August 2011

What if every photograph included a short video showing the few seconds that led up to the shutter being pressed? That's the idea behind a new free iPhone app called GLMPS (pronounced "glimpse"). It's a camera app that stores a few seconds of video with each shot, letting users share the background behind each picture (try clicking the photo above). Unlike normal iPhone photos, displaying a GLMPS photo/video requires a special embed code, make it somewhat inconvenient to share. Wouldn't it be …

When his friend Tom Offer-Westort decided to shave off his hair and massive beard, Peter Simon suggested that they take advantage of the opportunity and do it in style. This stop-motion video is what resulted.

We've shared a lens cap and hood hybrid here before, but this one is much nicer. "Flower", dreamt up by designers Rhie Hyi Joong and Lee Sang Hwa, is a concept lens cap that blooms into a hood by simply turning a ring.

Rather than use ordinary film to capture 2D images, photographer ShiKai Tseng shoots using 3D objects as film. After painting the objects with Liquid Light to make them light-sensitive, he uses a specially designed pinhole camera to expose them to light from all directions. It's a pretty neat way to decorate things like vases (which he demonstrates in the above video), though scanning the pictures for the web might be a bit tricky...

Some Leica M9 owners are discovering that their camera will suddenly stop functioning and render their SD card unreadable on any device.

If you've been dying to turn your Android phone into a remote for your Canon DSLR, today's your lucky day. A developer who goes by "chainfire" has released a new app called "DSLR Controller". It gives you live view and access to a whole host of camera functions through your phone, which connects to the camera through a USB host cable. Check out the demo above to see it in action. The beta version currently costs $8.56 over in the Android Market.

San Francisco resident Travis Curtis spent 15 minutes shooting this unique photograph of Yosemite Falls, receiving a lot of strange looks from the other tourists around him.

Here's a fun blast from the not-so-distant past: the video above is a short clip from the TV show "Call For Help" that originally aired back in September 2003. In it, tech broadcaster Leo Laporte chats with digital photography pioneer Mikkel Aaland -- who, by the way, was introduced to digital cameras by Ansel Adams -- about the evolution of digital cameras up to that point. It's an interesting glimpse into a time when the Nikon D100 was the state of the art.

Japanese electronics giant Pioneer is dipping its toes in the digital camera industry. It has partnered with camera maker Asia Optical to make Pioneer branded cameras in Brazil to sell in the Chinese market. The company aims to have sales of half a million units by 2015. Up to this point, the company had focused on things like car audio systems, television, and DVD players. It'll be interesting to see if Pioneer can find a foothold and steal some market share from the big players.

Here's really random/strange/stupid idea inspired by a comment left yesterday, but have you heard of anyone "printing" a photograph onto their skin using a negative under sunlight? Seems like it would produce a correct positive image of a negative.

Street photographer Bruce Gilden has a pretty distinct style of getting into strangers' faces and firing off a flash held in his other hand. Eric Kim -- who recently started doing street photography full-time -- created this behind-the-scenes video showing himself employing Gilden's trademark style, though instead of a Leica he uses a Canon 5D. The lens he's using is a Canon 24mm f/2.8, and the flash is a YN-560.

It took Steven Silton two hours and 150 tries to capture this amazing photograph of a water drop showing an MC Escher painting.

Most people balked at the $100 price tag of LockCircle's professional body cap when it was announced last month, but one thing is certain: manufacturing them is a lot more complicated than injecting some plastic into a mould. This behind-the-scenes video shows how the cap is crafted out of solid billett aluminum in 79 different steps. Ordinary plastic body caps should suffice for more DSLR owners, but perhaps the company will find customers among hardcore shooters who need the extra sealing for …

Facial recognition features are appearing in everything from cameras to photo-sharing sites, but have you thought about the different security and privacy concerns it introduces? Fast Company has published a piece on how mobile apps in the future may be able to quickly look up your identity, your personal information, and perhaps even your social security number! …

What happens when 3 guys spend 44 days flying 38,000 miles on 18 flights to 11 different countries, capturing moments of footage at each location with two cameras? Check out this epic short film based on the concept of "movement" and you'll see!

Thom Hogan has some news from reliable sources regarding Nikon's upcoming mirrorless announcement: …

Flickr user Rachel Carrier captured this photo of her awesome Polaroid tattoo on Polaroid 690 film. It's one of the coolest photo tattoos I've seen.

Freelance news photographer Phil Datz was recording the conclusion of a police chase from the opposite sidewalk last Friday when he was confronted by a police officer and commanded to "go away". Though he politely obeyed and moved a block further from the scene, the officer decided to arrest him for "obstruction of governmental administration". The latest news is that the department is planning to drop the charges and put its officers through "media relations training".

Ever wonder how George Eastman chose the name "Kodak" for the company he founded? …

Not satisfied with creating a stop-motion animation of microscopic proportions, Nokia has gone in the opposite direction, this time turning a beach into what Guinness deemed the "world's largest stop motion animation set." The 12-megapixel stills were shot over five days using a Nokia N8 cell phone strapped to a 40 meter high cherry picker, and the largest scene spans a whopping 11,000 square feet!

