One of the gripes some people have with Flickr is that it doesn't offer an easy way to download your complete collection of photos if you ever want to move your images elsewhere (though, hopefully you're not using it as your only backup).
This light painting photograph was created by a group of students over in Germany using a swarm of seven Roomba automated vacuum cleaners. Each one had a different colored LED light attached to the top, making the resulting photo look like some kind of robotic Jackson Pollock painting. There's actually an entire Flickr group dedicated to using Roombas for light painting -- check it out of you have one of these robot minions serving you in your home.
Nokia held a competition with a $10,000 prize this year asking filmmakers to create a short film using only the Nokia N8 cell phone. Director JW Griffiths won with this super creative and beautifully shot film titled "Splitscreen: A Love Story".
This Canon 7D and 70-200mm combo only costs $36 and helps you save money. How? Well it's actually a fancy piggy bank! Like the Canon 350D and 24-105mm L piggy bank we shared last year, you use this one by shoving coins into the lens.
Photo restorer Bob Rosinsky of Top Dog Imaging wrote an interesting article describing how he restored a tintype photograph from the 1870s brought to him by a client.
Photographer Elias Politis created this beautiful image showing the June 15 lunar eclipse over the Acropolis in Athens, Greece by shooting a time-lapse video and then combining the stills into a single frame.
Deal alert! Mixbook is offering a free 20-page 11x8.5" hardcover photo book with free shipping today only (June 30th, 2011). The book ordinarily costs $30 and shipping is $7, so you're getting a $37 value. All you have to do is use the code FREEBK [Update: See below] during checkout. The website's servers are getting hammered due to the deal being so popular, but if you can manage to get the site working it's definitely a sweet offer. To get started, go to Photo Books, then click 11x8.5" …
Olympus unveiled a boatload of Micro Four Thirds gear this morning, including three new PEN cameras, two new prime lenses, and a flash. All three cameras pack a 12.3 megapixel sensor with ISO that goes up to 12,800, a speedy new autofocus system (the "world's fastest"), and 1080i HD video recording. The E-P3 (shown above), the flagship camera of the PEN line, features an all-metal body, a pop-up flash, and an OLED touchscreen. It'll cost you $900 when it's out in August 2011.
OpenPhoto is a new "open" alternative to Flickr being built by programmer Jaisen Mathai -- an engineer who quit his job at Yahoo (Flickr's owner) back in May 2011. Instead of storing images using company servers, this new service will allow users to connect their own online storage accounts to store their data within arms reach. This would be like using Flickr to share your images while having the photos themselves be stored in a location that you control (e.g. Amazon S3, Dropbox, etc...).
Earlier this week an Internet user in China visited their county government website and was greeted with a horribly Photoshopped photograph showing three government officials inspecting a road.
CAPA magazine over in Japan asked some professionals in the camera industry to speculate on the rumored Nikon D4 and D900 DSLR cameras, and came up with some concept drawings for what the cameras might look like based on the information gathered. Their imaginary Nikon D4 packs a full-frame 18MP sensor, ISO 51200, 11fps burst mode, a tilting LCD screen, built-in Wi-Fi, and a 51-point cross-type autofocus system.
Here's a nice bit of encouragement for times when you feel like everyone else is coming up with neat ideas while you're stuck with lame ones.
Why settle for one boring lightning bolt when you can show 70+ bolts in the same photograph? Photographer Chris Kotsiopoulos of GreekSky recently shot a severe thunderstorm from Ikaria Island in Greece using a Canon 550D and 50mm 1.8 Mark II. He stacked 70 separate 20-second exposures to create the crazy image you see above.
Fujifilm recently put out this infomercial showing the company's efforts to restore production capabilities after having their manufacturing plant damaged by the disastrous earthquake and tsunami back in March. We get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what the manufacturing plant looks like, and the assembly line that puts the X100 together.
Forbes released its list of 100 most reputable companies in the world earlier this month, and a number of camera makers made the cut. Sony placed 6th, Canon 8th, Panasonic 13th, Kodak 41st, Samsung 43rd, and Fujifilm 47th. The Reputation Institute conducted the study with 48,000 consumers: …
Inspired by Tor Even Mathisen's stunning time-lapse of the aurora borealis over Norway, amateur photographer Ágúst Ingvarsson decided to try making his own time-lapse video to show the world what the northern lights look like over Iceland. Using a Canon 7D and Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 lens, he shot roughly 6,500 still photos between December 2010 and March 2011, using most of the images for this beautiful video.
