July 2011

Here's another nail in the fail coffin for the much-hyped but not-very-popular photo-sharing app Color: TechCrunch reports that Color received a staggering $200 million acquisition offer before it had even launched, but the company turned it down and raised $41 million in venture funding instead. Things haven't been going so hot for Color since then, while Google saved itself $200 million and has a couple photo-sharing apps in development that are generating some buzz.

Los Angeles-based photographer Dave Hill created this video showing all 11 photographs in his Adventure series deconstructed, giving us a glimpse of how they were put together. Hill lights and shoots different portions of his photographs separately, then combines them all into a single image using crazy Photoshop skills. Reminds me of Disney's amazing multi-plane camera.

If you look at the Top 100 Movies chart in the iTunes Store, you might not notice anything out of the ordinary, but one of the movies (#43) is actually a no budget film shot using a single Canon 5D Mark II. For Lovers Only" is a romance filmed by Mark Polish and Michael Polish -- known as the Polish brothers -- over the course of just 12 days with a single actress (Mark himself played the male lead). The film has already generated over $200,000 in profits after being spread through word of …

This photo that allegedly shows the mount and sensor on Nikon's upcoming mirrorless camera was just leaked onto the Chinese forum Xitek. My initial reaction was, "wow, that sensor looks small!". However, the camera is in fact rumored to have a relatively small 2.6x crop sensor (by comparison, the new Pentax Q has a 5.7x crop sensor).

Having a hard time getting a kid to smile? Children's photographer Jennifer Tonetti-Spellman suggests botching children's songs on purpose to draw out natural smiles and laughs: …

Update on 12/18/21: This video has been removed by its creator.

You know you're ballin' as a photographer when you can use your lens collection to play a giant game of chess.

"Vector Portraits" is a series of candid portraits of passing motorists shot by photographer Andrew Bush between 1989 and 1997 in the Los Angeles area. After making 66 of these portraits, he published a photo book with them titled "Drive".

The North Korean government is the latest to get caught trying to feed a poorly Photoshopped photo to the media. This past weekend the Korean Central News Agency -- a state-run organization -- released a photo of citizens trying to wade through floodwaters in Pyongyang, saying that heavy rains flooded farmlands, destroyed homes, and caused deaths. After initially passing the image onto its members, the AP decided to issue a "kill notice" (yup, that's what it's called) a day later to withdraw …

The WVIL concept camera that made the rounds on the Internet featured a lens that could operate separately from the camera body, but Or Leviteh's MMI camera is even simpler: it's a small screen-less camera that uses a smartphone as its "camera body".

Check out this mummified camera used by Reuters photographer Jo Yong-Hak. Yong-Hak was assigned to cover the popular Boryeong Mud Festival this year in South Korea, and decided to protect his gear with some good ol' fashioned plastic wrap.

For the first time ever, an Adobe program is available through the Mac App Store. Yesterday, Adobe began selling Photoshop Elements 9 there for $80, a generous 20% off the regular $100 price for the boxed version. It's a pretty big deal, because Adobe -- along with Microsoft -- is a company that would love to keep its software out of Apple's App Store. It generates significant profits by selling its popular programs in the traditional boxed format, while businesses that sell through the Mac App …

Lv Sisi created this music video, titled "Digital Analogue", using only sounds recorded from a collection of antique cameras and 6,000 individual photographs carefully shot and edited together into an artistic stop-motion video.

Here's an awesome tutorial that teaches you how to create beautiful light painting sparkler photos. The materials are pretty cheap: all you need is some steel wool, an egg whisk, and a rope or cable. Simply place the steel wool inside the whisk, light it on fire using a lighter (or 9V battery), and swing it around at the end of the cable while your camera snaps a long-exposure photo. Just be careful not to start a fire!

Here's a couple images of Sony's upcoming A77 translucent mirror camera (with a battery grip attached), which is expected to be announced in late August. It's rumored to have a 24-megapixel sensor, HD-video recording, and a $1,000 price tag. It's unknown whether or not it packs the crazy double translucent lens hybrid viewfinder that was talked about late last year.

On June 21, 2011, non-profit organization Shoot Experience sent out six photographers to various parts of London to see the current state of photographers' rights.

