September 2011

Have you ever wondered whether hall of fame athletes from decades ago would still find success if the played their sports today? How about the same question, but applied to photographers? Would the historical greats of photography be brilliant across all ages, or were they simply pioneers and ahead of the curve in their generation? If they were just starting out today, which of the famous photographers throughout history do you think would still become renowned in the present day, and which …

Over the weekend, Japanese blog ktf__design published this image of what appears to be the new mirrorless camera Nikon will reportedly announce on Wednesday. If it's just some fan-made mockup, they did a great job -- the mount and sensor section looks identical almost identical to the photo that leaked back in July.

Line up an array of digital cameras and you'll have yourself a setup that can take Matrix-style bullet-time shots. Artist Sam Blanchard created a similar rig, but went with Polaroid cameras instead of digital ones. The project, titled Polaroid Matrix, consists of 20 Polaroid cameras arranged in a circle and modified to be triggered remotely. After the cameras are triggered to simultaneously capture photos of the subject in the center, the Polaroid pictures are arranged and turned into a …

Last year Canon announced the world's largest CMOS sensor -- an 8-inch chip that's 40 times the size of those found in Canon's full frame cameras. Now, a year later, the sensor is finally being put to good use, having found its way into the Schmidt telescope at the University of Tokyo's Kiso Observatory. The extreme-sensitivity of the sensor has allowed astronomers to detect more faint meteors during a 1 minute period than could previously be seen during an entire year, and has the ability to …

This incredible time-lapse video was created using photos captured from the International Space Station at night.

tokyo camera style by John Sypal (see our interview with him) is a popular website documenting the analog camera culture in Tokyo, Japan by sharing photographs of cameras being used on the streets -- it's like The Sartorialist except for cameras instead of fashion. If you're a fan of the site and love browsing photos of old school cameras people use, you'll be happy to know that there's a number of similar websites for other cities and places around the world.

Philosopher and Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost gave this short talk recently on the photography of renowned American street photographer Garry Winogrand, specifically focused on Winogrand's famous quote in which he says, …

If you're the proud owner of a Sony NEX-5N but have been pulling out your hair due to strange clicking noises ruining your videos, here's some good news: it's not just your camera. Frustrated camera owners have taken to the Internet to complain about the faint clicking noise that can be heard from inside the camera when moving it around, a problem that was found in every NEX-5N that Engadget tested. 1080/60p video recording is one of the highly touted features on the camera, so Sony could be in …

Photo fads are themselves growing as a fad -- after "planking" became a worldwide Internet sensation earlier this year, it seems like every week a silly new idea is introduced as "the new planking".

Since photography emerged in the early 1800s, the number of photographs created every year has grown exponentially. A dramatic shift occurred around the year 2000 though: …

Here are the recordings of all the "Is Photography Over?" panel sessions hosted by SFMOMA that we referred to earlier today: …

Google Street View is neat in that it allows you to step into far away places through street-level photographs, but it's missing the fourth dimension: time. WhatWasThere is an awesome project that aims to combine the element of time with a photographic map of the world. The map includes both modern day and historical imagery, and users can contribute their photographs by tagging them with a date and a time. The site even lets you switch to Google's Street View and overlay historical photos onto …

In April of last year, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art held a two day summit on the topic of "Is Photography Over?". The panel discussions from the summit featured some pretty notable names from the industry, and generated quite a bit of discussion once they were shared online. In response, Conscientious editor Jörg Colberg made this humorous tongue-in-cheek video introducing a new color coded threat level advisory system as a quick and easy way of staying up to date with how over …

Facebook is by far the world's largest photo service, but how does its massive image collection compare with other website and photo libraries? 1000memories created this interesting graphic showing the relative sizes of the world's largest photo libraries.

You've probably seen videos showing the rolling shutter effect turning airplane propellers into boomerangs, but what if the camera was attached to the spinning object rather than pointed at it? mguw of Helidigital decided to find out by attaching a small camera to the rotorhead of an RC helicopter, synchronizing the RPM of the rotor to the scan rate of the camera. The result is an uber-trippy video in which reality is bended through the rolling shutter effect.

Canon sent out this teaser yesterday stating that it's going to be making some kind of game-changing announcement on November 3rd. Since the location is Hollywood, it seems more likely that it'll be some kind of camera for filmmaking rather than a mirrorless camera. Filmmaker Philip Bloom thinks it'll be an EF and PL mount camcorder with a Super 35mm sensor (possibly offering 4K resolution).

