July 2011

Shooting in JPG mode is convenient because you instantly have a file you can throw onto the Internet, but if you're serious about photography, you might want to think about shooting in RAW if you aren't already. The reason is that only shooting JPG is the equivalent of letting the camera make a print for you and then tossing the negative -- something film photographers would never do. Here's a simple diagram by Haje Jan Kamps and Reddit user jannne to help you understand the differences.

Filmmaker Philip Bloom recently helped Lucasfilm shoot parts of their upcoming film Red Tails. The behind-the-scenes video above gives an interesting glimpse into what it looks like when pretty ordinary DSLR gear meets the big budget world of Hollywood filmmaking. The cameras are hooked up to some pretty serious equipment.

Yesterday we shared some fun portraits of dogs taken while they shook of water, but you can take similar portraits of people too. It's called "jowling", and is far less adorable. Here how Urban Dictionary defines "jowling": …

Update on 12/18/21: This video embed has been removed by its creator, but the video can still be watched over at FastCompany.

Facial recognition technology has become ubiquitous in recent years, being found in everything from the latest compact camera to websites like Facebook. The same may soon be said about location recognition.

It's not a microscope stop-motion animation, but this stop-motion ad Kia created for its 2012 Picanto is pretty incredible. Over the course of 25 days and nights, they used 1200 bottles of nail polish to paint 900 individual fake fingernails. Each nail took a whopping 2 hours to paint.

There has been a lot of discussion regarding social media sites and their scary-sounding terms of services that always sound like rights-grabs. Here's what Photoshop guru Scott Kelby had to say after trying out Google+: …

Ever wonder what the bulky white coverings NASA uses on its DSLRs is for? Popular Photography sent the agency some questions regarding its use of the Nikon D2Xs, and found out some interesting details about astronaut photo gear.

After Bang-Bang Club photographer Joao Silva lost his legs to a land mine in Afghanistan in October of last year, NYTimes executive editor Bill Keller stated, "He will be missed until — as I have no doubt he will — he returns to action, cameras blazing." Keller predicted correctly -- Silva has returned to work less than a year after suffering his horrific injuries: …

For her series "Shake", pet photographer Carli Davidson photographed curious portraits of dogs shaking off water. Use a fast shutter speed and you can capture all kinds of strange expressions on your dog's face.

Image forensics company Fourandsix set up an interesting page called "Photo Tampering throughout History". It's an interesting timeline of famous photo manipulations, going as far back as the 1860s -- the above left image of General Grant was found by the Library of Congress to actually be a composite of three separate photos! Pretty good for not having access to Photoshop, eh?

Millions of people know Instagram as a fun way to share photographs, but get popular enough on the service and it can be a profitable one as well. Keepsy, a startup that helps people quickly create albums from Instagram and Facebook photos, has launched a new curated gallery featuring top Instagram artists. Fans can purchase photobooks from the site at a price set by the artist, and profits are split 50/50 between the service and the photographer. While only about 20 users are represented …

When we shared the practice of "rooftopping" (climbing to the tops of skyscrapers and taking pictures from the edge) a couple days ago, some commenters pointed out that accidentally dropping your camera could kill someone on the ground. Well, Reuters photographer Mark Blinch had a "rooftopping" adventure of his own recently at the CN Tower in Toronto, which just launched an attraction called "EdgeWalk" that lets you walk hands free 356m (1,168ft) off the ground. Blinch describes how the crew …

Free stuff is always nice, and free photo stuff is even nicer. Canon and Ilford have teamed up for a new promotion called Try My Photo through which anyone can upload a photograph and have an 8x10 print made and sent to their residence free of charge. The promo will last until the end of August 2011.

Artificial lens flare is an important part of making certain computer generated scenes look realistic, but up to this point creating realistic lens flare has been a task that requires a good deal of processing power. Now, researchers have come up with a way to simulating lens flare quickly and accurately, taking into account a large number of physical factors that cause the phenomenon: …

Advertising Standards Authority, the ad industry watchdog in the UK, has banned an advertisement by Lancome featuring Julia Roberts for being misleading, stating that the flawless skin seen in the photo was too good to be true.

