September 2011

If a stranger suddenly grabs your camera and takes a photograph, who owns the copyright to that photograph? Photographer Mirjam Letsch writes, …

We've shared a couple stories in the past month on how human eyes are very subjective and horrible as light meters, and here's yet another mind-boggling example of how easily our eyes can be fooled by context. In the image above, the "blue" and the "green" stripes are exactly the same color.

San Diego-based graphic artist Darren Pearson takes light-painting to a whole new level with his Light Fossil series -- long-exposure photos with detailed dinosaur fossils carefully drawn into the frame.

Could allowing the use of your photos for free actually be a way to increase income? Portrait photographer Jonathan Worth -- the man behind Coventry University's free photo courses -- used to send take-down notices to any website that shared his work without permission. Then he met author Cory Doctorow, a proponent of Creative Commons licensing, who suggested that he try giving away his work for free. Worth then made a high-res photo freely available online and quickly sold 111 signed prints, …

Japanese business newspaper Nikkei reported yesterday that Nikon is on the cusp of announcing its entry into the mirrorless camera market. What's more, the paper stated that the camera would cost between ¥70,000-¥100,000 ($900-$1,300), a pretty common price point for this type of camera (though it may be somewhat high if the camera only packs a 2.7x sensor). In response, Nikon put out a strange press release titled "Comments on Media Reports about Nikon's imaging product": …

The debate over David LaChapelle copyright infringement lawsuit against Rhianna rages on -- lawyer John William Nelson has written an article on why copyright should extend only to the literal copying of a photograph and not the elements within the photo.

Here's a weekend project idea: personalize your camera's wrist strap by making it look like a friendship bracelet! All you need is some embroidery thread and some time. Simply repeat a simple knot over and over and your strap will magically be covered with a neat repeating pattern. Head on over to KEH for the step-by-step tutorial.

DSLRs are finding their way into more and more consumers' hands, and apparently many of those consumers are tired of the standard black look. Just months after Canon announced the Rebel T3 in red, Nikon is following suit with its entry level D3100 -- the first Nikon DSLR to be available in a color other than black or silver. Aside from the new paint job, the camera's specs are identical to the black version.

Things aren't look very bright in the world of film. Citing plummeting consumer demand for silver halide films, Fujifilm has announced that they're cutting a number of films in the lineup in order to ensure that production of films -- presumably the more popular ones -- will continue. They've already stopped producing the discontinued films, so you might want to grab some rolls and freeze them before they become extinct...

Shutterlog is an interesting YouTube channel started earlier this year by Mijonju and Cameron Lew that collects user-submitted videos of people taking a picture with their favorite camera. After receiving and sharing over 100 videos, they decided to take some of the shutter click clips and remix them into a beat. It's like a simpler version of Lv Sisi's Digital Analogue.

Here's a video in which renowned street photographer Joel Meyerowitz shows us his method of doing street photography. His quiet, friendly, and "invisible" style is quite different from Bruce Gilden's in-your-face technique. The New Yorker also has a great video on Meyerowitz's photography.

In response to the "widespread, continuing pattern of law enforcement officers ordering people to stop taking photographs or video in public places", the American Civil Liberties Union has published a helpful article that clearly details what your rights are as a photographer in the United States.

Between 1903 and 1917, photographer Alfred Stieglitz published a quarterly photographic journal called Camera Work featuring the work of important photographers around the world and promoting photography as an art form. Called "the most beautiful of all photographic magazines", 50 issues containing 473 photographs were published before Stieglitz could no longer afford to continue the publication. Individual issues now sell for thousands of dollars each, but you can view the entire collection of …

Here's a creative way to offer a behind-the-scenes look at how a stop-motion video is created: while animator Barry Purves was slowly moving a puppet and snapping frames, a separate camera was used to photograph Barry doing the animating, creating a time-lapse video that shows how the doll was brought to life.

With the success of the Fujifilm X100, camera companies are starting to realize that consumers love both the design of old school cameras and the ease of shooting digital. Samsung may be looking to join the retro party -- the latest rumor to hit the Internet is that Samsung is planning a X100-style camera called the R1... with interchangeable lenses!

After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, photographer Richard Misrach visited the empty city and documented the destruction. Although he shot roughly 1,000 photos using an 8x10 large format camera, he noticed that many of the snapshots he captured using a point-and-shoot camera told an interesting story of what had occurred. These photos, which showed the graffiti messages left by residents fleeing their homes, were subsequently published in a book titled "Destroy this Memory". In the video …

Leave it to Leica to come up with strange ideas for special edition cameras. The company is collaborating with Japanese anime mechanical designer Kunio Okawara -- the guy behind the original Gundam design -- on an "Okawara Factory" limited edition V-LUX 30, which features a laser engraved design that makes it look like it's being disassembled. Only 200 of them will be produced, with each one priced at ¥89,250, or about $1,150.

