May 2011

Photographer Adrian Onsen wanted to use the AI Servo autofocus mode on his Canon 40D in low-light situations, but found that the AF assist beam is only emitted once until focus is achieved rather than every time the camera needs to refocus. He then purchased a laser pointer from a dollar store, disassembled it to obtain a defocused beam of light, and attached it to the top of his camera. The hacked-together AF assist tool ended up working pretty well -- Onsen was able to shoot sharper photos at …

There's a well known photography joke that goes, "If you saw a man drowning and you could either save him or photograph the event, which lens would you use?" While it's certainly morbid and pretty absurd, there's plenty of examples of photographers having a "shoot first" mentality in a time of crisis. The rally racing photographer seen in this video provides one such example.

Flickr user Robert Hodgin purchased a cheap RC helicopter and shot these 30 second exposure photographs of him attempting to keep the helicopter from crashing. If you have RC helicopter skills, you might be able to create pretty neat light-painting photographs using this idea.

The iPhone 4 has become the primary camera for many of its owners, but it lacks many of the useful features found on actual compact cameras. iShuttr is a hard case that makes your iPhone operate more like a compact camera by adding a grip, a shutter button, zoom buttons, a larger flash, an external battery pack, and a tripod mount. The people behind the case are currently raising money for the project through Kickstarter: a $50 contribution will pre-order an iShuttr, which is set to retail for …

Reflector mounts (the things that attach a reflector to your bike) are so cheap that bike shops often give them away for free. Add a standard tripod screw, some washers, and some wing nuts, and you'll have a super cheap camera mount that you can attach to a bicycle (it's also a way to attach a camera to some random pole if you need to). You can also find a text version of this tutorial over on Instructables.

The AP published an article yesterday titled "How Much Longer Can Photographic Film Hold On?" that gives a pretty grim outlook for the future of film. About a decade ago, Americans were purchasing close to 1 billion rolls of film and 19.7 million film cameras every year. This year, only about 20 million rolls will be sold and film camera sales may fall below 100,000.

Do you have an efficient way of keeping track of which batteries or memory cards are fresh and ready to use? Flickr user Damon Hair uses Post-it Flags to tag charged batteries and formatted memory cards, letting him quickly swap out used ones when shooting without having to check them one at a time. For an even cheaper solution, you can try wrapping a small rubber band around them instead.

There's plenty of tutorials out there teaching you how to fake the "Lomo effect" using Photoshop, but most of them don't provide very realistic results. This "ultimate" tutorial by SLR Lounge attempts to mimic all the distinct characteristics of lomo photos (e.g. cross-processed colors, vignetting, blown highlights, and blurred edges) giving you a level of control over the results that an iPhone app could never do.

Apparently Sigma was aiming for a much lower price when developing the SD1 DSLR, but was forced to price it high after putting in whole bunch of "great stuff". The company's Chief Operating Officer Kazuto Yamaki is responding to user complaints on Twitter with some apologetic Tweets, saying the company had missed the price range that they had originally targeted. Perhaps the SD1 wasn't designed as a halo product after all...

DC Watch has a tutorial on how to make your own bellows on which you can use various lenses (toy binoculars, magnifying glass, etc...). Print out the PDF template, then follow the video tutorial above to get started. Here's a Google Translated version of the tutorial.

Oleg Gutsol is the co-founder and technical director of photo-sharing service 500px.

A Leica 0-series camera made in 1923 was sold this past weekend at WestLicht Photographica Auctions for a staggering €1.32 million (~$1.89 million). Only about 25 0-series cameras were manufactured to test the market before Leica began commercially producing the Leica A. It's the most expensive camera ever sold, but is still only half the price of the most expensive photo that was auctioned earlier this month.

A group of neuroscientists at MIT recently conducted a study to try and determine what makes photographs memorable. After gathering about 10,000 diverse photos, they showed a series of them to human subjects and asked them to identify whenever a photo was a repeat of one previously shown. They found that photos containing people in them are the most memorable, while natural landscapes are least memorable and easily forgotten.

Time-lapse videos of the night sky usually feature breathtaking views of stars spinning in the background, but here's a night sky time-lapse that offers a different perspective -- instead of having the stars rotate overhead, the sky is fixed while the foreground spins around the frame. The original (and traditional) footage can be found here.

Not content with simply resurrecting traditional Polaroid instant film, The Impossible Project is also selling a special Black Frame version of its PX 600 Silver Shade film. The black borders give the instant film a pretty unique look, but packs of Black Frame film are pretty pricey: 8 exposures will cost you $24.

