Artist-hackers Becky Stern and Limor Fried took an old Brother KH-930e knitting machine from the 1980s and turned it into a device that can "print" photos onto garments. Andrew Salomone showed off the machine at World Maker Faire New York 2011, along with a ski mask that has his face printed on it.
For the low price of $69, this master class offered through daily deal site LivingSocial will teach you everything you need to know about photography -- everything except how to hold your camera properly.
Tired of having to screw lens filters on and off? The Xume Quick Release Adapter is a new filter mounting system that turns your screw-on filters into snap-on ones. It uses powerful rare earth magnets, and consists of an adapter for your lens and a holder for each of your filters. People who use a single UV filter for protection might not benefit much from this system, but if you constantly find yourself switching between different filters then this adapter could take a lot of pain out of the …
Instead of using a traditional guestbook at their wedding, Jess and Sloane asked wedding guests to pose for Polaroid pictures while holding messages written on a small chalkboard. Awesome idea.
According to Wikipedia, there are roughly one trillion photographs on film or photo paper in the world today -- enough to cover an area of 4,000 square miles (~10,000 square kilometers). That's about half the size of Wales, or pretty much exactly the size of Los Angeles County.
Setting a new Guinness World Record might be a difficult task for us humans, but is apparently much easier if you're a camera. A bizarre story that emerged this past week was that Casio's swivel-crazy Tryx has been awarded a Guiness World Record for being the "Most Adjustable Digital Camera". The description of the world record reads like something out of a press release: …
Instagram's popular filters have spent the last year permeating into every corner of the photographic world, but for every one that was included in the app, thousands are left on the cutting room floor. Blake Williams over at Keepsy was given a behind-the-scenes peek into some of the filters that didn't make the cut. The one above was named "Dirty Bird".
If you're one of the many frustrated Sony NEX-5N owners who are experiencing a mysterious clicking noise when moving the camera around, hope for click-free video recording has finally arrived. Sony updated its support site yesterday acknowledging the issue: …
Spotted this shirt, titled "Analog Retirement", over at BustedTees. The design might be cute and creative, but it was obviously created by someone who isn't a photographer. Sure the photographic film industry hasn't been doing so hot over the past decade, but you can't compare film with cassette tapes, VHS tapes, and floppy disks. Those technologies offer no advantages over the ones that replaced them, while analog photography does. As long as there are people passionate about shooting film, …
It's a big no-no when newspapers or photographers manipulate photos to alter reality, but when a father playfully does it to mess with his kids there's a big potential for awesome. Graphic designer Anthony Herrera recently did just that, and his story is now making the rounds on the Internet: …
Microstock did a lot of damage by turning traditional stock photography on its head, but now a company called Stipple is trying to give microstock a taste of its own medicine. The company, which offers technology for tagging people and objects in photos, has launched its new Image Marketplace website for publishers who want to use photographs without having to pay for them. Instead of publishers paying the photographers or agencies for licenses, brands step into the equation by paying money to …
Update: Looks like the video was taken down due to a copyright claim. You can watch it here.
Here's an inspiring video in which photographer and speaker Dewitt Jones talks about how he looks for "right answers" when he was doing assignments for National Geographic. Rather than specific tips or techniques, he mostly talks about high level ideas while showing off some of his stunning photographs.
Light painting is sometimes called light graffiti, but who does graffiti with flashlights? Halo is a neat light-painting tool designed by Aïssa Logerot that makes painting with light feel much more natural for people accustomed to creating... less-legal forms of art. Shaped like an aerosol can of spray paint, the tool includes interchangeable LED lights for painting in different colors and a battery inside that recharges when the can is shaken.
Buying large frames for displaying your prints can be expensive. For those of you who are rich in time but short on money, Oh Happy Day has an awesome tutorial on how you can create nice-looking picture frames for just $5. The main ingredients are plexiglass, mat board, cardboard, and paper tape. Buying all the supplies will set you back around $50, but you should have enough material for around 10 frames.
