September 2010

Leica may have teamed up with the Audi design team for the limited edition Titanium M9 they announced yesterday at Photokina, but Hasselblad has just announced a car partnership of their own: the limited edition Ferrari H4D digital medium format camera. Now pro photographers who are determined to flaunt opulence can shoot with a flaming red camera that matches their car. The camera is even more "limited edition" than the Titanium M9, with 499 being produced instead of 500.

Here are a couple new commercials for Brothers printers that blend stop-motion and time-lapse photography in pretty interesting ways with real people. We love how the technique makes the people look like claymation figures walking around in miniature sets. The foreground is done in stop-motion while time-lapse photography provided the scenes shown in the animated paper.

Earlier this year when Hasselblad announced the H4D-40, we found it interesting that Hasselblad claimed to be trying to reach a younger generation of photographers with the $20,000 camera. At Photokina today, Hasselblad introduced the H4D-31, a camera that actually makes digital medium format photography considerably more affordable (albeit still pretty darn expensive for a "young photographer").

National Geographic cameraman Bob Poole was in Mali searching for elephants when he and his team were engulfed by a gigantic sandstorm that spanned the horizon. The sandstorm is so massive that it blocks out the sun for four hours. Like any good cameraman, Poole keeps his camera rolling during the whole ordeal, capturing amazing footage of what it's like to be eaten by a dust storm.

In China there's a belief that burning paper representations of a deceased person's belongings allows it to be transfered to the afterlife for the departed person to use.

London filmmaker Temujin Doran created this great little video for Lego that doesn't involve any flashy effects or fancy camera techniques -- just a child-like imagination. It won a prize at the prestigious Cannes Lions advertising festival in 2010.

Leica's announcements at Photokina have been pretty dull so far compared to some of the other cameras that have been unveiled. Aside from announcing a Panasonic LX5 rebranded as a Leica D-LUX 5 and a Panasonic FZ100 rebranded as a Leica V-Lux 2, they've also announcement a "Titanium" version of the M9 digital rangefinder of which only 500 pieces will be made.

Editor's note: This tutorial was inspired by Phillip Maisel's "A More Open Place" project, which we featured here last week.

Apparently Sigma worked so hard on ensuring image and build quality on its new flagship SD1 DSLR that they forgot that overlooked the fact that video recording is pretty much a standard feature on new DSLRs these days. We forgive them, because they've included a 46-megapixel Foveon sensor that uses 3 stacked sensors of 15.3 megapixels each to capture red, green, and blue light. The resulting images are 15.3 megapixels in size with color resolution that's superior to traditional sensors.

A couple days ago we featured a compilation of stunning time lapse clips shot in the desert by Mike Flores. The video above is a change in scenery, but epic nonetheless. Photographer Simon Christen shot the various clips using a Canon 40D (10-22mm, 24-70mm, and 70-200mm) around the San Francisco Bay Area over the course of a year. His camera was always in manual mode, and he adjusted the settings as the light changed due to things like fog and clouds.

Panasonic announced the Lumix GH2 today at Photokina. Here's the low down: the GH2 is a 16.05 megapixel Micro Four Thirds EVIL camera with an ISO range of 160 to 12800, 23 autofocus points, face detection, a 3-inch swiveling LCD screen, and HD video recording at 1080p (60i/24p). You can also use the 3D lens Panasonic announced recently to capture 3D photos with this camera. This camera will ship by the end of this year at a price of $900 for the body only.

The retro FinePix X100 made a huge splash when it was announced a couple days ago, and now more details are being revealed. The beautiful camera will be available starting March 2011 at the price of around $1,000, quite a few pennies more than what many of us were hoping for.

The latest Transformers movie to crawl out of the Hollywood cookie-cutter machine had a budget of $200 million. The above 2.5 minute short film was created by Amateur Russian filmmaker Alexander Semenov using a Canon 550D (with a 18-55mm kit lens and 50mm 1.8) and a Nikon D5000 (with a 18-55mm kit lens). In other words, the gear used was entry-level quality with kit lenses.

Future generations of photographers may one day look back and wonder why we often blinded each other with painfully bright flashes of light for the sake of proper exposure.

Just unveiled at Photokina, Casio's new EXILIM EX-H20G point-and-shoot is a pretty ordinary 14.1 megapixel HD video-capable camera with a trick up its sleeve: a hybrid GPS system for geotagging your photos. Ordinarily cameras geotag your images with location based on signals from GPS satellites, but become oblivious to where you are if you move to a location where the signals can't be detected. The EX-H20G attempts to overcome this problem by storing the user's last known satellite location in …

It's funny how humor poking fun at hipsters seems to always include some reference to cameras and photography (see our hipster dinosaur post). College Humor has posted a pretty funny series of illustrations imagining what comics would be like if superheroes were hipsters. This photography-loving Spiderman is our fav.

