December 2011

As 2011 comes to an end, here’s a look back at 10 of our most popular articles from the past year: …

Curious as to what Sony's A77 pellicle mirror looks like on the inside? Here's an interesting look at the camera broken down into its main components.

Here's a quick and simple tip for better portraits by Reddit user rmx_: …

Filmmaking brothers John and Richard Ramsey came up with the brilliant and hilarious idea of unearthing some old home videos and adding directors commentary over them. It's a great way to have a laugh with family members, and could make a fun present.

Barbie Trashes Her Dreamhouse is a photo series by photo instructor Carrie M. Becker that shows what Barbie's dollhouse would look like if she was a compulsive hoarder and complete slob. The scenes ares 1/6th scale models, the objects are either repurposed Barbie toys or made by hand. Becker used a Nikon D40 with the on-camera flash.

Etsy seller missquitecontrary sells her fine art photographs printed onto vintage dictionary pages. You can try your hand at doing this yourself -- just be sure to use archival inks and find an old dictionary or encyclopedia with thick pages.

Steve 21 has an interesting trick for finding good available light: he places a marble in his hand to simulate what the light would look like on a human face: …

Accidentally expose an entire roll of film to light? Instead of throwing it away, you can turn it into a geeky greeting card! Lomographer brilliantgreen made a Christmas-themed one using small illustrations and letters cut out of a magazine, but you could do it for any occasion.

Here's an inspiring video in which we hear war photographer Joao Silva discuss the biggest fight of his life: losing his legs to a land mine in Afghanistian and fighting to return to his career. We've reported on Silva's story a number of times before.

News photo agencies EPA, AFP, and Reuters have all issued kill orders for a photo of Kim Jong-il's funeral procession released by the Korean Central News Agency, the state news agency of North Korea. The photo (above at bottom) raised red flags after a comparison with a Kyodo News photo taken just seconds earlier revealed that a number of people had vanished from the scene. The New York Times writes, …

Astrophotographer Stéphane Guisard captured this time-lapse video showing Comet Lovejoy rising above the Andes mountains like a giant paintbrush stroke across the sky. Guisard shot four different sequences with four different lenses to zoom into the scene.

Before We Begin is a project by photographer Christopher Jonassen (whose frying pan photos we featured here) that consists of diptychs showing clouds and cloud watchers. The images capture peaceful "moments of reflection between thought and action."

For his project titled "Unrealistic Scenes", photographer Nathan Spotts composited his own landscape photographs with digital artwork of planets floating in the starry night sky.

Back in the spring of 1980, Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson began to photograph the subway system in NYC for his project titled Subway. NYRBlog has published an interesting essay -- an excerpt from the introduction of Davidson's book -- in which the photographer talks about his experience: …

Earlier this month we shared some advice from an anonymous airline baggage handler, who revealed that hard-sided “spinners” suitcases are safest if you must transport valuables (e.g. camera gear) in checked baggage. To see why, check out the video above by Delta Airlines. They drilled holes into a hardcase and installed six outward-facing cameras to document what a bag goes through after it disappears behind those black rubber flaps and before it emerges onto the conveyor belt in the …

A Swedish hacker and robotics student named Björn Mabrö is claiming that he has successfully developed a custom firmware for the Canon 5D Mark II that adds Apple's Siri voice assistant to the DSLR. Mabrö claims that the hack allows the camera to respond to 124 different voice commands that control everything from the shutter to changing values in settings.

Looking for a lost camera on the web by searching for its serial number in uploaded photos is nothing new (see Stolen Camera Finder), but GadgetTrak's new CameraTrace service takes it one step further. For a fee of $10 per camera, the service will actively monitor the Internet for your camera's serial number. If it ever pops up in a photo uploaded to popular photo sharing services, you'll get an email notification. Back in August, GadgetTrak's manual Serial Search helped a photographer recover …

Qamar Hashim is an eight-year-old boy who works as a professional photographer in Iraq. He's a local celebrity, and has his photographs on display in exhibitions across Baghdad.

After damaging the pellicle mirror in his Sony A55 with cleaning fluid, a guy named Dario decided to look for a makeshift replacement while waiting for a real replacement mirror to arrive. He then discovered that food wrap (AKA Saran wrap) works nearly as well as a real pellicle mirror. The only downsides are occasionally degraded autofocus and a soft-focus effect when facing bright lights.

This photo shows what 5MB of hard drive storage looked like in 1956. The IBM 305 RAMAC hard disk was state of the art, weighed just shy of a ton, required a forklift to be carried around, and was composed of 50 separate 24-inch discs that occupied 16 square feet. The annual cost of using it was a staggering $35,000 -- steep even in today's money. Nowadays most RAW photos outweigh the storage capabilities of that behemoth of an external hard drive...

Over the past year, there have been a number of jaw-dropping (and viral) time-lapse videos created from the amazing photos captured from the International Space Station by astronaut Mike Fossum. The video above provides an interesting behind-the-scenes look into how the images are captured.

Here's an interesting video in which acclaimed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (the guy who directed The Fog of War) talks about the issue of truth in photography, and how he thinks we've forgotten that there's a connection between photos to the physical world.

Nikon's firmware got decrypted last month, and now an unofficial firmware for Nikon DSLRs has emerged. Rather than offer useful adjustments, the firmware is purely for geekiness: it gives Nikon D5100 DSLRs a Star Wars theme.

Here's a crash course on how to work with models as a photographer. Photographer Mark Wallace discusses tips for before, during, and after the shoot, and also how to find a model for your project.

