Here's one of the most creative examples of light painting and long-exposure photography we've seen -- a few techie guys built a special 12-foot-long rod with 80 LED lights that light up depending on how strong a particular Wi-Fi signal is. By walking the stick around and capturing the lights in real time, they were able to photograph "light charts" showing how a particular Wi-Fi signal strength fluctuates in a particular area.
If you want your kids to grow up with the same love of photography you have, you can try performing some "inception" giving them photography-related toys from a young age. "Zoom" is a camera windup toy by Z Wind Ups that waddles around, looking at things with a magnifying glass.
This short video gives a beautiful and inspiring introduction to night photography. Don't watch it if you already have plans tonight -- it might make you want to grab your camera and shoot once the sun goes down.
Photojojo has a new ring flash adapter that allows you to shoot soft, studio-style portraits without shelling out the big bucks for an actual ring flash. It's a plastic add-on with a reflective circle that simply channels the light from your existing flash, so it doesn't require any batteries.
We're lucky that cameras and camcorders can be used during flights, or we wouldn't have this amazing view of the Space Shuttle Discovery's final launch from inside an airplane. There was also a student project that captured the launch from the edges of space using camera-laden a balloon.
For her series entitled "Photo Opportunities", photographer Corinne Vionnet gathered hundreds of photographs taken by tourists at famous locations and combined them by layering them together, creating surreal views of places we've all seen before in photographs.
Scientists at Stanford have found that looking at pictures of loved ones can reduce pain. The study involved performing MRI scans on the brains of lovestruck students who were subjected to heat pain on their skin while focusing on photographs of their significant others. The results showed that the images have a calming effect on the pain processing parts of the brain -- similar to the effects of Tylenol or narcotics like cocaine -- and reduced pain by a whopping 36 to 44 percent on average.
All of us can now experience what it's like to accidentally fall off a giant cliff thanks to a GoPro helmet camera and one brave skier who miraculously escape unscathed. Warning: you might pee your pants while watching this.
In 1999 Corbis -- privately owned by Bill Gates -- paid $20 million to acquire Sygma, a legendary photo agency that was the largest in the world at the time. After the acquisition, the agency bled money and suffered heavy fines due to the mismanagement of photographs, paying $2 million at one point for losing 750 of one photojournalist's photos. In 2010 the new agency, named Corbis Sygma, filed for bankruptcy after its debt had risen to €73m (~$100 million). Now the court appointed …
Photographer John B. Crane was ice climbing in Colorado when he came upon a little ice cave full of "tiny wonders". Wishing he had a green gel, he suddenly had the brilliant idea of using some Fruit Roll-Ups he had brought along for that purpose.
If you were given the seemingly impossible task of photographing a giant 300-foot-tall Redwood tree, how would you go about doing so? National Geographic photographer Michael Nichols chose to use raise up a special rig of three Canon 1Ds Mark II DSLR cameras into the air, photographing dozens of photographs that he stitched into a beautiful panoramic tree photo. The photograph was used as the cover photo of the October 2009 edition of the National Geographic.
In the boring old past, printed portfolios were a great way of showing off your still photographs, but any video you also wanted to show off had to be included and viewed separately from the main portfolio. Now, new technology is allowing photographers to embed video right into their portfolios, with a small LCD screen displayed right on the page.
3D Photo is hardly a useful app, but it's a fun way to play with the camera on your iPhone. What it does is map your photographs onto geometric shapes, giving them a pseudo-3D effect by allowing you to move the shapes and view them from different perspectives. You can find it for $1 in the iTunes store.
If you want to make your camera stealthy for whatever reason (maybe wildlife photography?), there's special camouflage-patterned bags or cases you can buy to put your camera in. Those can be pricey though, and an easier do-it-yourself solution is to simply tape up your camera with some camouflage duct tape. Instructables member Nano_Burger posted a series of photos showing how he did this with a cheap film camera.
Sony and Olympus are headed in very different directions when it comes to DSLR cameras. While Olympus may be looking to step out of the DSLR market in favor of EVIL cameras, Sony is opting to stay put while transforming its line of DSLRs into translucent mirror cameras. During a Sony event in Zaragoza, Spain, company representatives confirmed to Quesabesde that all future Alpha DSLRs will have the translucent mirrors found in the A33 and A55.
Did you know that while cameras provide the things you see in movies, most of the sounds that you hear -- aside from dialogue and music -- are generated by Foley artists who reproduce everyday sounds with everyday things? Here's an interesting behind-the-scenes glimpse into how award-winning Foley artist Gary Hecker "paints" sound over what's captured with a camera.
