What do you think of this photo of a refinery by photographer Sander Roscoe Wolff? Apparently Long Beach police don't think very highly of it. Wolff was detained after capturing it last month, and now the police chief is saying that stopping photographers for photos with "no apparent esthetic value" is part of department policy. The Long Beach Post writes, …
Here's a neat image showing the different field of views offered by focal lengths ranging from 16mm to 200mm. It's not simply lines overlaid on a single photo -- the different focal lengths were actually used to capture what the scenes looks like through the lenses.
mr-korn over at Lomography recently snagged a cheap Olympus Zuiko 50mm lens on eBay, but the lens didn't come with a lens cap. Rather than try and find a replacement cap for that particular lens, he decided to craft his own DIY cap using a can of Coke.
One amazing perk that comes with being a NASA astronaut is that you can watch meteor showers up close and from above. Astronaut Ron Garan captured this awesome photograph from the International Space Station of a Perseid meteor burning up in our atmosphere.
There's a good chance the digital photos you've stored on hard drives and DVDs won't outlive you, but what if there was a disc that could last forever? M-Disc, short for Millenial Disc, is a new type of disc that doesn't suffer from natural decay and degradation like existing disc technologies, allowing you to store data safely for somewhere between "1000 years" and "forever".
Flickr user Henrique Feliciano Silva made this neat photograph by hollowing out a light bulb, filling it with water, hanging it upside down on his balcony, and shooting his neighborhood through it with a shallow depth of field.
It seems like everyone has access to some kind of camera these days, but will the digital images captured survive long enough to become part of the historical record of our time for future generations?
For his project "Day Into Night", photographer Stephen Wilkes set up a 4x5 camera with a 39-megapixel digital back 40-50 feet off the ground in a cherry picker, and photographed the scene throughout the course of one day. Keeping a constant aperture, he adjusted his shutter speed to compensate for the position of the sun. Afterward, the hundreds of images captured were edited to roughly 30-50 photos, and then seamlessly Photoshopped together to show a gradual transition from day to night.
Here's a fun and cute baby picture idea for photo enthusiast parents. Nikon should drop Kutcher and hire this little guy as its new ambassador. The brand would skyrocket in popularity with the baby demographic.
Update: It looks like the video was taken down by the uploader. Sorry guys.
Local TV station WGN made this beautiful tilt-shift time-lapse video of Chicago, giving us a neat miniature peek at what the "The Windy City" is like.
Here's some interesting innovation on the tech-side of photography: on August 24, Sony will be unveiling a new lens adapter called the LA-EA2 that will let customers use large Sony Alpha DSLR lenses on their small NEX mirrorless cameras. Unlike most lens adapters, this one actually does a lot more than adapt lenses -- it has its own translucent mirror and phase-detection autofocus sensor to aid the camera in providing snappy autofocus. It's almost like an accessory that helps turn small NEX …
Another week, another strange photo fad. The latest one is "horsemaning", and involves photographing two people to look like one decapitated person (like the headless horseman). Apparently it started in the early 1920s with the photo seen above, and is making a comeback as of late.
Last month, Sony's not-yet-announced A77 DSLR was revealed in leaked photographs, and now there's a video that gives us a another sneak peek at what the 24-megapixel camera will look like. The short 30 second video was uploaded to YouTube yesterday with the title "sony alpha A77 ?" and description "Taiwan". Rumor has it that the camera will become official later this month.
Check out this ceramic Canon 24-105mm shot glass, crafted by DERELIQ and for sale over at Photojojo. They come in a set of three for $18.
Here's a nifty visual guide to all the keyboard shortcuts you have access to when viewing a photograph on Flickr. Don't bother bookmarking this page though -- Flickr just added these guides to every page on the site. Simply press the "?" key for the popup to appear!
#phonar, short for "Photography and Narrative", is a free and open undergraduate photography course run by Jonathan Worth at Coventry University in the UK. Worth spent nearly 15 years as a successful commercial portrait photographer in New York before taking this part-time teaching position, and invites some pretty prominent photographers to guest lecture in the class. Participants have access to recorded lectures, assignments, and special discussions.
