September 2010

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Olympus E-5 and Samsung NX100 Officially Unveiled After Much Leakage

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.

Kate Moss LAX Video Helps Pass New Law Against California Paparazzi

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.

Canon G12 Price Leaked by Print Shop

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).

The Anatomy of a Canon 5D Mark II

So this is what a Canon 5D Mark II looks like on the inside. This anatomy illustration was done by concept artist Mads Peitersen, who created similar illustrations for other popular devices as well. Peiterson tells us, …

Seamless One World Portrait by Jock McDonald

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.

Canon EIS Mirrorless System Rumors Floating Around

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.

Olympus Set to Unveil the E-5 DSLR

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.

BBC Series from 1983 Featuring Masters of Photography

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.

Strange Contact Sheet Self Portraits

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.

Enlightening the Capture and Processing of Lightning

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 …

Canon 7D Footage Slowed Down to 1000 Frames per Second

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 …

Unbelievably Realistic Camera Tour of a Computer Generated Classroom

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.

HDR Video Demonstration Made with Two Canon 5D Mark IIs

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).

Photographer Creates Unique Webpage by Cloning Google

San Francisco-based photographer Michael Jang has worked in the business for over 30 years but wanted to have this personal website stand out -- so he decided to clone Google. Most visitors to his page will probably think they somehow landed onto a Google search results page until they give the text a closer look. Every link on the page points to something on the web that showcases Jang or his work, whether it's a photo of his in the SFMOMA, or an interview with him by the San Francisco …

Pac-Man Performed in Stop-Motion with Humans as Pixels

French-Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond created this fun little stop-motion video showing Pac-Man being played at a movie theater in Switzerland last month. The project had 111 patient volunteers sit, shift, and change shirts over the course of more than four hours. This is the fifth video in Reymond's GAME OVER project, in which he recreates classic arcade games with humans as pixels.

Pentax Embraces Customizability with LEGO-Style Blocks and Skins

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.

New Pentax K-r Replaces the Rainbow-Friendly K-x DSLR

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.

The Kite Photography of UC Berkeley Professor Charles Benton

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).

Hands-On with the Nikon 24-70mm Cup

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.

New TSA Poster Vilifies Pointing Canons at Airplanes

Photography rights advocate Carlos Miller came across the above poster recently put out by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Apparently the administration doesn't know that there's a huge number of non-terrorist photographers who enjoy doing something called aviation photography.

Want an Ostrich Skin Camera? There’s a Leica for That!

Leave it to Leica to come up with funky ideas for limited edition cameras. After recently releasing a special edition "Le Mans" X1 with what appeared to be a simple sticker added to an otherwise standard camera, Leica is turning to exotic leathers. They're releasing a limited edition X1 in Japan with black embossed ostrich skin. Only 80 of these cameras will be produced, and the skin bumps the price of the X1 from $1,995 up to $2,400. That is some expensive bird skin.

Sara Bareilles Music Video Features Polaroids and Contact Sheets

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 Unveils the P7000, S8100, and S80 Compact Cameras

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.

Tom Guilmette Tries Out the Phantom HD

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.

Takara Tomy Toy Camera Brings 3D Photography to Children

This morning Japanese toy maker Takara Tomy announced the 3d Shot Camera, a simple toy camera that lets kids shoot 3D stereoscopic photos, print them out, and view them using special fold-up viewer. All that is pretty cool and dandy, but now comes some of the downsides: the camera costs $70, and only weighs in at 0.3 megapixels. Shucks.

Limited Edition Canon F-1 Belt Buckle

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 and His Amazing Trailer-Sized Camera

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.

Aster Be Good: Post-Processing Purply Flowers

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 …

Mysterious White Camera is the Samsung NX 100 After All

It looks like the mysterious white camera that we've been tracking is the upcoming Samsung NX100 after all (after we stated it wasn't yesterday). Engadget received a handful of photos showing that camera will come in white, explaining why the three strange cameras leaked in the National Geographic video all look similar.

Blank Nikon D7000 Pages Confirm that Announcement is Near

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.

Abstract Pinhole Photos Created with Distressed Color Film

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.

Video Tutorial for Making Custom Bokeh

Here's an easy to follow video tutorial by photographer Lucas Ridley teaching you how to create custom bokeh shapes using a construction paper cap placed over your lens. Ridley's design is flexible, allowing you to swap shapes easily by sliding them in and out of the cap.

Samsung NX100 Photo and Specs Leaked

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.

Using a Leica Noctilux on a Sony NEX

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.

Man Creates a Frankencam Using an iPhone and Canon SLR

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 …