A study conducted by market research firm J.D. Power and Associates has found that "Nikon Pro Series" DSLRs rank highest in customer satisfaction. The company surveyed 4,500 verified online DSLR buyers to find out their satisfaction across five factors: image quality, durability, features, ease of use, and responsiveness.

Photographer Mark Menjivar captured some interesting portraits of people across the United States by photographing the insides of their fridges. He spent three years travelling the country, gathering individual stories from people, and assembling the unique portraits in his project, titled "You Are What You Eat".

In 1839, a year after the first photo containing a human being was made, photography pioneer Robert Cornelius made the first ever portrait of a human being. The Daily recently published an interesting piece on Cornelius' story: …

Here's how Urban Dictionary defines 'photographer'.

A compact camera probably isn't the first thing someone would grab when looking to make a photo with an extremely shallow depth-of-field, since the small aperture and small sensor limit it in this regard. That might soon be different: a recently published patent application by Samsung shows that the company is looking into producing achieving shallow depth of fields with compact cameras by using a second lens to create a depth map for each photo.

You can now create instant photo books with your favorite Instagram (AKA two-minute noodle) photos using Blurb. After logging into the page with your Instagram account, your most "liked" photo is used for the cover and the rest of the pages are filled with your most recent images (they can be changed, of course). A 40-photo, 20-page book starts at $11.

Here's a fun photo project you can try: recreate each of Calvin's funny face photographs from Calvin and Hobbes. A version of this project done by a cute Asian boy was a popular viral photo a couple years ago. You can download the original Calvin montage here.

Here's an update to the whole monkey copyright story that's been swirling around the blogosphere as of late: TechDirt points out that works that aren't the product of human authorship cannot support a copyright claim. Section 503.03 of Compendium II of Copyright Office Practices published by the US Copyright Office reads: …

In the middle of last year, Google finally gave users the option of customizing its homepage with a photograph. Microsoft's Bing search engine, however, has featured photography ever since it launched in 2009. Fast Company has an interesting article about how the photographs are an integral part of the strategy for stealing users from Google: …

Ken Murphy created this time-lapse showing an entire 360-degree view overlooking San Francisco using only a single camera: …

Here's another ad from Olympus' Get a Real Camera campaign spotted by Mark Matthews in Australia. Pretty funny, though it might not be the best ad for college students who live on instant noodles (and love it).

Here's a quick tip for making Photoshop faster: change Preferences->File Handling->Image Previews to Never Save. This keeps image preview data from being stored in the file every time you save, and gives you smaller files for uploading to the web!

What does four hours of a toddler playing look like when compressed into 2.5 minutes? Photographer Francis Vachon found out by creating this neat time-lapse video of his 9-month-old son Charles-Edward playing in the dining room. It's a fun idea for a photo project to try if you have a toddler of your own causing chaos in your house.

You might soon be able to control Nikon DSLRs using only your emotions. A patent published recently shows that the company is looking into building biological detectors into its cameras, allowing the camera to automatically change settings and trigger the shutter based on things like heart rate and blood pressure. For example, at a sporting event, the sensors could be used to trigger the shutter when something significant happens and the photographer's reflexes are too slow. The camera could …

If your photographs ever include the faces of strangers, you might not want to move to Slovenia. Boštjan Burger, a Slovenian photographer that shoots immersive 360° panoramas, has been ordered by the government there to take down roughly 11,000 photo from his website and delete them from his backups because they violate privacy laws. His crime? Showing faces, street addresses, and license plates in his panoramas taken in public locations. Rather than face a year in jail and a €12,000 …

When viewing other people's photographs online, more often than not there's a way to comment and share your thoughts. While photo-sharing sites seem to have nicer commenters than a site like YouTube, there are still plenty of people who seem intent on putting people down and filling the Interwebs with vitriol. If that's you, then here's a video you definitely need to see.

One of the things you've likely seen when looking at product or review pages for lenses is an MTF chart, used by manufacturers to give consumers an idea of how sharp a particular lens is. If you've never gotten around to learning how to interpret these charts, here's a helpful 10-minute video tutorial on the subject. Luminous Landscape and Cambridge in Colour have great tutorials on this as well if you're more comfortable with text-based tutorials.

Sure, Nikon USA finally started selling an official lens mug, but over in Nikon's Japanese online store the company actually sells Nikon-brand confections made with ingredients that include red bean paste, sesame seeds, and chestnuts. Apparently the company has been selling these candies to its employees since 1955, and recently started offering them to non-employees as well.

