June 2011

The Guardian compiled a powerful collection of vignettes by war photographers recounting times when their work almost got them killed.

One of our keen-eyed readers named Daniel recently opened up his July issue of Wired magazine and saw this advertisement for the popular Fujifilm FinePix X100. What caught his eye was the following line: …

Here's a neat little behind-the-scenes video in which Michael Ivins, the official photographer of the Boston Red Sox, talks about his experiences with shooting baseball. He offers some good tips that apply to other sports as well (e.g. try and anticipate).

A company called Lytro has just launched with $50 million in funding and, unlike Color, the technology is pretty mind-blowing. It's designing a camera that may be the next giant leap in the evolution of photography -- a consumer camera that shoots photos that can be refocused at any time. Instead of capturing a single plane of light like traditional cameras do, Lytro's light-field camera will use a special sensor to capture the color, intensity, and vector direction of the rays of light (data …

The power of the Internet is amazing. Just yesterday we reported on how a man found a battered memory card that apparently spent four years in the ocean and recovered 104 photos from it. After the story went viral and was widely reported, the owner of the camera has now been found. The girl nearest the camera in the photo above was visiting relatives four years ago when she accidentally dropped the camera into the Pacific Ocean from a wharf Santa Cruz.

Turns out that mysterious Leica camera spotted on British singer Seal was in fact a Leica that didn't officially exist yet, but now it does: Leica has just announced the M9-P digital rangefinder. The new camera is basically the M9 with a few cosmetic changes -- all the guts are identical. Like on the non-digital Leica MP, the traditional red dot is missing from the M9-P, which meant to give the camera an "understated appearance".

A while back we suggested that for a photo project (perhaps on a rainy day) you can collect things of a certain color in your house, arrange them neatly, and then take a picture. An even easier place to do this might be your local supermarket. Designer Marco Ugolini and photographer Pedro Motta teamed up for a project titled Per Color that features baskets of color shot in a Brazilian supermarket.

Argentinian photographer Irina Werning's "Back to the Future" series of photographs features people reenacting photographs of themselves taken decades ago, and has made Werning a well-known photographer after going viral on the Internet over the past year.

In March 2011 we reported that an iPhone photo sharing app called Color had raised a whopping $41 million in funding before it had even launched. Sequoia Capital, one of the most prominent VC firms in Silicon Valley, invested more money in Color than they had originally invested in Google. Now, just three short months later, Color is still struggling to find users while its less-funded competitors are leaving it in the dust.

If you use Photoshop, you're probably experienced with the uber-useful -- and oft-abused -- Clone Stamp tool, but what about the Clone Source panel that's been around since CS 4? This brief but informative tutorial by Photoshop guru Brian Wood is a great primer for that panel, and also includes some general Photoshop tips and tricks that you might not have known.

Last week we featured Shopobot, a new website that can show you the price history of camera gear and tell you whether it's stable or not. Decide is a new service (just launched yesterday) that goes a step further -- it not only tells you whether to buy or not based on price stability, but checks to see whether there's a newer model available or likely to be announced in the near future. The service bases each decision on 40 price factors, historical trends, and relevant rumors regarding …

Have you been running low on creative juices lately? Fill up again with these 29 simple ways to stay creative.

We've heard of digital photos being recovered after lost cameras drift for 1,000 miles (in underwater casing) or spend a year at the bottom of the ocean floor, but is there any hope for a camera that experiences four years of abuse at sea? Turns out there is. A man named Peter Govaars was walking along a beach in California when he stumbled upon a battered camera "skeleton" with a memory card still attached. He took the SD card home, took it apart, spent 30 minutes cleaning it, and was …

About a year ago, engineer and photo-enthusiast Morten Hjerde began brainstorming ideas for the next generation of photographic lighting after concluding that most of the lights used by photographers these days are simply glorified light bulbs.

Ryan Burnside recently set out to find a cheap way to shoot 360-degree panoramas of scenes, and discovered that shooting a Christmas ornament (or any other spherical reflection) captures all the information needed -- all that's needed is a way to "unravel" the spherical image. Burnside found that the free image editor GIMP can do the trick.

