The Story Behind the Polaroid SX-70
Harry McCracken over at Technologizer wrote a fascinating piece about Polaroid founder Edwin Land and the history of the SX-70 camera.
Harry McCracken over at Technologizer wrote a fascinating piece about Polaroid founder Edwin Land and the history of the SX-70 camera.
This is the large format camera collection of the School of Visual Arts in NYC, one of the leading art schools in the United States. Beautiful.
This photograph was taken by a lens with some "obstruction" on the front element. Aside from the blurry patch of nastiness in the bottom portion of the frame, the rest of the image looks pretty decent. What do you think the "obstruction" is? A little dirt? A smudge where the photographer accidentally touched the front element? A scratch? The answer is a little closer to a scratch than a smudge...
I'm not sure how useful this would be for most people, but it's a neat look at the kinds of technologies people are working on to enrich our photo sharing experience. Pass-Them-Around is an app developed by researchers at Nokia that lets you share digital photographs with friends sitting around a table as if you had physical prints sitting in front of you. The phones can also be placed side by side to act as larger displays for the photos.
Shopobot is a new shopping tool that helps buyers determine the best price to buy products from various retailers by tracking their price changes across time. Retailers often change the prices of different items often to determine the best price point, which can cause frustration for people who buy a product only to find it $50 cheaper the next day. If you're looking to buy a camera, lens, or any other piece of gear, you might benefit from doing a quick search on Shopobot to find the price …
During a workshop in São Paulo, Brazil earlier this month, someone asked Magnum street photographer Bruce Gilden to explain why he shoots with a Leica. Here's his response.
Last week we shared the beautiful first space photo to be taken with the OmegaCAM, a 268-megapixel, 1,700-lb camera operated by the European Southern Observatory. Here are some photographs of the camera itself, which uses an array of 32 separate CCD sensors for its incredible resolution.
DSLR Solutions has a new follow focus kit that allows you to keep track of focus points without being bulky or expensive. The $60 kit is basically a clamp, a velcro strap, and some metal markers that attach to the strap. Attaching the markers allows you to bounce between focus points, or keep track of a number of points if you have multiple subjects. We've featured a number of DIY follow focus solutions here in the past, but using a velcro strap and markers is something we haven't seen before.
One of the benefits of running a gear rental business is that you have a ton of equipment you can use for random experiments. That's exactly what Roger Cicala, the owner of LensRentals, did with the UV filters he had on hand. One-upping the 19 filter stack we shared a while back, he mounted 50 different UV filters to a Canon 5D Mark II and 300 f/4 lens to see what the resulting images would look like.
