July 2010

Olympus Patent Reveals Adjustable Aspect Ratio, Photographer’s Eye Detection

Canon may have revealed its plans for the Wonder Camera yesterday, but Olympus also quietly released something of its own to marvel at.

According to a newly published Olympus patent, originally filed in 2004, a new camera may be in development that is designed to make consumer point-and-shoots even more intuitive for casual photographers.

Homemade Medium-Format Camera by Susan Burnstine

Fine art photographer Susan Burnstine came up with the idea of making her own cameras from a hodgepodge of common household and hardware store objects. She picked up an old magnifying glass, plastic, rubber, garbage bags, cinema foil, metal, vintage toy camera parts, and cardboard, among other items, to create lenses and cameras. Above is a picture of one of her cameras.

Macro Portraits of Emerging Mosquitoes

Brothers Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas, the same UK-based duo who created a remote-control BeetleCam to photograph wildlife in Africa, decided to get up-close and personal with some of nature's less desirable creatures. The two originally noticed mosquito larvae in stagnant water sitting in the backyard of their home, and decided they'd found their next photo subjects. They patiently set up the photo shoot, waiting for key moment when the adult mosquitoes emerged from their larval state. It's fascinating how delicate and alien the pesky critter is up-close:

Their patience and planning went a long way, Will tells us:
We did a bit of research into their development and discovered that it takes about 1-2 weeks (depending on the temperature) for them to develop into the adult form. This gave us a good amount of time to devise a set up to photograph them as they emerged.

Over the course of about 14 days, we kept a keen eye on their development. We kept the larvae in a glass of distilled water indoors and covered it with perforated cling film - we didn't want to suffer any bites during the night! Once the larvae had turned into pupae, we knew they were close to hatching. We soon discovered that when one straightened out, we had about 5 minutes until they hatched.

Controversy Crops Up Over Economist Cover Photo

The Economist is in hot water after running an extremely edited photograph of President Obama on a Louisiana beach. The cover photo shows Obama alone on the beach. But the original photo, taken by Reuters photographer Larry Downing, shows that Obama was, in fact, not alone at all.

The altered image crops out Admiral Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, but also goes an extra step to completely omit the presence of Charlotte Randolph, a Louisiana parish president (perhaps with Photoshop CS5's content-aware fill).

This is a huge problem because The Economist's omissions entirely change the tone of the image in order to make Obama appear alone, hanging his head, when in fact he is likely looking down at the beach while in conversation with the two people next to him.  Additionally, according to journalism ethics, news photos should not be altered, especially to this extent.

Behind the Scenes of a Domino’s Pizza Photo Shoot

It's pretty amazing how much work goes in to commercial food photography, even if it's a delivery pizza. Domino's Pizza has a short video showing the behind-the-scenes action during a pizza photo shoot, complete with food stylists, a pizza screwed to the table, and a hand model. But Domino's new ad movement is all about ditching the food embellishments and promising "natural" photos from now on -- photos of pizzas made by employees and untouched by food artists during the photo shoot. (Though we noticed they didn't promise to go easy on post-processing!)

Shooting iPhone 4 HD Video at 1000 Feet

A few guys in Los Angeles recently convinced their friend to let them borrow his new iPhone 4 (that he waited 4.5 in line for), and got onto a rooftop with the help of another friend. Using some large helium balloons, they attached the iPhone and started recording 720p video of downtown LA as it rose up to 1000 feet into the air on the end of a kite string. They also made a fun behind-the-scenes video of their project.

Digital Holga Concept for a New Generation of Hipsters

Holga D is a concept camera by India-based industrial designer Saikat Biswas that brings the plastic, medium-format Holga camera into the digital age.

The cheap toy camera design retains the optical jankiness that lures hipsters to this type of camera (i.e. vignetting, blurring, and light leaks), but a DSLR-caliber sensor inside ensures that the anomalies are optical rather than digital.

Photographers Banned for Life from Metro for Taking Pictures

It seems like every week there's a new story of some photographer being hassled by law enforcement. Photojournalist Stretch Ledford and Carlos Miller of Photography is Not a Crime recently visited the the Miami-Dade Metrorail to ride through a few stations and see if anyone would stop them from doing non-commercial photography. They didn't even make it to the first station.

Side-by-Side Comparison of iPhone 4 and Canon 7D Video

Here's an interesting video by Take Zero Productions that compares the footage of the same scene recorded by both an iPhone 4 and a Canon 7D. You can also head on over to the Vimeo page to compare the footage in HD, since HD is disabled in this embedding.