This short film, found in Contacts, Volume 1, is a fascinating video in which photographer William Klein takes us beyond his iconic images to discuss the stories revealed in his contact sheets.
Mario Klingemann created this interactive Arduino-powered Facebook Like button. It doesn't do anything besides tally how many times it's been pressed, but with the ubiquity of Facebook, most people will instantly know how to use it. Wouldn't it be interesting if there was a fully-functional Facebook Like button next to every print in a photo exhibition? The buttons would help publicize the exhibition, and would show what visitors think of the photographs. Perhaps it's only a matter of time …
You've probably heard of tossing your camera into the air for abstract light painting photos, but what about for actual photos? Wedding photographer Mike Larson shoots group photos from above -- with himself in the shot -- by throwing a DSLR and fisheye lens into the air and letting the timer trigger the shutter. You can find some examples of photos made using this technique over on Larson's website.
Last friday, Dayton Daily News photo editor Larry Price received instructions to lay off half of his photo staff. Rather than follow through with the order, Price -- a 35-year veteran photojournalist and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes in photography -- decided to sacrifice his own job instead, resigning from the post this past Monday. Ginger Christ of the Dayton BizBlog writes, …
For his project "Cloud Collection", photographer Rüdiger Nehmzow went about four miles off the ground and photographed clouds through the open door of the plane. With no glass between Nehmzow and the sky to muddy up the shots, the resulting photographs are absolutely stunning.
Flickr introduced a novel privacy feature yesterday called "geofences", which lets you hide the location data of photos taken in certain locations from the general public. It seems like a great idea, but blogger Thomas Hawk points out that there's a pretty big loophole in the system: …
Here's a super creative video that attempts to capture 100 years of East London fashion, dance, and music in just 100 seconds. Reminds me of Rick Mereki's amazing "Move" short that we featured earlier this month, except this video travels through "time" rather than space.
Photographer Kim Pimmel created this amazing abstract time-lapse using a Nikon D90 and Nikkor 60mm macro lens. What you see is ferrofluid traveling between soap bubbles toward a magnet. No video was used -- every frame of the video was shot as a still photo.
Flickr introduced an innovative location-based privacy feature today called "geofences". It's a way of assigning default privacy settings to certain locations for geotagged photographs. For example, you can assign a geofence with a certain radius around your home, and automatically set those photos' location data to only be visible to your friends and family. Each user can have up to 10 geofences, and existing photographs are automatically updated to new geofence privacy settings.
Photojournalist João Silva lost his legs to a land mine in Afghanistan at the end of last year, but -- after months of intense rehabilitation -- returned to work in July, landing a photo on the front page of the New York Times. On August 2nd, Silva visited the Bronx Documentary Center and gave a talk on his thoughts and experiences.
Photographer Binh Danh observed one summer that there was a difference in color between grass under a water hose and the grass directly exposed to sunlight. He then began to experiment with combining photography with photosynthesis, and came up with what he calls "chlorophyll prints" -- photographs printed onto leaves using the sun.
YouTube user destinw -- the guy behind the chicken steadicam (and worth subscribing to) -- recently met up with photographer Darren Samuelson and his massive homemade large format camera. In this video, we're given another look into how this one-of-a-kind camera works, as Samuelson photographs the Saturn V rocket at the US Space and Rocket Center. Check out some of his amazing ultra-large format photos here.
Rumors about Fujifilm's upcoming "mini-X100" is heating up. The word on the street is that the camera will be announced on Thursday, and that it will officially be called the "X10" rather than the "X50". There were also some new photos of the camera leaked onto the web in addition to the blurry Promaster catalog photo we shared last week.
It's a pretty common question: if you had to choose, would you rather have a top-of-the-line DSLR with a cheap lens or an entry-level body with pro glass? Kai of DigitalRev attempts to answer the question through a hands on experiment in this humorous and educational video.
In 1505, Leonardo da Vinci painted a vast mural in Florence's town hall titled "The Battle of Anghiari" -- believed to be one of his greatest works. After being on display for more than 40 years, the unfinished painting was lost when the hall underwent renovations and new murals by Giorgio Vasari were added. There are no known records explaining what happened to the piece, but many people believe that it is currently hidden behind one particular mural called "Battle of Marciano in Val di …
Boston lawyer Simon Glik was arrested on October 1, 2007 when he used his cell phone to record officers making a drug arrest, and later sued the city and the officers for violating his rights. After the officers tried to having the lawsuit dismissed on the basis of qualified immunity, a Federal Appeals Court denied the motion last week and ruled that filming and photographing police is in fact protected by the First Amendment.
PillowMob is a new service that transforms photos of heads into puffy pillow heads. In addition to human faces, you can also use the face of your beloved pet. They cost $25 each with free shipping -- it's currently available to US residents only, but the company may begin shipping internationally soon.
