March 2011

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,

Photographer hereby acknowledges and agrees that all right, title and interest (including copyright) in and to the Photograph(s) shall be owned by Lady Gaga and Photographer hereby transfers and assigns any such rights to Lady Gaga.

After making a call to his editor, Westcott was told to not sign the release and to not shoot the concert.

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 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.

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 …

No, this isn’t some advanced beam weapon from a sci-fi flick. It’s actually a do-it-yourself ring flash created using …

"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 …

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.

PetaPixel: Could you tell me a little about yourself?

David Gallagher: I was born and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with my wife Fiona. I've been involved with journalism and the Internet since I got out of college. Now I work at The New York Times, where I'm an editor dealing with tech news.

Here’s a glimpse at how selecting an autofocus point works on the upcoming Fujifilm Finepix X100. The …

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 …

Olympus announced new compact cameras today. The SZ-30MR (on left) is the world’s first compact that can shoot both …

Like the Pen Tool tutorial we shared last month, here’s another awesome tutorial by …

Artist Billy Brown took 100 different pieces of photography gear and …

This video shows a beautiful way of displaying your photographs using a birch-wood plaque and clear epoxy resin. You …

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:

The Beauty Retouch Mode makes it possible to virtually makeup the faces. In Esthetic Mode, various effects can be applied to the face including clearing the skin texture, whitening of teeth and so on. In the Make-up Mode, you can choose the color of foundation, lips, cheeks or eye-shadow. [#]

The photoshopping capabilities aren't limited to what can be done naturally -- users can also do chin lifts and eye enlargements!

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 …

Do you like movies that make you think and make more sense the second time around? If so, “Tick …

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 …