March 2011

It seems like it's only a matter of time before compact cameras are made to be directly connected to the cloud. According to social gadget website gdgt, Sony is currently working on a digital camera (i.e. not a smartphone) that has a built-in 3G modem that would allow users to easily upload and share photographs using popular services (e.g. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter). There would likely be some level of free service -- such as a couple dozen uploads per month -- after which users can pay for …

If you had a camera the size of a grain of rice, that would be considered extremely small, but researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany have created a camera the size of a grain of salt. The world's smallest camera measures 1x1x1 millimeters, shoots 0.1 megapixel photographs (250x250 pixels), and is so inexpensive to make that they're disposable. Potential uses for the camera include photographing the inside of human bodies (AKA endoscopy) and being used as rearview cameras on cars.

The blogosphere is abuzz today over a rumor that Canon and Apple may be planning to collaborate on an upcoming project. Craig over at Canon Rumors started it yesterday when he wrote, …

Instaprint is a neat wall-mounted printer that fuses old-school Polaroid-style instant photos with social media (namely Instagr.am). Basically it's a box you rent for events that contains a modified, Internet-connected Zink printer. It uses the Instagr.am API to constantly scan for a specific location or hashtag, and when new photos are found they're automatically printed and pushed out the bottom.

The UN01 is a Kickstarter-funded iPhone 4 case that makes it look like some kind of Apple-designed futuristic camera. The middle of the case features a pseudo-lens bulge that is actually a locking mechanism that secures the two halves of the case. They're looking to raise $23,000 to bring this case to market in 7 colors, and a pledge of $30 will pre-order one for you in black or white.

Update on 12/18/21: This video has been removed by its creator. It originally showed a man shooting hockey photos with his lens cap still on his lens.

For a Yahoo HackU programming competition, a group of students at the University of Washington created FlickrMosaic, a simple app that creates photomosaics from Flickr photographs. The website randomly selects a Creative Commons-licensed photograph from Flickr, then begins transforming it into a photomosaic by adding other photos as small squares.

This is the incredible story of how one man's photography was used hundreds of times all over the world without his permission before he finally found out.

Emphas.is is a newly launched Kickstarter-esque website that brings the latest Internet craze of crowd funding to photojournalism.

Rather than using more expensive bags or cases for moving around your lighting gear, you can buy a bass guitar bag for $30 or $40 to get the job done. The length allows you to store light stands, the velcro straps inside help secure them, and the multiple handles and straps on the outside give you a number of options for carrying the bag.

At the beginning of the year, a guy named Todd Bieber was skiing in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park when he came across a lost roll of film. After he had the pictures developed, he discovered some pretty nice photographs, and created a video to find the owners. The video went viral, and amassed over 1 million views.

It's a good time to be a digital photographer -- massive hard drives are becoming cheaper than ever, making it so photo-enthusiasts don't have an excuse for not backing up their data redundantly. Here's an interesting look at how the price of a Gigabyte of storage has changed over time: …

Last month there was quite a bit of buzz among photographers when photographer Michael Wolf's Google Street View "photographers" (or screenshots) were awarded Honorable Mention at the prestigious World Press Photo 2011 contest. A month later, the British Journal of Photography tracked him down and interviewed him regarding the work.

Customer: Hi, I am looking for a Canon lens. Shopkeeper: Certainly, which one specifically or what's the purpose? Customer: I am looking for a lens that can shoot pictures with sharp foreground objects and sharp background objects. Shopkeeper: Right, you mean a lens that is good for close-ups and landscape? Customer: Well, not exactly, I want a lens to shoot pictures that everything is in not blurry, especially not those blurry backgrounds with people. Shopkeeper: Hmm? Customer: Should I buy …

A bill recently introduced by Florida state senator Jim Norman would, if passed, making taking pictures of farms a felony unless permission is granted by the owner.

If you thought Google Earth was cool, check out the work being done by Swedish corp C3 Technologies. Using only photos shot from planes, they can automatically create high-resolution 3D models of entire cities that can then be explored. The above video shows a beautiful fly-by of New York City.

