Want to use Instagram filters without using Instagram? Creative director Daniel Box carefully recreated a number of filters from the popular iPhone app as Photoshop actions, providing a quick and simple way to retrofy your digital photos. Download the actions file to get started.
For his project titled "Texters", photographer Joe Holmes captured unsuspecting people lost in their own worlds while texting on their phones. If you want to photograph strangers on the street without getting noticed, this seems like a good way of doing so...
Here's a beautifully designed cheat sheet by Miguel Yatco that you can use to introduce people to the fundamental concepts in photography. You can also order it as a poster for your wall over on Zazzle.
Mashable is reporting that Google will be rebranding Picasa as "Google Photos" within the next six weeks, coinciding with the public launch of its Google+ social networking service. Blogger will also be rebranded as "Google Blogs". Furthermore, images up to 2048x2048px won't be counted towards the 1GB of free storage offered by the service for Google+ users, up from the 800px rule announced earlier this year. Larger images uploaded after the storage limit is reached will be automatically …
Three years ago wildlife photographer David Slater spent three days photographing a group of crested black macaque monkeys in an Indonesian national park. As he was trying to fend off some monkeys, another monkey approached his tripod-mounted Canon 5D and started playing with the remote shutter release.
Fans of the Fujifilm X100 who are hoping the company will release an interchangeable lens successor to the camera may soon get their wish. Camera division chief Takeshi Higuchi strongly hinted at their plans for an interchangeable lens camera in an interview with Reuters: …
Nikon has been doing a pretty good job with its "I AM NIKON" advertising campaign in Europe -- so good, apparently, that one Flickr user went as far as to get the slogan tattooed on her forearm. Too bad Nikon chose to run Ashton Kutcher commercials in the US instead of these ads...
Here's a short inspirational video featuring Canadian photographer Jeff Wall in which he talks about his method of allowing his eyes to do "photography" first before using his camera.
The power of the Internet is awesome when it helps reunite people with lost photos, but it's even cooler when it uses photos to help reconnect people with relatives. That happened recently with a 71-year-old shoe shiner in China named Shufang Zhong. Zhong's daughter had moved to a far away city five years ago, and although they could speak on the phone, her daughter desperately wanted to see her face. The problem was, Zhong had absolutely no Internet access and no idea how to reach her daughter.
The Negative Effect is a documentary film by Malaysian director Dick Chua about a group of youngsters obsessed with film and lo-fi photography. He followed the group of about 40 photo-enthusiasts back in 2008 as they traveled to Penang Island in Malaysia to shoot and put on a photography exhibition without any sponsorship or support. The film premiered in Malaysia in 2009 and Singapore in 2011. Hopefully it'll start showing internationally soon, or at least become available as a DVD.
If you've ever wanted a lens to hug at night but found your actual glass to be a bit uncomfortable, then these plush pillows are designed for you. Plushtography is a new company that makes these lens-lookalike pillows by hand using "fleece, felt, and a little bit of love". You can buy a small prime pillow for $41 with shipping included or a pro zoom lens for $77.
As we sign off for this 4th of July weekend, we leave you with this neat experiment by videographer Jeremiah Warren. He recently purchased some small keychain cameras off eBay and mounted them to various fireworks, giving us a glimpse into what it's like to be a 4th of July firework.
When Lomography teamed up with Threadless for a t-shirt design contest back in 2008, nearly 400 photography-related designs were submitted. This one by Sebastian Guadarrama Gomez, titled "Striped Bird", was crowned as the winner. You can check out all the other submitted designs here -- there's a lot of awesome ones that we'd love to wear.
Here's a step-by-step video tutorial teaching how to develop your B&W film using instant coffee and powdered vitamin C instead of actual developer. You'll still need some darkroom gear and some fixer, but it's a neat way to experiment with film photography. Photo geeks call this solution Caffenol, and there's even a special Flickr group dedicated to making homebrew developer.
Facebook can't be too pleased with Google right now. In addition to releasing a Facebook competitor called Google+, the company has also beaten Facebook to the mobile photo sharing space with a new app called Pool Party. Like Google+, the app is currently invite-only, but if you can score an invite it's a free download for both iOS and Android. The app is based around collaborative group albums called "pools" that allow you to share pictures with friends and family in real-time.
A great way to get inspired is to listen to other people who are serious about photography talk about their work and things they've learned. Here's a short video in which photographer Daniel Milnor talks about capturing stories through film photography. After getting into the "fast lane" by switching to digital, Milnor hit a wall and rediscovered his passion for photography by going back to shooting film with Leica rangefinders.
Between 1969 and 1972, NASA left 12 Hasselblad cameras on the moon to make room for moon rocks. One camera that wasn't left there was a 16mm camera called the "Data Acquisition Camera" used during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. It's now in the center of a legal dispute between the US government and astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth person to set foot on the moon. Mitchell claims that NASA allowed him to keep the camera as a souvenir after the mission, while NASA says that no evidence of this …
Eli Stonberg created this creative video by recording skateboarder Aryeh Kraus with seven separate cameras, with six of them on Kraus or the skateboard. When they're all viewed at the same time it's a pretty unique visual experience. Like the splitscreen short film we shared yesterday, hopefully this one will give you a healthy dose of inspiration.
Ricoh is purchasing the Pentax camera business from optical glass-maker Hoya for roughly 10 billion yen (~$124.2 million) in order to jump into the DSLR game. Hoya had purchased Pentax back in 2007 mainly for its medical technologies and was widely expected to sell off the camera division of the company. Ricoh already makes a number of quality compact cameras, but the market is slowly being eaten up by large-sensor interchangeable lens cameras and mobiles phones. The company is planning to …
