April 2010

A banner on Andrew Romanoff's Senate campaign website provoked a bit of an outrage from a minority group when people realized that it was digitally manipulated.

Adorama announced today that "So Long & Farewell" by Neville Black was picked as the grand prize winner of the first annual iPhone Photo Contest, which comes with a $1,000 gift certificate as the prize.

Nikon's new president Makoto Kimura believes that the explosive growth of the digital camera market is ending, and that the market is near its saturation point.

Here's an interesting behind-the-scenes video series that shows the creation of a Canon 500mm f/4.0L IS lens. It's a neat look at the guts of glass, and an opportunity to see how exactly the various components of a lens are created and put together.

The big news in the tech/gadget world is that an Apple iPhone 4G prototype was found lost in a Redwood City, California bar, disguised in a plastic case to look exactly like an iPhone 3Gs.

When Instructables member bertus52x11 had his cast removed after breaking his arm, he found that his arm was too weak to handle his DSLR camera. Realizing that those less fortunate might have similar problems with handling heavy equipment, he created a do-it-yourself camera support using PVC pipe that transfers the weight of your camera to your chest.

Picsean is a new travel magazine that resembles Laura Brunow Miner's Pictory. Photographers submit their best photographs and stories to themes, and the best submissions are selected and featured.

Doxie is a portable, USB-powered scanner for scanning things on the go. It scans documents and photographs at 600dpi in JPEG or PNG, and has the ability to scan directly to the cloud, sending your files to a large number of web apps. What's neat is that in addition to documents, photographers can use it to easily scan and then share their prints online: …

Octopuses are known to be the most intelligent invertebrate, and this clever guy also seems to have an eye for pricey camera gear and a playful sense of humor.

Richard Renaldi has an interesting approach to street photography: he asks complete strangers to touch one another. The resulting interactions are documented in his project Touching Strangers.

The Holga 120 3D Stereo Camera is a plastic, medium-format camera that captures two slightly offset images at the same time on 120 film. The resulting images are then viewable in stereo 3D using the special Holga 120 3D Slide Viewer. The camera itself costs $100, but for $150 you also get the 3D viewer, some 120 film, and a set of slide mounts.

photobattle.me is a fun little web application that pits two submitted photographs against each other and asks the visitor to vote on which photo they think is better. Of course it's entirely subjective, and photos can be of different types and flavors, but it's an interesting way to see what the general public thinks of your work compared to other photos.

Sigma announced yesterday that the upcoming 8-16mm f4-5.6 DC HSM, first announced at PMA 2010, will have a retail price of £799.99.

PicTreat is a free online application that allows you to quickly and easily retouch portraits using patent-pending face detection and correction technology.

Got an assignment? Hire an AP photographer! …

A divorced Long Island couple decided to share custody of their kids, but they ran into a hitch over who got the family albums.

We've featured a couple posts on cakes shaped like Canon cameras recently, while Nikon has been underrepresented on this front. Well, we just received an email from Aimee over at True Beauty Photography with photographs of a Nikon DSLR birthday cake she surprised her husband Dustin with two years ago: …

The Chobi Mini Digital Camera is an uber-compact digital camera that captures both still images and video. It captures AVI video at 1280 x 960 resolution, and JPEG photographs at 2048 x 1536, or 3 megapixels.

This year's nominees have just been announced for the 14th annual Webby Awards, and one of the nearly 70 categories is "Best Use of Photography".

Video monitor maker SmallHD has just announced the DP-SLR, which they boast is the smallest HD field monitor on the market. The DP-SLR is 5.6" diagonally (or 4 x 6 x 1), and has a resolution of 1280 x 800 at 270 ppi. As the name implies, it's designed for use with DSLRs with video capabilities. The monitor mounts on the camera's hotshoe and connects to the body with an HDMI cable. The standard monitor also has a component connection. The higher end model includes a 3G SD/HDI, which puts the …

On Monday afternoon, just hours after the 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced, Pulitzer-Prize winning photographer Kim Komenich was standing at a Wells Fargo bank in San Jose, California when he noticed the man in front of him hand the teller a note. As the teller began to empty a cash drawer, Komenich proceeded to wrap his arms around the robber in a stifling bear hug.

We recently featured a Canon 5D Mark II shaped cake, but didn't have any photographs of the back.

In his recent Twitter Q&A session regarding House being filmed with a 5D Mark II, director Greg Yaitanes answered a question about differences of the new setup by saying, "focus was hard with these lenses but more “cine-style” lenses are being made as we speak." Lo and behold, new cine lenses are being announced! …

Real time photo sharing service TweetPhoto has raised a $2.6 million Series A investment from a group of investors led by Canaan Partners.

Apparently, there are plenty of people who find a traditional camera strap to be a (pardon the pun) pain in the neck.

