August 2010

A day after photos of the upcoming Sony A33 and A55 DSLR cameras (rumored to have pellicle mirrors) were leaked, photos and specs of what appear to be the upcoming A560 and A580 cameras have also sprung up. Like the photos leaked yesterday, the front view of the two cameras show exactly the same body with only the model number Photoshopped. Not sure why this is.

The two cameras will be 14 and 16 megapixels (respecitively), and will offer features similar to comparable cameras from the Canon and Nikon camps. These include an ISO range of 100-12800, 1080p HD video recording, 15 autofocus points, 5 frame per second shooting, and a swiveling LCD on the back.

Last week we featured a stunning time-lapse video that unfortunately failed to capture Perseid meteor shower well because of too much air traffic in the area. Landscape photographer Henry Jun Wah Lee attempted the same kind of video in Joshua Tree National Park. Even though there's still quite a bit of air traffic, you can clearly see quite a few shooting stars that light up the sky.

It looks like someone hit the "publish" button too early over at CNET Asia, accidentally spilling the beans on the upcoming Canon PowerShot G12. The 10-megapixel camera's main selling points seem to be features that are also included in the PowerShot cameras announced today by Canon: 1080p 720p HD video recording and a special High Dynamic Range (HDR) scene mode that snaps three bracketed photos for you and combines them into a single photo.

Canon isn’t going to have Nikon have all the announcement fun today. They’ve unveiled three new PowerShot compact cameras: …

After an eternity of rumors and leaks, Nikon has just officially announced the D3100, an entry-level DX format DSLR replacement to the D3000. The main selling point is 1080p video recording at 24fps in h.264 with continuous autofocus, a new feature for DSLR cameras. The 14.2 megapixel camera has 11 autofocus points, a 3-inch LCD screen, an ISO range of 100 to 3200 (can be expanded to 12,800), and 3 FPS shooting. The camera will be out in September at the price of $699, bundled with a 18-55mm VR kit lens.

A Venezuelan court ordered newspaper El Nacional not to print violent images after the paper published a controversial image of dead bodies piled up in a Caracas morgue.

The photo, taken by an El Nacional photographer in December, ran with a story last Friday about security problems in the country. On Monday, the image was picked up by another newspaper, Tal Cual.

The Venezuelan government deemed the decision to run the photo as a part of a campaign criticizing current president Hugo Chavez, in light of the upcoming September elections.

The court ordered El Nacional and Tal Cual to not publish violent photos, saying the ruling is to protect children:
"(The print media) should abstain from publishing violent, bloody or grotesque images, whether of crime or not, that in one way or another threaten the moral and psychological state of children."
El Nacional responded to the ruling on Wednesday by running a front-page story about what they call censorship, along with large blank spaces with "Censored" stamped across where photos usually run.

This music video by YouTube celebrity Joe Penna (AKA MysteryGuitarMan) shows him dancing in various locations while the world around him moves in slow motion. What's even cooler is that he also published a behind-the-scenes video showing how you can do the same thing. Check it out!

Yesterday, Canon announced a rather strange and unexciting Canon 7D "upgrade." It's not exactly an upgrade either -- all of the camera specs for the new Canon 7D Studio Version are unchanged. For $1829 for the body only ($130 more than the current 7D), photographers can have several "locked levels" of the camera. Pay even more and you get a barcode scanning kit and a wireless transfer unit, the WFT-E5A.

So essentially, an extra $900 on top of the regular 7D price lets you have the camera equivalent of parental controls, plus barcode scanning that embeds information into the EXIF data in photos.

Sure, there's a (somewhat niche) practical application for these features. The locked levels can allow for quick settings that can't be changed without a password -- perfect for head photographers to who send mindless drones out to shoot or have little faith in their assistants.

Alleged photographs of the upcoming Sony Alpha A33 and A55 DSLR cameras have popped up in an overseas forum. The images look legitimate, though the A55 and A33 front views are identical images that had the model number Photoshopped. Not sure why that is.

These two cameras are rumored to be pellicle mirror cameras. Read this post that we wrote last week to learn more about what pellicle mirrors are.

