Looks like the rumors were dead on. Both the Olympus E-5 DSLR and Samsung NX1000 EVIL cameras have been officially announced by their respective companies with exactly the same design and specs that have been circulating the blogosphere. Camera makers haven't been doing a good job at keeping their news under wraps as of late.
We've covered quite a few stories of photographers being harassed while doing legitimate photography, but what about cases in which photographers are doing the harassing? For many of you, paparazzi likely come to mind. The above video was published by Hollywood.tv back in 2008, and shows supermodel Kate Moss trying to leave Los Angeles International Airport with her young daughter while being hounded by a swarm of paparazzi.
Mattijn Franssen is an artist based in the Netherlands who combines his photographs into beautiful and surreal photomontages.
A print shop in Paris called BK Photo just released a product catalog that includes the not-yet-announced Canon G12 and its price: 549 Euros (~$706 US). Pretty much everything about this camera is known already from various leaks and accidentally published news articles. It'll be a 10 megapixel camera with HD video recording and a special HDR feature that automatically snaps bad photos (just kidding).
So this is what a Canon 5D Mark II looks like on the inside. This anatomy illustration was done …
Jock McDonald is a San Francisco-based photographer that has travelled the world, photographing people of different ages and cultures. He recently teamed up with animator Paul Blain to transform his black-and-white portraits spanning decades into a single 17-minute long video. The twist is that the transitions between faces are seamless using morphing, resulting in what feels like a single, dynamic portrait of the world.
There's a very improbable rumor floating around about a new Canon EIS (Electro Imaging System) mirrorless system that will be announced in mid-2011. The rumor was first posted to a couple Chinese forums, xitek and 520dc. EOSHD then created the above graphic with a fake logo and non-EVIL camera design.
So what's in the rumor? The new Canon EIS 60 mirrorless camera will supposedly have a sensor nearly identical in size to the Micro Four Thirds system that captures 22 megapixels. Continuous shooting goes up to a whopping 20 frames per second at 5.5 megapixels. HD video recording is included, and ISO is expandable up to 25,600.
The above teaser was leaked late last week, revealing that Olympus has a E-series DSLR announcement on September 15th. It is rumored to be the E-5, which will succeed their E-3 flagship DSLR, and comes about three years after the E-3 was announced. Rumored specs include a 12.3 megapixel sensor, HD (720p) video recording at 30fps, 5 fps shooting, in-body image stabilization, swiveling LCD display, 11 autofocus points, build-in wireless flash, and ISO that goes up to 6400.
In 1983 the BBC aired a series called "Master Photographers" in which they interviewed some of the biggest names in photography at the time, including Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The series can't be found anywhere on DVD, but luckily many of the episodes have been uploaded to YouTube. If you're at all interested in learning how historical greats worked and thought, this is a video series you have to bookmark and chew through.
Check out these Nikon pendants for sale on eBay for the hardcore Nikon enthusiast. You can find them for about $3 (shipping included) by doing a quick search for "nikon necklace".
Remember back in April when we shared a story in which an Octopus stole a point-and-shoot camera and led the owner in a 5 minute chase? Well now there's a story that's crazier and bigger in almost every aspect.
Nic Grobler and Stan Engelbrecht have a great photography project in which they examine the bicycling culture in South Africa.
[...] we are not photographing people who ride purely for exercise or recreation, but instead we are focussing on those who use bicycles as an integral tool in their day-to-day existence. We've noticed that in South Africa, especially in the major centers, very few people use bicycles as mode of transport. This is very strange since we have no proper public transport infrastructure, and that which does exist is expensive and unsafe.
The duo raised $15,000 through social funding website Kickstarter in 55 days, and traveled around South Africa meeting and photographing the cyclists they met. They're currently working on raising an additional $7,500 to have 3,000 copies of their Bicycle Portraits book published.
Nikon Rumors received an interesting anonymous tip a few days ago from someone claiming …
Texas A&M graduate student Roman Kogan has written an interesting program that turns your webcam into scanner camera.
This program turns your webcam into a scanner camera, similar to the ones used to record photo finishes, but much, much, much slower. With it, you can create images like the ones on this page with ease and with no digital manipulation! It works by taking one pixel line at a time and arranging those slices in a line to produce the image. Thus one dimension of the image is spacial, and the other is temporal.
Remember the contact sheet art we shared a while back? Photographer Karl Baden does something similar -- he creates strange contact sheet self-portraits. These images were all created back in 1980. How a roll of film is exposed needs to be carefully planned out in order to know exactly where each shot will appear on the resulting contact sheet.
