September 2011

Nine years ago, during his final year as a fine art photography student in Melbourne, Martin Cheung came up with a strange idea: seeing how roast duck was a symbol of Chinese cooking, he wanted to see how the duck saw Melbourne's Chinatown. He then bought a roast duck, turned it into a pinhole camera, and -- after a couple of failures and adjustments -- used it to photograph Melbourne’s Chinatown gate. You can find more info on the project (and a step-by-step guide on making your own roast …

Crazy about photography, web designer and aspiring commercial photographer Dabe Alan decided to get a sleeve tattoo showing the evolution of cameras. He documented the process by creating stop-motion videos in which the artwork magically appears on his arm. The videos show 12 hours of sitting in the tattoo parlor, and comprise 2713 separate photographs shot with a Canon 5D Mark II and 24-70mm lens.

Kodak's stock plummeted again today, losing nearly 50% of its value and closing at $0.78 per share. The company was worth over $30 billion back in 1997, but todays stock price pegs the value at just $200 million. Prominent investors in the company are calling for its sale, but apparently there's been hurdles in selling off its patent portfolio, and now bankruptcy might be on the horizon. A quote by a company spokesperson a couple days ago caught my eye: when asked why Kodak was struggling in …

Earlier this week, a Reuters photograph showing a Libyan rebel firing an RPG caused a stir after people on a number of sites suggested that it might have been Photoshopped. Well, it turns out the photo is 100% real -- not only did Reuters confirm this with us, but forensic expert Neal Krawetz arrived at the same conclusion after analyzing the image: …

Photographer Patrick Lindsay shot this beautiful photograph of gumballs seen through water drops. It's similar to the MC Escher water drop photo we shared a while ago, but is much easier to create since the drops of water aren't moving in this photo.

Awesome deal alert (for those of you in the US): Walmart is offering a free 16x20 photo poster print. These things normally cost $13 or $14 bucks, and are a great way to show off a photo on your wall. Download the coupon here to print out yourself. You'll need to place the order through Walmart's photo site and then pay at the counter when picking it up. The coupon expires at the end of October, so you have a month to pick out your favorite photo.

Photographer Lee Morris recently purchased a Nikon MB-D11 battery grip from Amazon.com for $216. It worked perfectly fine, but after Morris purchased a second grip for a wedding, he noticed something was different about the first one. After some investigation, he came to realize that he had purchased a Nikon-branded version (i.e. counterfeit) of a grip that ordinarily sells for $40 on Amazon.

Daily deals sites have become quite popular as of late, with Groupon and LivingSocial leading the charge. Photo Dough is a similar service that's geared towards professional photographers. Every few days the site features a new service or product that's heavily discounted thanks to group buying, allowing you to save money on things like photo editing programs, digital picture albums, and website templates.

Here's a bit of photo humor to start off the day: Jeremiah Warren made this satirical video imagining what it would be like if Apple announced an "iPhone 5 iDSLR": …

Here's a helpful illustration that shows acceptable places to crop when shooting portraits. Cropping at green lines should be fine, while cropping at red lines might leave you with an awkward looking photograph.

Just heard the terrible news that Photojojo founder Amit Gupta has been diagnosed with leukemia. Amit's a super nice guy who has done a ton for the photo-lovin' community by spreading the joy of photography through his business. Postagram is trying to fill his hospital room with get-well-soon cards by offering a free postcard through the promo code "superamit".

If you're a longtime Instagram user that recently upgraded to Version 2, you might have noticed that the filters don't quite feel the same. Don't worry, it's not just you: each of the filters was indeed tweaked in the app's overhaul. Despite the new live view and faster response times, many users aren't too happy about the changes that were done to their beloved filters. Owen Billcliffe over at My Glass Eye did a side-by-side comparison between old and new filters to show the differences. The …

A Nikon patent published today details a new dust reduction feature that might make its way into future Nikon DSLRs. The basic idea is the introduction of a hole at the bottom of the camera's mirrorbox that is designed to catch dust when the mirror swings up. Nikon claims that the feature reduces dust found on the sensor by 50% after 10,000 actuations.

Instagram's filters are meant to mimic the look of vintage and toy cameras, but have you ever wondered which cameras and films you'd need to make analog photos with the same look? The folks over at 1000memories decided to tackle this question and, after a good amount of research, came up with a neat infographic showing the different camera and film combinations you can use to recreate popular Instagram filters.