Apparently Nikon has decide to save some trees (and shipping weight) by no longer including user manuals in some of its digital cameras. Since most people likely never touch the manuals anyway, it's not really a problem, but the company's draconian stance towards downloadable instruction manuals has some customers grumbling.
We've seen DSLR photo booth projects before, but usually they're just simple ways for guests at an event to take self-portraits of themselves. Kevin over at I Dream In Code actually made a fancy photo booth for his brother's wedding that prints out a nice keepsake for guests.
You've probably read plenty of articles touting the benefits of Sony's translucent mirror technology (e.g. high fps, AF for video, quietness, etc...), but what about the cons? One of the main downsides to having a translucent mirror is that the light hitting the sensor passes through an additional layer (the translucent mirror), which reduces the amount of light and the image quality.
Here's a pretty inspiring video that poses a simple question: "how bad do you want it"? It's from motivational speaker Eric Thomas' "Secrets to Success" talk, meant to help people accomplish their goals, whether it's "academically, financially, relationally", etc... Definitely applicable to those passionate about improving their photography as well.
Marc Levoy, the Stanford professor behind the "Frankencamera" project, teaches a course on digital photography called CS 178. The class website is a treasure trove for anyone looking for some great free education in photography: …
Here's a behind-the-scenes video showing Chinese photographer ERIC getting up close and personal with strangers on the streets of Hong Kong and Mainland China. He uses a Mamiya 7II and a large Metz flash, chewing through medium format film as though he was shooting digital. It's interesting to see how people in China seem less defensive about this kind of photography compared to people in New York, Derby, or Hollywood.
While looking into the new compression service JPEGmini yesterday, the following statement caught my eye in an interview they did with Megapixel: …
Photo sharing is proving to be one of the main battlegrounds in the social networking war between Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Facebook launched another counterattack today by increasing the resolution of displayed photos yet again from 720px to 960px, a 33% increase (last year they increased by 20% from 604px to 720px). Furthermore, the company claims that photos now load twice as fast as before.
Today Panasonic unveiled a new line of Lumix X lenses for Micro Four Thirds cameras, introducing two new zoom lenses: the 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 and the 45-175mm f/4-5.6. What's unique about them is that they're both power zoom lenses, meaning the focal length is controlled electronically using a rocker on the side of the lens. The 45-175mm also has standard zoom and focus rings, but these are electronic controls as well.
You might want to skip this post if you're squeamish. A filmmaker named Rob Spence has successfully become a cyborg by replacing an eye he lost through a childhood accident with a wireless camera that transmits everything he sees to a computer. Spence believes that technology may soon reach the point where are be tempted to swap out their body parts for superior prosthetics. No word on when he'll be able to apply Instagram filters to his eye camera photos.
Forget model airplanes... This Plamodel snap model kit is the one to buy if you're a photo-enthusiast (or want to make your kid one). Created by Japanese design house superheadz, it uses simple snap-together parts that allow even the "not-so-mechanically inclined" to assemble their own 35mm camera. There's 44 individual parts, and an instruction manual for building the camera is available online. You can check out some sample photos in this Flickr group pool, and buy one for $17 over on Amazon.
While we're on the subject of photos of Earth, did you know that the first photo showing the entire planet was captured by an unmanned NASA orbiter from the moon back in 1966? To accomplish this, they had to come up with a camera that could expose, process, scan, and transmit film photographs -- something "akin to a flying television station and photographic mini-lab".
As Hurricane Irene bears down on the East Coast, NASA has published a satellite photograph of Earth to its Flickr stream in which the storm is clearly visible. The storm has a diameter of 510 miles -- roughly 1/3 the length of the East Coast -- so it could probably be seen very clearly from someone standing on the moon. President Obama is warning Americans that the hurricane could be of "historic proportions".
Lomo shooter wn7ant came up with a neat way of turning instant film photos into one-of-a-kind business cards. After printing out his business card design onto a transparency, he cuts it out and sticks it onto an Instax film cartridge. To create a new card, he simply takes a picture -- the contact information on the transparency is printed onto every photograph!
Well, that was fast. Just a week after opening up its Photovine photo sharing app to the public, Google is now planning to kill it off, along with its second -- and not-yet-launched -- app Pool Party. Google is planning to focus its photo-sharing efforts on Google+, and will be shutting down Slide, the company behind the apps, which Google acquired last August for $200 million. The Slide employees were developing the apps independently, which explains why they were being made for iOS initially …
In the future, after you print photos onto paper using your camera, you'll be able to scan them and share them on Flickr using your mouse. At CES earlier this year, LG showed off an amazing new mouse that lets you quickly scan images and documents by simply waving the mouse over them. Now it's available -- if you live in the UK, you can buy one from Dabs for £90 (~$150).
