While on vacation in Ohio, Flickr user Greg Smith spotted and photographed something neat: the water, rust and grime had created an accidental Western scene on the side of the pier! It's a cowboy on a horse, in a field, at sunset, with tree silhouettes in the horizon and wispy clouds in the sky.
Editor's note: This is the second interview we've done with Haje. The first was back in 2010 regarding his blog Photocritic.org …
Nikon has a support page for people who wonder why the company hasn't added sensor-shift image stabilization to its DSLRs. The first point is that stabilizing the image before it enters the camera allows the user to see exactly what the sensor "sees" through the viewfinder, and allows the autofocus and metering sensors to take advantage of this stabilized image as well. Secondly, they state that they can optimize the system for each lens to achieve finely tuned stabilization that gains extra …
Back in 2006, Flickr user André Rabelo submitted the above photograph to the group pool of DeleteMe!, a group whose members vote on photos to weed out any photos that aren't "incredible pictures, amazing, astonishing, perfect". Sadly, the photograph was very quickly removed by popular vote.
Here's a short video that gives a small glimpse into how Google's stealthy Photovine photo-sharing app works. Like we reported yesterday, it's an app that's focused around sharing photos based on a theme with both friends and strangers.
If you're a professional photographer taking your camera into extreme environments, the cheap plastic body cap that comes with your DSLR might not cut it. That's where LockCircle comes in -- it's a solid billett aluminum body cap designed to seal your camera from the elements while providing a special grip for removal even if you're wearing thick gloves. They're available for Canon EF mount cameras in silver, titanium, and black, and will soon be available for Nikon's F mount as well.
Government officials have been caught in a number of Photoshop flubs recently, from the Egyptian president being edited to be walking at the head of a pack of world leaders to a badly Photoshopped photo of Chinese officials that went recently went viral. Now the Syrian government may be the latest culprit -- the country just released an image of its president swearing in a newly appointed governor, and something doesn't quite look right...
Tina Roth Eisenberg, AKA swissmiss, has just launched an online temporary tattoo store called Tattly. Of the small selection currently offered, two of them are designed for photo geeks: Aperture and Instant Camera. You can pick up a pair of either tatt for $5 with free shipping in the US. Hopefully the prices will come down a bit if the store becomes popular.
San Franciscan Tanya Vlach lost her left eye in a car accident back in 2005. Dissatisfied with her prosthetic eye, she's trying to raise money to develop an in-eye camera that captures blink-activated still photos and 720p HD video. Her wish list of features include geotagging, IR/UV capture, facial recognition, and sensor activated zoom, focus, and on/off. Vlach's Kickstarter project is titled "Grow a new eye", and has a set goal of reaching $15,000 in funding by August 3rd, 2011.
If you're not convinced that Google is jumping into the photo-sharing pool head first, get this: the company has not one, but two stealthy photo sharing apps in private beta. Besides the Pool Party app that came to light at the beginning of the month, the rumored Photovine service has now materialized into a website -- well, a landing page, at least.
French design duo Zim & Zou (Thibault Zimmerman and Lucie Thomas) these papercraft versions of Polaroid and Leica cameras -- they're super realistic, except the colors are quite trippy!
A student in Germany created this fake Canon 5D Mark III commercial for a school project, and fooled quite a few people online.
Last year Scott Bourne caused some commotion among photo-enthusiasts by claiming that Twitter's ToS forced photographers to give up rights to photos shared through the service. After Google launched their new Google+ social network, Bourne again wrote a very similar post warning his readers about the ToS. We weren't planning on weighing in, but seeing that the FUD has spread to our comments and even The Washington Post, we'd like to clear some of it away for our readers.
Last year map geek Eric Fischer created heat maps showing where Flickr photos are taken in large cities and comparing tourist vs. local hotspots. Now he's back again with beautiful maps showing geotagged Flickr photos and Twitter Tweets, and the maps aren't limited to cities -- there's maps for continents (see North America above) and even the whole world! The orange dots show photos, the blue ones indicate Tweets, and a white one means both were found in that location.
Nikon has just announced the new AF-S DX Micro NIKKOR 40mm f/2.8G lens, which has a FoV equivalent to a 60mm on a full frame body. It boasts a minimum focusing distance of just 6.4 inches, and has a reproduction ratio of 1:1.
The AP has sacked photographer Miguel Tovar for "deliberate and misleading photo manipulation" after Tovar cloned out his own shadow from a feature photograph. The Photoshopping came to light after an alert photo editor spotted a strange looking dust pattern in a photo of Argentinian children playing soccer.
