Alan Morris created a DIY LCD viewfinder loupe by slicing the viewfinder off a pair of child binoculars and building the loupe using plexiglass. The total cost came out to about $10-15. It's a bit wobbly when not in use, but that just gives it character, right?
Last week Scott Bourne published an article on Photofocus titled, "Photos On Twitter – What You Should Know". In it, he claimed that Twitter's terms of service (TOS) forced photographers to give Twitter a license to do whatever they wanted with photos shared through the service. The argument centered around a couple paragraphs found in the document: …
Light painting and calligraphy are both hard enough skills to master on their own, but what about combining the two and doing it well? That's what French artist Julien Breton specializes in. These photographs show Breton's calligraphy created with light with no trickery involved at all.
The first phone to use the 16 megapixel Sony CMOS sensor announced at the beginning of the month has emerged, and it's a Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot phone. The Cyber-shot S006 cellphone has a 16.2 megapixel sensor and ISO that goes up to 12,800, but it still has a camera-phone with its tiny lens rather than the phone-camera look adopted by the new Panasonic Lumix camera. Thus, though the S006 might pack 3 more megapixels than its Lumix counterpart, the 13.2 megapixel Lumix might end up delivering …
Terrorists aren't the only people photographers are being mistaken for in the UK -- upscale shopping area Multrees Walk in Edinburgh has begun targeting photographers after a string of thefts by ram raiders, or burglars who drive large vehicles through the front of stores and then loot them. The above video shows a confrontation with security that occurred after a guy and his friend snapped a photo of a shop window.
Solaroids are unique prints created by photographer Jeff Mclane by exposing large format (4x5 in) Fuji instant film to direct UV light for long periods of time.
If you have a Panasonic Micro Four Thirds camera and a love for retro photos, the Skink Pinhole Pancake Pro Kit can instantly turn your camera into a digital Holga pinhole camera. It's a modular system that provides three kinds of "holes": …
Meet the Inflatable Photo Studio (IPS), a giant plastic bag that inflates in 3 minutes to provide you with a super-portable temporary photo studio. This might be an elaborate, outdated April Fools joke, but the website looks somewhat legitimate, and there's even a video demonstrating the thing in action.
There was quite an outcry back in September when we shared the iCannon 4 project, where some guy gutted his Canon film SLR to use it as a shell for an iPhone 4. The frankencamera shown above is a bit cooler - it was created using a Russian Leica imitation and a Sony DSC-WX1 digital compact. Both cameras were disassembled, with the rangefinder contributing the outer shell and then Sony cam offering the inner workings. What's amazing is that the resulting camera looks like a nicely designed retro …
Lens caps, filters, and hoods are great from protecting lenses from scratches and bumps, but they aren't the best for reducing the impact in the case that you accidentally drop your gear. The Lens Guard by DeluxGear is designed to absorb this kind of shock, protecting your lens from the impact of bumps and drops, and slips over lenses snugly with or without the filters or lens cap attached.
A visual explanation of why vampires and photo booths don't mix. Woot is selling this shirt today -- grab it now for $10.
If you're like a lot of people, you might have felt the urge to secretly shoot where there are signs posted prohibiting photography. Strictly No Photography is a website that aggregates these photographs, giving the public a glimpse into various things that are off limits to cameras. There's photographs from museums, theaters, and even a collection of "no photography allowed" signs.
The Canon 1200mm f/5.6 L lens is a legendary optic that B&H calls "The Mother of all Telephotos". It's a 36 pound behemoth that costs $120,000 if you can find one for sale -- only a handful of them were made at a rate of 2 per year (delivery time was 18 months). When coupled with a crop factor body (e.g. the Canon 7D) and a 2x extender, the lens is the equivalent of a 3840mm f/11. In the above video, Bryan Carnathan of The Digital Picture gives us a glimpse of the lens in action.
The expression "shooting from the hip" might soon become "shooting from the ear" for iPhone photographers. There's a new app in town called Camera Camouflage that allows you to sneakily photograph while appearing to be engaged in a phone conversation. The app can activate your phones ringtone, allowing you to "take a call", and then snaps photos whenever you talk (it's voice activated). On the iPhone 4, the app deactivates the flash by default, helping you avoid potentially embarrassing …
Here's a scan of a Mechanix Illustrated magazine article from 1941 teaching readers how to get creative with their prints by creating "Shadowgraphs", a technique that uses photographs for photograms: …
Itching to get your hands on the Nikon D7000? You might want to try Best Buy. Apparently some Best Buy stores are breaking the rules and selling Nikon D7000 kits before the camera is officially available on Sunday. Here are some unboxing videos created by the lucky few who were able to purchase the D7000 early.
Last month we shared some of Kiel Johnson's amazing cardboard camera creations, and now here's a behind-the-scenes video showing how one of them (a twin lens reflex camera) was made. Kiel uses only three materials: cardboard, tape, and glue. I had no idea the cameras were so massive, since the photos he takes of them don't show any indication of scale.