Some photographers try to make miniatures look like the real world, while others aim to make the real world look like a miniature. "The Village" is a charming portrait of a tiny Portuguese town, made to look like a miniature via tilt-shift and time-lapse.

Leica offers a funky $200 lens holder accessory for its M system film rangefinders that screws into the tripod mount and lets you store an extra lens on the bottom of the camera.

For their music video for the song "Bright Siren", Japanese band androp created a mind-blowing giant display using Canon 60D DSLRs and strobes as the individual pixels. They used 250 separate cameras and flash units, and controlled each one individually using a computer program. Every single light used was real, and no computer-generated trickery was used. You can also check out the behind-the-scenes video they made.

Here's a fun weekend project: create a tiny keychain photo album with your favorite photos! Simply print out your photographs as little circles on photo paper or card stock, laminate it, cut them out, and punch the holes. It's a neat way to keep some tiny snapshots with you, and also makes for an awesome gift. To get started, head on over to the tutorial by Happy to Create.

Photographer Sacha Goldberger set up an outdoor studio in a Parisian park and asked joggers who ran by to sprint and then pose for a photograph while out of breath. He then invited the same joggers to visit his studio one week later to be photographed in the same pose, but dressed up. The resulting photos are an interesting series of "raw vs. proper" portraits of strangers.

What if in the future, the human eye itself could be turned into a camera by simply reading and recording the data that it sends to the brain? As crazy as it sounds, researchers have already accomplished this at a very basic level.

Want to play role in the legendary agency Magnum Photos? Well, now you can as a "Magnum Tagger". The cooperative is having a tough time keeping their large archive of historical photographs organized and easily searchable. Of the 500,000 images they've uploaded to the web, about 200,000 have little or no associated metadata.

"Moonbows" are rainbows that appear at night under moonlight, and are difficult to see with human eyes but beautiful when captured in long exposure photographs. There aren't many places on Earth where this phenomenon can be regularly witnessed, but a few of them are found at the waterfalls in Yosemite.

Thrill-seeking photographer Tom Ryaboi is one of the pioneers of "rooftopping", the practice of climbing to the tops of skyscrapers and shooting pictures off the edge. Photographers who participate in this new craze aim to visit the tops of every tall building in their city, capturing the incredible -- and adrenaline-pumping -- views that they afford.

Great news for PC users: Microsoft has finally released a free codec pack for Windows Vista and Windows 7 that allows you to view and work with the RAW files of more than 120 different cameras directly in Windows Explorer. Simply download and install the codec pack to get started.

Last year Philips ran a contest called Parallel Lines in which they asked people to create a three-minute short film using only six lines of dialogue: “What is that?”, “It’s a unicorn”, “Never seen one up close before”, “Beautiful”, “Get away, get away”, and “I’m sorry”. After more than 600 entries were submitted, director Ridley Scott selected the above film, titled "Porcelain Unicorn", as the winner.

Design studio Woouf! takes different objects and creates epically cool beanbag chairs out of them. They have one that looks like a giant camera -- a perfect fit for any photo studio (or photo-enthusiast bedroom). It's a bit pricey though: it costs €175 (~$250) each over in their online store.

dpreview forum member Jorginho created a couple side by side images showing the recently leaked Nikon mirrorless camera sensor next to other sensor sizes. It gives us a visual look at how big a 2.7x sensor actually is. Above, we see the Nikon sensor next to the tiny Pentax Q sensor, which has a crop factor of 5.7x.

Photorank.me is a new web app that attempts to calculate how influential you are in the world of online photo sharing. After giving it read-only access to your social media accounts (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc...) the app computes a numerical score based on reach, activity, and quantity. PetaPixel got a score of 63, and the highest ranked person on the global leaderboard is currently English Purcell Struth, AKA "photoeng" on Instagram.

