If you had the task of choosing some photos that represented Earth and mankind to extraterrestrial life forms, which photos would you select? NASA had to do this back in 1977 when it launched the Voyager space probes, which are now the farthest human-made objects from Earth. A committee led by Carl Sagan eventually settled on 116 images: …
Address Is Approximate is a beautiful and creative stop-motion video by Tom Jenkins of Theory Films. Here's the one-sentence synopsis: …
An earlier post here on PetaPixel showcased a wonderful image of a flock of cell phones and the method used to create it. In a rather snarky comment, I said to get back to me when they started tossing babies, and linked to my daughter merrily jumping in her crib with her toys. Mike was kind enough to approach me about writing up a small walk-through on how I created my image, and who can honestly turn down a chance to show off their baby daughter looking so cute?
Just days after Holga announced a new iPhone case with 9 lens filters in a rotary dial, a new challenger emerges: the iPhone Lens Dial. Compared to the Holga case, it's much more professional looking -- but equally as bizarre. The oversized dial packs three different lenses (wide angle, fisheye, and telephoto) into one aircraft-grade aluminum case. The price is prohibitive to all but the most obsessed iPhoneographers though: each case costs a cool $249.
Rodney Smith of The End Starts Here has written an interesting piece on the topic of smiling, and argues that smiling is a "false sentiment" that separates a casual photograph from a portrait.
Photographer Carolyn Marks Blackwood's Birds project contains photographs in which birds dominate the frame.
What if framing a scene with your fingers actually caused photos to be created? Air Camera is a clever camera concept by designer Yeon Su Kim that would make that idea a reality. It consists of two components: a ring-like camera worn on the thumb, and a tension-sensing device worn on the forefinger. If the tension unit senses that you're making a camera gesture, it triggers the camera to snap a photo. Make a video camera gesture, and it begins recording video! The resulting photos would also be …
We've seen that Google Street View imagery is capable of winning photojournalism awards, but how would the camera-equipped cars do as fine art photographers? Photographer Aaron Hobson has a fascinating gallery of fine art-style photographs found in Street View -- cinematic photos that would look great blown up and exhibited on museum walls.
Last week we featured Jason Hull's awesome nightlights created out of old (and cheap) vintage cameras. If you've been dying to learn how you can make one yourself, today's your lucky day: Hull has written up a step-by-step tutorial showing how the conversion is done. If you do attempt this project, try to find a broken camera -- working ones are happiest when they're used for photo-making! …
French animator and photographer Micaël Reynaud took a large number of black & white head shots by photographer Michael Jang and turned them into this super trippy video showing the faces morph through a ripple effect. You can also find an animated GIF of the morphing here.
For his project Infra, photographer Richard Mosse photographed landscapes, villages, and people in Eastern Congo using Kodak Aerochrome infrared film.
While most 14-year-old boys are hooked on things like video games, Laurent V. Joli-Coeur is busy using astronomy and photography for crazy science projects. A few months ago, he had the crazy idea of photographing a shadow caused by Jupiter's light. He then spent 7 hours building an instrument to do so, and used a Nikon D700 and 60mm Macro lens lent to him by Nikon to capture the image: …
This giant film roll packs a roll of toilet paper instead of photographic film. It's refillable, and can be placed on a table (dispensing TP through the top) or mounted on a wall (with the TP coming out the side). They come in red, yellow, and green, and cost $17 apiece over at Brando.
The Nikon D800 has been rumored for quite some time, but was reportedly delayed last month after production was halted by the massive floods in Thailand. If you've been frustrated with the lack of Nikon news on the DSLR front, here's something that should tide you over temporarily: photos of the upcoming Nikon D800 were leaked this past weekend.
Kevin Klein has a hobby of miniaturizing Victorian technology, and recently he made the world's smallest wet plate camera using 1/32-inch plywood and other wood materials. The camera is only a little bigger than a quarter, and shoots miniature 1/2-inch square plate images.
Want to learn the basics of studio lighting? Here's a two-hour-long lecture with photographer Joey Quintero in which he gives an overview of the basic principles, techniques, and tools.
Caleb Barrett wanted a simple ring light to play around with, so he built himself one for just $20 using built himself a makeshift ring light using eight cheap compact fluorescent light bulbs. The lights are pretty dim and have a horrible color rendering index, but are fun to play around with if you're just looking for something to experiment with.