Adobe announced a new cloud-based photo storage and sharing service today called Carousel, which will let you store all your photos at a central location, making it easy to view, share, and edit them -- using a Lightroom/ACR-based engine -- on any device you own. It'll only be available for Apple users in the beginning (e.g. Macs, iPhone, iPad), but Android and Windows versions are in the works. The service will cost $9.99/month or $99/year, and the free apps will be released later this month.

Back in March of 1954, Popular Science magazine featured an invention called the "dentapod" -- a metal bracket attached to the tripod mount that you bite with your teeth to stabilize your camera. For some reason, this didn't seem to catch on back then, but if any of you aspiring entrepreneurs decided to revive this thing for DSLRs, I'm sure it would be the next big thing.

Here's a startling video on how 9/11 turned using a camera in public into a "suspicious activity": …

Bloomberg reports that Canon and Nikon's failure thus far to enter the mirrorless camera market has allowed Sony to eat into their combined market share -- at least in Japan: …

Here's an uber-inspiring video in which National Geographic photographer Sam Abell discusses the difference between "taking" and "making" photographs through his experience of shooting one particular photograph for a story on painter Charles M. Russell. He explains that taking an image is shooting a photo as a reaction, without any preparation, while making a photograph is a process.

What you see here may be the first leaked photograph shot with the upcoming iPhone 5. The EXIF data claims it was shot with the iPhone 4, but other EXIF details indicate otherwise. Although the leaked image was cropped, the original size of the image was 3264x2448 (roughly 8MP), the rumored resolution found on the next iPhone. The lens info was recorded as "4.3mm f/2.4", more similar to a point-and-shoot than then 3.85mm f/2.8 lens found on the iPhone 4. Finally, the geotag info in the photo …

When Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980, photographer Robert Landsberg was documenting the changes in the volcano from just a few miles away. Realizing that he couldn't possibly outrun the approaching ash cloud, he kept shooting for as long as he could before using his body to preserve his film: …

Artist Jennifer Collier uses found and recycled paper as if it were fabric to recreate common household objects, including cameras! Here are a few that were made using maps, postcards, and letters.

Gigalinc is an "immersive photography" project by University of Lincoln student Samuel Cox that allows people to explore gigapixel photographs on a giant display using arm movements and hand gestures. Using an Xbox Kinect sensor for motion detection and a large cinema display, the resulting user interface is strikingly similar to the interface Tom Cruise uses in Minority Report.

Here's another public service announcement for those of you who travel often (see our warning on zippered bags): the safes in hotel rooms may not be as secure as you think. YouTube user skyrangerpro recently discovered that the safe in his room could be opened with "000000" regardless of what passcode he chose. This is presumably the "master password" the hotel uses when you've forgotten the one you've chosen, but the fact that some hotels leave this on factory default settings is cause for …

What would famous photographs look like if the photographers who created them had been using Instagram? That's a question that's answered by Mastergram, a site that takes the work of renowned photographers and passes them through Instagram filters.

Mike Johnston of TOP explains why Sony shouldn't call its pellicle mirror "translucent": …

If you want to do street photography, attacking people with cameras like Fabio Pires does in London probably isn't the way you should go about doing it -- unless you're trying to give photography a bad name. Does anyone know of any good behind-the-scenes videos of good (and candid) street photography being done in a respectable way?

After finding out that he was going to become a father, photographer Tom Robinson decided to make a creative photo project out of the task of telling his family and friends by capturing their expressions at the moment of hearing the news.

Kirsty over at kootoyoo transformed her old Cosina CT-2 into a neat desk lamp that emits light from inside the lens. The legs on the tripod can be adjusted, so it can be used as a floor lamp as well. It'd be awesome if she could make it so adjusting the aperture on the lens would change the brightness of the light. Kirsty is currently writing a tutorial that'll teach you how to make your own -- it'll go on sale starting next week.

After moving into their new dorm room, Caleb Ungewitter and his roommate Kyle decided that their walls looked too empty, so they decided to decorate it with a photo. Not just any photo, mind you, but a gigantic do-it-yourself print of a beautiful city skyline. Using a free program called The Rasterbator, they converted the photograph into 152 separate frames, which they printed out themselves and attached to the wall in a grid.

A huge photo scandal erupted over in Sweden this past weekend after a well-known and award-winning wildlife photographer admitted to faking some of his photographs. Terje Helleso -- a nature photographer who was named Nature Photographer of the Year by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency in 2010 -- was discovered to have published multiple images in which stock photographs of hard-to-find animals were Photoshopped into nature scenes.