Google has added EXIF data to Google Images, allowing you to quickly look up details on how a particular photograph was taken (as long as the data is embedded). Simply click any of your search results to see the details in the panel on the right. They don't seem to be doing anything with geotag info -- displaying where the photo was taken on a Google Map, for example -- which is probably a smart choice. Something tells me a lot of people would have a problem with that, even though the data is …

People seem to be having a hard time swallowing the idea that Nikon could do well if their upcoming mirrorless camera only packs a 2.7x crop sensor, but Thom Hogan argues that there's a logical "hole" in the market that Nikon could be the first to fill: …

Ties are meant to be soft and comfortable around the neck, so they're a perfect fit for a do-it-yourself camera strap project! Besides an unwanted tie, you'll need some sewing supposed, some ribbon for the ends, and a couple rings for attaching the strap. Check out the step-by-step tutorial over on Ecouterre.

Stephen Shore is an American photographer known for his "deadpan images of banal scenes and objects in the United States" and for his pioneering use of color in fine art photography. At age 14, he sold three photographs to the Museum of Modern Art, and at 24, he became the second living photographer to do a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this video, Shore talks a little about his work and shares some of his thoughts on photography.

If you're into experimental film photography at all, Lomography is currently offering a $50 voucher towards its website or NYC store for $20 through Groupon (available to people in the US only, sorry!). There's free shipping on orders over $25, so you could get 18 rolls of Lomography color negative film with some change to spare!

Don't want people using photos of your private island without permission? Watermark it! Billionaire Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan had his name carved into the sand of his island in the Persian Gulf. The giant "HAMAD" is two miles long and half a mile tall, is partially filled with water from the Persian Gulf, and can be clearly seen in photographs of the region capture by satellite. Gives new meaning to the term "watermark", eh? …

If you're looking for a fun photography-related way to invest some money, you might want to look into photobook collecting. The Guardian writes that prices have been soaring in recent years, and not just for expensive rare editions: …

We shared a couple weeks ago that it's possible to scan film using an ordinary flatbed scanner and a DIY cardboard adapter, but did you know you can also use a large-screen cell phone or tablet computer to provide the necessary backlighting? All you need is a way to turn a large portion of the screen entirely white (e.g. a "flashlight" app). Simply place the device facedown over the film on the scanner, and scan it with the cover open.

Multi-tools are pretty convenient when you're wandering around the great outdoors, but they've never really been a friend specifically to photographers. That changes with Gerber's new Steady multi-tool, which turns into a mini-tripod using fold-out legs on one side and a fold-out tripod screw on the other. It also has 11 other useful tools to help you get things done. The Steady will be available starting in Spring 2012 for $65.

Update: Looks like the item has sold out.

As Space Shuttle Atlantis left the International Space Station to head back to Earth for the final time, one of the astronauts on the ISS captured this beautiful image of the shuttle's glowing re-entry. Any guesses for what shutter speed this was shot at? …

Photographer Lori Nix spends weeks and months creating extremely detailed miniature scenes -- called dioramas -- and then photographs them using an old fashioned 8x10 large format camera. This video offers a look at what goes on behind-the-scenes at Nix's Brooklyn studio, and how she goes about creating her unique images. You see some of her photos in this post we published a year ago featuring her photography.

Remember the strange boxy cameras that were spotted on Samsung's website a couple months ago? Turns out they were in fact digital medium format cameras, but were developed for "internal purposes" only.

Skott Chandler's House Watch project consists of photographs taken in private living spaces using a pinhole camera fixed to the ceiling.

After reading about the revolutionary "shoot first, focus later" Lytro camera that's currently in development, Canadian fashion model Coco Rocha reached out to the company to ask if they could work with a prototype.

Photographer Mike Mitchell was 18-years-old back in 1964 when he captured The Beatles on their first US tour. After sitting in a box for 45 years, 50 of the photographs were individually sold at a Christie's auction on Wednesday for a whopping $361,938.

PBS is starting a new web-only video series called "Off Book", and the inaugural episode features Patrick Rochon and Aurora Crowley, two photographers dedicated to the art of light painting.

If you ever find yourself with some unwanted negatives on your hands, you can upcycle them into creative film candle holders! All you need is a glass candle holder and some way to fix your negatives to it.

Here's a short clip from the talk show Stossel where American libertarian journalist Radley Balko talks about how cameras -- especially mobile phone ones -- are a powerful weapon against tyranny, and why laws should protect our rights to use them.

How do you get a silverback gorilla to put a GoPro HD camera up to its face? Stuff the case full of raisins, of course!