In his series "Elastic" photographer Edi Yang shows that you can fake smoke photography by shooting plastic bags a certain way. What you need is a strong backlight and some post-processing mojo.
Apple just refreshed their line of MacBook Pro notebook computers, and one of the new features is a Thunderbolt I/O port, making the MacBook Pro the first notebook computer to have this blazing-fast interface developed by Intel (it was known as Light Peak during R&D). As the technology makes its way into more and more computers, camera makers will undoubtedly begin offering it in their cameras. Nikon Rumors recently received a rumor that the upcoming Nikon D4 will be the first DSLR camera to …
Sorry that this is the second beard-themed time-lapse video we've posted in two days, but it's so neat that we had to share it with you. Cory Fauver spent one year and six weeks growing a beard, taking roughly one photo a day and creating this awesomely creative video.
F-Stop Searching Key Caps are tiny camera key fobs that help you quickly identify important keys on your keychain. They attach to your keys easily -- the key slips in from the top -- and come in black, gray, and bright yellow. You can pick one up for $9 over at ModCloth.
Spanish sports daily AS was forced to publish an apology earlier this week over a soccer match photo in which a player was airbrushed out. The photo was of a controversial no-call in which a Barcelona player might have been slightly offsides before receiving the ball and assisting in a goal. In the photograph published by AS, the last defender was removed, making the Barcelona player look clearly offsides.
Adam Fisher, an animator at Laika, grew out his hair and beard in order to make this neat video in which he gives himself a haircut and shave with only his hands. It's a creative use of stop-motion, and was made to promote the protection of our natural resources.
Tiffany Threadgould of RePlayGround had the awesome idea of building a room divider using old 35mm film canisters. She spent three months befriending film processing shops in New York and collecting the 1,000+ canisters needed for the project.
"The Cameraman" is a cartoon retelling of a true story involving a bunch of first-graders and a camera craze that swept across the playground. It illustrates how being behind a camera can rob you of your humanity... even if the camera isn't real.
Remember the pastel baby box cameras that we featured a while ago? Well the seller, Mel Stringer (girliepains on Etsy), has a new design for vintage box cameras that's inspired by cameras such as the Brownie, Bakerlite, and Ensign. These could make nice table decorations for when you hang out with your photography-lovin' friends. The templates come on A4-sized PDF files and a cost $4 through Stringer's store.
If there was an MTV Cribs for photographers, it would probably look something like this. In this video Yuri Arcurs gives us a tour of his new photo studio, and the €300,000 (~$400,000) of lighting equipment that he has lying around in it. It's a studio fit for the king of microstock -- one who sells over 2,000 photos a day and over 2 million a year.
Upon first glance, the photographs in Christopher Jonassen's "Devour" project might look like pictures of alien worlds. What they actually show are the bottom of frying pans shot against a black backdrop.
Photographer Danny Cohen does things a little differently than most. Wanting to work for photographer David LaChapelle, Cohen eschewed all the boring old methods of self-promotion and opted to plaster a 43-foot sign on a bridge in Melbourne the night before LaChapelle was scheduled to shoot there. The banner read "ATTN: DAVID LACHAPELLE I WANT TO BE YOUR ASSISTANT .COM".
We've featured this creative style of photography before where the subjects were neighborhood children and a baby, but what about dreaming up scenes with a cat and a dog on the ground instead of a person? That's exactly what Theresa Knudson did with her cat Fluffy, arranging paper props in the scene and using the ground as the backdrop.
MI5 might have missed a golden opportunity to prevent the 7 July 2005 London bombings back in 2004 when they cropped a photograph of two of the terrorists badly before sending it to the FBI. The photograph was of two of the bombers -- Shehzad Tanweer and Mohammad Sidique Khan -- and was shot by an undercover agent at a motorway service station. For some reason, MI5 decided to desaturate the photo, crop Khan (the ringleader) out, and make Tanweer look hardly human with blurry facial features and …
In 1993, a guy named Harrod Blank had a dream in which he drove around in a camera-covered car taking pictures of people staring at his camera-mobile. When he woke up, he decided to make the car a reality, and spent the next two years designing and building the thing. In 1995 he completed the Camera Van complete with a working camera to capture the expressions of onlookers.
Canon might be rolling out a new Image Stabilized lens with a built-in teleconverter, but Tamron and Nikon seem to have image-stabilization/vibration-reduction tricks up their sleeve as well. Apparently in the early 2000s both Nikon and Tamron filed patents for teleconverters with image stabilization baked right in. Tamron's was for a standard unit that sits between the lens and the camera body, while Nikon's was for a unit that sits in front of the lens.
Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner was randomly selected and is announced below.
