September 22, 2011

"The City" is a beautiful time-lapse video that gives you a taste of what San Francisco is like. Between June 2010 and August 2011, photographer Wesley Townsend Kitten visited various locations in the city, capturing 85 different shots comprising roughly 28,000 photographs. He used a Canon 5D, Canon 5D Mark II, 15mm fisheye, 16-35mm, and 70-200mm for the shots, which were subsequently tweaked in Lightroom. Everything was then brought together into this time-lapse video using Final Cut Pro.

Ex-Magnum and current National Geographic photographer Michael Nichols first launched his website back in 2001 but left it untouched until last year, when he finally decided to update it with new work. After spending a considerable about of energy towards the update, he suddenly decided to change course: …

Some photographers prefer using ordinary bags with padded inserts to carry their camera gear, both for aesthetic reason and to prevent theft. Instead of buying an insert, you can also make a custom one with some foam, fabric, and velcro. Abi over at vanilla & lace made one to turn her purse into a camera bag after finding that purse-style camera bags can cost up to $300. She also wrote up a helpful tutorial on how you can do the same.

Color -- the much-hyped but largely ignored photo sharing app -- is back, and this time it's built entirely around Facebook. One of the main reasons for the app's failure the first time around was the fact that the photo sharing relied on proximity, a huge problem for new users when no one around is using it. Now, founder Bill Nguyen is trying to avoid the "ghost town" problem by harnessing the power of Facebook's social graph.

Here's an educational time-lapse tutorial by Los Angeles-based architectural photographer Mike Kelley in which he walks through how he goes about photographing buildings. His technique might be described "manual HDR" -- after shooting the building over a longish period of time to capture different lightings, he then enters the scene and lights different areas of the building using two Canon 430EX Speedlites. Afterward, he loads the stills into Photoshop and selects different portions of the …

Remember the tiny Chobi Cam One "DSLR" that was introduced in Japan at the beginning of the year? Well the camera has found a distributor in the US and is generating some media buzz again after being marketed as "the world's smallest camera". While it certainly isn't the world's smallest camera, you probably won't find an interchangeable lens digital camera that's smaller. You can buy the video-capable 2-megapixel camera over at Hammacher Schlemmer for $100, though it doesn't appear to come …

Want a DSLR viewfinder but don't want to pay big bucks for a professional one? Photojojo has a tutorial on how you can build your own DIY version using a lens from a pair of magnifying reading glasses and some plastic/foam board. It'll definitely draw some weird looks but hey, it works! …

Allen Murabayashi is the co-founder and CEO of PhotoShelter.