The cute photo above of a surprise photo booth proposal is making its arounds around the Internets right now. Angela writes on her blog,

These are the pictures from when we got engaged. I have no idea in frames one and two and am really confused in frame three (lets never make that face again!) and really surprised in frame four.

Turns out the idea of popping the question unexpectedly in a photo booth in order to capture the resulting (priceless) expression is quite popular.

Jolayne Attwood (jolayne on Flickr) was at the International Photography Fair in Bièvres earlier this year when she came across this gigantic Instamatic 133 camera. There's no covert street photography or shooting from the hip with this baby.

Obviously, what we have here is a brilliant conversation piece.

About a year after launching the first mainstream stereoscopic digital camera, the FinePix Real 3D W1, Fujifilm has just …

Photoshop CS5's Content Aware Fill feature was quite a hit when it came out earlier this year, but what about free alternatives? Webinpaint is a web-based photo app that aims to do just that. You simply open up an image, paint over the area you'd like removed, and click the "Inpaint" button for the app to do its removal magic.

From tests I've done with the app, it's pretty clear it doesn't come close to the power of Content Aware Fill. However, for simple photographs without much texture or clutter, the app actually works quite well.

We often share cool slow motion or time-lapse videos here on PetaPixel, but this video is a bit different. YouTube user brusspup uses a turntable spinning at 45RPM to create amazing optical illusion animations. To a human eye look at the turntable, everything looks like a blur, but record it at 24 frames per second, and amazing animations appear!

Nikon just announced two new Coolpix cameras today: the S1100pj and the S5100. The S1100pj (pictured in this post) is an update to the S1000pj projector camera, with an increased brightness of 14 lumens (up from 10), a thinner form factor, and the ability to become a tiny projector for your computer via USB. This allows you to project whatever is on your computer screen onto a nearby wall... with your digital camera. How crazy is that?

Typical sized white balance cards may be of (literally) little assistance in color calibrating global imaging satellites, …

It’s not just photography enthusiasts that like to play with bokeh — check out this short clip …

Deal alert: There’s a special offer on Popular Photography magazine over on Amazon.

Here's a terrific "Doh! Why didn't I think of that?" idea shared by Flickr user Ralph Odenwälder in his photostream: create a set of matching Polaroid photographs for an awesome do-it-yourself memory card game that you can either give someone as a present or play yourself!

Here's a stop-motion music video created by Ian Robertson for a song titled Lyrical Spread by The Chameleon. Robertson uses stop-motion to display the lyrics of the song in a pretty unique way -- as jam being spread over bread.

Nice. The For Dummies series just added a Olympus PEN E-PL1 book to …

Vimeo user ph dee went out to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park last night after hearing that it's a great place to watch meteor showers. After spending four hours shooting frames for a Perseid meteor shower timelapse video, he discovered that the heavy air traffic in the area dominated the scene.

Here's a method of scrawling gigantic messages that puts skywriting to shame: Nick Newcomen spent 30 days driving 12,238 miles across 30 states in a GPS-logger equipped car, tracing the message "Read Ayn Rand" across the face of the United States. Ayn Rand is a Russian-American novelist and philosopher who write two bestselling books (The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) and introduced a philosophy called Objectivism.

After the road trip, he loaded the location data from the logger (a Qstarz BT-Q1000X) into Google Earth to produce the end result: the world's biggest writing.

Here's what the next couple weeks are going to look like in terms of press events possibly related to DSLR announcements: Nikon goes first on August 19th, Sony does theirs on August 24th, and Canon has one scheduled August 26th. Nikon will likely be announcing the D3100, while Canon drops the 60D during theirs.

A big rumor regarding Sony's upcoming unveiling is that they're going to be showing us the world's first pellicle mirror system on a DSLR camera. This means instead of a traditional bulky mirror that swings out of the way -- as found in current DSLRs -- the Sony DSLR will have an ultra-thin and ultra-lightweight semitransparent mirror that allows photos to be shot without the mirror swinging out the way.

German photography magazine Foto Digital let the cat out of the bag today when it sent its September issue out to subscribers, along with photographs and specs of the yet-unannounced Nikon D3100. Nikon Rumors broke the story, and published some scans of the magazine.