Here's a fun photo project you can do with any small kid (preferably not a stranger's): spinning shots. All you have to do is set the self timer on your camera to automatically take a shot while it's hanging around your neck. While it's counting down, grab the child by the arms and spin them around. If luck is on your side, the photograph will show a clear subject, happy face, and motion-blurred background.
We're now one step closer to being able to take photographs with our minds. Scientists at UC Berkeley have come up with a way to reconstruct what the human brain sees: …
"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.
If Apple ever got into the photo printer business, this SWYP ("See What You Print") printer might be similar to what they'd come up with. It's a brilliant concept photo printer design by Artefact, the same design group that dreamed up the WVIL concept camera. Instead of having to send photos to the printer from a computer, users use a giant touchscreen interface that shows you exactly what's going to pop out of the bottom. Come on SWYP, hurry up and exist!
What has the world come to? Apparently the prestigious Magnum Photos has partnered with Nintendo to promote the Nintendo 3DS as a camera. Photographers Martin Parr, Thomas Dworzak and Gueorgui Pinkhassov used the handheld gaming device to shoot a series of 3D photos that were then put on display in an exhibition held at the Magnum Gallery in Paris.
Cut Out + Keep member Myam made this awesome Leica-style messenger bag for a photography-lovin' friend. Sadly there's no tutorial for this bag, but she says that the process is identical to what's seen in this guitar bag tutorial she wrote. A padded insert can also be added to make the bag more suitable for holding cameras. This bag could definitely make for a fun weekend project and photography gift.
Warco -- short for War Correspondent -- is an upcoming video game in which the player takes on the role of a journalist named Jesse DeMarco. Despite being classified as a first person shooter, the objective is to shoot people with a camera rather than a gun. After venturing into dangerous conflicts and risking your life to snag some footage, you're given the task of editing the video into a compelling news story. It almost seems like a Pokemon Snap game for adults. If they went a step further …
Is it your dream to become a professional photographer? Magnum photographer Christopher Anderson says you should focus more on the word "photographer" than the word "professional": …
Here's a neat productivity tip for those of you who regularly buy stuff online (e.g. obsessive photo gear buyers): you can track most packages by simply searching for the tracking number with Google! The search engine automatically figures out which service the number belongs to, and provides you with a direct link to the droids page you're looking for. Since some shipping companies don't have bookmarkable tracking pages, this tip can help you avoid having to go through those companies' …
Japanese Gift Market sells these camera-shaped wooden pencil sharpeners that can conveniently be carried around on your keychain. They ship from within the US, and cost $10 each.
Turns out the giant hand sculptures that popped up all over the world over the past few days were indeed part of a marketing stunt for Nikon's new mirrorless cameras. thebighands.com is now an "I AM Nikon 1" website. Our guess yesterday turned out to be true as well: the hands are now holding giant Nikon mirrorless cameras!
Photographer Nathan Seabrook made this creative stop-motion music video for the band Yuba Diamond. Despite what your eyes might tell you to believe, no computer trickery was used. Instead, Seabrook used roughly 1700 separate prints and some old fashioned techniques (e.g. fishing line and projecting scenes onto the background) for all the animations and effects seen in the video.
At Levi's Photo Workshop in New York City last year there was a large collection of cameras sitting on shelves and available for anyone to use. To keep track of what was missing, labels and outlines were drawn on the wall to "carve out" little homes for the cameras. If you have a sizable camera collection, labeling your walls could be a neat way to both organize them and show them off! …
Nikon's long-awaited mirrorless camera system has arrived. Today Nikon announced the new J1 and V1 mirrorless cameras and four new Nikon "1 System" lenses. The two cameras have nearly identical specs: a 10.1 megapixel CX-format (13.2mmx8.8mm) CMOS sensor with 2.7x crop factor, a 3-inch LCD screen, 10fps shooting, 1080/30p HD video recording, 1200fps slow-motion recording at 320x120, simultaneous video/still capture, 73-point hybrid autofocus, and 12-bit RAW files.