This has got to be one of the awesomest uses of a record player ever: photographer Kim Pimmel photographed light sources attached to a spinning record player in the dark, and strung the still frames together into a beautifully hypnotic stop-motion video set to Tron.

Pentax has announced its new K-5 DSLR camera as Photokina is getting underway in Cologne, Germany. The new 16.2 megapixel CMOS sensor camera has nice but pretty standard specs and features: 11 autofocus points, an HDR mode, 7fps burst shooting, a 3-inch LCD screen, an ISO range of 100 to 12800 (expandable to 80 to 51200 via custom functions), 100% viewfinder coverage, 1080p video recording at 25fps, and a magnesium alloy body. The K-5 will be available starting in mid-October at around £1200 …

Wow... Fujifilm just unveiled a new EVIL compact camera it's going to be showing off at Photokina, and it look amazing. The camera is styled like a film rangefinder camera, with a leathery covering surrounding the body and a magnesium alloy top and base plate. Inside the camera is a 12.3 megapixel APS-C sensor that has an ISO range of 200 to 6400 and captures 720p video or stills at 5fps. There's a 2.8 inch LCD on the back, and a new and innovative hybrid viewfinder that can toggle between …

The music video for "My Favorite Pillow" by Rhett & Link has the same kind of awesomeness and creativity that made OK Go the kings of viral music videos. Released less than a week ago, the video already has millions of views. It's a backwards music video in which everything is playing in reverse, but the singers still manage to mouth the words correctly. There's also 600 pillows used in the video, which obviously creates instant awesomeness in itself.

Well whaddya know, it looks like besides being a masterful ping pong player, Bruce Lee was also an avid Nikon user! …

This is a stunning montage of timelapse clips created by Mike Flores during the past year. Many of the scenes are layered beautifully, with the desert in the foreground, clouds whizzing across the sky, and the universe spinning brightly in the background.

Mats Wernersson's website is aptly named, "The Camera Maker". Wernersson creates his own custom cameras by hand, making everything from 9x12 field cameras to "frankencameras" created for specific purposes from existing bodies. The above camera is a 3D 35mm camera created by fusing two Konica FS1 bodies together.

My boys have started getting into photography, but often have trouble keeping the camera still enough for really clear shots.

The above photo by Aaron Yeo, titled "Woodwards Collage", has the honor of being the 5 billionth photograph uploaded to Flickr. According to the blog Media Culpa, Flickr receives about a billion photographs per year, while 2.5 billion photos are uploaded per month to Facebook.

Robert Overweg is a photographer who works in the virtual world. His series, "the end of the virtual world", contains images captured in popular computer games at the edges of the "world". Based in the Netherlands, Overweg has been working exclusively in the virtual world since 2007.

Photographer Timur Civan had a project that required vintage-looking photographs. Originally planning to shoot the project on a 4x5 large format camera, he abandoned that route after calculating the cost for equipment and processing. His lens technician friend then discovered a 1908 Wollensak 35mm F5.0 Cine-Velostigmat hand-cranked lens in a box of spare parts, and spent 6 hours helping him make the lens fit on an EF mount for Civan's 5D Mark II.

Forget the uber-rare Leica MP2 that's going on auction at the end of this year. If you want a unique camera but don't want to trade your house for it, you can save yourself a couple hundred grand by going for this brand new made-for-NASA Hasselblad MKWE up for sale on eBay for a cool $33,751.

Less than a year ago when I was a grad student at Berkeley, I heard a guest lecture by Professor Daniel Fletcher in which he discussed his CellScope project. His group aims to transform cell phones into light microscopes to aid in disease diagnosis in developing countries. Turns out the concept can be used for more than medical purposes.

One of the big features touted by Samsung in the unveiling of the new Samsung NX100 was the i-Function lens system, which allows people to adjust camera settings traditionally handled only by the camera body. By placing an "i-Function" button on the lens, the focus ring suddenly has a dual purpose, becoming the "dial" that is traditionally used to change things like aperture and shutter speed.

The top photo was published by Al-Ahram, Egypt's second-oldest and most widely circulated newspaper, while the photo below it is another photo taken at almost exactly the same moment in time by Getty Photographer Alex Wong. The main gripe people have with the edited photo is that the paper placed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at the front of the group -- suggesting that he was leading the Middle East peace talks -- while he was actually trailing behind the others.

The above photographs were anonymously emailed to Nikon Rumors recently, and appear to show Nikon presenting some sort of upcoming "Q" camera. The fact that Nikon has begun including the text "F Mount" on their rear lens caps seems to indicate that we might see a new mount introduced soon, possibly for a new EVIL system and in time for Photokina.

Super nerd Doctor Popular recently did a wiggle stereoscopy experiment using two Flip video cameras and $10 in nuts and bolts, filming himself doing yo-yo tricks at AT&T Park in San Francisco. Wiggle stereoscopy is when images from two slightly offset points of view are quickly alternated, resulting in a 3D effect that does not require special glasses to view. A few months ago we shared the world's first music video that utilized the technique.

