When Calle Hoglund had his buddies over one night editing a music video, he got the idea of creating a photo manipulation with his friends looking out from photo frames. The project took three hours from start to finish, and luckily for us they created a stop-motion behind-the-scenes video showing how it was done.
In case you're wondering whether Yahoo still cares about Flickr (acquired in 2005), the answer appears to be yes. Chief Product Officer Blake Irving recently tweeted a short message affirming the company's support for the popular photo sharing service, saying, …
Fuji's much anticipated FinePix X100 is now available for preorder over at Adorama for $1,199. Fuji also released the above video showing the camera's aperture and shutter systems in action. The aperture looks quite round at all f-stops, which should lead to some pretty nice looking bokeh. The shutter sound you hear is the actual shutter's sound mixed with sound effects from the camera.
A new German company called X-Pire wants to give you a little more peace of mind with photographs you share online by allowing you to share them with a time-based "self-destruct" feature. According to Yahoo News, …
3D is a hot new fad, but the fact that viewing things in 3D often requires special glasses is a huge deterrent to people who would otherwise embrace the technology. Well, a guy named Jonathan Post invented this awesome new way of viewing 3D on 120Hz monitor displays that simulates 3D Active Shutter Glasses. Maybe in the future we'll be walking around in galleries viewing 3D photographs with blue and red devices attached to our temples.
Alexandra Pacula paints beautiful oil paintings of cities at night that look like blurry, long-exposure photographs.
Tag clouds are a neat way of visualizing what content is about, and Tagerator is a simple program that generates them for your Flickr photo tags. Created by Jeremy Brooks (the guy behind SuperSetr), the simple Java app will run on any computer that has Java 1.6 installed. Besides its ability to generate the tag clouds for you, it stores the tag information gleaned from your account to disk, allowing you to use the tag/count information however you'd like.
Creating plexiglass clones of your Polaroid photos is a classy way of showing them off, but Lori Andrews' (aka the 10 cent designer) has an equally awesome method: she picked 154 of her favorite Polaroid pics and had them neatly framed under glass for her kitchen.
Here's a clever trick to keep in mind if you use SD cards for your photography: if the locking mechanism on the side of the card breaks off and renders your card unwritable, covering over the area with a little scotch tape magically makes your card useable again.
There's plenty of tutorials online that teach you how to convert digital cameras into infrared cameras, and plenty of services that will do the conversion for you if you send in a camera, but what if you want to cut out the hassle of having a camera converted? Mike Keesling sells pre-converted Canon Powershot cameras through his website Opticsgeek that capture infrared images straight out of the box. A PowerShot A480 will cost you $200, and a SX200 IS will set you back $350.
There was much hype over Fujifilm's upcoming X100 camera even before it was proudly displayed to the public at this year's CES, with people drooling over the camera's retro design and unique hybrid viewfinder.
There's an old beat up Leica MP-36 being sold by a reputable seller on eBay (8533 feedback score with 99.4% positive) for the staggering price of $104,000. What's strange is that the details provided in the listing are quite sparse. The page includes a few photographs and the description,
Eirik Solheim has been making videos documenting the changing of seasons since 2005. Over the past year, he glued a Canon 400D camera with an EF-S 10-22mm lens to a shelf, and had it shoot one photograph every 30 minutes of the scene outside. By the end of the year, he had over 16,000 photographs to work with. He then selected about 3,500 of the images (he didn't use the ones shot at night, for example) and combined them into a time-lapse video showing the passing of 1 year and 4 seasons in a …
Sony's newly unveiled CLM-V55 is a 5-inch LCD screen for videographers (or maybe still shooters) who need a larger view of what their camera is recording. It has a 800x480 pixel resolution and has features that aid in shooting video, including a "color peaking" feature that highlights the edges of areas in sharp focus and a zoom-feature for checking sharpness. It connects to Sony interchangeable cameras via an HDMI port, and can also be used with HDMI-capable cameras from other camera makers as …
Ever wonder what you camera flash would look like if you watched it in super slow motion? Thanks to Phantom high speed cameras you can wonder no more! This flash bulb (the single-use kind used in old film cameras) was captured at 1052 frames per second.
Peter Lik, a self-taught Australian landscape photographer, has sold one of his photographs for a whopping $1 million to an anonymous private art collector. The photograph, titled "One", was shot on the banks of the Androscoggin River in New Hampshire just after dawn. Only one print of the photo will ever be produced. Lik states, …
Shooting photos or video remotely may get a whole lot easier if a startup company named Satarii is able to raise enough funding ($20K) for their idea -- a camera base called the Satarii Star that automatically keeps the lens pointed at a remote sensor. We could waste our breath explaining how it works and all the different applications it could be useful for, but the video above does quite a good job.
