September 27, 2011

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.