Totems is a series by photographer Alain Delorme that imagines an augmented reality of Chinese migrant workers in Shanghai transporting monstrous shipments from place to place using bicycles. Delorme captured 6,000 photographs over the course of 44 days while biking around Shanghai, and then created these photo-manipulations using Photoshop.

This Leica MP2 camera and matching Wetzlar electric motor are going up for auction at WestLicht Auction in December of this year. The starting price for this auction is €80,000 (~$105,000), and the camera is expected to fetch up to €180,000 (~$235,440).

Lightroom adjustment sliders are nice and all, but wouldn't it be neat if fine adjustments could be made using our hands and physical sliders rather than a mouse and virtual ones? There's an open source program called PADDY for Lightroom that allows you to map adjustment settings in Lightroom to external devices, including MIDI faders with sliders and knobs. Here's the description:

These photographers were taken by Phillip Maisel as part of his project, "A More Open Place". He made long exposure photographs of Facebook photos while flipping through albums, creating this surreal, layered effect.

It looked like quite a deal -- a photographer with an impressive portfolio of photographs offering a $500 photo package for $65 on the social buying website Groupon. The offer was so enticing that all 1,175 packages quickly sold out, generating over $76,000 in revenue. That's when people started noticing something fishy about Dana Dawes and her photography.

Most of the time we come across an absurdly large and expensive lens on eBay, it's some sort of lens with focal lengths in the thousands of millimeters (e.g. this 5200mm Canon lens or this 2000mm Nikon lens).

life.turns. is a creative crowd-sourced stop-motion project by photo sharing service Blipfoto. By dividing the motion of a human walking into eight simple frames, they invited contributors to submit photos of people in one of the eight poses. 1025 photos were submitted in 40 days. After putting the submissions in sequence and aligning them, what resulted was a stop-motion video of thousands of people in 21 different countries walking.

Superheroes is a project by photographer Dulce Pinzon in which she shoots Mexican migrant workers in New York City as well-known comic book characters while they're on the job. In addition to creating the photographs, Pinzon documents the worker's name, the hometown in Mexico, and the amount of money they send back to their families each week.

Two advantages of the translucent mirror found in the Sony A33 and A55 are high fps continuous shooting (since the mirror doesn't slow things down) and the lack of viewfinder blackouts when shots are being captured.

Remember the awesome Leica M9 iPhone 4 skin that we featured back in August? If you desperately wanted one, today is your lucky day -- we've created our own and it's for sale in the PetaPixel Store for $13 with free shipping within the US! …

Nikon has officially announced the D7000, a camera that we've know about for quite some time now through various rumors. The camera replaces the Nikon D90, and has a number of interesting upgrades: 11 autofocus points has been increased to a whopping 39-point system, the megapixel count has been increased from 12.3 to 16.2, the 96% viewfinder coverage has been replaced with pro-level 100% coverage, parts are now beefed up with magnesium alloy, one SD card slot has been increased to two, 4.5 fps …

This video will blow your mind. We've all seen light-painting photos and stop-motion animations created with those photos, but marketing agency Dentsu London figured out how to take light painting a step further using an iPad.

Jim Reed is a photographer that does full-time storm chasing. When normal people are running away from things like hurricanes and tornados, Jim Reed grabs his camera, hops into his car, and sets out on a mission of making amazing storm photographs. The above video is a short segment by Good Morning America interviewing him and promoting his book. It sure takes nerve to head into photo shoots not knowing whether you'll make it out in once piece.

What appear to be legitimate photos of the soon-to-be-announced Nikon D7000 DSLR were leaked onto the web today. The camera is expected to replace the D90, occupying a midrange DX sensor spot a step above the recently announced Nikon D3100. The official announcement for this camera, some new lenses, and a new Speedlight flash are expected to come at midnight tonight. Stay tuned.

Some of the most raw, intimate and iconic photographs of the Civil Rights Movement were taken by photojournalist Ernest C. Withers. He was present during the entire Emmett Till trial, when Martin Luther King, Jr. rode the first desegregated bus, and in the hotel room where Dr. King was assassinated. Many civil rights activists would cite Withers' images as key to informing America of their plight and fight for equality.

A week after their rival Nikon unveiled their P7000 compact camera for prosumers, Canon is firing back with their newly announced G12. The cameras are pretty similar actually -- the G12 has a 10 megapixel sensor, 5x lens, 2.8 inch swiveling LCD screen, a special HDR mode, and (most importantly) 720p HD video recording. It arrives in the beginning of October for $500.

Look at the above photos. Now look again. The photos are now diamonds! Notice anything? When I saw these photos the first time, it actually took me a few seconds to realize what was going on. I think it was a case of change blindness. Switcheroo is a fun project by Hana Pesut in which she has two people take two photos where they switch places while everything else remains the same -- including the clothes!