Photography business analyst Dan Heller has written a helpful post in which he busts common misconceptions photographers in the US have about model releases. A big one is that you need to first obtain a model release before selling photos of people. Heller writes, …

After the widespread looting that occurred in the UK recently, a guy named Mrog Deville was inspired to distribute photographic art to the masses. Through his project This Was Found, Deville makes prints of photographs, frames them, and then leaves them in various locations where you normally wouldn't expect to see art. His hope is that either the works will be left untouched at those locations for the public to view, or that people take them home to treasure privately. Finders can also visit …

DxOMark has just published its findings on the quality of Nikon's new mirrorless camera sensor, and the verdict is that Nikon did a pretty good job milking quality out of the small 1-inch sensor: …

Here's an interesting behind-the-scenes video that shows what a workday is like for fashion photographer Peter Stigter.

You've probably heard the expression "It's the photographer, not the camera", but apparently Nikon -- or at least one of its PR people -- hasn't. A few hours ago the company updated its Facebook page with, …

Lens hoods can become loose over time, leading to annoying rattling sounds or problematic vignetting if the hood rotates into your shots. Instead of buying a replacement hood, you can apply a quick fix using a little tape or glue. Simply cover the threads with a few layers of tape or a few dabs of non-permanent glue (be sure to wait until it dries). The extra material around the threads should help the lens hood to secure much more tightly to your lens.

Instructables user art.makes has a tutorial on how you can make a pair of paper iris glasses with adjustable apertures. You could definitely build upon the idea to make each side more like a camera lens (e.g. adding barrels, f-stop values) -- perhaps as part of a geeky Halloween costume?

Here's a quick and easy tip from Scott Kelby for portraiture: reduce the number of distracting elements in the shot by positioning yourself with the background in mind. Sure it's a simple and obvious tip, but those are usually the kind that come in handy most often.

If you're a Flickr loyalist that hasn't jumped ship for competing services, Flickr is rewarding you with a couple new tools for sharing your photos. Today the company announced an official app for Android and a new photo-sharing feature called Photo Sessions.

Ask a photographer to shoot a time-lapse portrait of a city, and they might choose a number of famous locations to photograph with a fixed camera. Photographer Jesse Kopp, however, prefers to stay at the ground level and photograph what it feels like to actually be roaming around the streets. He visits famous cities around the world and creates time-lapse videos out of photos taken while walking from landmark to landmark. It's an awesome way to get a feel of what each city is like (the video …

Bits of Everything has a great tutorial on how you can make a large and beautiful picture collage for your wall on the cheap: the entire project costs less than $20. Mod Podge glue, which dries clear, is painted over the entire thing to give board a matte finish. This could definitely make for a fun and photographic weekend project.

Deal alert: you can buy a 16GB Kingston 266x CompactFlash card over at Buy.com for just $23 with shipping included. Just for comparison, these cards are listed for $33 everywhere else. Not sure how long this deal is good for.

Singer Bob Dylan is being accused of plagiarism after several paintings in his recent art show were found to have "striking resemblances" to works by photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dmitri Kessel and Léon Busy. An example is Dylan's painting titled Opium (above left), which appears to be directly copied from Busy's Vietnam (above right). A Flickr user also found that Dylan had copied six photographs -- one of which an artificial Photoshop edit -- from his Flickr stream.

The Sharpen Tool in Photoshop has always been useful in that it allows you to quickly sharpen specific areas in a photograph, but a major problem was that it had the tendency to introduce nasty artifacts into the image. Alternative methods that avoid this issue (e.g. using a new sharpened layer) became popular, leaving the Sharpen Tool to gather dust on many users' tool pallets.

There's plenty of mini-tripods out on the market, but Joby's new GorillaPod Micro tripods are special in that they're designed to stay attached to your camera at all times. The legs fold up neatly when not in use, allowing you to stick your camera into your pocket or a case without having to remove the tripod. It features zinc alloy legs, rubber feet, and a head that offers 36-degrees of tilt-motion.

The next time you're walking around with a DSLR around your neck and a stranger asks you for directions, you might want to keep a hand on your lens. Yesterday BBC's "The Real Hustle" included a short segment called "The Twist" in which they demonstrated how easy it is to steal a lens on the street. The con artists simply detach and pocket the camera lens of an unsuspecting photographer while pretending to ask for directions. Apparently this is a real con that thieves are using these days...

Photographer Rodney Smith writes that the greatest gift possessed by still photographers is under attack like never before.

Here's a fun and creative idea that requires brains rather than a big budget: using an ordinary video-capable camera and some basic editing software, you can show a person walking forward through a world that's traveling backward. For even crazier examples of this same technique, check out the music videos for The Scientist by Coldplay, Typical by Mutemath, and Drop by The Pharcyde.

Yesterday Kodak's stock fell 64 cents, or 26.9%, to close at $1.74 -- the lowest the stock price has been in 38 years. Investors were reacting to news that the company (which hasn't netted a profit since 2007) had taken out a new $160 million loan. The plummeting value of the company is bad news for the photography pioneer but good news for companies that might be interested in buying it -- a list that is rumored to include Google and Microsoft.