A little update to the recent brouhaha over Google+'s Terms of Service: Tom W of Getty Images posted the above message to fellow Getty members on Flickr informing them that Getty's lawyers have no problems with the ToS. He writes, …

If you've ever wondered how an art gallery would display the world's largest photo taken by the world's largest camera (and aircraft hangar), check out the above artist render of an exhibition that's opening tomorrow at UC Riverside. The 32x111 foot photo will be wrapped around a two story atrium at the Culver Center of the Arts.

Here's a helpful tutorial by Tutvid that teaches how to give your photographs dramatic colors using only Adobe Camera Raw. If you've started shooting RAW but haven't played around too much with ACR, this video is also a great primer for becoming familiar with the different panels and sliders.

If ordinary citizens have the right to photograph police in public places, what about the other way around? That's a question that's sure to be asked often in the coming days, as 40 law enforcement agencies across the US are planning to use iPhones to photograph civilians for the purpose of identifying wanted perps. The system, called Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System (MORIS), costs $3,000 apiece and will be able to do facial recognition searches on a database of known …

Here's a concept for you to play around with over the weekend: give your shadow a real camera to shoot with!

If you've tried to scan film using an ordinary flatbed scanner as you would a piece of paper, you've probably discovered that it didn't turn out very well. The reason is because film needs to be illuminated from behind, while conventional scanners capture light that's reflected off what they're scanning. Before you give up hope and shell out money for a film scanner, here's some good news: you can build a cheap and simple cardboard adapter that turns any scanner into a film scanner!

Did you know that earlier this year YouTube added a free image stabilization tool to its video editor? It lets you smooth out the jitter in your videos without having to shell out dough for an expensive rig or software solution. The downside is that the stabilization makes your video look like it was shot by a robot.

There's plenty of tutorials online teaching you the "proper" techniques for photographing fireworks, but have you ever tried shooting them "incorrectly" on purpose? When photography enthusiast Pete Rogina took his Canon 5D Mark II out to capture fireworks this past Independence Day, he decided to try "light painting" with the fireworks by shooting them at long exposures without a tripod, waving the camera so that the streaks of light would take on abstract shapes.

Pose is a camera case that doubles as a simple stand. Designed to replace the little bean bags or mini-tripods that many people carry around separately, Pose has an attachment mount built in, and can either be propped up by itself on flat surfaces or wrapped around poles and curved surfaces. The $24 accessory is available for pre-order over at quirky, and will be manufactured if at least 1,000 people join in.

Photographer Mark Matthews of Sydney, Australia spotted the above plaque on a sidewalk that reads, …

At what point does inspiration turn into plagiarism? That's the question that popped up last year when Rhianna was sued by David LaChapelle over scenes found in one of her music videos, and it's the same issue with a lawsuit recently filed by photographer Janine Gordon against photographer Ryan McGinley. Gordon claims that 150 of McGinley's images -- including some used for a Levi's ad campaign -- are "substantially based" on her photos. In the three pairs of disputed images shown above, the …

File this under "awesome ways to show off your photos". Lomographer zakguy had a year's worth of Instax Mini instant photos on his hands and no way to display them, so he created a custom coffee table using his favorite shots! …

Kyle Jones wanted to see what it was like to film from inside a guitar, so he stuck his iPhone inside and started recording. The resulting footage shows the strings vibrating in wacky wave patterns thanks to the rolling shutter effect, which we also saw in the Canon 5D Mark II footage of a bass player shared earlier this year.

sonyalpharumors published the above image today showing what appears to be a pre-production render of an upcoming Sony NEX camera (reportedly the NEX-7). If the image is to be believed, then it looks like Sony is gunning for the customers Fujifilm is trying to capture with its popular X100 -- people who want a retro, rangefinder-style camera with a viewfinder and large sensor. The camera is rumored to have a 24MP APS-C sensor, an electronic viewfinder, manual aperture and shutter speed controls …

Now here's an interesting way to capture the passing of an entire day in a single photograph. It's composed of 24 shots -- one per hour -- with no photo manipulation needed!

Just as the monkey photography story was dying down, a new twist emerges: on Monday tech blog TechDirt received an email from Caters News, the agency representing wildlife photographer David Slater, whose camera was hijacked by a monkey and used to shoot a number of self-portraits.