YouTube user smithje77 and his dog recently embarked on a cross-country road trip from Seattle to Maine (3,000+ miles!), and he decided to document the journey by programming his Droid X to snap a photograph every 90 seconds (the script is available here). Afterward, he took all the stills captured and combined them into one epic time-lapse video that shows what it's like to drive from coast to coast.

On September 2nd, a woman in Northern California named Debbie Payne heard a loud crash and, upon investigating, found a smashed Canon 24-105mm lens on the ground and a gaping 9-inch hole in her roof. Now the police department in Petaluma is trying to figure out how the lens apparently fell from the sky.

Want to add some simple panning action to a time-lapse video? Trying using a cheap IKEA kitchen timer. GetawayMoments has a tutorial on how to convert a $2-$6 timer from IKEA into a simple device for your time-lapse projects.

Regardless of how bad photographers' rights seem to be in your country, here's a story that will definitely make you appreciate them at least a little bit more: a photojournalist named Sithu Zeya may spend 18 years of his life in prison after being arrested for photography. Zeya, who's only 21 years old, was arrested in Burma last year after getting caught photographing the aftermath of a grenade attack that killed 10 people in the country's largest city, Yangon. After being sentenced to 8 …

Tokyo-based editorial photographer Irwin Wong created this funny Justin Bieber parody song titled "Pay Me" as a shout out to all his "photographer homies who have had their copyright infringed".

Canon sends out an email containing a customer survey once or twice a year, and yesterday's survey included a few questions regarding mirrorless cameras. Looks like the company is looking into entering the mirrorless game. About time too -- mirrorless cameras are chipping away at Canon's market share, and Nikon is rumored to have a mirrorless camera announcement just around the corner on September 21st.

Melbourne-based design studio Betty Wants In is at it again. They've created this stunning slow-mo video of BASE jumpers doing their thing -- a perfect followup to the skydiving one they shared back in April. The footage was captured with GoPro cameras and then slowed down using Twixtor, just like the crazy wingsuit video we shared yesterday.

Today Canon unveiled its new high-end PowerShot S100 compact camera, successor to the popular S95. The S100 uses Canon's new DIGIC 5 image processor and packs a CMOS sensor (1/1.7") instead a CCD one. It shoots 12 megapixel images with a 24-120mm (35mm equivalent) f/2.0 lens, can capture RAW files, has a max ISO of 6400, includes GPS functionality, and has a 3-inch LCD screen. The camera is very similar to Canon's high-end G series (the sensor size is the same), except the S series has a …

If you ever find yourself needing some quick stabilization when recording video with your DSLR, but don't have a fancy rig with you (or you're in a place where you can't bring one), you can use an ordinary tripod as a makeshift shoulder rig for some extra stability.

Cell phone cameras have pretty poor image quality when compared with point-and-shoot cameras due to their small sensors, but one advantage they have over compact cameras is a naturally deep depth of field. That was particularly useful for this YouTube user in capturing some sharp video of his new motorcycle -- something that would have been much more difficult using a standard point-and-shoot.

Gomite's new Tiltpod is a simple "tripod" designed for people who do a lot of traveling with a compact camera. Stored on the end of your hand strap, it attaches quickly to your camera's tripod mount to help you frame and stabilize your shots when there's no one around to help you take it. The underside is made of a "grippy" magnetic material that helps it stay still on most surfaces, and the angle of the base can be adjusted after the camera is attached.

In this video, UK photography instructor Damien Lovegrove demonstrates how you can add some pseudo-sunlight to portraits by simply placing some weeds or part of a bush -- which he calls a "dingle" -- between an off-camera flash and your subject.

Baking blog Bakerella has a fun tutorial teaching how to make Instagram logo graham crackers, or "Instagrahams", a geeky treat for anyone addicted to the wildly popular photo sharing app.

According to a survey conducted for SanDisk, 64% of adults in the US wouldn't consider destroying their photo collections for $1 million. At the same time, the general public probably doesn't spend nearly enough time and money ensuring the safety of those same photos.