This animation was created by students of the Engineering 128: Advanced Engineering Design Graphics course at UC Berkeley during the Spring 2008 semester. The first part shows a Canon 10D DSLR exploding into its individual parts, and then those parts coming together again to slowly rebuild the camera, while the second part does the same for a Canon 24-85mm lens. Pretty dang impressive considering that it's for an undergraduate course.

It seems every time we feature a fun or useful phone app, it's for the iPhone. If you're an Android user (there's more and more of you out there), here's one for you: Photo Tools is a free app that offers a pretty large number of useful photography tools bundled into a single application. In it you'll find everything from a digital gray card to a sunset/sunrise calculator.

Libertarian magazine Reason created this video about the erosion of photographers' rights in the United States. One of the cases highlighted is the one involving Antonio Musumeci, who was arrested for filming a government building and came out victorious in a lawsuit with the help of the NYCLU.

When two photographers got engaged in Japan, they asked their jewelry-maker friend to create wedding rings based on the Leica 50mm Summilux lens. The groom's ring was the focusing ring while the bride's was the aperture ring. The friend also created a stunningly realistic miniature Leica M3 to hold the rings (they slide onto the lens)! …

Bryce Bell of cardnetics created this business card design that features a built-in aperture mechanism. Pull the lever down and the aperture opens up. If you run a photography-related business, this could be a neat business card to pass out to your clients. Pre-assembled cards start at $6 each, while you can buy kits that you put together yourself for $2.50. If you want to try printing and laser cutting the card yourself, the design templates are available here.

Flickr user Alex Eylar created this humorous recreation of Pete Souza's now-iconic photo of Obama in the Situation Room during the Osama bin Laden raid.

Here's a beautiful illustration titled "A Camera Study" by Mari Sheibley, the lead designer over at Foursquare and the person behind the badges. I think this would be awesome as a poster.

In November 2010, Talking Points Memo published an article that included a wire photo taken on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. Yesterday they received a cease and desist letter from the NYSE claiming that photos of the trading floor cannot be displayed without the NYSE's permission, and that it owns trademark rights to images of the floor: …

If you've used your flash for quite a while, you may have noticed some yellowish haze where the plastic has oxidized. For flash units that have a smooth surface, here's a pro tip: you can make it shine again by simply dabbing a little toothpaste onto a cloth and wiping off the haze in a circular motion.

Sigma generated a lot of buzz recently after announcing its SD1 DSLR with a $9,700 MSRP, and that's probably exactly what they were trying to do. As articles all over the Internet questioned why a 14.7MP Sigma DSLR would cost the same price as Pentax's 40MP medium-format DSLR, Sigma was quick to point out that the camera would actually be selling for a slightly more reasonable street price of $6,900.

Did you know that you can turn any wall magnetic by painting it with magnetic primer? Communications company M Booth did this with one of its walls, then sent out employees onto the streets of NYC with Fujifilm Instax cameras. The result is this impressive wall displaying 800 instant photos!

One of the big complaints users (or ex-users) have against Flickr is that its account deletion process is often unexpected and almost always permanent. Many users -- even paid subscribers -- have found their accounts deleted and have had no way of appealing and no chance of recovering their data. Flickr finally addressed the issue today by changing its deletion policy -- data is now stored for 90 days on the server after accounts are deleted, giving users a chance to appeal. Huzzah! …

Sigma's upcoming SD1 uses a special Foveon sensor that captures red, green, and blue information at each pixel by stacking three separate 15MP sensors, giving the resulting images 46 million pieces of information. Hasselblad's new H4D-200MS medium format DSLR also captures each of the three colors at every pixel, but with a different method -- it shoots 6 separate photos with its 50MP sensor, but shifts the sensor by 1.5 pixels for each shot, giving the resulting photos 200MP of resolution.

After Space Shuttle Endeavour launched on its final mission, a woman named Stefanie Gordon snapped a photograph of it from her Delta airlines seat using her iPhone, sharing it with friends and family through TwitPic. Though it quickly went viral, and was shared all over the media, Gordon was only paid by five media organizations for licensing rights to the photo. The Red Tape blog over on MSNBC wrote a great post a couple days ago bringing the issue of copyright infringement to the public's …

If you've ever found folding up a reflector to be difficult, here's a short and sweet video tutorial on how to make it fit back into its bag.

If you're planning to try your hand at solargraphy, it might be a good idea to label the pinhole camera before placing it out in public -- when one was spotted at Central Washington University, it was reported as a bomb and caused part of the campus to be shut down for four hours! …

A little boy named Miles was documenting a sledding adventure with his little sister when his new camera slipped out of his hands and disappeared into the snow. As his life flashed before his eyes, the camera kept rolling and recorded the mega-cuteness that ensued.

The P.90 is a limited edition pinhole camera by Kurt Mottweiler, an Oregon-based builder of wooden cameras. It's constructed using Cherry wood and brass, has a tripod adapter on the bottom, and is loaded with 120 roll film.