Here's a useful idea related to the memory card recovery tutorial we shared yesterday: if you're ever confronted by someone who forces you to delete your photos (and our magical photographers' rights gray card doesn't work), go ahead and delete them! What most people don't know is that deleted photos can easily be recovered afterward. Even photos on a memory card that's formatted and completely wiped can usually be restored.
Here's an eye-opening look at the world of food styling and photography, where Elmer's glue is used for cereal milk, hamburgers are filled with sponges, brownies are sprayed with WD-40, and salad is padded with mashed potatoes. Food stylist Kim Krejca and photographer Rick Gayle discuss some of the tricks and techniques used to make food look as appetizing as possible while keeping it realistic. It's an episode from Adorama's How'd They Do That? series of videos.
Owners of Sony's NEX line of EVIL cameras can now autofocus A-mount lenses that are used with Alpha DSLRs. Previously A-mount lenses attached to NEX cameras via the $200 LA-EA1 adapter could only be manually focused, but with the firmware update Sony released today they can be autofocused for single shots at the blazing speed of 2 to 7 seconds per autofocus.
Apparently inspired by the f-stop watch we posted on recently, theres a new widget for Android phones that puts an aperture clock on your home screen. Unlike the wrist watch, the widget actually adjusts the "aperture" depending on what time it is, though it refreshes every half hour to save battery life. The bad news is that this dash of geekery comes at a price -- the app costs $1.05 over at AppBrain. Someone make a free version please.
FindTheBest is the latest startup founded by Kevin O’Connor, the guy who started the online ad company DoubleClick and sold it to Google for over $3 billion. It's a human-powered comparison engine consisting of "comparison apps" in which various things of the same category are compared side by side with comparison points specific to that category. For example, the camera lenses comparison app allows you to browse lenses from a number of manufacturers, filtering and ordering them by things …
cookieboy makes awesome cookies, and we especially love this super detailed camera cookie he created. It even has a camera strap attached!
New York City photographer Sally Davies purchased a McDonalds Happy Meal on April 10th of this year and left it out uncovered on her coffee table to prove wrong a friend who said it would rot after only a few days. After about two weeks of photographing the food, Davies realized that absolutely nothing was happening, so she began taking pictures once a week. After 180 days Davies shot the 27th photograph, with the meal looking almost identical to when she first bought it. The 1st and 27th …
Next time you shoot a fireworks display, try combining the individual photos you capture into a collage of fireworks explosions afterward. Jesse Garcia created the above image with 50 different photographs.
A couple days ago our minds were blown by a diminished reality demonstration showing objects being removed from live video feeds. Today's mind-blowing video is a demonstration of MovieReshape, an image manipulation program by German researchers that's going to make it much harder to believe anything our eyes see in future videos. As you can see in the demonstration above, the software allows physical characteristics of a person in a video to be manipulated by simply dragging sliders around.
Last night my pastor emailed me telling me that he had accidentally deleted an entire folder of photographs off his Sony compact camera, and that Sony's technical support informed him that it would cost $200-300 for them to recover the photos. After I got a hold of the memory card, I checked some of the recovery programs I've used in the past, but discovered that they now require paid licenses to actual do recovery (though analysis is free). I then stumbled across PhotoRec, a free and open …
Foodscapes is a series by photographer Carl Warner in which he creates beautiful surreal landscapes using various foods. Warner starts by visualizing and sketching his ideas, which are then built on a large table in his studio with the help of his team. Large blocks of polystyrene are carved and covered with ingredients in order to make the hills seen in his photos, while shallow tanks are used to create lakes, rivers, and seas. Photographs for three different layers (foreground, middle ground, …
If you shoot often, then you probably go through the hassles of sticking your memory card in a card reader and battery in a battery charger often as well. While these tasks don't take much time in themselves, doing them day after day can cause them to become quite tedious. Canon's Cross Media Station is designed to make these things a breeze, allowing you to do both by simply placing your camera (or two, or three) on the device, which looks like a slick scanner.
If you’ve never been on a budget and blow money like a vuvuzela at a football game, don’t bother reading any further. If you like saving money and are on a budget, then please continue reading.
"Seaweed" is the sixth lo-fi video experiment by London-based filmmakers Luke White and Remi Weekes, who go by Tell No One. It's a beautiful video in which a "still" frame is captured and frozen every few seconds, resulting in a seaweed sculpture created with human arms.
Here's a creative idea that we love - cut out giant letters, gather up some friends, and spell out words with shadows! Justin Swindle, a student at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, created the above image by cutting the sides off the biggest cardboard moving box he could get his hands on. He then traded the letters freehand and cut them out using a razor.
Randomly came across this camera today on Wikipedia in the article on Stasi, the secret police of East Germany. Apparently it's a "quiet" camera that was able to capture photographs through 1mm holes in walls. Now that's a pinhole camera.