High quality video on consumer DSLRs is changing how journalism is being done. Kevin Roach, the VP of In this video interview by Beet.tv, Kevin Roach -- VP and Director U.S. Broadcast News at Associated Press -- called the Canon 5D Mark II "game changing" when asked by Beet.tv about the future direction of the AP.
Here's a fun idea for displaying your Polaroid photographs and decorating your wall: arrange the prints in the shape of a heart! …
Photographer David Friedman was recently visiting his parents when he came across a photograph of himself taken almost 30 years ago, taped to a piece of construction paper. The paper was originally green, but indirect sunlight had faded the paper into a salmon-like orange color. When Friedman removed the photograph from the paper, he was surprised to find that the image had been burned onto the construction paper! …
A Tucson photographer recently found out the hard way that the public doesn't always side with photographers in copyright infringement cases, even if their claims are valid. About a month after the tragic 2011 Tucson shooting, portrait photographer Jon Wolf threatened so sue nearly three dozen media outlets after they showed a portrait he made of 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green -- the youngest victim -- and demanded $125,000 from one newspaper for publishing the image.
This is a stunning time-lapse video of an entire night at the ALMA Array Operations Site in Chile (the largest astronomical project in existence). The antennas point at the same part of the sky at any given moment, so their movements are perfectly synchronized. If you think watching a sunset is beautiful, wait till you see our galaxy come into view in this video.
The SeaLife Mini II is a digital camera meant for the outdoorsy type of person -- the kind that risks freezing to death, being eaten by sharks, or having a boulder fall on them. The 9-megapixel camera is waterproof to 130 feet, shockproof from drops of 6 feet, and has a rugged, unbreakable, crushproof build that can apparently survive being run over by a car. It'll be available starting in March 2011.
A special limited edition set of three Nikon f/1.4 lenses is being sold in certain European countries (currently Belgium and Sweden). Limited to only 100 sets, each set includes a Nikkor AF-S 24mm, 35mm and 85mm.
Here's a humorous introduction to the Arri Alexa digital motion picture camera by Inspiration Studios. Though they have the Canon 7D available for rent, they don't seem to think too highly of it.
Here's a humorous Amazon user review of the Nikon F6 35mm SLR, which currently sells for $3,200. With only 5 other user ratings (all perfect scores), this single user was able to knock off half a star off the rating for this camera.
Flickr user Vincent Riemersma shot this beautiful photograph of colored liquids splashing up the side of wine glasses champagne flutes using a Nikon D300s, a custom rig for sliding the glasses down a ramp, and a sound trigger.
The Flashkus by Art Lebedev is a cheap, disposable, and environmentally friendly cardboard USB stick that might one day make sharing event photos with friends much easier and cheaper. While many websites are geared towards photo sharing, transferring gigabytes of data to friends is still difficult to do via the Interwebs, so people often choose to burn DVDs or use pricey USB drives. The Flashkus would make the process easier by allowing people to simply tear off a USB drive, dump photos onto …
Now here's a photograph you don't get to shoot everyday: the White House Flickr stream published a photograph of the most powerful man in the world having dinner with the most powerful people in Silicon Valley. In terms of photography-related technologies, what you see is Picasa on the left, iPhone and Facebook Photos on either side of the President, and Flickr in red on the far end.
Animal Planet recently featured Cooper the Photographer Cat, who is apparently becoming a pretty big deal. Cooper is also jumping into filmmaking in addition to his still photography, though we think they should start teaching him how to use a Steadicam to reduce some of the motion-sickness inducing camera shake.
How do photographers get those wide images that bleed through the edges of the negative, showing the sprocket holes? It's a technique that allows your to create stunning panoramic images -- these little bits of film become art in themselves. These photographs are achieved by loading 35mm film into a 120 medium format camera. This tutorial was written with the Holga in mind, but the same technique works for other 120 cameras as well.
If computers can have fans, why can't cameras? With recent Sony cameras running into unexpected limits due to the sensor overheating, Nikon may be looking to solve the problem with a good, old-fashioned fan. A recent patent filing by Nikon shows a mirrorless camera with a computer-style fan embedded into the circuit board.
If you find yourself often shooting in cold weather and having to take your right hand glove off to operate your camera, you might want to check out Freehands gloves. These are special gloves that have thumb and index finger tips that fold back, allowing you to adjust your camera settings without having to expose the useless parts of your hand to the cold. They range from $18 to $80 and can be ordered directly from the Freehands website.
"Thrush" is a creative short film that tells the story of a relationship in four minutes using only photographs. It was created by Gabriel Bisset-Smith back in 2009.