When filmmaker Paul Kroeker happened across a dragonfly that lay dying on his deck, he decided to flex his creative muscles, creating this haunting short film with his Canon 7D and Canon 100mm f/2.8L IS macro lens. Perhaps it'll inspire you to think outside the box when thinking of things to photograph or film.
For his project "Back from the Future", photographer Sander Koot asked his subjects to find old photos of themselves that brought back good memories. He then made portraits of those people reliving those happy moments.
It's finally happened -- companies are starting to realize that the two lenses on 3D cameras look a whole lot like eyes. This 3-megapixel "Felyne" camera is designed to look like a character from the video game franchise Monster Hunter, and goes on sale later this month in Japan for about $90. Something tells me we'll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing if 3D cameras start becoming popular.
Apparently the universe isn't perfect enough for Apple's products. David Kaplan, a keen-eyed physics professor at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, noticed that an entire galaxy is missing from the image of the Andromeda Galaxy used as OS X Lion's default wallpaper.
It took six months of on and off shooting for photographer Colin Rich to create this amazing time-lapse video showing Los Angeles at night. He used a Canon 5D that's still chugging along after 120,000 actuations. Be sure to watch it in HD and in fullscreen!
Film usually comes in pretty boring boxes, but what if you could reuse those boxes as a pinhole camera? Designer Linna Xu won the Packaging category of the 2010 Adobe Design Achievement Awards with this concept, creating these awesome boxes for Ilford medium format film that double as pinhole cameras resembling old school twin-lens reflex cameras. Each box allows users to explore the world of medium format photography without even having a medium format camera!
Celebrity portrait photographer Chris Buck offers this tip for portraiture: be genuinely enthusiastic. Your enthusiasm can be infectious and make your subjects more comfortable with your ideas.
Mechanical engineer and Flickr user Some Guy (Art) was bored at his job where picture taking was explicitly disallowed, so he did what any rebellious photo-fanatic would do: build a makeshift camera out of trash! Bringing $5 worth of parts (e.g. dowels, bolts, super glue) from home, he successfully turned some machine core -- which he calls "cardboard toilet paper tube on steroids" -- into a 35mm pinhole camera.
The Guardian has published a piece on how a four-man news operation called Sangat TV has stolen the headlines from big news outlets during the England riots, armed with just a "point-and-shoot camera": …
Photo Stats is a new iPhone app that can help you visualize your iPhoneography habits by automatically generating interesting infographics showing things such as where you snapped photos and the time of day you shoot the most. You can buy it for $1 in the App Store.
Photoshop product manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes offers this quick tip for getting better results with Content Aware Fill: use smaller selections for more accurate results.
Apple's upcoming iOS 5 will offer a number of welcome photography-related upgrades for iPhone shooters, but here's one that will surely cause a love/hate response: filters.
Film student Zach King and his sister made this creative mock commercial for the Macbook Air using a Canon 5D Mark II, some string and a lot of imagination.
The photo sharing feature on Twitter that we first reported on a couple months ago is now live for all users. This nudges the service a little more closer towards what Facebook and Google+ offer, allowing users to upload and share photos directly through Twitter. Third-party photo-sharing services geared towards Twitter users can't be too happy about this -- the founder of TwitPic turned down a $10 million offer back in 2009, only to have Twitter drink its milkshake a couple years later.
Poke around on Craigslist, and you'll find that it's filled with ads selling professional services at dirt-cheap prices, including photographers offering to shoot weddings for just a few hundred dollars. Does this spell doom for the wedding photography business? Probably not.
If you decide to watch the new indie film "Like Crazy" when it hits theaters on October 28th, keep this in mind: it was shot using a Canon 7D. The movie won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival this year, which led to Paramount snapping it up for a cool $4 million -- much better than $200,000 in profits using a Canon 5D, wouldn't you say?
Mother Jones reports that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is cracking down on glymes -- chemicals linked to health problems that can be found in many products we regularly come in contact with, including digital cameras: …
Did you know that Photoshop has built-in mechanisms that prevent you from editing photos of banknotes? After getting a payday, Reddit user tarballdotgz tried to Photoshop some of his hundred dollar bills, but ran into the above error in Photoshop. Even if you find a way to edit the images in Photoshop, there's a good chance your printer will give you a similar error if you try to print the image out! …
The Israeli army has a tactical intelligence device called the "Firefly" -- a wireless camera that's launched out of a grenade launcher, capturing eight seconds worth of imagery as it floats on a parachute from 500 feet in the air.