Photographer Murray Fredericks took sixteen solo trips over eight years to the center of Lake Eyre in Australia, the largest lake in the country and one that forms salt flats every year when the water evaporates. These salt flats provide a perfectly flat, featureless landscape that extends to infinity in every direction, and allow for beautiful abstract photographs.
We may soon live in a world where the photographs in newspapers and magazines move like they do in Harry Potter -- that is, if newspapers and magazines are still around in a few years.
Photographer Mitchell Feinberg wanted to continue shooting 8×10 large format once his Polaroid stockpile runs out, so he decided to create his own 8x10 digital back. He spent over a year looking for a manufacturer and designing the back, and shelled out enough money to buy a good-sized house: …
JPEGmini is a new image compression service that can magically reduce the file size of your JPEG photos by up to 5 times without any visible loss in quality. ICVT, the Israeli company behind the service, explains how the technology works in an interview with Megapixel: …
Austrian photographer Andreas Franke chose an interesting photo exhibition location for his project "Vandenberg: Life Below the Surface": a shipwreck 93-feet underwater. It makes sense though -- the project consists of photos Franke took of the wreck last year and subsequently turned into surreal composite photos containing people. The images, encased in 3mm thick plexiglass and mounted on stainless steel, were attached to the ship using magnets that don't damage the ship or affect the sea life.
On Monday we reported that Fujifilm is planning to release a smaller and cheaper version of the popular X100 called the X50. The photo here shows the camera listed in a Promaster catalog, spotted by a person over on the Something Awful forums. The $600 12MP camera is shown to have a fixed f/2 28-112mm (35mm equivalent) manual lens and a "wide and bright optical viewfinder".
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, photographer Alexey Titarenko observed how St. Petersburg streets that used to be lively and filled with joyful people had suddenly turned dark and gloomy, with people confused, malnourished, and worn out. He decided to capture this change by shooting the streets at slow shutter speeds, turning the downtrodden crowds into shadowy figures. He titled the resulting project "City of Shadows".
As technology improves, features that were once limited to expensive professional models often become available to the masses, but will this ever be true for full-frame sensors? Nikon's Senior VP David Lee was recently asked this question in an interview with TWICE, and here's what he said: …
Time-lapse photographer Randy Halverson spent three months hunting thunderstorms at night in central South Dakota using a Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 60D, and Canon T2i. Capturing both the storms and the Milky Way in the same shots proved to be a difficult task: …
Lost in the commotion of Sony's awesome camera announcements was the official unveiling of the LA-EA2 A-mount adapter, which we reported on a couple weeks ago. This fancy lens adapter lets you use Sony's Alpha line of DSLR lenses with NEX mirrorless bodies without the loss of autofocus functionality by having a translucent mirror and autofocus system baked into the adapter itself! …
Photo filters that turn ordinary pictures into vintage ones are becoming mainstream. How mainstream, you ask? Well, Facebook is reportedly planning hop onto the bandwagon, adding them to its mobile apps to compete against Instagram. The New York Times writes, …
Have you ever noticed how ridiculous many of the poses seen in fashion and glamor photographs are? Artist Yolanda Dominguez has a project called Poses highlighting how absurd and artificial the poses are by having a group of women do them in public locations and filming the reactions of passersby. It's interesting how something so ridiculous when seen in real life can look so "normal" when done by a model in the context of a fashion photograph.
Last year we featured the work of Matthew and William Burrard-Lucas, two brothers who mounted their Canon DSLR to a remote-controlled car to shoot close-up photographs of dangerous African animals. The behind-the-scenes video above was just published yesterday, and shows the RC DSLR being driven up to different animals, all of which are clearly thinking, "what the heck is this thing"? They should offer these "BeetleCams" for sale. I want one.
When was the last time you came across a photography-related job opening this awesome? The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is looking for a "Senior Photographer" for its Paris station. It pays the equivalent of $100,000 a year tax free, and has great benefits (e.g. 30 days of vacation per year). Check out the opening here.
Scott Kelby, the publisher of Photoshop User and Layers magazines, has launched a new iPad-only magazine dedicated to the subject of digital photography lighting called "Light It".
Earlier this year we saw the launch of two search engines -- Stolen Camera Finder and GadgetTrak Serial Search -- that help find stolen cameras by searching photos on the web for the serial numbers. The idea is neat, but no one knew whether it would actually help recover stolen gear or not. Turns out it does work.
Los Angeles-based photographer Amanda Rynda recently did an awesome engagement photo shoot with Juliana Park and Ben Lee, who wanted the photos to show them surviving a zombie attack. Needless to say, it turned out pretty epic.
