June 2011

Unusual Uses for Potholes in Large Cities

Husband and wife photography duo Davide Luciano and Claudia Ficca have a project called "Potholes" in which they stage unusual scenes around giant potholes found in large cities (e.g. Montreal, NYC, LA, and Toronto). The project started after they collided with one such pothole and needed a way to channel their frustration into a positive project, transforming something useless into something humorous and creative.

15 Minutes to Shoot, 15 Years to Master

Here's a story that was shared over on the Photo.net forums recently:

Client : Nice shot. You got it in 15 minutes. But isn't 1,000 bucks for that a robbery?
Photographer : Yes, you are right, but to get it done correctly in 15 minutes it took me 15 years of hard work and dedication to master this art of "robbery".

When people see photographers at work, they often assume that the results must not be worth as much as other forms of art, since pressing the shutter to capture an image seems so much faster and easier than painting a photograph.

Store Your Treasures in this Polaroid Camera Locket

Etsy seller Mariko Carandang sells handmade jewelry, and one of her products is this small treasure locket that's meant to look a little like the Polaroid SX-70.

The treasure locket is perfect for those of us who find and get attached to small objects that get lost in the bottom of a pocket or handbag, but don't quite fit in a wallet. It will keep those trifling but meaningful objects close to you at all times. You can use it to carry a tiny photograph or a good luck charm. Keep a scroll of paper with your favorite quote on it-- a quote you mean to live by.

Word Clouds for Popular Cameras

How do camera makers describe their cameras? To answer this question, we took the press releases of some popular cameras and made word clouds with them that are based on the number of occurrences of non-common words. The above word cloud is for the Canon 5D Mark I.

Twitter to Launch Photo Sharing Feature

Twitter has just announced that they will be launching their own photo-sharing service that will let you attach photographs directly to Tweets, competing with services like TwitPic. Rather than host the images themselves using their own servers or Amazon's S3 storage, they've decided to partner with photo-sharing giant Photobucket. It'll be interesting to see whether photographers feel more comfortable sharing their images on Twitter now that the functionality will be baked into the service itself, especially after recent brouhahas involving third party services.

How to Photograph the Night Sky

Photographer Ben Canales created this great video tutorial teaching the basics of shooting the night sky. He goes over how to shoot quick test shots to set up your composition before discussing more in-depth tips and tricks for capturing the final shot, including the "Rule of 600".