While we're on the topic of high-speed cameras (and slow motion videos), here's a beautiful slow-motion video of an eagle owl "attacking" a camera, shot at 1,000fps with a Photron FASTCAM SA2. The new Phantom v1610 camera announced today can record footage 1000 times slower than this.
Shooting 4.5 million frames per second of molecules using an x-ray flash is impressive, but can non-scientific cameras come anywhere close? The answer is yes: Vision Research has a new Phantom high speed camera called the v1610 that can capture footage at a whopping 1,000,000fps. Granted, the resolution needs to be a paltry 128x16 for that fps, but at a full 1280x800 it still shoots at 16,000fps. To give you an idea of what 1 million fps is like, consider this: 1 second of the footage will …
When Matthew Harrison (aka The Leica Guy) got married recently, he was given the awesome gift of a f/.95 Noctilux ring.
Here's a neat video that made its rounds on the Interwebs back in 2007, but maybe some of you haven't seen before. To capture Barry Bonds setting the all time home run record, USA Today shot with three Canon EOS-1D Mark III at the same time, triggering the cameras in sequence so their 10 frames per second effectively became 30 frames per second. You can check out the frames captured of the home run slam here.
Flickr user Céline Ramoni has a beautiful set of photographs shot from the Yurikamome rail line connecting the cities of Shimbashi and Toyosu in Japan. The exposure times aren't too long (they're all less than a second), but the speed of the train creates plenty of motion blur -- even in daytime.
One of huge benefits of shooting in RAW is that RAW files usually have considerably more dynamic range than a JPG. This means that details in the shadows and highlights of an image that would otherwise be lost if shooting JPG are stored in the RAW file, and able to be recovered if needed during post-processing.
Photographer Vincent Laforet recently attached a Canon 600mm f/4 lens with a 2X converter to a $58,000 RED Epic camera using a yet-to-be-released mount, capturing some great footage of a lake at more than 3400mm (in 35mm terms).
The Appcam is a new concept design for camera controls -- and supposedly a patent -- that aims to make handling DSLR and compact cameras more user friendly. Instead of having your camera settings hiding in different menus and changed using different controls (e.g. buttons, scroll wheels, dials), the Appcam turns them all into "apps" that sit conveniently on the LCD touchscreen. The apps/settings can be swapped in and out and reordered, and are adjusted using the physical scroll wheel next to it.
There are several things you can and should do to get the most out of the images from your point-and-shoot camera. If you use it correctly, people won't know with what camera the shot was taken.Check out the photograph above and guess which camera it was taken with. I'll reveal the answer at the end of the post.
Pre-med student Ryan Killackey and his wife spent nearly two years shooting 10,000 photographs in California using a Canon Rebel XS with a "nifty fifty" 50mm, 18-55mm kit lens, and 50-250mm. They then combined the stills into a short time-lapse video -- adding a fake tilt-shift look to some of the footage using After Effects -- creating a beautiful and creative portrait of California.
New York-based design consultancy Mélangerie helps customers make custom View-Master wedding invitations that display photos in full-color Kodachrome. All they need are 7 high-res photos and a short snippet of text for each one. They're pretty pricey though: 100 invites will set you back $3450.
Last week we published a post asking whether anyone had made a "print" on their skin by placing a negative on their skin under the sun. After seeing the post, videographer Jeremiah Warren decided to conduct the experiment for the benefit of all mankind. Taping four slides onto his forearm (he didn't have any suitable negative film), Warren exposed his skin for four hours in 100-degree heat (consuming a gallon of water in the process).
PetaPixel doesn't have an official profile on Google+ yet because we're waiting for the non-individual accounts to become available, but in the mean time, you can add my personal account to your circles if you want to connect. You can find my profile here -- I look forward to sharing with you!
Wedding photographer Kirk Mastin hired Shep Films to create this stunning promo that really conveys his passion for the art. It's pretty inspirational, even if shooting weddings isn't your thing. How can you pass up hiring the guy after watching this?