Photographer Eric Schwabel was trying to think of a creative way to photograph the people at Burning Man, and ended up making a portable photo studio called the "Human Light Suit" for lighting portraits in the desert. It's like the photography version of a one-man band!

Here's some good news for people who find memory card readers and data cables a hassle -- Toshiba has unveiled a new "FlashAir" SDHC memory card with built-in wireless LAN functionality. It's similar to Eye-Fi's offerings, but Toshiba's cards will offer something that Eye-Fi's don't: two-way transfer. This means they can not only send photos wirelessly, but receive photos as well -- perfect for quickly exchanging photos on the go with a friend's camera! You'll be able to purchase the cards …

Sometimes pricing your services creatively can be a good marketing tactic. Other times, as in the case of this photographer, it can be quite the opposite.

Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner was randomly selected and announced below.

According to the smart folks over at MIT, this video shows footage that was captured at an unbelievable one trillion frames per second. It appears to show some kind of light pulse traveling through some kind of object. Here's a confusing explanation found on the project's website: …

The debate regarding what makes a photograph "truthful" or not is probably as old as the art of photography itself. By sheer coincidence, there were a couple interesting articles published today on this issue, and written from two different points-of-view.

For his series titled "Drift", photographer David Burdeny traveled along roads in Canada, France, Japan, England, Belgium, and the USA, and captured the shifting light and color of the diverse landscapes by shooting at slow shutter speeds.

We love sharing about photography-related movies that you might want to add to your "films to watch" list, and today we have a great one: Marwencol. It's a documentary about Mark Hogancamp, a man who was beaten nearly to death back in 2000 outside a bar (leaving him little memory of his previous life), and how he turned to photographing action figures in a miniature world as a form of "art therapy". The photographs -- which you can browse here -- are incredible in their realism and creativity, …

The Art Institutes, one of the nation's largest for-profit school systems where people can receive an education in photography, has come under fire. Last month, the US Department of Justice filed a massive lawsuit against the company behind the schools, Education Management Corporation, accusing it of fraudulently collecting $11 billion in government aid by recruiting low-income students for the purpose of collecting student aid money. Whistleblowers claim that students graduate loaded with …

The photographs in Adam Magyar's Square series appear to show crowds of people bustling about in open town squares, seen from a height that makes them look almost like ants. In reality, each photograph is actually a composite of hundreds of individual photos, and none of the squares actually exist. Magyar photographed strangers walking on sidewalks from only 3-4 meters off the ground, and then blended the photographs together to make them seem like they were captured from a fake height!

It's no secret that Hollywood directors are using DSLRs more and more these days to film scenes that traditional bulky cameras can't, but what's interesting is that the cameras are often used from within the scenes filmed by the main cameras. A Canon 5D Mark II was mounted to the front of Tony Stark's crashing racecar in Iron Man II, and was also attached to moving vehicles in the recent Captain America movie. The cameras are camouflaged to blend into the scene, but keep your eyes peeled (or …

Samsung's DualView feature adds a small LCD screen to the front of compact cameras for self-portraits, but why use a small screen when you can use the screen on the back? Announced today, the company's new MultiView MV800 camera has a large 3-inch touchscreen on the back that can flip up 180-degrees, letting narcissists users view it from the front (or above, or below). No word on when it will be released, but the 16MP camera will be priced at $280 when it is.

Back in 2009 we published a post highlighting 8 video games that feature photography. One of them was Fatal Frame, and an upcoming spin-off of the game will involve using an actual camera during gameplay. Shinrei Shashin, which translates to "Spirit Photo", is being developed for the Nintendo 3DS, and makes heavy use of the portable game system's 3D-capable cameras. Imagine playing the game in a dimly-lit room, and seeing a ghost in your room through the camera -- horror games may soon become a …

Since we wrote about CineSkates last week, the tripod-on-wheels project has already raised nearly $200,000 in preorders -- not bad considering the goal was only $20,000. Today, Emm over at CheesyCam just announced something similar: the Pico Dolly. It's a tiny portable dolly system for your video-capable camera that lets you capture smooth tracking shots without the hassle of big and expensive equipment. Unlike CineSkates, they're already shipping -- $65 will buy you the dolly itself, and $90 …

Between July 1944 and 1946, the U.S. Camera Publishing Company published a comic book titled "Camera Comics" in an attempt to get kids interested in the growing hobby of photography. Covers showed pilots pointing huge cameras out of planes and baddies getting whacked with cameras.

Today, we're excited to introduce our new Camera Stickers: cute little stickers based on the awesome pixel illustrations of designer Billy Brown. The stickers are printed on durable and tear-proof PVC plastic. 91 stickers per sheet, and 3 sheets -- 273 stickers total -- cost just $5 with free shipping within the US! You can buy them over in our store.