iPhone photography app Hipstamatic was the king of retro filters before Instagram came along and stole its crown. Now, the developers are hoping to capitalize on the retro photo app craze with a new idea: delivering a disposable camera experience on an iPhone. Pocket-lint reports, …
Photographer duo Joachim Guanzon and Marden Blake (AKA aesonica) created this short behind-the-scenes video showing how they recently shot and Photoshopped an Audi A4 photo for a print advertisement. You can read a longer how-to over on the aesonica website: …
When clients Janet and Darrell asked Australian photographer Hailey Bartholomew for a creative engagement shoot earlier this year, she came up with the idea of having the couple wear oversized bear heads.
One of the main reasons Apple has been so successful as a tech company is its focus on usability. Even as competitors' smartphones screens are approaching tablet screen sizes, Apple has stuck with 3.5-inches -- an optimal size for operating the phone with one hand. John Gruber of Daring Fireball just published his review of the iPhone 4S today, and writes that Apple focused on speed as one of the main improvements featured in the iPhone 4S camera: …
"What is Life?" is a creative stop motion animation created by a group of students at the MAPS Film School in South Australia, featuring the responses of people around the world who were asked that three-word question. Every single frame in the video is an individual light-painting photograph drawn with lights and torches and captured through a long-exposure shot.
Forget sending cameras up to the edges of space on a weather balloon: rockets are much, much cooler (and faster). A man named Derek Deville created a homemade rocket in an effort to win The Carmack Prize, which offers $10K to anyone who can launch a rocket to above 100K feet, take a GPS reading, and then recover the vehicle. Although he failed to take a GPS reading, Deville's rocket managed to reach 121,000ft (~23 miles) in 84 seconds.
Back in August, it came to light that some of Leica's $7,000 M9 cameras had a problem in which they would corrupt the SD card being used -- a problem that caused one photographer to permanently lose work after a day of shooting.
By Martin Pannier on picuous …
Videographer Joel Loukus created a continuous ring light source -- which he calls the "WreathLight" -- using a wreath frame and two strings of Christmas lights. The total cost came out to $24. It's a cheap and easy way of adding some soft lighting to your portraits.
Instagram just celebrated its first birthday last week, and now early adopters have a new toy to play with: And7YearsAgram. It's like Photojojo's Photo Time Capsule, but for Instagram instead of Flickr. The service sends you a daily email with the photographs you captured on that day the year before, giving you a fun and visual glimpse of your past (and reminding you of how fast time flies).
Thailand is experiencing the worst flooding it has seen in more than 50 years, and Nikon is also getting hit hard. A statement released by the company today (and photos emerging from the area) reveals that the company's entry-level DSLR factory there is now swamped with water: …
After seeing his close-up photographs of human eyes become enormously popular last year, photographer Suren Manvelyan turned to a more difficult subject: animals. He somehow managed to create a series of photographs showing the stunning eyes of animals ranging from crocodiles to horses.
Here's a quick and easy photo hack: cut a slice out of a white film canister to soften the light from your DSLR's built-in flash.
Expose two images without advancing your film, and you have yourself an in-camera double exposure photograph. With the advent of digital photography, creating a double exposure image has largely moved to image editing programs. The MINIMO-X, however, is a digital camera that has double exposure built-in as a feature. The pocket-sized toy digicam lets you snap two exposures on the same frame, combining the fun of analog with the convenience of digital. You can find them for $130 each over in the …
Advertising photographer Paul Ripke's project "Man Babies" features portraits of parents with their children... with their heads swapped. Ripke enlisted the help of two professional Photoshoppin' friends, and says that the photographs were purely for fun and to test the limits of Photoshop.
If you think about it, there are many parallels between Apple and Polaroid: both companies introduced innovative products that redefined markets in their time, both were founded by college dropouts, and both emphasized design and usability in their products. What you might not know is that it's not a coincidence. Christopher Bonanos wrote a fascinating article for the New York Times on how Steve Jobs idolized Polaroid founder Edwin Land and modeled his career after Land's: …
Poladarium is a cool tear-off calendar that's great for Polaroid enthusiasts looking for daily inspiration: …
According to Nikon Rumors, Nikon has introduced a new Unilateral Pricing Policy on DSLR gear sold in the US that will take effect on October 16th. Saying that the policy is "designed to allow customers to make purchasing decisions based on service provided and not have to worry about hunting for a better price", Nikon plans to withhold sales to any store caught pricing equipment below "national prices" that the company will set for each product.
Back in 1937, art director M.F. Agha wrote a piece in U.S. Camera magazine titled The Hippocratic Oath of a Photographer, which warns photographs not to pursue common photographic clichés that were saturating the industry. It's an interesting glimpse into what popular photo subjects were back in the day.
