has suffered a bit of a statistical loss to non-American companies on home turf: American-owned companies have captured far fewer U.S. patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2009. U.S. corporations hold about 49% of all U.S. utility patents in 2009, while non-U.S. firms hold the majority. In a repeat of last year's trend, major Asian companies, such as South Korea's Samsung, …

Update: It looks like many of these courses are no longer available.

Here's a "carry around" tripod for your carry around lens and camera: The ZipShot is a "compact, ultra-light tripod" by Tamrac that has aluminum-alloy legs that resemble the collapsible poles used in tents. While it's not very useful in windy situations, or with heavy professional gear, it might suffice for most ordinary uses and lighter cameras (supposedly it can hold up to 3lb). The biggest benefits are obviously weight (11oz) and setup time.

At the beginning of the month we featured a creative lamp shade made using slide film. Here's a new idea: curtains. Jacki Vance-Kuss over at Yarn Zombie took Kodachrome slide film and aluminum chainmail rings and created a unique curtain for her front door.

About a week ago, San Francisco hackerspace Noisebridge launched its own space program, Spacebridge.

Caleb Charland is a Maine-based photographer who combines a love of scientific experiments and photographs into wonderful and amazing photographs. If Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin were into photography, their photographs might look something like these: …

Liquid Scale is an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that offers content aware image resizing. What does that mean? Basically it's like a URL shortener for your photographs, reducing the dimensions of the photograph but retaining the meaning.

When I've needed to take quick self portraits with my DSLR, one of the tricks I've discovered is to focus the camera using the reflection in the UV filter. As long as my eye is directly over the center of the lens in the reflection, then I know the center autofocus point is focused on my eye.

For sale on eBay is a Century Studio Camera by Eastman Kodak transformed in steampunk fashion into a computer workstation. The auction starts at $5,000, but you can Buy it Now for 7,500. The workstation is shown with a matching steampunked keyboard, but it's not included in the auction.

One of the best online photo editors is now completely free to use. Aviary has decided to offer its entire suite of online apps for free, including its popular Phoenix image editor.

Pentax recently asked a couple production companies to shoot short films demonstrating the HD filming capabilities of the Pentax's flagship K-7. After the recent flurry of short films shot with Canon and Nikon DSLRs, it seems Pentax would like to remind us all that they're still in the game. The two films were recently released, and are titled "Uncle Jack" (embedded above) and "The Rider".