You might have heard about Leica's legendary manufacturing quality, but have you seen it? The company released this promotional video a couple days ago providing a behind-the-scenes peek into its production facilities.
Remember that super realistic Leica M3 paper pinhole camera we featured back in June? You can now print and make your own! Photographer Matt Nicholson has created a 10-page PDF with the printable template and detailed instructions, and is selling it for £1.50 (~$2.5) in his online store.
Musician Chris Bray was 13-years-old when he and his father attended the first ever launch of NASA's Space Shuttle program on April 12th, 1981. His mother snapped a photograph of the two standing ready with binoculars and a Super 8 camera. Last Friday, Bray (now 44) and his father (now nearly 70) were also in attendance at the final launch of the Shuttle program, and decided to recreate the photo they had taken together 30 years earlier.
On Saturday, the Leica store in Moscow was targeted by two masked men who used a sledgehammer to break through the door and shatter all the windows. Apparently the thieves didn't know too much about Leica gear: they stole a $300 flash unit but left a $23,000 Leica S2 medium format camera sitting on the shelf. Leica has published a list of stolen items and their serial numbers here, and is asking customers to compare serial numbers when buying gear from unauthorized sources.
San Diego-based wedding photographer Aaron Willcox won 1st place in an engagement photo contest with this shot showing a feat of incredible strength. No Photoshop trickery or invisible wires were used in making this image (nor does the guy have Superman-esque strength). Can you figure out how it was done? …
Last Thursday, three Georgian photographers including Irakli Gedenidze, the personal photographer of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, were arrested on suspicion of spying for Russia by taking photos of secret documents. On Saturday, Georgian TV aired a clip of Gedenidze confessing to selling the information to someone he thought was a Russian agent, but claimed to be the victim of blackmail. The Moscow Times suggests that this may simply be an attempt by Georgia to "chill the media".
Want to see how instant film for Polaroid cameras is made? How It's Made recently paid a visit to The Impossible Project's factory in the Netherlands (purchased from Polaroid a few years ago) to give us a neat behind-the-scenes look at the processes that go into making the popular film.
The New York Times has a powerful piece about photographer Giles Duley. Duley was covering a patrol in Afghanistan back in February when he stepped on a bomb and lost an arm and both legs: …
Did you know that the original Star Wars lightsaber was made using antique camera parts? If you have an old Speed Graphic press camera, you may even have a replica lightsaber sitting on your shelf without knowing it.
Let's start off this week with something lighthearted and awesome. The folks at 2D Photography spent nearly six months working on building a giant Rube Goldberg machine using photo gear. Like the epic Battle at F-Stop Ridge video, it seems pretty likely that this video will soon be going viral.
Update on 12/18/21: This video has been removed by its creator.
Thought the grain-of-salt-sized camera announced in Germany earlier this year was small? Well, researchers at Cornell have created a camera just 1/100th of a millimeter thick and 1mm on each size that has no lens or moving parts. The Planar Fourier Capture Array (PFCA) is simply a flat piece of doped silicon that cost just a few cents each. After light information is gathered, some fancy mathematical magic (i.e. the Fourier transform) turns the information into a 20x20 pixel "photo". The fuzzy …
For photo enthusiasts, Google's new Google+ social network is something like Flickr mixed with Facebook. It has the social sharing power of Facebook while providing features and tools Flickr users would appreciate thanks to the fact that Google runs a full-fledged photo-sharing service in Picasa (soon to be brought into the Google+ fold and renamed Google Photos). One such feature is the EXIF data section, easily accessed for each photo by Action->Photo Details. Most Facebook users would likely …
We've seen all kinds of ideas for keeping track of your camera's lens cap when it's not being used, including velcro, special mounts, fashionable pouches, and even a retractable cap, but Nikon has come up with the best idea yet: a lens cap that attaches to camera straps! A patent filed by the company in 2009 and published yesterday shows a lens cap that can easily clip onto a strap when not in use -- a simple solution to a small problem that apparently many entrepreneurs have been interested in …
Space Shuttle Atlantis blasted off for the last time today, the final launch ever for NASA's Space Shuttle program. 18-year-old Ryan Graff was lucky enough to be flying to Miami as the Shuttle launched, and captured this awesome photograph of Atlantis' smoke trail using his iPhone.
"The Untitled Project" by photographer Matt Siber features urban scenes with all traces of text stripped away and reconstructed in a separate frame. Siber shot the original images in North America, Europe, and China over the past nine years.