Each photo is a pretty normal shot of some area of Baden's face or hands, but when combined into a contact sheet, the resulting image is quite... unique.
Living in the Southwest United States gives me a great opportunity to capture lighting. Every summer “Monsoon Season” arrives, officially June 15 through Sept 15th, in Arizona. Prevailing northwesterly winds carry humid air north out of Mexico where it meets the hot air of the desert, resulting in powerful thunderstorms nearly everyday. The thunderstorms often produce localized areas of heavy wind, thick blowing dust (Haboobs), rain, and most importantly, lightning. I regularly track the storms on the local Doppler radar feeds and try to guess where the best shooting will take place.
If you don't have the $2,500 needed to rent a Phantom camera for a day but would like to have super slow motion in your videos, you can fake the effect using special software designed for the task. The above video by Oton Bačar was recorded on a Canon 7D at 60 frames per second, but was slowed down to mimic 1000fps in After Effects with Twixtor, a plugin that allows you to speed up or slow down footage smoothly. It uses warping and interpolation to provide smooth results, avoiding the choppiness that you see when you play normal video back in "slow motion".
Elena Kalis is a Bahamas-based photographer that specializes in underwater photography. Among her projects are a series of photographs that put an underwater twist on Alice in Wonderland.
If you were reading PetaPixel earlier this year, you probably remember the jaw-dropping CGI animation titled "The Third & The Seventh". Here's another extremely realistic and detailed computer-generated animation that simulates a camera traveling through a classroom (with lens flares and all). It was created by Israel-based Studio Aiko.
Earlier today Lens Tip published a leaked photograph of an upcoming Pentax K-5.
Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner was randomly selected and announced below. Last week we gave away …
You've most likely seen HDR photographs before, but how about HDR video? The above is a demonstration of HDR video by Soviet Montage, created using two Canon 5D Mark II DSLR cameras. Both cameras recorded identical scenes using a beam splitter, and captured the footage at different exposure values (over and under exposed).
I took this shot with my Canon EOS 450D, and a Canon 50mm f1.8 -- my favourite lens in the case of portraits especially.
I chose to make the shooting session about a hour and half before sunset when there's still a lot of light, but with a warm, lovely quality to the light. I prefer warm tones, and to emphasize these tones and balance the cool colours of my model dress and tree leaves I set White Balancing to "cloudy". You can see in the picture that the sun was on the right side of model, so she didn't have too much direct light on her face. The white wall behind acted as a discrete reflecting panel, resulting in light that's quite uniform.
San Francisco-based photographer Michael Jang has worked …
French-Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond created this fun little stop-motion video showing Pac-Man being played at a movie theater in …
Pentax is trying all sorts of ways to differentiate its cameras from the 800-pound gorillas in the camera market, and apparently thinks customization is the best way to go. After allowing customizer the colors on traditionally boring-looking DSLRs with their K-x, they've just announced two new compact cameras that allow users to choose their own style.
Pentax has just launched a new color-happy DSLR to replace the K-x: the Pentax K-r. If you remember, the K-x was offered in a bajillion different body colors -- up to 100 in Japan. The company looks like it's aiming for the same eye-candy loving market with this new camera, unveiling it in red and white in addition to the standard black DSLR body.
This photograph results from exposing a pinhole camera while it’s spinning around on a record player. A simple yet …
Here's an interesting video created by Make Magazine showing how UC Berkeley architecture professor Charles Benton uses kites to capture amazing aerial photographs. Benton creates his own gear for mounting his DSLR on a kite and controlling it from afar -- you might be surprised at how creative some of his contraptions are (for one rig he uses a disposable camera, rubber bands, and a ping-pong ball).
We reported on the Nikon coffee cup that finally appeared on the web months ago, but didn't get our hands on one until today. We did an unboxing of the Canon coffee mug and thermos back in June, so we'll do a similar hands-on for this Nikon one. Like the Canon ones, there's a whole bunch of places making these things (none of which are the camera companies themselves), so there might be some variation on how the thing looks depending on where you buy it from.
Photography rights advocate Carlos Miller came across the above poster recently put out …
Leave it to Leica to come up with funky ideas for limited edition cameras. After recently releasing a …
The music video for Sara Bareilles' song "King of Anything" has everything contained in Polaroids and contact sheets. The concept is pretty neat. Can you imagine how mind-boggling this video would have been if they had done it in stop-motion with individual Polaroid photos and carefully exposed film strips? That'd be epic.