Major camera makers including Olympus, Samsung and Sony have all filed patents in recent days for liquid lens technology. Unlike traditional glass lenses, liquid lenses don't have any moving parts. Instead, liquid is used to focus light, and different voltages are applied to the liquid to change the shape of the liquid, thereby controlling the image. In the video above, techie Ben Krasnow introduces the technology, and then shows off a device he made by ripping a liquid lens out of a USB webcam.
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John Sypal of Tokyo Camera Style spotted a photographer on the streets of Tokyo using this homemade lens created out of a potato chip tube. It captures photos that show the world in a glass-like sphere, with everything else blurred.
Award winning Korean photo studio Indylab shot this award winning advertisement without the aid of computer generated imagery. Instead, they manually tossed and photographed phones one at a time, and then composited all the images afterward.
Brian DeFrees spent two months between August and October of this year driving a giant loop around the United States on a 12,225-mile-long road trip. He captured a photo every 5 seconds using an intervalometer with his Canon 60D while in his car, and by creating individual time-lapse videos when parked or exploring an area. The result is this epic 5-minute long time-lapse.
Did you know that in addition to making his famous landscape images, Ansel Adams made ends meet by shooting commercial work? Although he made photos for clients as large as IBM, AT&T, and LIFE, Adams didn't like his job. In a 1938 letter to a friend, he wrote, …
Steve Jobs may have had ideas beyond the iPhone when it came to transforming the landscape of photography. In a New York Times interview published today, Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson said, …
We've featured special gloves and mittens designed for photographers before, but what if your camera uses a touchscreen instead of physical controls? Here's a video by Make's Becky Stern showing how you can sew some conductive thread into your glove to make it compatible with capacitive touchscreens.
Here are some developments in the ongoing Olympus scandal: investors and a former director are currently calling for fired CEO Michael Woodford to be brought back to clean house and right the ship. At the same time, The New York Times is reporting that Japanese investigators are still trying to understand a $4.9 billion hole in Olympus' financial records, and believe that over half of that amount were paid to organized crime groups in Japan. More specifically, the company is accused of being …
European Southern Observatory photo ambassador Yuri Beletsky shot a series of epic photos showing astronomers shooting powerful laser beams into the night sky. The photo above showing a laser beam pointed at the center of our galaxy was voted as last year's Picture of the Year over at Wikipedia.
This photo published by Chinese site xjrumo may be the first to show the APS-C sensor found in Fujifilm's upcoming sleek mirrorless camera. The sensor is rumored to be a revolutionary organic sensor that will allow its performance to rival that of larger full frame sensors.
We never thought we'd say it, but someone finally found a DSLR that makes Pentax's limited edition models look bland. Erle Kaasik was walking on a sidewalk in Seattle when she walked past a woman using this eye-popping Canon DSLR and 28-135mm lens that a local artist had decorated. It looks like someone mistook the camera for a cupcake or something.
Check out Google's homepage: the doodle today celebrates the 224th birthday of Louis Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype and one of the fathers of photography (the others are Nicéphore Niépce, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Thomas Wedgwood). Daguerre was born on November 18, 1787, and unveiled his daguerreotype process at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1839, when he was 51 years old.
Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner was randomly selected and announced below.
Ken Murphy has completed his ambitious "A History of the Sky" project, which we first got a glimpse of in March of last year. Wanting to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year, Murphy installed a still camera on the roof of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, pointed at the sky and snapping a photo every 10 seconds around the clock.
Earlier this month, Kodak sold off its sensor business in an effort to raise some cash to stay alive and hopefully turn things around. Now the company is looking to get even leaner by selling off its online photo sharing business. Photo sharing? Kodak? Yup, it's called Kodak Gallery. While it's not surprising that the camera maker has online services, what might be surprising is the price they're looking to sell it for: according to the Wall Street Journal, it's in the "hundreds of millions of …
If you enjoyed the beautiful 360-degree helicopter ride video we shared earlier today, then Condition One is an iPad app for you. It uses immersive video as a way to pull viewers into news stories -- viewers control the camera by simply moving their iPad around! …
Many extreme athletes these days use helmet-mounted HD cameras for photos and videos captured from a first person point of view, but photographer Justin Olsen does things a little differently: he uses a chest-mounted DSLR. Using a custom rig created for him by a local sewing shop, Olsen snaps his unique photos using a 15mm on a Canon 1D Mark III or a 5D Mark II, and a PocketWizard to trigger the shutter wirelessly.