A signed print of Edward Weston’s Nautilus Shell purchased for $10 in 1927 has been auctioned off for a whopping $1,082,500 at Sotheby's auction house in New York.

NachoFoto is a new image search engine that attempts to deliver relevant results for a specific kind of query traditional search engines haven't focused on: dynamic keywords.

The New York Times' Lens blog is attempting a project similar to the worldwide 4am project we covered recently.

Photojournalists Mary Chind of The Des Moines Register and Craig F. Walker of The Denver Post won Pulitzer Prizes this year in photography.

Here's a fun concept design imagining the classic Kodak Brownie reintroduced to for the 2012 London Olympic games as a simple digital camera. Designer James Coleman says, …

Google has acquired UK-based mobile photo search startup Plink for an undisclosed amount.

After building up anticipation by releasing sneak peeks at upcoming features such as Content-Aware Fill and Puppet Warp, Adobe has unveiled Photoshop CS5, the latest version of its popular image editing program.

Here's an amazing stop-motion video created for Nissan, and promoting zero emissions mobility. It's amazing that a sense of speed and danger can be created from photographs of people sitting still in wooden chairs.

Major tangent, but one of the big stories of the day is that Palm (yeah, the cell phone and PDA maker) is putting itself up for sale. There's a discussion going on over at Engadget regarding which company should make the purchase, with HTC coming out as the crowd favorite.

The "Sony a352" is a concept camera design by Ryan David Francis, a Industrial Design Student at the California College of the Arts. His aim in the design was to create a camera that focuses on how people hold cameras: …

Athanasios Varzanakos, a Greek man, is suing Swedish dairy company Lindahls for using his image on containers of Turkish-style yogurt. The $6.9m lawsuit alleges (in 40 pages, no less) that the image is misleading because the man has no connections whatsoever with Turkey.

Instructables member KoZuEst made his own remote for his sister's Nikon D60 with a LEGO and a bit of electrical know-how. He says the total cost of materials, not including the circuit board and his time, was around $7 -- as opposed to spending ~$40 for a Nikon remote. Not bad! …

Tom Petters, a former owner of Polaroid was sentenced yesterday to 50 years in prison for heading up a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme.  One of Petters' lawyers, Paul Engh, told reporters that his client is likely to appeal the sentence.

The season finale of the popular TV show House, which will air on May 17th, was filmed entirely with the Canon 5D Mark II. cinema5D overheard the plan last month and Greg Yaitanes, the director of the show, has confirmed it through a tweet in which we made himself open to questions.

If you're looking for a photographic adventure, check out Wikipedia Takes the City or Wikimedia Photo Scavenger Hunts for an event near you.

If you've always wanted to see what a Canon 5D Mark II looks like opened up, you're in luck. zakums06 over at DCHome converted his 5D Mark II to a mirrorless version for filmmaking purposes, and documented the whole mirror removal surgery: …

The Last 3 Minutes is a beautiful short film by cinematographer Shane Hurlbut, the cinematographer of Terminator Salvation. It was shot using the Canon 5D Mark II, and was sponsored by Canon to show off the latest firmware that enables 24p (frames per second) recording, giving it a "movie quality". Filming spanned 17 locations across 4 1/2 days, and a wide assortment of Canon prime L lenses were used.

The Digital Economy Bill has passed in the UK with a vote of 189 to 47. In spite its initial controversy, many photographers are breathing a sigh of relief.

Flickr has its own URL shortening system to make links suitable for things like Twitter. However, for some strange reason, the short URLs to photographs aren't readily available on the photo pages themselves.

Google Books, an ambitious project to make millions of physical books searchable online, found itself in yet another legal battle today after photographers followed in the footsteps of authors by launching their own class action lawsuit for copyright infringement.

Yale University has announced the acquisition of American photographer Lee Friedlander's archive, and 2,000 prints from his collection. The joint acquisition by Yale's Art Gallery and Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library involves over 40,000 rolls of film and contact sheets by the prolific photographer.

A common gripe about the iPad is that it doesn't contain a built-in camera. Developer Yusuke Sekikawa saw this need, and wrote two applications that allow an iPhone 3GS to be used as an iPad camera.

A photograph of a Canon 7D with firmware version 1.2.0 has appeared before any official word of the update from Canon. It was posted to POTN by forum member garycoleman, who says, …

Earlier today, photographer Chase Jarvis announced his partnership with creativeLIVE, a free, live online class site. Each class presentations is filmed live, to an in-person audience in Seattle, and streamed on the creativeLIVE website.

As more and more people are ditching compact cameras for their camera-equipped phones, it's clear these hybrid devices will be playing a big role in casual imaging in the years to come. One of the leaders in this space is the Apple iPhone, which boasts countless applications that improve and customize the photography that can be done with it.