Street photographer Eric Kim generated some buzz last month by recording himself shooting on the street with a GoPro mounted to his Leica M9. Now, he's back again with an even cooler point of view: through the Leica M9's viewfinder itself. This 10 minute video of Kim doing street photography in Santa Monica was recorded using a HTC EVO 4G smartphone stuck to the back of his camera.
Robots might not be able to convey emotions or tell stories through photographs, but one thing they're theoretically better than humans at is calculating proportions in a scene, and that's exactly what one robot at India's IIT Hydrabad has been taught to do. Computer scientist Raghudeep Gadde programmed a humanoid robot with a head-mounted camera to perfectly obey the rule of thirds and the golden ratio. New Scientist writes, …
Here's yet another painful-to-watch example of what the powerful lasers used at concerts can do to your camera's sensor. This poor soul brought their Canon 5D Mark II to capture some footage, and left with the camera having a new feature: white "framing lines"! Too bad they can't be turned off...
When we shared the story of how monkeys hijacked photographer David Slater's camera and unwittingly snapped some self-portraits, we asked the question "doesn’t the monkey technically own the rights to the images?" Techdirt, a blog that often highlights copyright issues, went one step further and dedicated a whole post to that question.
You know that blank space around your fridge photos? You can fill it up with Photoshop menu magnets to increase your photographic geek cred by a few stops. This 13 piece magnet set sells for $26 over in the Meninos Store.
How do a group of the world's premier photographers shoot a group portrait? Well, just like the rest of us! This short one minute video shows photographer René Burri -- who made iconic photos of Che Guevara and Pablo Picasso -- shooting the group portrait at the end of this year's meeting between Magnum Photo members (something he's done for 30 years).
Yesterday we shared a disconcerting art project by Kyle McDonald in which he installed apps in Apple Stores throughout NYC to secretly photograph customers staring into the computers. We predicted that Apple wouldn't be too happy about it and, lo and behold, it's pissed. The company has reportedly enlisted the help of the US Secret Service to investigate McDonald's actions. Mashable writes, …
If for some reason you've always wanted pair up your SLR lenses with the tiny sensor found on the iPhone 4, Photojojo has a new mount that can make your dream come true. The package includes a special aluminum case for your phone, a UV filter attachment, and the lens adapter, and almost guarantees that you'll be the strangest looking iPhone shooter on your street.
Kodak uploaded a video to YouTube recently thats been causing quite a bit of controversy. It's a talk by Rob Hummel at Cine Gear Expo 2011 in which he states that bringing your digital camera onto an airplane will damage its sensor and cause dead pixels (it's about 8min into the video). The reasoning is that at altitudes of 20,000ft and higher, you would need 125ft of concrete to shield yourself from the gamma rays, which induce voltages in the sensors and fry the photo sites. He also claims …
The legal battle between photographer Mike Hipple and sculptor Jack Mackie over a photo of Mackie's public art piece "Dance Steps on Broadway" has ended with Hipple paying a settlement out of court. Mackie writes, …
Here's an interesting trailer for Artists & Alchemists, a documentary film coming out later this year about the resurgence of 19th century chemical photography.
A 268-megapixel sensor might suffice for photographing the stars through a telescope, but apparently a sensor many times more powerful is needed for photographing alien planets from space.
Kyle McDonald wrote a stealthy app that captures a single photo every minute and sends it to his server if it contains a face. He then went around to different Apple stores around New York City and installed it on the computers, collecting more than a thousand photos.
Astronomy and photography enthusiast Alex Cherney spent 31 hours over six nights shooting photographs of the Milky Way over the Southern Ocean using a Nikon D700 and Nikkor 14-24mm lens. The resulting 2.5 minute time-lapse video was named the overall winner of this year's STARMUS astro-photography competition.
While real cameras generally max out at two card slots, this camera wallet packs five. It also "snaps" closed to keep your cash and cards safe. Pick one up over at fredflare for $34.
Update: We hear that all charges against Rhonda Hollander have been dropped after a judge found the testimony "not credible." …
Niklas Roy built a unique electronic "instant" camera using an old black & white video camera and thermal receipt printer. When turned on, the printer slowly prints the live video feed from the camera onto cheap receipt paper. Since the image isn't stored anywhere first, the subject has to remain still during the three minutes it takes for the image to be printed.
Australian PhD student Hamish Innes-Brown lurked around Tullamarine Airport in Melbourne and shot these beautiful photographs of airplanes landing using a Mamiya C330 twin lens reflex camera and Kodak Portra 160NC medium format film.
