April 2011

The MoMA Store used to sell these nifty salt and pepper shakers made from

The Midnight Shot NV-1 Night Vision camera by ThinkGeek is a compact camera specially designed for infrared photography. Instead of permanently removing the IR filter from a traditional digital camera, the Midnight Shot allows the filter to be retracted when you want to use it as an IR camera. It shoots 5 megapixel stills, VGA video, and has built-in IR illumination that lets you shoot and film in complete darkness.

Slate magazine just published an interesting article on David Hobby and his popular blog Strobist, and shared this interesting example of how the photography industry is drastically changing due to low barriers of entry: …

Perfect Layers is a new plug-in by OnOne Software that brings layers functionality (e.g. image layers, blend modes, layer masks, etc...) to Lightroom and Aperture. The program is currently in Public Beta right now available as a 30-day free trial, meaning you can download and try and a free preview version for Lightroom.

This is the instruction manual for the Kodak Petite camera, which was made between 1929 and 1933. It shoots 127 film, and came in five different colors.

If you're the kind of person that constantly misplaces your lens caps after removing them to shoot (Psst! You can ditch them in favor of UV filters), the LensCapTrap can help you hold on to them. It's an uber simple kit that allows you to attach your lens caps to your camera strap using Velcro, avoiding the annoyance of having your caps dangle like they do with the popular string-style holder. The standard kit costs $6 and provides Velcro patches for two lens caps, though creating your own …

Copywriter Jean Saxon Morrow created with these clever advertisements for Canon's Digital ELPH compact cameras. The tagline is "Remember your story".

The Common Camera Project is a neat experiment started in 2009 by a group of Berkeley students led by Kevin Huynh in which hundreds of disposable cameras are being passed around the world with these simple instructions on the back of each one: …

This "Sky Aperture" t-shirt is a nice way to sport some photography-related apparel without being too geeky. You can grab it now for $20 over on Threadless, though if you wait you might be able to grab it for $5 or $10 during a sale.

Did you know that 1 out of 255 women and 1 out of 12 men have some kind of color vision deficiency? X-Rite has an interesting online "Color IQ" test that helps you find out how well your eyes see colors. You're given four strips with color chip squares, and are tasked with arranging them in order by hue, starting from the fixed chip on the left side and ending with the fixed one on the right. It's an online version of the Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue test, which has been used by the government …

Lomography has a huge exhibition going on in Hong Kong's Times Square shopping center featuring 40,000 Lomo photographs, massive film cartridges, and giant cameras loaded with trampolines.

If you have an instant camera, have you ever tried taking digital photos of the prints right after you made them? For his series titled "Instax Windows", Shawn McClung carries around a digital camera and snaps a digital photo of his Fuji Instax prints right after they're taken, with the scene in the print lined up with the real world.

Here's a funny prank that Canadian hidden camera show Just For Laughs Gags did involving a Polaroid camera and asking strangers to help take a picture. Pictures don't lie, right?

On June 6, 1944 -- also known as D-Day -- war photographer Robert Capa braved the defenses of the heavily fortified Omaha beach, swimming ashore with the second wave of soldiers. Using two Contax II cameras, a 50mm lens, and several rolls of film, he managed to capture 106 photographs documenting the first couple hours of the now-famous invasion (Omaha beach is the one seen in the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan). After he raced back to London to have the film processed, a Life magazine …

Microsoft's jaw-dropping Photosynth technology has arrived on the iPhone as an app that allows you to easily create immersive 360-degree panoramas. All you need to do is load up the app and sweep your camera around in every direction, and the app automatically snaps photographs filling in the panoramic image (you can also tap it if it gets sluggish with its snapping).

Here's an interesting look at the guts of the pellicle mirror Sony A55 and how the camera works. The camera being examined in the video is already disassembled and neatly organized by layer. If you haven't seen or read much about the A33/A55 before, this video will bring you up to speed on the advantages of having a translucent mirror instead of a traditional one.

Easter is just around the corner, and camera case maker ZKIN is selling these limited edition bunny-style Micro Four Thirds camera cases for a good cause. Only 101 of them were made, and proceeds of the sales will be donated to the Society for Abandoned Animals. They're available from DCFever for 620 HKD (~$80).

Photographer Chris Jordan uses his photography to bring awareness to a problem that many people have never heard about -- baby albatross dying in the middle of the Pacific due to their parents feeding them plastic from the Pacific Garbage Patch. Jordan finds the carcasses of the baby birds scattered around the Midway Islands and captures how they died filled with plastic. Watching this video about his work will probably make you think twice about how you use and dispose of plastic.