After Polaroid stopped manufacturing instant film in 2008 -- breaking the hearts of Polaroid lovers around the world -- a small new company called The Impossible Project purchased Polaroid's manufacturing equipment and factory in the Netherlands in an attempt to save the film from extinction. They were successful in doing so, announcing new lines of instant films in 2010. The above video is an interesting mini-documentary that gives us a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on at The Impossible …

"Lonely Traveller" is a new photography-related t-shirt for sale over on Threadless. Basically, elephants have nature's version of the XShot Camera Extender.

Shoot a stunning time-lapse video of the Milky Way, and there's a good chance it'll go viral. Photographer Randy Halverson used a Canon 60D and Canon T2i with Tokina 11-16, Sigma 20mm F1.8, and Tamron 17-50 lenses to shoot these beautiful images of the night sky over South Dakota.

Even though it seems like the photo sharing market is saturated with services competing for the world's photos, the incredible growth of many young companies (e.g. Instagram) shows that there's still plenty of untapped areas for growth, with mobile sharing being one of the big ones at the moment. A trademark for "Photovine" filed by Google earlier this month seems to suggest that the search giant is looking to expand beyond Picasa.

Here's a lighthearted video as we sign off for the weekend: photographers Larry Chen and Joe Ayala recently found themselves stuck overnight at Dallas Fort-Worth Airport with $30,000 in photographic equipment (including Canon 5D Mark IIs and GoPros, so they decided to make best use of the opportunity and film themselves fooling around in the empty airport.

Yes, it looks like some kind of futuristic spaceship fuel cell, but it's actually the Alpinist camera case by BetaShell. As you might remember, BetaShell sells a line of lens cases that guard against extreme environments, and the Alpinist offers the same kind of protection for people looking to bring compact cameras into extreme environments (rock climbing or extreme skiing, for example). They're made out of aircraft-grade aluminum, and come in a few different sizes priced between $60 and $120 …

You've probably seen countless photographs already of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan back in March, but they were likely captured by professional photographers looking to have the images published in news outlets. What, then, would photographs look like if they were taken by ordinary people who were directly affected by the disaster? Aichi Hirano found out the answer to this question by distributing 50 disposable cameras to survivors at a number of shelters with a note …

The Arizona Republic features photographer Michael McNamara shot this photo of his camera bag showing the gear he uses for his work. His photographs are used for food, fashion, and lifestyle pieces, and usually requires lighting.

Photographer Nasim Mansurov's friend recently ordered Canon 5D Mark II from online camera store AjRichard for just $2,350, but was then called by a sales rep and told that the battery and charger weren't included. The final order came out to $2,629, which included some unneeded accessories and 3-day shipping. When the order finally arrived in 2 weeks, he found that it was a 5D Mark II + 24-120mm kit box with the lens removed.

We shared a video of Canon's Image Stabilization technology in action in the beginning of the year, but that was on a pro telephoto lens and inside a glass display case. What would the same technology look like in a cheaper, consumer lens? Preston over at Camera Technica decided to find out, disassembling a Canon 18-55mm kit lens to capture this short video of the IS mechanism in action. I had no idea the thing used springs, did you? …

Panamanian photographer José Castrellón's series Priti Baiks features portraits of men standing proudly next to their decorated bikes. The bikes are their owners' only form of transportation, and the owners spend a considerable amount of their time and resources personalizing their bikes into symbols of identity and individuality.

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.

Last week we shared about how astronauts left some Nikon DSLR gear to burn up in the atmosphere instead of having it brought back to Earth, but it certainly wasn't the first time cameras were left in space. Did you know that there are 12 Hasselblad cameras currently sitting on the surface of the moon? The cameras that shot those iconic images of the moon's surface between 1969 and 1972 were left there to allow for the 25kg of lunar rock samples that were brought back instead. Only the film …

German sports photographer Peter Langenhahn has an interesting way of documenting the important moments in a sporting event. Instead of showing them each in a separate photograph, he shoots events from a distant perspective and combines the important moments into a single image afterward. For example, one of his panoramas shows every single foul called throughout the course of a soccer match. After shooting up to 3,000 photos during an event, he spends up to 2-3 months combining them into a …

Kate Spade's Pocomo Gwem handbag features a pretty well-known rangefinder camera. Recognize it? It's the Leica M9 with a gold plated spade in the "red dot" instead of the standard Leica logo. Too bad the $225 bag isn't meant to actually hold one.