Gavin of Sydney, Australia created an awesome 2-meter long programmable staff that makes painting giant words and images as easy as waving/walking the staff around during a long-exposure photograph. The staff, which he call the LightScythe (we would have called it the "Lightsaber"), was inspired by the Wi-Fi light painting project we shared here earlier this year.
An integral part of being a respectable artist is to have your artist statement be so confusing that you can't even decipher what it means. If coming up with one of these statements requires more time or brainpower than you have on hand, then check out Instant Artist Statement, an online generator that authors a perfect statement on your behalf for you to paste all over your website, exhibitions, and portfolios. Here's ours: …
We have a bit of a scoop for you today: there's going to be a new Kickstarter-funded gadget announced on Thursday called the Triggertrap. It's a pretty nifty universal camera trigger that can trigger your camera's shutter with anything you can think of using a built-in intervalometer, a laser trigger, a sound sensor, and an Aux input that you can connect custom triggers to: …
This card company must feel pretty good about itself -- they managed to save 50% on the stock photos used for these "new baby" cards! …
Time-lapse enthusiast and electronics wiz Achim Sack came up with this super-small hardware-based intervalometer. Only a little larger than the size of a standard 2.5mm stereo plug, the device doesn't require any special setup or configuration -- all you do is plug it into your Canon/Nikon/Pentax DSLR and then take two photographs between 0.4 seconds and 18 minutes apart. The device will continue to shoot photos at that interval until the memory card is full or the battery dies. Sadly, it's not …
Street photographer Eric Kim wanted to capture what it's like to roam around on the streets and shoot photographs of complete strangers (without their permission), so he mounted a GoPro HD 960 video camera to the top of his Leica M9 and then walked the streets of LA. You can see some of the resulting photos over on Kim's blog.
At the Hello Demain (Hello Tomorrow) exhibition in Paris, France this year, Nikon showed off a number of strange looking concept camera designs. While it's pretty unlikely they're actually planning to release any of these designs, it's interesting to see what they would come up with for this kind of exhibition.
Vibration tester manufacturer Fluke recently published this video showing what the world of vibration looks like at 1,000 frames per second.
Instead of labeling their memory cards in MB/s, some manufacturers choose to use "Times" ratings (e.g. 8x, 12x, 20x, etc...). While it's pretty clear that a higher number indicates faster speed, what exactly is the number a multiple of?
Apparently some people are becoming so rich through China's economic boom that they're using Canon 5D Mark IIs as ashtrays now. These are probably the same people that might use this Canon coffee table.
On August 4, 2006, AOL published a text file containing 20 million searches done by 650,000 users over a 3-month period for research purposes. Although the company anonymized the data by showing the users as numerical IDs, people soon realized that many people searched for personally identifiable information (e.g. their names), allowing real names to be put to unique IDs, thus revealing the search history of that individual. After the media caught wind of this, the whole thing was known as the …
Editor's note: The guest author of this DIY tutorial, Vadim Gordin, is also selling DIY kits and ready-made Lens Loop slings for $15 and $25, respectively. You can find the project over on Kickstarter.
Wedding photographer Brian Adams and wedding videographer Rainer Flor claim to be the first to capture a wedding entirely using the iPhone 4. Flor volunteered his own wedding last November for the experiment, and a total of three iPhone 4s were used: two for the photos and one for the video.
There's a new entry in the list of most expensive photographs, and this time it's not a fine art photo. Over the weekend, the only existing photograph of legendary outlaw Billy the Kid sold at auction for a whopping $2.3 million to billionaire Bill Koch, becoming the 4th most expensive photo in the world.
Someone wasn't careful while using the "Swatches" panel in Photoshop and accidentally spilled it all over this bed spread! …
YouTube user opica1983 was in Cannes, France recording some footage at night with his GoPro camera when a seagull suddenly strolled over to it, grabbed it in its beak, and flew off. Luckily he was able to find the camera after scaling a castle wall, and uploaded the footage to give us a glimpse into what it looks like to be stolen by a seagull. Now there's a perspective you don't see every day.
Maybe when Leica's designers were brainstorming ideas for the company's logo, they noticed the flag of Japan and said, "Okay, lets go with that." …
Photographer Dana Neibert made this unique iPad case using an old 8x10 film holder. It doesn't look like the most comfortable way to carry your iPad around, but it's a pretty creative idea.
If you find ordinary camera bags too boring, then check out these custom-fit bags for DSLR cameras. Each "Pixbag" is made specifically for a certain DSLR model, ensuring a snug fit in addition to the one-of-a-kind design. It looks like the bag is only available to people living in Europe, but if that's where you are, you can pick one up for about €50 over on DaWanda (the Etsy of Europe).