Erin Paysse sells one-of-a-kind pinhole cameras created by upcycling vintage hardback books. Each camera has a magnetic shutter and is designed to take standard 35mm film.
Kaleb Wentzel-Fisher had the brilliant idea of using custom bokeh to spell out words in his videos, and spent a good amount of time developing and perfecting the idea. The above video, titled "Light Works", is a demonstration of this technique in action. The results are pretty awesome.
While some street artists are reclusive when going about their work, French artist Fabian David takes a much more open approach -- he recently decorated a street in Lyon, France by shooting over 100 passers-by photo booth-style, printing them out and pasting them up on the spot. The project is titled Perffusion 2010 Evénement.
PBS NewsHour recently aired this interesting and inspiring video profiling photographer Alec Soth, providing a glimpse into what it's like to work as a fine art photographer. Here's an interesting quote by Soth in the video, …
Flickr member Deeepa Praveen 4-year-old pro account was deleted recently without any warning or explanation, and in response she created this graphic showing what she lost in the blink of an eye. While Flickr is undoubtedly one of the best photo-sharing services on the web right now, the fact that pro accounts can be permanently deleted without any warning doesn't sit too well with many users. Even if the deleted accounts deserved to be removed, it would be much nicer if they followed a notice …
You know that roaring lion in the logo shown before MGM movies? That's Leo the Lion, and the behind-the-scenes photograph shown above provides an interesting glimpse into how they shot him. He must have been a pretty well-trained lion to have the discipline to stand on boxes, face a camera, roar into a microphone, and not attack the crew.
By 2053, cameras are going to become so automated that they start thinking for themselves, and then realize that humans are a threat to great photography. This photograph leaked from the future shows a couple CanonBots duking it out.
You've probably heard of EVIL cameras already, but how about WVIL? The Wireless Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens is a concept camera design by Seattle-based design firm Artefactgroup. What's novel about the design is that the imaging sensor is situated in the back of the lens rather than in the camera body, allowing the lens to be detached and used apart from the body wirelessly.
The Third Person Point of View Camera Rig is a unique project by UTSI PhD student Jason King that aims to create a wearable camera that allows users to view life through a third-person, video-game style point of view. A camera is mounted to a backpack, which then feeds the video into the goggles of the wearer. There's even an Instructables tutorial that teaches you how to make your own, if you're so inclined.
AmoK Exif Sorter is a program written for photographers obsessed with organization, allowing a collection of photographs to be renamed and organized based on the EXIF data embedded in each photo. In addition to the obvious choices for details to include in the file name (e.g. time and date), you can also use any other piece of EXIF info you wish, including things like camera model, aperture, ISO, and shutter speed. For organization, the program allows you to copy or move files into whatever …
A brief explanation (and examples) of what circular polarizers do and how they're used in photography.
The Twilight Calculator is a free and useful web app that takes in your location and spits out a table with when you should photograph if you want to shoot during golden hour.
This is a low budget music video directed by sixtwelve for the song "The Better Man" by Cayetano, and filmed with a Canon 5D Mark II. The story centers around an old Polaroid 636 received as a birthday present.
Looks like the blogosphere was right in December of last year when it guessed that a teaser put out by Polaroid was for a new instant camera launch at CES 2011. The company -- along with Creative Director Lady Gaga -- officially unveiled the camera today in Las Vegas, and also showed off a new printer and a bizarre pair of glasses as well.
Apple launched its new Mac App Store yesterday, along with an App Store version of their popular photo editing program Aperture. The program costs $199 in a retail box and $159 through Amazon, but through the new App Store the price has been cut to a mere $80! It's no wonder that it's currently the top grossing app in the entire store. If you've wanted to start using Aperture but have always been deterred by the price, now's a good time to jump in.
Polaroid instant photographs are fun to make and look at, but displaying them (or selling them) in a nice and formal way can be difficult. Grant Hamilton came up with a fantastic way of selling his Polaroid prints -- he makes high resolution scans of the photographs, prints them on Fuji Crystal Archive Polyester, and then encapsulates the print in Plexiglas. The resulting 1:1 scale shiny photo-clones are thick enough to stand on their own, and are a great way to show off your best Polaroid …
Here's a short and very interesting behind-the-scenes documentary with Scott Schuman, who has made a name for himself in the fashion industry by roaming the streets of big cities, capturing beautiful photographs of fashion, and publishing them to his website The Sartorialist.
This crazy looking camera-gun is actually a Nikon D200 attached to a rifle stock. The Tactical Camera Long Range Assault Stock (TALCS, not sure why it's not TCALRS) has a trigger that activates the camera's shutter, allowing you to shoot photographs just like you would shoot a gun. Read more about the background and construction on this forum post.
A couple days ago we featured a video showing how memory cards are made, and now here's an older video about an older medium. It's a short documentary created back in 1958 showing how Kodak creates its film. The narration is in Dutch, but there's English subtitles.