Flickr is a popular method of sharing photos, but the service doesn't provide any easy way to download them in bulk. Flick and Share is a web app that creates simple download links for Flickr sets that you can send to family and friends, allowing them to quickly download a copy of the images you shot at an event. We've tested it out, and it works as advertised.

Film director André Chocron created this beautiful music video for the song "Time is of the essence" by Cold Mailman using time-lapse and tons of time-consuming editing. The time-lapse stills were shot over two weeks using a Canon 7D and Nikon D300, but that wasn't the difficult part -- editing the video to have the apartment buildings serve as equalizers for the music took a whopping three months!

Mobile photo sharing star Instagram just announced its 5 millionth member and will soon pass 100 million photos, but their domination of the market may not last much longer. According to TechCrunch, Facebook -- a service that receives 6 billion photos a month and stores 100 billion photos total -- is currently working on a feature-packed iPhone app that may soon be ubiquitous on iPhones.

Meet Ianto, a light painting Miniature Pinscher. Her owner Michael Zoellner created a special vest with 5 LED lights that functions as a Persistence of Vision display, spelling out the words of the novel "Makers" by Cory Doctorow in the air as Ianto sprints across the park. If you don't have the technical know-how to pull this off, you can always try strapping an iPad to your dog!

German wedding photographer Rocco built this ingenious do-it-yourself photo booth using a Nikon, an iPad, and a remote shutter release. Guests can step on a pedal to trigger the shutter, which snaps a well-lit photograph (there's a Speedlight on each side) and beams the image to the iPad via an Eye-Fi card and the app ShutterSnitch. While this photo booth doesn't print out photo strips, it could be a great and fun way to give an event's attendees some extra high-res photos without any extra …

Move aside Panasonic GF3, this is the world's smallest Micro Four Thirds camera. Olympus took its Despicable Me-style shrink ray and reduced the Olympus E-PL1, E-P2, and E-PL2 to the size of an SD card for a promotion over in Hong Kong. They're meant to be used as cute little cell phone charms, but they work nicely as tiny prop cameras for your action figures as well!

One of the exciting features of iOS 5 announced by Apple last week is the ability to use the iPhone's "volume up" button as a shutter button when taking pictures. What's also neat is that this design choice also means that the "volume up" button on Apple's headphone remotes can also trigger the shutter, allowing them to be used as remote shutter releases. Say hello to stealthy and/or non-blurry iPhone photographs!

Bad news for TinEye but good news for photographers: Google is adding reverse image search to their ever-growing list of products, allowing photographers to search using their photos to see the different places they're being used online. You can search for images by entering a URL, uploading from your computer, dragging and dropping onto the search page, or via Chrome and Firefox extensions. The feature will be rolling out to Google's users over the next few days -- once you see the camera icon …

Sometimes Photoshop's amazing Content-Aware Fill gets it almost right, yet so very wrong.

Just because you use the built-in flash on your compact camera doesn't mean you need to live with harsh, direct lighting. Here's a quick video tutorial teaching how to use any small white card (e.g. a piece of scrap paper or a business card) to easily bounce your flash and soften the lightning.

Medical experiments can be quite bizarre -- I once heard about one that involved injecting subjects with various kinds of animal feces. After a year of participating in various clinical trials for cash, photographer and recent art-school graduate Josh Dickinson decided to start a project called Studied to document what it's like to be a human guinea pig. His experiences range from being pricked with needles and subjected to pain to being suffocated...

Here's a helpful tutorial that teaches how to shoot in harsh, midday sunlight using a single reflector to soften the shadows on your subject. If you've never used a reflector outdoors before, it's a great primer for getting started. Aside from buying a nice reflector for about $30, you can also find cheap ones for under $10 on eBay, use a car sun shade, or make one yourself with cardboard and foil.