Here's a helpful 22-page guide by National Geographic that explains many of the basic concepts of photography, from lens types to composition. It's a free excerpt taken from the 400-page book "National Geographic Ultimate Field Guide to Photography", and is a great read for anyone just starting out.
For her husband's 40th birthday, Jen had the idea of turning an old, unwanted globe into a unique photo gift showing "his world". She printed photographs onto white tissue paper, and then adhered the photographs to the globe using Mod Podge. Head on over to her site for a step-by-step walkthrough.
MIT scientists have discovered that graphene, a material consisting of one-atom thick sheets of carbon, produces electric current when struck by light. The researchers say the finding could impact a number of fields, including photography: …
These Diana cameras were decorated and auctioned for Lomography's Diana World Tour this year. If you regularly photograph young children, giving your camera a colorful costume can help make it a lot less intimidating (Camera Creatures work well too).
Seeing a double rainbow is a relatively rare treat, but how about three or four rainbows? Scientists have only reported seeing triple rainbows five times over the past 250 years, but German photographer Michael Theusner was recently able to capture this first ever photograph of a fourth-order rainbow. Ordinary rainbows (first and second order) appear in the area of the sky opposite the sun (and aren't seen in his shot), but when higher order rainbows appear, they show up on the sunward side.
A team of researchers at UC Davis have come up with a super-cheap way of turning an iPhone into a microscope -- useful for diagnosing diseases in areas where medical equipment is hard to come by. Inspired by the CellScope project at UC Berkeley, Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu decided to create something even smaller and cheaper. By taping a 1-millimeter ball lens embedded in a rubber sheet to the iPhone, he was able to boost magnification by 5x, which allows the camera to photograph blood cells.
Nightmares Fear Factory in Niagara Falls, Canada, which calls itself the scariest haunted house in North America, has an automatic camera set up at one particularly horrifying point in the house. The camera takes a photograph of visitors at precisely the moment when sheer terror reaches their brain, and the resulting expressions are hilarious.
We always get a laugh when news organizations or governments try to pass off bad Photoshop jobs as real images, but with the way graphics technology is advancing, bad Photoshop jobs may soon become a thing of the past. Here's a fascinating demo into technology that can quickly and realistically insert fake 3D objects into photographs -- lighting, shading and all. Aside from a few annotations provided by the user (e.g. where the light sources are), the software doesn't need to know anything …
We shared the terrible news last week that Photojojo founder Amit Gupta was diagnosed with leukemia. Well, he's now looking for a bone marrow donor and needs your help: …
Mouthpiece is a series of photographs by photographer Justin Quinell in which he documents some of his life's experiences as seen by his mouth. The photographs were captured using a custom pinhole camera created from a 110 film cartridge. It's a unique perspective of the world that we don't often see in photographs.