Things aren't going very well for Sigma these days -- just days after the world balked at the $9,700 price tag it's attaching to the upcoming SD1 DSLR, Nikon is announcing that it's suing Sigma for $150 million over the vibration reduction technology found in Sigma DSLR lenses. Furthermore, it's demanding that Sigma put a halt to the manufacturing and sale of lenses that infringe on the VR patents, which might be a large number of OS (Optical Stabilization) lenses.

Here's a great video lesson by Greg Cazillo on understanding and using image histograms to improve your photography.

Here's an idea for a quick photo activity (perhaps on a rainy day?): pick a random color, walk around your house and collect things that match that color, neatly arrange them, then take a picture.

The superheroes that line Hollywood Boulevard for tourist pictures may have a tiny taste of stardom while on the job, but what are their lives like when they put down their masks and capes? For his project "Super Heroes", photographer Gregg Segal followed a number of superheroes home to document their not-so-super lives when not on the job.

You know the "anyone can cook" mantra spoken by Chef Gusteau in Pixar's Ratatouille? It seems the same can be said about other forms of artistic expression as well, whether it's photography or painting abstract pictures. Two unusual artists we featured here before were 3-year-old Ruby Ellenby and Cooper the photography-lovin' cat. The above video shows Aelita Andre, a girl who became a professional abstract expressionist painter at the age of 3 and is called a "prodigy of color".

A camera's sensor size is a very good predictor of how good its image quality is, but understanding and comparing the sensors sizes isn't very easy. While televisions and computer monitors are usually measured by diagonal length, sensors sizes are listed with its two dimensions in millimeters. Back in 2008, David Pogue of the New York Times wrote an article about this issue, calling for someone to develop an online tool for converting confusing sensor measurements into the diagonal length of …

Since we first covered its launch back in October 2010, Instagram has become one of the fastest growing photo-sharing companies and iPhone apps. This week founder Kevin Systrom announced that they now have 4.25 million registered users, and that users are posting 10 photos every second, or around 900,000 photos per day. Not bad for a seven month old service, eh? …

William Phuoc and a few other storm chasers were shooting a thunderstorm in the Australian grasslands when a huge bolt of lightning struck the ground about 200 meters away. Luckily, they captured the strike on video and Phuoc's Canon EOS-1D Mark IV (using a 14mm lens and lightning trigger) was able to capture an amazing photograph of the strike.

Sit around long enough near an airport and you can shoot photos like these -- stacked long-exposure images that make airplanes look like fireflies streaking around the night sky. Flickr user Terence Chang visits various locations around the Bay Area to capture these photographs of San Francisco International Airport.

Here's a terrific 20-minute video that features Henri Cartier-Bresson -- the father of modern photojournalism -- talking about his views on photography and a selection of his amazing photographs. It's both educational and inspiring.

See the big box hanging out from under this Nikon F2 film SLR? It's called the Speed Magny, a special back that transforms the camera into an instant film camera. Instead of loading the camera with film, you take off the back of the camera and attach the 4lb contraption that's loaded with Polaroid pack film. Light entering the camera is directed onto the instant film below using lenses and mirrors, giving you a neat way to capture instant film photos at the expense of 5 stops of light.

Merit badges are earned by Boy Scouts to show that they've become experienced in a particular area of study after completing a list of requirements. The photography merit badge was created exactly 100 years ago in 1911, and its requirements have been revised through the years as photographic technologies continue to change and evolve. We've compiled some of the badge's requirements through the years -- see if you would be worthy of any of them with your current know-how.

Here's another quick tutorial by Destin, the guy who helped popularize using chickens as a cheap Steadicam alternative. It was made on an airplane flight when he wanted to shoot some photographs of the ice forming outside his window. If you're ever in a situation where you want to shoot a macro photo but don't have a macro lens, try flipping your lens around for a cheap and easy macro photography solution.

Apparently this is what some police officers see when they look at a camera, which explains the horror stories of photographers being harassed by law enforcement for having cameras and making pictures.

Samsung created this humorous ad a couple years ago teaching how you can take better self-portraits of yourself for social media profile pictures. It all has to do with harnessing the power of angles.

This compact camera is only one dollar... literally. Won Park, an artist that does origami using money, folded this camera using a dollar bill without cuts, glue, or tape. You can find more of his creations here, though this is the only photography-related one.

There's plenty of time lapse projects documenting the passage of time and the process of aging with human portraits, but how about with animals? This video going viral on the Interwebs right now was creating by making a photo a day of Dunder, a German Shepherd, and shows him growing from an 8 week old puppy to a 1 year old adult. If you have a pet, this concept could be a fun project for getting it involved in your photography!