MarketWatch has an interesting article titled "Kodak Is Apple In Reverse" that compares Kodak's meteoric fall with Apple's meteoric rise. Back in 1997, Kodak was a $28 billion dollar company while Apple was worth a measly $2 billion. Now Apple is one of the most valuable companies in the world (currently worth $330 billion), and earns enough profit every quarter ($6 billion) to buy Kodak... six times over! …
Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner is announced below.
Reddit user acts541 tried creating a time-lapse video of a flower opening and learned a valuable lesson in the process.
Amazon's Gold Box deal of the day today is Adobe Lightroom 3 for $189. This normally costs $299 direct from Adobe or $240-250 elsewhere, so if you've been waiting to jump into Lightroom, now's a good time to do so.
February seems to be the month when lost photographers' lives are saved thanks to their camera flashes. Last year around this time a German tourist was miraculously rescued when a woman spotted his desperate flashes on a live webcam feed.
Here's a fun project for you film-lovers: use
The Super Bowl isn't just the biggest event in the NFL season, but one of the biggest events for the world's best sports photographers each year. Here's a neat behind-the-scenes look at what it's like to shoot the Super Bowl as a Sports Illustrated photographer.
NEC announced today that they've developed "noise suppression technologies" for compact cameras that will clean up the audio in video recordings by canceling out the noise created by the lens zooming in and out. It works by storing a recording of what the zoom noise sounds like to the camera, and subtracting that noise from recorded video. Casio's new EX-ZR10 will be the first compact to feature this new tech, but NEC promises that it'll be found throughout the digicam market soon. Enjoy the …
Did you know that Russian President Dimitri Medvedev is an avid photo enthusiast? In this video he shares some thoughts on photography, and talks about his own involvement in the art. If you're wondering what he shoots with, the answer is a Leica M9, as well as Canon and Nikon cameras.
For his project titled "Ponte City", photographer Mikhael Subotzky photographed every door, window, and television set in a particular apartment building in Johannesburg. The photographs are then displayed on giant contact sheets, creating beautiful miniature apartment buildings out of photographs. You can view larger versions of each contact sheet on Subotzky's website.
Have you always wondered how to use the Pen Tool in Photoshop but have never gotten around to learning it? f stoppers published this uber-informative video tutorial by Sean Armenta teaching how it's used and why it's a tool that everyone should learn. The teaching is done on a Mac, so if you have a PC, just substitute CTRL for CMD and ALT for OPT.
Sharan pinhole cameras are Japanese-made cardboard camera kits that you buy and build yourself. All the parts are pre-cut, and can be assembled using tape in about 1 to 2 hours with the help of step-by-step instructions. The STD35 is a standard 35mm pinhole camera, while the Wide-35 allows you to take panoramic photos.
Here's a mind-blowing demo reel by Stargate Studios that will make you doubt everything you see on television in the future.
Fashion photographer David LaChapelle is launching a lawsuit against Rihanna over the controversial music video for her song S&M. LaChapelle alleges that "the music video is directly derived from and substantially similar to the LaChapelle works" and that it copied the "composition, total concept, feel, tone, mood, theme, colors, props, settings, decors, wardrobe and lighting" of eight of his photographs.
Photographer Martin Usborne shot a series of photographs of dogs patiently waiting in cars for their owners for his project "MUTE: the silence of dogs in cars". He managed to capture their longing expressions quite well.
A man in Atlanta was just awarded $40,000 in damages after having his cell phone confiscated and photos deleted while filming police activity from a public location. The man was filming for Copwatch, an organization that aims to crack down on law enforcement wrongdoing by filming their activities, and was told by the police that he had no right to record them. An interesting quote from the CNN segment above is the lesson this case should send to other police departments, …
For those of you who still shoot film and are adventurous, have you tried double film photography? Flickr user Chuck Miller stuck two 35mm Fuji 200 films -- one normal, one redscale -- into a Holga 120N and shot the films simultaneously to get these unique sprocket hole, layered photographs.
This award-winning music video for the song "Squeeze Me" by Kraak & Smaak features creative photo flip book animations. Rather than use special effects, actual still frames were printed as photos and assembled into the flip books that overlay the scenes.
The Gizmon Half D is a digital toy camera by that mimics the look of the Olympus PEN F half frame 35mm camera. The 2 megapixel camera has a 1.5-inch LCD screen, ISO ranging from 100-400, VGA video mode, three aspect ratios (standard, half, and square), and 10 different color modes. Like the Chobi Cam One, the Half D has a number of lenses that can be used for different looks. You can buy one for $120 through the Gizmon store.