It looks like tap tap tap's Camera+ added one too many features for Apple's liking. When the app developers tweeted a secret workaround that enabled the volume button to double up to control the shutter, Apple pulled Camera+ from the App Store.
Just this week, developer John Casasanta wrote in a blog post that an upgraded version of the app originally intended to launch the feature, VolumeSnap. VolumeSnap would have also allowed users to use the volume control on iPhone headphones as a remote shutter control. Pretty nifty.

But Apple rejected tap tap tap's new version, citing this as a reason:
Your application cannot be added to the App Store because it uses iPhone volume buttons in a non-standard way, potentially resulting in user confusion. Changing the behavior of iPhone external hardware buttons is a violation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement. Applications must adhere to the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines as outlined in the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement section 3.3.7
So tap tap tap left out the feature -- at first. The app retained the feature, which was now hidden, but could be enabled by pointing the phone's browser to a specific site provided by the developers.

Craig is the blogger behind Canon Rumors

PetaPixel: Can you tell me a little about yourself and your background?

Craig: I am a 34 year old father of one, and soon to be husband of one, living in a small town in Ontario, Canada.

I am the editor and owner of Canon Rumors and an owner of Lens Rentals Canada.

I am a business administration graduate.

I love photography and shoot as often as I can. I made a go at wedding photography but found myself pulled into the direction of web businesses. I gave up wedding photography this season and I’ve moved fulltime into my 2 current ventures.

If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be working in a 5 star restaurant somewhere on the planet hoping to become the executive chef.

Photographer Petra Hall's fiancé recently bought a used MG convertible right before going on a vacation. However, on the way back from work the weekend before the vacation was to begin, something in the car exploded and the car went up in flames.

The list of gadgets in the car is enough to make a grown man weep: a Canon 7D, a Canon 24-105L lens, and a MacBook Air. Everything burned up.

There's a bit of bad blood going on between user-generated "street journalism" website Demotix and the UK Press Card Authority.

Over the past year, Demotix has issued press passes to select active citizen journalists. But now, the UK Press Card Authority, which issues press credentials for news organizations like BBC and SKY, warned that the press passes are not the same, nor should they be treated similarly to official credentials issued by the Authority. Furthermore, UK Press Card Authority chairman Mike Granatt said he would share his concerns with UK police and authorities, saying that the Demotix passes may appear similar to the official national press passes.

Granatt said:
Our concern is that the police and third parties might be misled by the Demotix card. Its intention is confirmed by Demotix's advice on their website, which suggests ' … walking up to the authorities with swagger, then shove the press pass in their face along with "that's right, I have access to this event" grin on your face'.

No professional journalist would behave like that. And no one should encourage anybody to try to bluster their way past a cordon or into an event with this hobbyists' 'press pass'.

Flickr user Florian (AKA f/28) creates and photographs 1:87 scale miniature sets carefully created by hand. The photographs featured here are from a set titled "No Country for Small Men", with the title and scenes inspired by the movie "No Country for Old Men". Everything was shot with a Canon 400D.

Chuck Patterson was SUP surfing with friends one day when two sharks joined them and circled around for 15 minutes. Rather than have the encounter deter them from surfing there again like it would for mortals, he returned to the same place the next day at the same time with a Go Pro HD HERO camera at the end of 10 foot pole.

With a select few companies currently dominating the digital camera scene, less popular brands are forced to come up …

This photograph, titled "Easy Rider", was shot by photographer Chris McVeigh (AKA powerpig on Flickr). The photograph seems so unbelievable that many people asked whether it was faked using Photoshop.

Check out this solid brass Nikon belt buckle, a fusion of masculinity and photo geekiness.

Google has a useful account on YouTube called GoogleWebmasterHelp that publishes short video answers to search engine optimization (SEO) questions submitted to them. If you have a website promoting your photography, then thinking about SEO can help you drive more visitors to your photography.

A good majority of news and documentary photographers tend to shy away from capturing video footage on DSLRs, owing to the cameras limited HD clip length. However, here's a really fantastic example of a documentary-style story shot with a 1D Mark IV, directed by photographer Austin Walsh in Kansas City.