When the iPad 2 was announced a week ago, many people were undoubtedly excited that front and rear-facing cameras were added to the device. However, rather than endow the iPad with a rear-camera equal or superior to the iPhone 4's, the geniuses at Apple decided to add a pretty lame one, giving it the (dis)honor of being the first "camera" to have a sensor resolution lower than the display resolution.

Most modern tripods are made of materials that are designed to be light-weight yet stable. If having the lightest of tripods isn't a requirement for you, then check out these hand-made wooden tripods from the German company Berlebach. Though they can weigh in at 6+ pounds, the solid ash wood legs are supposedly better at dampening vibration than steel, carbon, or aluminum. Plus, they look pretty snazzy.

If you want to know the ins and outs of shooting a college basketball game, check out this awesome behind-the-scenes video with pro sports photographer Miguel Olivella. In it, he walks us through things like where to be, what gear to use, camera settings, and various tricks he has under his sleeve that help him get the perfect shot.

The Necono Digital Camera is a funky cat-shaped digital camera out of Japan that might make it easier for you to take smiling baby photos. It's a 3 megapixel camera that doesn't have any LCD screen embedded for you to review your shots -- you have to connect it to a "Monitor Ground" base that includes an LCD or transfer the images to your computer via USB. The cat has a shutter button on its butt, the camera and a self-timer LED in its eyes, and magnetic feet that allow you to stick it in …

Television network TBD recently sent photographer Jay Westcott to cover a Lady Gaga concert in Washington D.C. Upon arriving at the Verizon Center, Westcott was given a release form, on which the fourth paragraph read, …

Every time you launch Photoshop, you're greeted momentarily with a splash screen showing a cloud of names that give credit to the people who have worked on the program. This "Behind the Splash Screen" video introduces you to some of the people whose names are found there, and provides some background on how Photoshop CS5 was developed (as well as the huge challenges they faced).

What you see here is a non-manipulated photograph by Wolcott Wilhelm showing a Chevy muscle car with a see-through hood that shows the engine underneath. It was created by splitting the exposure time between having the hood up and having it down.

We've already featured a video showing what life is like as President Obama's official photographer, and now here's an interesting behind-the-scenes video that gives us a look into shooting on Capitol Hill.

Here's a side-by-side comparison of Fujifilm's Finepix X100 and the classic Leica M3. Needless to say, the X100 is one classy looking digital camera. It just started shipping this past weekend in Japan, and should begin arriving elsewhere in the very near future. If you want a closer look at the camera's features, check out the 124 page owners manual that recently found its way online.

Hayashi Natsumi is a girl who lives in Tokyo, has two cats as housemates, and shoots daily photographs of her adventures in levitation.

Having a camera with you may get you better customer service at places like restaurants, retail stores, and hotels. Consumer advocate Christopher Elliott writes, …

Toronto-based artists Brad Blucher and Kyle Clements have an exhibition titled "Take a Picture" which features paintings that are invisible to the human eye but visible to cameras. To do this, they use a frequency of light that is outside the visible spectrum but visible to the CCD and CMOS sensors found in digital cameras.

Here's a fun blast from the past: in the early 2000s The Daily Show ran this short segment in which Ed Helms (now known for playing Andy Bernard on The Office) introduces viewers to digital cameras. It's an interesting glimpse at how some people felt about the emergence of digital photography as it was starting to become popular.

What you see here is every still frame of the famous 1939 film The Wizard of Oz compressed into a single frame, creating a colorful "barcode" for the movie. moviebarcode is a neat blog that publishes these images for a wide range of famous movies.

You won't really learn anything about how to use cameras from this short film, but it's pretty amusing and can be a nice photography-related 2-minute diversion from your work.

No, this isn't some advanced beam weapon from a sci-fi flick. It's actually a do-it-yourself ring flash created using 150 optical fibers, with one end wrapped over the pop-up flash of the DSLR and the other end spitting out the photons in a ring-shape. If you want to learn how to make your own, here's an in-depth writeup on how this was constructed.

"The Portrait Machine Project" by Carlo Van de Roer consists of new-age portraits taken with a controversial camera called the AuraCam, a modified Polaroid camera that supposedly shows what psychics see when they look at people.