A designer in Japan created this mockup of what Fujifilm's upcoming mirrorless camera might look like based on photos that were leaked earlier this week.
Now here's something we haven't seen before: a Star Wars-themed engagement shoot. All you need are two working lightsabers and a couple crazy enough about the franchise to do it. These photos were shot by San Jose-based photographer Michael James.
Src Img is an uber-simple bookmarklet created by Jarred Bishop and Hayden Hunter that lets you quickly do a Google Image search for any online photograph with just two clicks. It's a simple link (i.e. bookmarklet) that you drag into the bookmarks bar of your browser. Whenever you want to search Google Images for a particular photograph, simply click the bookmarklet. It'll overlay all the photos on the page with a "?¿" square. Click this to search for that photo. Voila!
Check out this incredible 360-degree video by northStudio360, titled "The Nimmo Bay Experience". They attached the camera(s) to the bottom of a helicopter, and flew through some incredibly beautiful landscapes. Simply click and drag to move the camera's direction.
If you're a fan of Fujifilm's X100 and X10, then you might want to brace yourself: the company's next camera might be the one mirrorless camera to rule them all. Fujifilm's upcoming mirrorless camera will likely have the same sleek styling as the X100, but with one colossal difference: a revolutionary new "organic sensor". Fuji has been developing the technology for years now, and the new camera -- supposedly named the Fujifilm LX -- is rumored to be the first to pack the sensor.
Photographer Yasuaki Segawa captured this incredible photograph of the Milky Way rising above the ocean, as seen from Taketomi Island, Japan. In addition to the uber-sharp stars, reflections of two bright stars can be seen in the waters. Segawa used a Canon 5D Mark II with a 24mm f/1.4 lens, and composited 5 separate photos to make this image (allowing him to expose the sky and the foreground separately). He also compensated for star rotation to sharpen the sky and prevent star trails. A …
Apparently Annie Leibovitz is a proponent of the idea that the best camera is the one you have with you. When asked by NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams about her camera recommendation to friends, the famed portrait photographer made a surprising pick: the iPhone.
This video was shot by a German film crew in the early 1980s, and shows American street photographer Garry Winogrand at work. Although he died of bladder cancer at age 56, his photographic output during his lifetime was enormous, even compared to other photographers: …
The Apesnake Photobooth is a novel photobooth triggered by facial expressions. Created by Che-Wei Wang & David Penuela, it detects the eyes and mouth of the subject and triggers the shutter on a Canon 1000D when they're found to match a desired expression (they chose the Manwolf face). The booth also automatically uploads photographs to a dedicated Facebook page.
If you're ever sitting down in a public place with your camera bag, having it close by isn't enough to protect it from theft -- you need to make sure it can't be easily snatched. Tom Bird of the UK learned this the hard way: he was at a pub recently when his camera bag suddenly disappeared. It's contents? Just thousands of dollars worth of gear including a Canon 5D Mark II, a 24-70mm f/2.8, a 50mm f/1.2, a 16-35mm f/2.8 and a laptop.
Photographer Josef Fischnaller shoots portraits that recreate famous paintings by the Old Masters, often including some humorous modern day elements in the scene. The photos remind us of the "Remake" contest photos that we shared a couple months ago.
If you've been waiting to upgrade Photoshop CS3 or CS4 to CS6 when it's released sometime next year, here's some bad news: the upgrade price won't apply to you. Starting with CS6, Adobe will be enforcing a new upgrade policy: …
Holga is selling an iPhone Lens Filter Kit that packs 9 separate "retro" filters into a single accessory using a rotary dial. While the design itself is pretty clever, the resulting photographs are a bit... strange. They sell for $25 over in the Holga store.
You probably know that stopping down (i.e. increasing your f-stop number) can increase the sharpness of your subject, but how much should you stop down to boost resolution without losing that nice, creamy bokeh? Roger Cicala did some research on this question and writes: …
Photographer Stephane Vetter managed to capture a moonbow, an aurora, and an Icelandic waterfall, all in the same photograph.