Here are a couple photographs that made their way onto the Internets today via a Japanese website. They seem to be actual "spy" photographs of the camera with an L lens attached, and it looks like a tilt-screen does in fact exist on the back.

There's the old adage, it's not the camera that makes the photographer, but according to a by-the-numbers study by dating site OkCupid, the nicer camera might make you look more attractive.

Based on a random "snap decision" survey hosted by the site (two juxtaposed photos with the question, "Who would you rather date?"), people tended to favor photos of people taken with Panasonic Micro-4/3s, followed by Leica point-and-shoots. DSLRs ranked pretty highly as well, followed by big-brand compacts. Certain camera phones like the iPhone ranked as slightly less, though still producing attractive photographs. Minolta DSLRs and the Nikon Coolpix fell below the attractive standard, along with most other camera phones. Kodak really takes it hard, ranking third lowest with the EasyShare next to the Windows and Motorola phones.

With Photokina 2010 just around the corner, rumors regarding soon-to-be-announced DSLR cameras from …

Kate received this awesome miniature Polaroid One-Step camera as a present from her friend Pia. What's neat is that the camera came with a collection of baby Polaroid pictures, with actual photographs printed on them!

"Misadventures" is a series of photographs by San Francisco-based photographer Matt Sartain that shows individuals on long and epic journeys through dreamlike landscapes to find a place to belong. We love the ethereal quality present in all of his photographs -- especially the one above taken in Memory Glade on the Berkeley campus (Go Bears!).

The mysterious white camera -- most likely the NX100 -- that was seen in a leaked photograph from a commercial shoot recently has apparently been spotted again, this time in a National Geographic/Samsung advertisement posted to YouTube.

This is an amazing 1.5 hour exposure taken at the Gippsland Lakes in Australia by Phil Hart, showing both star trails and the crazy blue light given off by a bioluminescent algae called Noctiluca scintillans, commonly known as the Sea Sparkle.

English soccer (football) club Southampton F.C. revealed a plan last week to deny press accreditation for photojournalists this season, and instead to force publications to purchase photographs from a single approved source, a photo agency called The Digital South.

Needless to say, this didn't go over well with newspapers, and one in particular -- The Plymouth Herald -- came up with a creative way to protest the decision. Rather than purchase approved photographs, they commissioned city historian Chris Robinson to cover a recent match with Argyle using cartoons (reminds us of a criminal trial).

Tilt-shift lenses are usually pretty pricey, so many people fake the effect during post-processing by selectively blurring sections of their photographs. There's even simple web-apps that can add such blur to give your photographs a miniature scale model effect.

If faking the effect isn't legit enough to satisfy your photo-geekiness -- and you'd rather not drop big bucks on it either -- there's a nifty do-it-yourself solution you need to check out: Bhautik Joshi over at cow.mooh.org has a new DIY Tilt-Shift project that teaches you how to convert an old lens into various kinds of tilt-shift lenses.

In the spirit of the iPhone 4 vs. Canon 7D side-by-side camera comparison video, filmmaker Brandon Bloch has made a wonderfully clever juxtaposition of the Canon 7D and Mattel's Barbie Video Girl. The Barbie Video Girl alone is a thing of wonder -- it's a really bizarre bionic-looking glitz and glam doll with a camera built into her chest.

You've heard the term "photographic memory" before, but have you ever heard of someone who actually has it? Meet Stephen Wiltshire, a UK-born autistic savant with an extraordinary memory that has given him the nickname, "The Living Camera". The above is a short video showing his abilities that will make your jaws drop.

Here's a super random gift idea for photographers that have everything: a camera that's hidden behind what appears to be a normal shirt button. The Thanko Button Camera is attached to button-up shirts using special buttons that have a hole for the lens. If you don't have a shirt with black buttons, you'll be happy to know that the buttons come in three different colors: black, white, and pearl.

NewsARSE has a pretty funny satirical piece poking fun at the photographers’ rights situation in the UK: Police forces have …

Amateur Photographer is reporting that stock photo agency Getty Images added the …