Here's a short 5-minute news segment on Ruth Gruber and her work as a photojournalist during the Holocaust. Currently 100 years old, Gruber was an eyewitness to much of the history most of us have only read about in books.

Cop Block created an interactive map showing the "War on Cameras" in which each marker shows an incident where someone was "harassed, detained, threatened, attacked, arrested, or charged with a crime" by government officials for using a camera. It only has about 60 markers on it at the moment -- a more solution would be to have a crowdsourced map where anyone can contribute and add events. Still, this is pretty neat for those interested in photographers' rights (a pretty big issue last year).

If you want to play around with lo-fi photography, you don't have to venture into the world of analog or hack together a DIY lens for your DSLR. There's cheap plastic lenses you can buy for a toy-camera look, and one of them is the Holga HL-N lens available for both Canon and Nikon mounts.

David Gallagher was one of the earliest photobloggers with his (now defunct) website lightningfield.com. He is currently an editor at the New York Times.

Here's a glimpse at how selecting an autofocus point works on the upcoming Fujifilm Finepix X100. The hybrid viewfinder -- which overlays an electrical viewfinder view over the optical view -- provides a rich user-interface previously impossible for fully optical viewfinders.

Flickr user Chase Lewis created this working pinhole camera using ordinary LEGO pieces (we featured an uber-fancy LEGO Mindstorm camera before) for his high school film photography course.

What do you get when you combine a design-less white living room with two projectors and two 3D projection gurus? The answer is a living room that can be completely transformed in the blink of an eye. It's almost like having a living room that behaves like a digital picture frame!

Olympus announced new compact cameras today. The SZ-30MR (on left) is the world's first compact that can shoot both 1080p Full HD video and 16 megapixel stills at the same time. What's more, the camera can record two different videos at once -- videos that differ in zoom, quality, or filters.

Like the Pen Tool tutorial we shared last month, here's another awesome tutorial by Sean Armenta showing how to use the Healing Brush and Patch Tool in Photoshop. Perhaps these are two tools that you've never gotten around to learning how to use. If that's you, watch this video and you'll soon have two new weapons in your portrait retouching arsenal.

Artist Billy Brown took 100 different pieces of photography gear and turned them into pixel art. What's neat is that he's making them available for any kind of use as long as you credit him. There's everything from old film and Polaroid cameras to memory cards and the latest telephoto lenses.

This video shows a beautiful way of displaying your photographs using a birch-wood plaque and clear epoxy resin. You can order them from The Resin Man for your Facebook photographs, or you can try doing this yourself for your next photo project.

Panasonic wants to move portrait retouching off of computers and directly into cameras. Their Lumix FX77 compact camera released last week has a "Beauty Retouch Mode" that allows users to make all kinds of edits to faces immediately after capturing the photo: …

Last year we posted a tip on how you can use jar openers to remove stuck lens filters, but have you ever thought of using them as a cheap follow focus? Tony Carretti was shopping at Bed, Bath & Beyond when he came across a twist jar opener in the kitchen aisle that he realized could be used on his camera.

creepy is a desktop application written by Yiannis Kakavas that demonstrates how the geotagging features found in newer cameras and phones can violate your privacy. Simply provide it with a Flickr username and it will map the places and times photos were taken conveniently on a map.

Do you like movies that make you think and make more sense the second time around? If so, "Tick Tock" is a short film that you'll probably enjoy. This 4 minute film was shot in one take with a Canon 5D Mark II and 24-70mm lens, and required a whopping 36 takes to get right. If this doesn't inspire you to do something awesome with your DSLR, we don't know what will.

Mel Stringer (aka girliepains on Etsy) keeps dreaming up cooler and cooler camera papercraft decorations. Her latest creation is a Polaroid model that include fake Polaroids to stick in the slot.

This creative time-lapse video (a commercial for Volvo) shows a beautiful outdoor scene transform from one season to another through time-lapse photography. If computer trickery wasn't involved in the creation, then this video must have required a whole lot of patience and hard work.