Earlier this year, daredevil BASE jumper Jeb Corliss leaped off a cliff in Switzerland in a wingsuit and wearing 5 separate GoPro cameras. One of the things Corliss did afterward was create this ethereal slow-motion video with the footage using Twixtor, the artificial slowmo program that has become quite popular as of late.

ifttt (If This Then That) is a new service that lets you automate tasks across different social media services you're signed up for, including Dropbox, Flickr, Instagram, and Facebook. All you have to do is choose what "this" and "that" are, and the service will take care of handling the task. For example, you can use ifttt to automatically send every photo uploaded to Facebook that's tagged with your name to your Dropbox account, or have it send all of your new Instagram photos to a particular …

Last September, Sony issued a notice informing customers that its pellicle mirror cameras would overheat during extended periods of video recording. Rather than maximum clip lengths, the company's cameras are apparently limited by how long the sensor can endure high temperatures. In the video above, someone tests Sony's new NEX-5N mirrorless camera for this overheating issue, and finds that you can record about 23m22s of video from a "cold start" before the camera issues a warning and shuts off …

Last week Toshiba announced "FlashAir" SD card with built-in LAN functionality, and today SanDisk is launching a counterattack. Rather than develop its own wireless cards, the company is partnering with Eye-Fi to sell co-branded wireless SD cards to European customers. The cards, which allow photos to be transfered to a computer over Wi-Fi, will be available in 4GB and 8GB sizes, and are basically Eye-Fi cards with a SanDisk logo slapped onto them. No word on price or release date as of yet.

Everpix is a new company that wants to make your entire photo collection -- both online and offline -- accessible from anywhere through the cloud. Introduced yesterday at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 conference, the service will come as a desktop client that monitors folders on your computer and photo sharing accounts on the Internet. Whenever you add new photographs, they're automatically beamed to the cloud (i.e. Everpix servers), allowing images created using many different devices and stored …

Johan Rijpma spent six months creating this two and a half minute time-lapse video showing rolls of transparent adhesive tape slowly unwinding. For one of the shots, he spent hours standing in the wind and rain, turning a plate 0.4 degrees every 30 seconds and then snapping a photo. Some of the sequences took as long as 12 hours to develop.

We all knew it wasn't a question of if, but of when: a major camera review site (Imaging Resource) has published a review of a cell phone (Apple's iPhone 4) as a digital camera. The review's conclusion is positive news for camera-makers though: …

Next time you're on vacation and find yourself without a camera, try checking the mini-bar in your hotel room. Ace Hotel has announced that the mini-bar in each of their guest rooms will be stock with a refurbished Polaroid camera and limited edition packs of Ace Hotel branded Impossible Project B&W instant film. If you don't plan on staying at any of their hotels, you can also purchase the branded kits through their website for $150 each.

In 1986, Texaco's gas stations ran a promotion where you received free Fujifilm film every time you filled up with at least 25 liters of gas. That's neat and all, but my question is: where can you buy that awesome photo-snappin' car?

It looks like all the negative news stories about photographers' rights in the UK is finally causing some positive change -- private security guards across the nation are being instructed (for the first time) to exercise some common sense when stopping and questioning picture-takers: …

Photographer Michael Freeman says that although things are getting tougher for professional photographers, the "consumption of imagery in all areas is actually increasing". Professionals therefore need to think more about marketing themselves and specializing in a particular niche.

Shutterbugs is a new comedy web series geared towards photo geeks: …

To promote its new Xperia phones, Sony hosted a three-day hackathon on a boat to see what creative innovations people could come up with. One of the hackers decided to make a flamethrower-style flash (seen at 2:26), triggering a gas flame to flare whenever a photograph is taken with the phone. Maybe this'll start a fire-lighting trend in professional photo studios...

German satire program Extra 3 conducted a humorous -- albeit disconcerting -- experiment testing photographers' (and videographers) rights in Germany. They had an actor use a camera at different "sensitive" government locations, doing the exact same things (e.g. film the locations of security cameras) but dressed in two different outfits -- first as a European tourist and then as a Middle Eastern man. The result shows that how law enforcement deals with cameras is largely determined by common …

The rise of microstock and the fact that anyone with a camera can sell cheap photos has done a lot to devalue stock photography, but is the same thing happening to the photojournalism industry? Paul Melcher says that the industry is headed in that direction: …

Here's a long exposure light painting tutorial by a couple MIT Media Lab students. In addition to teaching the basics of the technique, they also show off a robot arm that they programmed to do extremely precise light painting photos and animations.

As a tribute to 9/11, Jason Powell revisited locations where photos of the attacks were captured on that fateful day and rephotographed them with the photos overlaid on the background.

Miklós Falvay used 3D camera mapping techniques on some historical photographs, turning them into tiny windows into the past that viewers can step into.

John Sypal is the photographer behind Tokyo Camera Style, the "Sartorialist of the camera world".

Canada's TSN created this "Top 10" compilation of clips showing sports photographers and cameramen getting way too close to balls, pucks, feet, and fists.