At the Adobe MAX 2011 event in LA last week, the company gave a sneak peek into an advanced Image Deblurring feature that may appear in an upcoming version of Photoshop. Provided with a blurred photograph, the feature uses advanced algorithms to calculate the camera movements that caused the blur, which allows the program to do a very accurate unblurring of the photograph. The video is a bit shaky and the quality isn't the best, but judging from the audience's reaction when the example photo is …
Last Friday, 45-year-old Chris White was at the Braehead shopping center near Glasgow, when he took a snapshot of his daughter Hazel eating some ice cream. He was then confronted by security guards -- and later the police -- who cited the Prevention of Terrorism Act to explain that it was in their rights to confiscate his phone. While they did allow him to keep the photos, they demanded his personal details. Afterward, White created a Facebook page titled "Boycott Braehead" in an effort to draw …
Photographer Joseph Nienstedt was at a grocery store recently when he spotted a $4 plastic flask that reminded him of a curved light modifier he had seen before. After buying it and transforming it into a diffuser using a razor, Nienstedt discovered that it provided softer light than his Sto-Fen Omni-Bounce due to the 5x larger surface area. While it's not a very respectable look for a professional environment, using a plastic bottle as a DIY diffuser could be an option if you're in a pinch or …
Tamara Lackey recently sat down with Chase Jarvis to talk about how he became a successful photographer. Chase offers a lot of really good high-level advice for aspiring photographers based on his own experiences -- both the successes and the failures.
Photographer Jessica Bjorn was recently hired by the Owen family to shoot some post-apocalyptic zombie slaying family portraits. The husband makes and sells chainmail armor and costumes through his Etsy store ChainCrafts, and made all the costumes seen in these photos using things such as hubcaps, soda tabs, and a railroad crossing sign.
Photo enthusiast Robert Simpson created this informative behind-the-scenes video detailing how he created a composite photograph showing tiny children running along a bookshelf. Although a ton of planning and preparation went into the shot, everything was done at home on a small budget rather than in a fancy studio. This may inspire you to dream a little bigger using your current resources.
Update on 12/18/21: This video has been removed by its creator.
Kodak's website has a "Create" section stocked with all kinds of different photo projects for various purposes and occasions, from things for the home to gifts for the holidays.
This great video lesson by San Francisco-based interior photographer Scott Hargis teaching how to compose shots when photographing the interiors of homes. Stepping into the scene itself like Hargis does is a great way to teach composition.
Artist Jonathan Keller Keller first started taking a self-portrait of himself every day starting in 2000, and later created a time-lapse video showing eight years of his life passing in less than two minutes (similar to Noah Kalina's famous everyday video). What's neat is that Keller maintains a directory of other similar photo projects out there. All the projects either deal with the passage of time or the obsessive documentation of something.
Here's an illuminating (pun intended) video walkthrough by photographer Eric Curry, showing how he went about creating a photo of a B-25 bomber. His technique for lighting the plane is similar to the real estate photography walkthrough that we featured last weekend, and involves lighting the scene a bazillion times from different angles, and then combining the different parts of the photo in Photoshop.
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.
After Apple founder Steve Jobs passed away yesterday, the company replaced its homepage with a well-known photo of the brilliant innovator made in 2006 by photographer Albert Watson. An article published by PDN Pulse today reveals the story behind the (perhaps soon to be iconic) photo: …
Instagram is changing not just the way photos can be shared, but how music videos can be made. UK indie rock band The Vaccines recently created a website that asked fans to snap photographs of themselves while at music festivals and then tag them with "#VACCINESVIDEO". After receiving nearly 3,000 submissions, the band used them to create the music video for their song "Wetsuit". Aside from a few video clips, everything you see in the video was submitted through Instagram.
Phonar, the free and open undergraduate photo class we wrote about a couple months ago, is now underway. While the physical class can only be attended by students at Coventry University, the general public can take part through the assignments and recorded materials shared through the website. Here's the first assignment that's due on October 13th: …
At the Bring to Light nighttime art festival in NYC last weekend, artists Sean McIntyre and Reid Bingham showed off the Rainbow Tracer -- a programmable rotating bar of LEDs that paints giant rainbows into the backgrounds of group portraits.
The Fuji Guys sent out a tweet today saying that the company's upcoming interchangeable lens mirrorless camera will not have a Micro Four Thirds sensor inside: …
Needing a portable light box, Instructables member HHarry came up with a ingenious collapsible design that has built-in lighting. He's also written up a tutorial on how you can build one too, but be warned: the materials may cost you up to $80, and you'll need a good amount of know-how. However, if you're looking for a hefty weekend project and need a convenient way to light and photograph small objects on-the-go, this one's for you.
Demos at graphics conferences are often interesting to watch because they offer a sneak peek at technologies that may soon become available to the general public. The video above is a demo for "PatchMatch", an algorithm developed by researchers at Princeton and Adobe. Although you might be unfamiliar with PatchMatch, you've probably heard of its most famous feature: Content Aware Fill. Only a small piece of this amazing technology was introduced in Photoshop CS5, so the amazing image …
Fujifilm's press event yesterday wasn't just to announce that they're working on a new mirrorless system camera: they also announced the X-S1, the first non-retro styled camera to appear in the X lineup. The camera looks like a DSLR with a kit lens attached, but actually uses a fixed 26x f/2.8-5.6 lens and an electronic viewfinder. It uses the same 2/3-inch sensor size as the X10, which has about 1/4 of the area of a Micro Four Thirds sensor.
Here's a quick and easy tutorial that'll teach you a cool method of transferring a photo print (black and white or color) onto a block of wood.
Time-lapse guru Dustin Farrell recently released this epic video showing the stunning landscapes of Arizona and Utah. Every single frame in the video was a still photo captured with a Canon 5D Mark II.