The United States Postal Service admitted last week that the Statue of Liberty photo found on 3 billion newly printed stamps was in fact an image of the half-size replica (shown on left above) found in front of the New York-New York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas rather than the original in NYC. The original photo was shot by photographer Raimund Linke and was found through Getty Images.

This is the first color photograph ever taken underwater. It's a hogfish captured off the Florida Keys in 1926 by National Geographic photographer Charles Martin and Dr. William Longley. In addition to some special waterproof camera housing, the duo used pounds of highly explosive magnesium flash powder to illuminate the scene.

The Frazier Ultimate lens is like the universe's anti-matter to the Canon 50mm f/1.0 that we shared yesterday. Rather than have a tiny depth of field and tons of bokeh, the Frazier lens is one that has massive depth of field, allowing both the foreground and background of the image to be in focus at the same time. It's widely used in Hollywood and in wildlife documentaries, and the video above shows some of the visual tricks you can do when having infinite DoF.

Back of a Webpage is a creative new site that imagines what popular websites might look like if you look at them from behind -- as if you were a tiny person sitting inside your computer monitor looking at the other side of the screen. What you see here is the one for Flickr. We finally get to see what those digital prints look like on the back!

Photographer Joey Celis needed to shoot a photograph of eleven people in a dimly lit cigar lounge, but found it difficult to light the models without having lighting gear appear in the shot. In the end, he was able to make the image above with a single Speedlite.

Market research firm IDC released its findings about the worldwide digital camera market recently, with interesting details about the current market shares of camera manufacturers. From 2009 to 2010, Canon's share remained perfectly constant at 19%, while #2 player Sony increased its share from 16.9% to 17.9%. Nikon also grew from 11.1% to 12.6%. The worldwide market for digital cameras is also growing -- last year it increased 10% to 141 million cameras sold.

Nikon created this beautiful video promoting Nikkor lenses, and included interesting looks into how their lenses are manufactured. Previously we shared a post showing how Canon manufactures their 500mm lens.

Boston news station WBZ-TV stirred up some controversy recently after airing a piece titled "Downtown Crossing ‘Street Photographers’ Crossing The Line?". Apparently a viewer sent in some video showing a group of six or seven older men who regularly visit a particular crosswalk to photograph pedestrians on the street, saying that they see the men "aggressively hunting down and photographing women and children nearly every day". The station then decided to air a piece and publish a story …

Do you remember how you felt when you get your hands on your first DSLR camera? Perhaps it was something like what this woman felt after receiving a Nikon D90. Even if you're a Canonite or the Tin Woodman, this video will probably still bring a smile to your face. Nikon needs to contact these people and turn this into a commercial.

Check out this bizarre looking homemade medium format camera spotted by tokyo camera style on the streets of Tokyo, Japan. That bizarre glass bulb you see sticking out of it is the 360 degree lens that projects panoramic views onto the 120 film inside the camera.

Photoshop is a pretty resource intensive program that can slow down to a crawl when you're working with large and/or many files. Aside from beefing up your hardware specs to provide the program with more memory or disk space, there's also a number of Photoshop and operating system preferences you can adjust to make sure the program runs as smoothly and quickly as possible. The Photoshop performance team recently published a helpful guide with 19 adjustments you can make, which range from …

Terje Sorgjerd is a master of out-of-this-world timelapse videos. After stunning all of us with one featuring the northern lights earlier this year, he's back again with an even crazier one that captures the Milky Way over El Teide, Spain's highest mountain. The individual frames were shot using a Canon 5D Mark II with a Canon 17mm TSE, Canon 16-35mm II, Canon 24/1.4II, and Sigma 12-24mm.

Flickr user Frannie 1 shot these beautiful photographs of the rare Canon 50mm f/1.0. The lens currently goes for over $4,000 used on eBay. That is one beautiful piece of glass! …

If you're looking to get started in studio portraiture, here's a great tutorial by prophotolife teaching three different lighting techniques (Rembrandt, butterfly, and edge) you can do using only one light.

Here's a funky fusion of analog and digital: Etsy seller newfocus repurposes 35mm film cassettes by using them to house USB flash drives. You can buy a 2GB one for $19 or a 4GB one for $24 from their Etsy store. They would make pretty fun gift for a photography-lover you know, and if you don't want to buy one you can try your hand at building your own!

To capture "portraits of the sun" and to illustrate its power, General Electric filled 20 weather balloons with hydrogen and helium, surrounded them with 24 Canon DSLR cameras (18 7Ds and 6 60Ds), and shot the balloons exploding Matrix-style.

Shooting the Dalian Oil Spill on assignment for Greenpeace, Chinese photographer Lu Guang witnessed and photographed 25-year-old firefighter Zhang Liang's accidental drowning while attempting to unblock a water pipe in the harbor. His gut-wrenching series of photographs went on to win third prize in the 2011 World Press Photo contest for Spot News. In the video above, he reflects on that day and his role as a photographer in showing the world what happened.