Getting an infant or toddler to stare into your camera lens can be a challenge, and you're forced to compete with all kinds of sights and sounds that easily steal their gaze and attention. Camera Creatures are hand-stitched toys that attach to the front of your camera lens to give your tiny subjects something cute to look at while you photograph them. They cost $10 in this Etsy store.
We're waiting for the day when someone makes this kind of video for how DSLRs are made, but in the meantime, here's a neat "How It's Made" episode by the Discovery Channel showing how Arri movie cameras are manufactured.
The October 27, 1972 issue of LIFE read "A Genius and His Magic Camera: Dr. Edwin Land of Polaroid demonstrates his new invention". The invention was the Polaroid SX-70 instant camera.
It's a little to late to get this card in time for Valentine's Day this year, but maybe this can give you some inspiration if you're looking to create one by hand for a special photography-lover in your life. This "We Just Click" card sells for $4.50 from dudeandchick's Etsy store.
YouTube user havok2 created this creative follow focus using LEGO Mindstorm pieces. It's lightweight, and can be adjusted to fit on different sized lenses. There's more photographs of the rig here, and there's even a blueprint 3D tutorial video if you're interested in building your own.
Julie Lewis saves the
It's always fun listening to photographers recount once-in-a-lifetime experiences that lead to once-in-a-lifetime photographs. In this short National Geographic video, photographer Brian Skerry describes what it was like to get up close and personal with a 45-foot-long whale. We only wish there was a little video to go along with his wonderful storytelling!
Tom Guilmette was doing a project in Vegas that involved a Phantom Flex high speed camera when he decided to experiment with 2,564 frames per second in his hotel room. This is the resulting video showing his random experiments.
What you see here are portraits created by taking photographs of women in 40 different countries and averaging them with Face Research software. These are the most neutral faces for various nationalities.
You might have seen clone photographs while browsing around on the Web before, but do you know how to shoot and post-process photographs that have multiple instances of a person? Here's a video tutorial by Gavin Hoey teaching you the process (the resulting photo can be seen here).
Does Google Street View count as photojournalism? That's the question that's being discussed on the Interwebs after photographer Michael Wolf was given honorable mention in this year's World Press Photo contest for a series of photographs made using Google's Street View. "A Series of Unfortunate Events" contains photographs created by Wolf of unique scenes found in Google's street imagery, which is captured by Google using special camera-equipped vans driven down streets.
urbanscreen discovered this strange string-wobble effect when shooting a bass player with a Canon 5D Mark II. No special effects or slow motion were added to the footage -- what you see results from the frequency of the strings and the fast shutter speed of the camera. Here's another video showing the same effect from different angles.
Did you know that Adobe Photoshop was almost Nikon Photoshop? It's true -- in 1988 at the MacWorld tradeshow, two brothers approached Nikon and offered them the rights to an image editing program they had developed. The brothers were Thomas and John Knoll, and the program they had created was called Photoshop.
With a suggested retail price of £19,800 (currently about $32,000) and only 500 units in existence, Leica's limited edition M9 Titanium probably isn't a camera you're ever going to lay eyes on in real life. When it was announced back in September of last year, we predicted that most of them wouldn't see the light of day and would be placed immediately into collectors' vaults. Luckily for us, someone decided to actually unbox (gasp!) one of these babies (camera #164), allowing us to see what …
You know you're a professional photojournalist when you try to take good care of your cameras but they still end up look like these.
Last Friday the art collective THIS had a gallery opening during which a patron asked to use the restroom shortly before closing time. Turns out it wasn't just to relieve themselves -- the person brazenly snatched a one-of-a-kind Polaroid photograph of Dennis Hopper taken by Jason Lee off the wall and walked off with it. Now Lee is personally offering a $25,000 reward for the return of the photograph.
If you think the expression on these people's faces don't look like ordinary street portraits, it's because they're actually looking at themselves in a mirror. Moa Karlberg captured these unique candid portraits of strangers by using a one-way mirror, capturing what it looks like when people look at reflections of themselves.
Think it's difficult to muster up enough courage for street photography? At least strangers don't eat you! This wildlife photographer got quite a scare while shooting a pride of lions when a lioness decides to investigate him. Luckily, he escapes without a scratch and now has a great story to tell his buddies.