Logo designer Graham Smith has a neat project called "Brand Reversions" in which the logo styles of famous companies are swapped with their competitors. Canon and Nikon swap styles in the logos above, while Leica's famous red dot takes on Panasonic's Lumix brand name. Check out the rest on Smith's website.
Earlier this week Apple released Final Cut Pro X, the latest version of the popular video editing software. The program was completely rebuilt from the ground up but lacks many features found in previous versions, frustrating many users and causing people to label the program "iMovie Pro". Conan O'Brien wasted no time lampooning the program and drawing attention to Apple's ever-increasing PR nightmare. Lets hope Apple doesn't do the same thing to Aperture!
This is Photoshop Inception. They say when you reach limbo you find yourself in an HDR program.
It's estimated that 8 million people in the US struggle with an eating disorder, with 95% of them between the ages of 12 and 25, and one of the big reasons may be the aberrant use of Photoshop by the ad industry. The American Health Organization updated its policies earlier this week urging the ad industry to stop the "altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image." Board member Barbara L. McAneny states, …
Late last year we showed you an interesting demonstration of HDR video filmed using two Canon 5D Mark IIs. The cameras captured the exact same scene at different exposure values using a beam-splitter. Now, a new camera called AMP has been developed that captures real-time HDR video using a single lens. The trick is that there are two beam-splitters in the camera that take the light and direct it onto three different sensors, giving the system a dynamic range of 17 stops. Check out some sample …
Researchers in Australia are working on developing a thin piezoelectric film that can be used to convert mechanical energy into electricity. An uber-useful application would be to use the film in existing gadgets, allowing button presses and finger swipes to be used to recharge the device's battery. One of the lead scientists, Dr. Madhu Bhaskaran, states, …
Five years ago, web designer Matthew McVickar decided to give one lucky disposable camera a free vacation, sending it through the mail from Cape Cod, Massachusetts to Honolulu, Hawaii with the instructions "Take a photo before you pass it on!". When he got the camera back, there were seven photographs taken by various workers in the United States Postal Service that show the cameras journey (and the inner workings of the USPS!).
In 2009 Andy Baio of Waxy.org -- founder of Upcoming.org and former CTO of Kickstarter -- created Kind of Bloop, an 8-bit tribute album to the best-selling jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. While Baio meticulously licensed all the music he used to create the album, he released a pixelated version of the original album cover (top, second from left) without licensing it, believing it was different and low-res enough to be considered fair use. He was then sued by the …
Vignetting is often viewed as a bad thing when discussing lens quality, but it's sometimes desirable to add artificial vignetting to a photograph to draw attention to the center of the image, separating the subject from the background. Here's a helpful tutorial that shows how you can add vignetting using a curves adjustment layer in Photoshop.
Photographer Jamie Beck has done quite a bit lately to popularize the "cinemagraph": Harry Potter-esque photos that are given an extra dimension by adding a dash of animation. If you want to learn how to make your own, Photojojo recently published a great tutorial on how to make them using Photoshop. Photographers Fernando Baez and Christopher Mathew Burt have also published tutorials and some helpful tips.
In 2008, the Nikon D90 became the first DSLR to offer HD video recording, a feature that has become pretty standard on new DSLR models. Third-party companies have also taken advantage of the HDSLR craze by offering a boatload of specialized HDSLR filmmaking products, including camera rigs that are constantly becoming larger and more crazy-looking. DSLR film school Neumann Films created this funny short film poking fun at huge and expensive rigs.
Pentax has just announced the Q, the world's smallest interchangeable lens camera (ILC). Unlike existing ILC cameras, which have large sensors despite their tiny bodies, the Q has a tiny 1/2.3-inch sensor that's more comparable to the sensors in point-and-shoot cameras. Thus, the Pentax Q can be considered the world's first interchangeable lens point-and-shoot camera, though it is packed with the features and manual controls found on ILCs and DSLRs.
Leica is reportedly working on a compact, large-sensor, interchangeable lens camera that will rival the "EVIL" cameras offered by Olympus/Panasonic (Micro Four Thirds), Sony (NEX), and Samsung (NX). In an interview today with Amateur Photographer, company boss Alfred Schopf stated that consumers "will see something at the next Photokina", and that the camera will have at least an APS-C sized sensor. Perhaps the new camera will be how Leica finds its way again after being late to the digital …
Earlier this week the New York Times was lent a mysterious photo album that contained 214 photos of Nazi Germany, including images taken just feet away from Hitler. There was no indication of who the photographer was, so the Lens blog decided to publish some of the photos and crowdsource the task of solving the mystery.
This artist statement has magical subtitles that translate what the artist is saying. Google needs to add this technology to their Translate tool so we can decipher text-based artist statements.