Nikon announced three new compact digital cameras this morning. The first is the COOLPIX P7000, a competitor to the Canon G11 (and possibly G12 soon). This is a prosumer level 10.1 megapixel (CCD) camera that allows you to shoot in RAW with all sorts of manual controls. It can also record HD video (720p) at 24 fps, and has an ISO range up to 6400. Additional plusses are a 3-inch LCD screen and an optical viewfinder. The camera will arrive later this month at a price of $500.
You know all those eye-popping slow motion videos we feature occasionally on PetaPixel? Many (if not most) of them were filmed with the Phantom HD Gold camera. This camera is capable of shooting thousands of frames per second, and costs a staggering $2,500 to rent for a single day.
This morning Japanese toy maker Takara Tomy announced the 3d Shot Camera, a simple toy camera that lets kids …
We featured a Nikon belt buckle here last month, and now here's one by Canon. It's a limited edition Canon F-1 belt buckle made by Lewis Buckles in Chicago for Canon in the 1970s. Charles Eves won the one above for $3 in an eBay auction. The seller was a former Canon salesman that was awarded the belt buckle for his high sales.
John Chiara is a San Francisco-based photographer that uses an uber-large format camera the size of a trailer that he constructed himself. The camera is so dang big that setting up the thing requires a car jack and lots of yanking. After setting up the film inside the camera, Chiara climbs out of the camera through a long black garbage-bag style tube. To develop the prints, he uses an 18-inch diameter sewage pipe that he pours chemicals into and rolls around on the ground.
Asters of any kind provide such potential in photography: the colours and the gentle curve of their tiny thin petals combines with their close-growing nature to give the impression either of flowers fighting each other for space and light or of a mass of colour, huddled together for comfort. The clump of asters shown in this shot are a soft, luscious purply-cerulean-cornflowery-blue. Light seems to dance off the petals. Or it would, had there been much light when I took this. Instead, it was a fairly overcast day and I pondered whether it was worth the damp knees necessary to get down low enough to grab this shot. Turned out it was.
German photographer Carolin Wanitzek's Die Grenze (The Border) project explores the intersection of dreams and reality.
It looks like the mysterious white camera that we’ve been tracking …
Here's just a fun tidbit to chew on while we wait for the official Nikon D7000 announcement: Nikon Rumors discovered today that the Nikon sites of certain European countries (e.g. Germany, Poland, and Italy) have already put up placeholder pages for the upcoming camera. There are no links to these pages, but they can be accessed by using "d7000" in the URL.
Drew Kunz has a pretty neat way of creating abstract pinhole photographs. Using a film canister as his "camera", he drills small holes into rolls of color film, distresses the film further with a small nail, and then develops the exposed film first with coffee and sodium carbonate, and finally with C-41.
Here’s an easy to follow video tutorial by photographer Lucas Ridley teaching you …
A photo and diagram of the upcoming Samsung NX100 were leaked today on the dpreview forums by a guy named Alex Ramos. According to Mirrorless Rumors, the NX100 will be a 14.6 megapixel HD video capable (720p) camera with an ISO range of 100 to 6400. An electronic viewfinder can optionally be attached via the hotshoe, and there is no built-in flash.
Darren Chan recently attached his $6,500 Leica Noctilux 50mm f/1 lens to his Sony NEX-5 camera using an adapter in order to test out the unique combo. As you might expect, the combo is great for creamy bokeh and doing nighttime street photography in areas with low light.
Nikon recently (and quietly) replaced their LF-1 lens cap with the LF-4 (so much for Nikon tetraphobia), …
Imagine you snap out of unconsciousness and realize you've been in a pretty serious accident. You have no memory of what happened, but luckily you were wearing a motorcycle camera that was filming your ride.
New York City-based photographer Zack Seckler's Less than Ordinary series is composed of beautifully captured photographs that have clever twists and creative concepts that make you look twice.
For whatever reason, Vimeo user Aniebres decided to combine the bulkiness of an SLR camera with the lowly sensor of a phone camera. Taking an old Canon film SLR, he gutted it and created a space for his iPhone to snap into place. What's sad is that the SLR acts as a completely useless shell, and the lens has to be removed for photos to be taken. If only he took off the lame Apple sticker on the front, he might be able to pass off as a photographer... as long as he only snapped photos while changing lenses or something.