Sure Lexar just launched a 128GB SDXC card, but that only transfers at a meager 20MB/s. SanDisk's new Extreme Pro Compact Flash card announced today boasts the same 128GB capacity but has a write speed of up to 100MB/s. That extra 80MB/s is quite costly -- unlike the $700 it costs to buy the Lexar SDXC card, this SanDisk one costs $1,500. But as they say, time is money... right?
We've featured a couple beautiful examples of fake slow-motion video created using Twixtor shot with the Canon 7D and 550D. If you don't want to shell out $300 just for Twixtor, you can do something somewhat similar using only Final Cut Studio. The above footage was shot at 60fps using a Canon 60D and created entirely with Final Cut Studio. Yes, yes, we know the wheels look strange, but it's still a neat effect and might produce interesting results with the right kind of footage.
The big camera corps are dumping a huge number of new compact cameras at CES 2011. While many are standard upgrades to bring their cameras up to par with what consumers expect nowadays, there are some that stand out for one reason or another. Some of Sony's new compact cameras (the DSC-TX100V, DSC-TX10, DSC-HX7V, DSC-WX10 and DSC-WX9) are unique in that they can shoot 3D photographs with a single lens and sensor. The trick is that two separate photographs with different focus settings are …
This is what lighting a match looks like up close and in super slow-mo at 2000 frames per second. Who knew the process was so bubbly and gross?
"Keep it simple, Stupid!." That's a principle exemplified by Apple's industrial design, but sometimes is nowhere to be found when it comes to compact cameras. Panasonic, however, seems to be on the same wavelength with the Lumix FP7 they just unveiled at CES 2011. The physical buttons normally found on the back of point-and-shoots are missing, replaced instead with a sleek 3.5-inch touchscreen LCD. The only physical buttons that remain are found on the top of the camera -- power, shutter, and …
The stories are often the same -- you spend some time saving up money for the perfect piece of gear that you've spent hours reading reviews about and comparing. You finally order it, and spend some days checking the tracking information every few minutes to see if your package is still traveling according to schedule.
Yesterday we got a sneak peek at a strange multi-dimensionally swiveling Casio TRYX camera, and today it was officially unveiled at CES 2011. The TRYX is a 12.1 megapixel camera that shoots 1080p HD video at 30fps or 240fps slow-motion video at 432 x 320. The unique thing about the camera is that the 3-inch touchscreen LCD can both bust out of its "frame" and also swivel, allowing the frame to be used as a stand and for the screen to point in all kinds of random directions.
It's interesting (though some might say infuriating) to see how photographers are depicted in some police training videos. Lesson learned? Don't carry camera gear and sleeping bags together in the back seat of your car.
Kodachrome film officially died at the end of last year when the last developer -- Dwayne's Photo Service -- stopped accepting the film. Before that final nail in the coffin was pounded in, 53-year-old Jim DeNike drove from Arkansas to Dwayne's in Kansas to have 1,580 rolls developed. The total cost for the 50,000 slides? $15,798. All of the photographs were of trains.
Here's an interesting behind-the-scenes video showing how they make memory cards from start to finish. May the ingenuity and engineering-prowess of man amaze you and cause you to appreciate your memory cards more. Imagine what it would be like to watch this video back in the early 1900s...
Lexar has announced two new SDXC memory cards ahead of CES 2011 that tip the scales at a whopping 64GB and 128GB. The Class 10 cards have transfer speeds of up to 20MB/s, meaning a full 128GB card would take nearly 2 hours to unload. Ordinary photographers won't likely need storage capacities anywhere near what these cards offer, but people who work primarily with HD video may find these sizes useful. The capacities aren't the only way these cards are massive -- the costs are up there as well, …
Reynaldo Dagsa, a local councilman in Manila, Philippines, was celebrating on New Year's Eve with his family when he was shot in the chest and later died on the way to the hospital. His family later discovered that Dagsa had accidentally captured his killer on camera while taking a picture of his wife and daughter moments before he was shot.
Back in 2010 we featured an interesting documentary about what the life of Pete Souza -- President Obama's official photographer -- is like. Now, here's a look at a different kind of official photographer: the team photographer of an NBA basketball team. Layne Murdoch has been shooting sports for over 30 years, and is the official photographer of the New Orleans Hornets. In this video he provides an interesting behind-the-scenes glimpse into what his coveted job involves.
CES 2011 is still a couple days away, but camera gear announcements are already making their way out of Vegas, both intentionally or unintentionally on the part of the manufacturers. Engadget outed one of the soon-to-be-announced cameras, the Casio TRYX, after spotting massive advertisements outside a CES building. Apparently it's a compact camera that sports two hinges -- one on the frame and one on the display -- that allow it to swivel in funky ways. Presumably the frame swiveling provides a …