Did you know that Leica was actually the company that first invented autofocus? Between 1960 and 1973 the company patented a number of autofocus technologies, and then showed off the technology at photokina in 1976 and 1978. However, the head honchos of the company believed that their customers knew how to focus and preferred focusing themselves, so they decided to sell the patent rights to Minolta.

The stock prices of major camera equipment manufacturers took a major -- and expected -- dive after the earthquake on March 11, 2011. Though they made a brief recovery afterward, they're continuing to fall due to the risk that gear prices may soon skyrocket soar once decreased production isn't able to meet demand.

Here's a pretty lengthy video tutorial by the (unofficial) Nikon Help Hotline channel on YouTube teaching how to properly and thoroughly clean a camera lens.

Twaggies are fun little comics based on unique Tweets found on Twitter. The above is Twaggie #217, based on this Tweet by @mollymcnearney: …

Forget Little Trees. "Sweet Snapshots" are the air fresheners photo enthusiasts should have hanging from their rear view mirrors. ModCloth sells them for $6 a pop in yellow grapefruit or pink peach. The reviews say the scents don't last very long, so just know that you'd be buying them mostly for aesthetics.

Top of the line DSLR cameras are cheaper, more versatile, and superior in most specs when compared to the $7,000 Leica M9, so why would a photographer ever choose an M9? In this video, NYC hip hop photographer John Ricard argues that it boils down to two things: usability and focus.

Turns out Fujifilm's new FinePix X100 isn't just nice to look at -- DxOMark just published results from testing the camera's APS-C sensor, finding that it delivered better results in all aspects compared to the best Micro Four Thirds camera sensors (namely the Olympus PEN EP2 and Panasonic Lumix DMC GH2) and rivals the quality of the best APS-C sensors found in DSLR and SLT cameras. Now if only the camera would start becoming available here in the US...

Magnum street photographer Bruce Gilden shoots his candid portraits on sidewalks by walking right up to strangers and sticking his camera and flash up into their faces, as seen in the "walking NYC streets" video we featured last year. In the behind-the-scenes video above, British Journal of Photography editor Olivier Laurent follows Gilden around as he shoots a project in Derby, England.

David Eger has a fun 365 day photo project called "365 Days of Clones" in which he posts a daily photo involving Star Wars clone trooper action figures. He also has a neat mini-series in which he recreates famous photographs, called "Cloned Photos". See if you recognize any of these.

Here's a neat necklace for photo geeks -- it's a 35mm "cropper" that you can use to see what a scene would look like in a photograph. There's even rule of thirds lines built into it. They're handmade, crafted in Korea, and cost $49 over on Etsy. If you want an equally geeky tool without paying such a ridiculous price, you can punch the film out of a 35mm slide and use that.

Andrew Lathrop came up with this novel way of building a simple radiation detector using an old compact camera, plastic scintillators, some reflective material, and black tape. A scintillator is material that lights up when exposed to radiation, and might be a little difficult for you to get your hands on unless you work in a science lab. Lathrop sent his idea to newspapers in Japan after the recent earthquake, but none of them decided to publish it.

Alberto Korda's iconic photo of Che Guevara, titled "Guerrillero Heroico", is constantly at the center of copyright battles, with Koda's daughter Diana Díaz even licensing the image for branded products in order to fund the legal fights. The latest case involves a London gift company, takkoda, which recently began selling products featuring a dog Photoshopped to look like Che in Korda's photo. The designers insist that there was no copyright infringement but, rather than risking a prolonged …

As Instagram continues its meteoric rise, an ecosystem of third-party services is developing around it. Postagram is one such service by Xobni co-founder Matt Brezina and his new company Sincerely. It lets you easy send physical prints of your Instagram photos as postcards with personalized messages. The photo itself pops out of the postcard as a glossy 300-dpi print. Postagram is available as a free download in the App Store, while each postcard costs $1 and arrives in 2-5 days.

We covered the WVIL (wireless viewfinder interchangeable lens) concept camera at the beginning of the year when the design team behind it released a fake video of it being showed off at CES 2011. The above video is another neat glimpse at the supposedly patent-pending design, which puts all the camera functions in the lens itself, leaving the camera body to function as a wireless display and control panel. What do you think of the idea?

Looks like Nikon has a new 50mm lens primed for announcement. Earlier today a AF-S NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8G product page appeared on Nikon's website, but was quickly pulled -- but not before it was already widely reported (here's a screenshot of the page). The lens features a Silent Wave Motor for quiet focusing, and a "newly developed optical system employing an aspherical lens element". It will be compatible with both DX and FX format cameras. No word on when this lens will become official or how …