Want to adorn a wall with a giant print using your own photography? Here's a great video in which photographer Lee Morris shares how he shot, printed, and framed a massive 5-foot-wide panoramic print for less than $150 -- super cheap compared to the $1,000+ you might pay to have it professionally done. After shooting multiple photos on a bridge in Rome, he merged the images using Photoshop, had a metallic print made by Bay Photo Labs, and then framed it using a large mirror he found at Bed Bath …
While on vacation in Ireland five years ago and browsing a street fair, photographer Tom Storm captured a few shots of bubbles floating past. After reviewing the photos and discovering that a whole world was captured in the bubbles, he began to intentionally photograph bubbles while visiting landmarks around the world.
Want a challenging photography project? Try capturing an analemma in a single shot. "Analemma" is the name given to the figure-eight shape traced by the sun if photographed at the same time of day over the course of a year. To capture it, you'll need to leave your camera in a fixed position and shoot photos at exactly the same time of day for all of the shots.
All signs point to a Nikon mirrorless camera announcement at midnight tonight and, after Nikon's strange "I AM COMING" proclamation yesterday, another strange teaser has emerged that appears to be related to the camera. People in Europe have received postcards with the words "THE BIG HANDS", and a link to the website thebighands.com.
Of all the camera lenses offered on Amazon, the $26,000 35-pound giant green Sigma 200-500mm f/2.8 probably has the funniest customer reviews and images.
Today Instagram released version 2.0 of its wildly popular iPhone app, which will soon see its 10 millionth user. The base technology has been completely overhauled to bring speed to the app -- filters now apply 200x faster, tilt-shift applies 100x faster, and both can be viewed live while shooting. Four new filters have been introduced (seen above), and borders on filters are now optional. Finally, the resolution of photos saved to the iPhone 4 has been increased from 612x612 to 1936x1936 (the …
Flickr user Alex12Ga turned his Canon 5D Mark II into a DIY digital view camera by mounting a Novar-Anastigmat 75mm f/3.5 lens from 1949 with its original bellows. He mounted the bellows to his camera using an aluminum plate and an EOS mount ring that he salvaged from a broken Sigma lens.
Canon has long offered its telephoto L lenses in white in order to keep the lens cooler under sunlight, but did you know that certain Nikon lenses can be found in "white" as well? The lenses were officially called "light gray", and can be purchased for pretty reasonable prices on eBay -- the AF-S ED 70-200 f/2.8G VR seen above was sold a couple days ago by eBay seller shrewd25 for $1,999.
Real estate agents make it a point to have homes look attractive in photographs, knowing that good photography can make a huge difference, but the people at animal rescue shelters often settle for second-rate photographs of the dogs they're trying to find homes for. Professional pet photographer Teresa Berg of Dallas, Texas realized that countless dogs are likely euthanized each year simply due to bad photography, and decided to make a difference. Several years ago she started doing shoots for …
Why sell an old photo as something historical when you can market it as something mythical? A few days ago someone listed an old civil war photograph on eBay with the description: …
Last Friday, Olympus partnered with JetBlue for an Oprah-style giveaway: each of the 1000+ passengers traveling on Flight #001 from New York to Fort Lauderdale was given a newly-announced PEN E-PM1 Micro Four Thirds camera. The company documented the event using its own PEN cameras, and simply asked that everyone upload 20 of their favorite images captured to this website.
Nikon has set up a teaser page titled "I AM COMING", with a countdown that ends on Wednesday September 21. With all the rumors that have been floating around, it would be pretty shocking if this wasn't the company's mirrorless camera announcement. Looks like Nikon couldn't snag the domain name "iamcoming.com", though -- the teaser is at iamcomings.com.
The giant "GRIT" seen in this photograph wasn't added in post-processing. The secret? Blue painters tape.
Teenage photographers Vanessa Hollander and Wilson Philippe embarked on a ten-day motorcycle trip across Mongolia this past summer on a mission to give instant photo portraits to Native Mongolians who had never seen a photo before. They also made the above video documenting the reactions of a few of their subjects: …