Frank Taylor, the guy behind the unofficial Google Earth Blog, is currently on a 5 years sailing trip around the world called The Tahina Expedition. Google is actually a partner in the expedition, and is acquiring content generated by the trip for use in their products. One thing Taylor has been doing is taking aerial photographs of locations using a kite, resulting in imagery that's much clearer than the photos Google gets from their satellites up in space. Google has already begun …
First there was the House season finale filmed entirely with the Canon 5D Mark II to show the HD video recording potential of DSLRs, and now there's a star studded short film titled "The Commuter" being shot entirely on the new Nokia N8 cell phone, which boasts a 12 megapixel sensor and Carls Zeiss optics. The project -- directed by the McHenry Brothers -- began filming at the end of September and stars Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire), Pamela Anderson, and Ed Westwick (Gossip Girl).
Olympus is ditching the entry-level DSLR in favor of its Micro Four Thirds mount PEN line of EVIL cameras. In an interview with Fotopolis, Toshiyuki Terada -- the Product Manager of Olympus' SLR Planning Department -- is quoted as saying, …
Sam O’Hare is developing quite a reputation for his tilt-shift, miniature faking videos. O'Hare is the same guy that created The Sandpit, a beautiful tilt-shift video of New York City that has been watched nearly 2 million times. He was recently commissioned by the Coachella Music Festival to create a similar video for Coachella 2010, and the resulting video (shown above) is just as stunning.
The New York Times recently issued an apology for staged photographs that appeared alongside an art review that ran at the end of September.
We're having a hard time deciding whether to laugh or cry. Sony has been on top of the innovation game lately, but today's announcement is a bit silly -- they held a special press event to announce a pink version of the NEX-3 mirrorless camera. Earlier in October rumor sites were already reporting the October 12th press event scheduled to "announce a new mirrorless SLR". Other websites began speculating as to whether or not it would be a new EVIL model to compliment the NEX-3 and NEX-5. Turns …
SortMyPhotostream is a tool that most Flickr users will have no use for, but one that some might find invaluable. It all depends on whether you would like your Flickr photos' upload dates to reflect the day they were actually taken. For example, if you're doing a Project 365 and would like each photo to show up on the day it was taken in your calendar view, then this app can help you make that happen.
The Friend Poster is a fun product product offered by grad student Benjamin Lotan through his new website PrintingFacebook. For $20, you'll receive a 20 x 40 inch high-quality poster with thumbnails of the profile pictures of all your friends (works best for 200 to 2,200 friends). What's neat is that the posters are created using a traditional photographic print process: …
TDK has unveiled a monstrous 1 terabyte (1000 gigabyte) optical disc at CEATEC 2010 (the Japanese equivalent of CES), which wrapped up a couple days ago. The disc has 16 layers on both sides that each store 32GB of data, and is the equivalent to about 213 of the recordable DVD discs that you might be using to back up your image files.
Ars Technica published an interesting story today about how photos uploaded to Facebook remain on their servers months -- or even years -- after they're "deleted" from the service. We decided to test this out ourselves, uploading the above photo to Facebook, copying the direct URL to the image file, and then deleting both the photo and the album. As you can see from the hotlinked photo above, the image continues to live on as a zombie photo on Facebook's CDN servers.
Content aware fill was mind-boggling enough when it came out earlier this year, but what if the same concept could be applied to video... while the camera is recording? That's the idea behind Diminished Reality, a topic being researched by Jan Herling and Wolfgang Broll at the Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany. Basically, you select something in the scene against a uniform background, and it disappears from the resulting video. Pretty crazy.
If James Nachtwey were a street photographer, he wouldn't be the type to stand on the opposite sidewalk and stealthily capture unsuspecting strangers using a telephoto lens. As you can see from the photograph above, Nachtwey has a fearless attitude when shooting in dangerous situations, getting up close and personal with the subjects.
You've probably seen do-it-yourself pinhole cameras or even large format cameras created with foam core, but what about a solid metal do-it-yourself 35mm camera? That's exactly what Denis Mo decided to create, posting his step-by-step documentation to French camera forum collection-appareils.fr.
If you use GIMP as a Photoshop alternative, but would like a free program to handle the processing of Raw image files as well, check out RawTherapee. It's a free raw image processing program that has a polished user interface and a solid list of features. Unless you want to compile the source code yourself, you can download the latest version of the program from this page. It's available for Linux and Windows, though Mac OSX versions are available too (though they might not be as stable).
When Ria van Dijk of the Netherlands was sixteen years old back in 1936, she visited a shooting gallery in which a camera shutter was triggered every time a target is hit. She fell in love with the gallery, and faithfully visits it each and every year, only missing the years 1939 to 1945 due to WWII. Ria van Dijk is now 88 years old, and still collects a photo of herself hitting the target. The resulting photographs have been compiled into a book titled "In Almost Every Picture 7".
You've probably seen time-lapse videos spanning hours, days, weeks, or months, but how about years? Ramon, a videographer based in Paris, spent three years shooting the same location in Paris, documenting the teardown of an old skyscraper and the construction of a new one. The photographs were shot between January 2007 and September 2010 using a Pentax K110D DSLR, and a whopping 45,000 photographs were captured.
It's Friday, so let's kick back - here's a dose of completely-useless-but-kinda-interesting trivia: Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs has done wedding photography. Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison is good friends with Jobs, and when Ellison married novelist Melanie Craft in 2003, Jobs was the official wedding photographer. The other photographer was Ellison's son David.