Fast Burst Camera is a best-selling Android app that upgrades your phone camera's FPS to 5 to 10 frames per second, allowing you to capture action shots by spraying, praying, and selecting the best image afterward. On high end phones, the FPS can even go up to a crazy 30FPS. Like with the burst mode on DSLRs, holding down the shutter will fill up your buffer, and you'll need to wait for it to clear before continuing. The app can be purchased from the Android Market for $3.63.

If a camera lens has been abused, mishandled, or is just plain worn out, there are telltale signs that a knowledgeable buyer can look for to help appraise the value or lack thereof in a used camera lens.

Here's the first episode of Shutterbugs, the new web series we mentioned a couple weeks ago that's geared towards photo enthusiasts. Each episode is pretty short -- this one is just 3.5 minutes long -- and a new one will be released every Tuesday. You can also follow the show by subscribing to the channel through YouTube.

Cell phone photography is a huge trend these days with Instagram skyrocketing past 10 million users this past weekend, but have you ever wondered how it all started? An entrepreneur named Philippe Kahn is credited with creating the camera phone back in 1997. On June 11th of that year, Kahn took the first "camera phone" photo of his newborn daughter in a maternity ward, and then wirelessly transmitted the photo to more than 2,000 people around the world. Since "camera phones" didn't exist at …

Based on a recently published patent filing, Canon appears to be working on putting aperture rings on EF-mount lenses to allow the aperture to be smoothly controlled during video recording. The patent, filed by the company back in March and published late last week, talks of a "diaphragm driving unit" and shows a third ring on the lens in addition to the zoom and focus rings.

Update: Erin from Reuters contacted us informing us that this is in fact a genuine, non-manipulated photograph. Here's a good explanation of why it's real.

Korean artist Gwon Osang makes creative photo sculptures by photographing subjects, making hundreds of prints, and then plastering the photos onto a styrofoam sculture. Photographing the body takes up to half a day to complete, and Osang carves the sculptures himself since his background is in sculpture rather than photography. Each piece takes one to two months to complete.

Suppose Apple hadn't abandoned its digital camera business. What effect would Steve Jobs and his team have had on the cameras we use today? Photo enthusiast Karim Ghantous thought about this recently, and came up with the following list of things he thinks Jobs might have pushed for.

If you have a GoPro or any other compact camera with a constantly exposed lens, you can protect the lens from scratches when it's not in use by making a cheap DIY lens cap out of a ping pong ball and a rubber band.

Many Nikonians would have been overjoyed if Nikon's mirrorless cameras had been announced with an APS-C sensor instead of a 1-inch one, but are DSLR-sized sensors the best fit for smaller interchangeable lens cameras? Michael Johnston over at The Online Photographer says no, arguing that Micro Four Thirds is the optimal size: …

A 19-year-old man in the UK has been sentenced to two months in prison for snapping a courtroom photo. Paul Thompson was sitting in a public gallery last week -- the defendant was a friend who was on trial for robbery -- when another friend texted him to ask where he was. Thompson decided to snap a picture with his Blackberry to explain why he couldn't talk, but was quickly arrested by officers who noticed what he was doing. He was then sentenced to two months in prison for "contempt of court" …

Back in 1996, National Geographic released a documentary film titled "The Photographers" that gives the world a behind-the-scenes look at how the magazine's amazing imagery is created: …

Sling Shot is a concept camera that's designed to capture expressions of fear on people's faces. It's shaped like a slingshot, and the camera's shutter release is the elastic band: pretend like you're about to shoot the slingshot and the camera snaps a photo. It could make for a fun gag camera, and luckily it's nowhere near as morbid as this 1938 revolver camera.

Inspired by the incredible ISS time-lapse that went viral recently, YouTube user isoeph collected NASA photographs from The Gateway To Astronaut Photography of Earth and created this equally impressive time-lapse video showing the ISS passing over the auroras.

Nikon included the above illustration when announcing its new mirrorless cameras in the UK. The company's new EXPEED 3 image processor, which is supposedly "the fastest in the world", can process data at a whopping 600 megapixels per second. That's equivalent to 24 frames per second with a 25MP sensor! …

New Zealand-based wedding photographer Delphine Ducaruge takes photos from her wedding shoots and combines them into creative stop-motion animations. You can find more of them over on her Vimeo page.

The relatively small 1-inch CX-format sensor found in Nikon's new mirrorless cameras caused quite a bit of discontent among serious shooters even before the cameras were announced, but now that it's official we finally have the opportunity to see its image quality in real-world environments. dpreview has published a gallery of 23 JPGs shot with the Nikon J1, along with 5 RAW files shot between ISO 100 and ISO 3200. Take a look, and judge for yourself.