We reported yesterday that Kodak has taken defensive measures to prevent a hostile takeover for its extensive collection of digital imaging patents. One of these patents is an image previewing invention that has earned Kodak nearly $1 billion from Samsung and LG, and that's at the center of an ongoing legal battle with Apple. With the income generated by patent lawsuits dwindling, the company is now considering the sale of 1,100 patents (about 10% of its portfolio), including the valuable image …

With the rise of sites like YouTube, the Internet is teeming with digital videos (two days worth are uploaded to YouTube every minute), but when was the last time you stopped to think about how video works? Here's a fascinating video in which Michael from vsauce explains everything from beta movement to frame rates.

What does it look like when every inch of a room's walls and ceiling are covered with photographs? German art students Joern Roeder and Jonathan Pirnay decided to find out through their project titled "fbFaces". Using a crawler that traverses the Facebook social graph, they harvested 100,000 profile pictures and used them to print out an intense wallpaper for the entire room.

Here's yet another example of the crazy visual effects found on today's TV shows -- this time it's from HBO's series "Game of Thrones". Just making composites this realistic using still images would be difficult enough, but for video? Wow.

If you look at the price of Kodak's stock, you'll see that the company is currently worth about $600 million -- a figure that may be significantly lower than what its digital imaging patents could sell for. With the risk looming that a buyer might try to acquire the patents by simply taking over the company, Kodak is taking evasive maneuvers.

As far as camera cookies go, these colorful cookies by sweets shop manjar are top notch.

If you had any doubts that Leica's new M9-P is simply the M9 given a cosmetic makeover, get this: Leica is offering to upgrade any customer's M9 camera into an M9-P. For the low Leica-esque price of $1,995, the company will give your camera "sapphire glass" for your LCD screen and a new top cover without the famous Leica red dot. If only upgrading to the latest DSLR were this easy!

Alexa's traffic reports seem to show that photo sharing service 500px is growing like a weed. The site has received quite a bit of coverage as of late.

Craftzine has a step-by-step tutorial teaching how to turn your unwanted 35mm film into an uber-geeky necklace. Not sure how comfortable wearing it would be, but if you're the type that's constantly looking for new levels of photo geekiness, this one's for you.

Canon created this short but interesting video showing how its SLR cameras evolved from the Canon Flex in 1959 to the latest DSLRs that currently dominate the industry.

Now here's a camera accessory you don't see every day: over in Japan there's an artisan named Takuya Okamoto who handcrafts unique camera straps out of crocodile hide. The straps cost a whopping $1400 apiece.

Having a camera that shoots 5000 frames per second is enough to capture slow motion footage of a bullet flying through the air, but scientists at the Science and Technology Facilities Council have now announced a camera that shoots a staggering 4.5 million frames per second. Rather than bullets, the camera is designed to capture 3D images of individual molecules using powerful x-ray flashes that last one hundred million billionth of a second. The £3 million camera will land in scientists hands …

Shortly after startup lens maker Noktor went out of business, a company called SLR Magic decided to acquire the brand and continue the Noktor project. Now, the company is planning on launching a 50mm f/0.95 "HyperPrime" lens for the Leica M mount. It'll be a 6-bit coded lens that's significantly cheaper than the Noctilux lenses offered by Leica.

The video recording quality of DSLRs has gotten to the point where you can slap them onto big fancy rigs and use them to film portions of big budget Hollywood movies without anyone noticing any difference. Iron Man was the first superhero in the Marvel universe to make use of the Canon 5D Mark II, and today it was announced that the camera was also used extensively throughout "Captain America: The First Avenger".

For every iconic photograph that's out there, there was likely a number of other photographs taken at the same time that many people probably have never seen. One such photo is Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange -- an image that became one of the defining photos of the Great Depression. The woman in the photo, Florence Owens Thompson, had been travelling with her family when their car's timing chain snapped. After setting up a temporary camp to wait while her husband and two sons went to town for …

This is what happens to your photography when you grow in both Photoshop skills and laziness.

Gadget painting company ColorWare is now offering its services for the Leica D-Lux 5, allowing you to choose custom colors for everything from the body to the hot shoe insert. If you've always wanted to make your D-Lux as painful on the eyes as some of Pentax's limited edition cameras, now's your chance. You can buy a custom painted $800 D-Lux directly from ColorWare for $1200, or send in your camera for a $400 paint job. It's super pricey, but if you're shooting with a Leica and even thinking …

Transform is a short film by photographer Zack Arias that offers encouragement to photographers who are going through a slump and hard times. It's an incredibly powerful piece that everyone interested in photography -- pros and enthusiasts alike -- should see at least once, though you might find yourself coming back to it again and again in the future.

Finish modder metalfusion has a sweet DIY way of showing off photographs. After converting .jpg, .gif, or .png photographs into halftone images using a free program, they use a CNC machine to carve the image into black-painted plywood by drilling into the wood at various depths. Up close the "print" looks like a piece of wood with a bunch of holes, but step back -- or squint your eyes -- and the photo can be seen!

Ordinarily if there's movement in a timelapse video, it's constrained to a small area because a dolly or crane system was used to change the position of the camera small distances between shots. The folks at T-RECS came up with a special way to introduce large distance movements into timelapse shots, but are keeping mum on how they did it. Check out the showreel above and see if you can figure out their secret technique.