With the limited lens and sensor sizes of cell phone cameras, the megapixel race isn't really doing much to improve the quality of the resulting photos. A new startup called Pelican Imaging thinks it can revolutionize the game by increasing quality without focusing on megapixels. Instead, they use an array of 25 micro-cameras to capture each image, processing the data into a single photograph with fancy software. If all goes well, future cell phones will be taking much nicer photos while still …
Rockie Nolan captured these beautiful photographs of vintage cameras placed next to matching shoes. It's the perfect fashion guide for vintage photo geeks! …
At CP+ Camera and Photo Imaging Show that just kicked off today in Japan, Sony is showing off a see-through prototype of an upcoming translucent mirror A77 camera. It will replace the A700 DSLR as a mid-range to high-end shooter, will shoot AVCHD video at 1080p with a APS-C sensor, and will be available sometime in the middle of this year. Not much else is known about the camera at this point. Looks like the whole translucent mirror thing is working well for Sony.
One of the many thank you notes Leah Dieterich has on her "thank you note a day" blog, thxthxthx.
Remember Wafaa Bilal, that NYU professor that decided to have a camera implanted on the back of his skull? Well, turns out the human body doesn't like it when random electronic devices are fused with it, so the cost of having the camera on his nogging has been antibiotic and steroid treatments to get the body to ignore the thing. Despite the treatments, his body still decided to reject one of the three posts onto which the camera is screwed, forcing him to have the camera and one of the posts …
You might have framed photographs up in your home, but what about using an entire wall to show off your pictures? Photographer Lyanne Wylde turned her hallway into a photo wall by putting up wallpaper with frames and slowly filling in the frames with her own photographs. You can buy the wallpaper, titled "Frames", yourself from Graham & Brown for $45 a roll and start your own wall!
Nikon announced the high-end compact P300 today to compete against the likes of Canon's popular S95 and Olympus' XZ-1. First, the good things -- the 12 megapixel camera has a sweet f/1.8 24-100mm equivalent lens that should perform quite nicely in low light situations (especially with an ISO that can be boosted up to 3200). It can also record HD video at 1080p and 30fps, and has a 3-inch LCD that's easy on the eyes.
External hard drives are a convenient way to store your digital photographs, but they have finite lifetimes and eventually fail. Failing drives have a number of distinctive sounds that can warn you and give you some time to start a data-exodus to a healthier hard drive. Datacent, a data recovery company, has a useful page on which you can listen to some of the most common "bad drive sounds". These are categorized by manufacturer, and include things like stuck spindles, disk heads crashing, …
For Christmas, I received a Canon 60D. I’m definitely still learning how to use it, but I’m excited to have it. The first big problem I encountered, besides the need for more regular exercise so I can lift the beast, is that I am going to lose the camera lens cap. I take this cover off the lens and leave it everywhere. I had the camera for about 4 days before I was considering checking the price on replacing it. Lucky for me, I came up with a better idea while I still knew where it was.
Sigma isn't planning to let EVIL cameras have all the large-sensor fun. They've decided to stuff their new DP2x compact camera with a Foveon X3 sensor -- similar to the ones found in the Sigma SD15 and SD1 DSLR cameras (about 12 times larger than traditional compact camera sensors). The camera is capable of capturing 14 megapixels worth of data with its stack of three sensors, generating 4.7 megapixel photographs. It also shoots RAW, lacks HD recording (video clips are a paltry 320x240), has a …
What would a calendar look like if the world was run by photography geeks? Photographer David Schloss woke up one morning with the idea of creating such a calendar, with days being incremented by 1/3 f/stops, and the year being ISO 2000. He's also selling them as t-shirts for $15 a pop over on Mac Create.
A day after Carl Zeiss announced they would be joining the Micro Four Thirds format, Sony is striking back by announcing that they will be releasing specifications for its E-mount, allowing lens makers to develop third-party lenses for the NEX line of mirrorless cameras and camcorders. What's more, Carl Zeiss, Cosina, Sigma and Tamron have already committed to manufacturing lenses for the format.
What would it look like if you tripped and with a Pentax Spotmatic F camera in hand, and it somehow smashed neatly into its most basic components? Artist Todd McLellan gives us an idea by taking one apart, neatly arranging it on a table, and photographing it in a style similar to Carl Kleiner's IKEA baking book shots.