Love music just as much as you love photography? Want an extra music stand? You can make a makeshift one by combining your tripod with a music stand! The IKEA BRÄDA stand is perfect for this, and only costs $2.50. Peter Janssens of grow for it make his stand connect to the tripod using a bolt and the mount on an old camera.

The photographs in Nadav Bagim's project "WonderLand" might look like paintings or computer generated images, but they're actually real photographs captured at home using ordinary objects and creative artificial lighting. His tools and props include things like vegetables, plastic bags, flowers, and leaves, and he captures the images using a Canon 60D and 100mm f/2.8 macro lens. Getting his "subjects" into the positions and poses he wants requires countless hours of patient encouraging.

If families always listened when photographers say, "look natural", this is what nearly every Christmas card would look like. Clever.

For 25 years, YouTube user spoonito's father would record footage of spoonito and his sister walking down the stairs on Christmas morning. The video above is a compilation of the videos that shows the passing of 25 years, and the coming and going of relatives and pets.

Olympus recently filed a patent in Japan for a vari-angle LCD screen. While that's not exactly groundbreaking, the illustrations in the patent appears to show some kind of medium format digital camera. What's more, it looks nearly identical to the Samsung digital medium format prototypes that emerged earlier this year.

Flickr user Chris captured this remarkable photograph of the Eiffel Tower at night by panning his medium format film Hasselblad 500CM while snapping a long exposure photograph.

Apple's doing it. Adobe's doing it. Now Dropbox wants in. An upcoming version of the company's popular cloud storage client will include a new photo importer feature that will automatically backup your photos whenever you connect a memory card, smartphone, or camera to your computer. You can try it out now by downloading the experimental build from this forum thread. Be sure to read the instructions to make sure you have a system that supports the feature.

Kodak is burning through $70 million every month and desperately trying to stay alive by selling off divisions that other companies are willing to buy. After selling off its sensor business last month, the company announced yesterday that it has agreed to sell off its gelatin business (called) Eastman Gelatine) to Rousselot, the world's leader gelatin producer. Gelatin is one of the main components used in photographic film and paper, so this certainly can't be good news for Kodak's future in …

Slide Light is a wall light designed by SUCK UK that provides low level background room lighting that's customized using slide film. Adding different photographs to the light provides different moods.

Smartphones are taking huge bites out of the compact camera market. A recent study by market research company NPD found that the percent of photographs taken with a smartphone has increased from 17% to 27% over the past year, while the share of photos taken with a dedicated camera has dropped from 52% to 44%. Senior imaging analyst Liz Cutting says, …

Photographer and craftaholic Parul Arora sells beautiful Polaroid picture ceramic coasters through her Etsy shop justnoey for about $12 each. If you're feeling ambitious, you can also try buying some blank white ceramic coasters and making your own, though transferring your photos onto the tiles might be a bit difficult. One option might be to glue a print onto the tile and then paint over it with Mod Podge to seal it.

What would you pack if you were assigned to cover a war from the inside? The photo above shows what photographer Umit Bektas decided to pack in his camera bag for his embed with a US military unit in Afghanistan.

If you're a photographer and not an architect, why settle for boring ol' gingerbread houses this holiday season? Gingerbread cameras are where it's at! They're not very difficult to build -- you just need to know the correct sizes and shapes to cut out. Photojojo has published a step-by-step tutorial on how you can make your own.

What you see above is reportedly what the upcoming Nikon D800 will look like from the side. The leaked photo, published by Nikon Rumors, appears to match the front and rear views that were leaked last month.

Reading a camera's user manual is a great way to become familiar with all of its features and functions, but what if you don't have the patience to sit down and chew through it? Here's a strange but useful trick for making sure you read the manual thoroughly: put it in the bathroom. By placing it in a place where you're desperate for things to read, you'll slowly work your way through it and understand your camera more without having to take a chunk out of your busy day! …

Wedding photographer Joe Simon learned about copyright the hard way recently after his video of Tony Romo's wedding went viral on YouTube. He had used the song "Fix You" by Coldplay without permission, and was forced to take down the video and pay a settlement to avoid a costly lawsuit. David Walker of Photo District News has an illuminating article on the issue: …

Want to travel the world through photographs? Wander is a new free app that can help you do that. It connects you with strangers around the world through photo-based conversation threads. Create a profile, and the app will suggest guides for you. Once you've established a connection with a "photo penpal", you share lives for a week through photo-based missions, allowing you to glimpse into what life is like for a person. Once the week is over, you're given a new guide to provide you with a …

It looks like Microsoft is finally putting its war chest and brilliant minds to good use: the company has released a new free app for Windows Phone users called Face Swap. The app uses face detection to let you quickly switch the faces of subjects in your photos. Simply shake the phone and faces will be swapped! The resulting face swap photos can be saved or shared on social networking websites. Hopefully they turn this into a web app soon.

Here's a fun idea for a weekend project: take pictures of smoke, think about what they look like, and then add color during post-processing to transform them. Photographer Geoff Jansen noticed that one of his smoke photos looked like a rose, so he added some red and green and ended up with the photo seen above. It's the second creative rose shot we've featured today.

Sony's NEX-7 mirrorless camera has been extremely difficult to find due to manufacturing being disrupted by the flooding in Thailand earlier this year. As a result of the shortage, the camera is selling for absurd prices on eBay -- people are buying the camera for over $3,700 new. If you managed to snag one of the cameras while they were available, you might want to auction it off now before supply is restored. You'll be able to buy three of them then for the current price of one!

Black-suited investigators raided and searched 20 different sites today over Olympus' ongoing accounting scandal. Among the sites searched were the company's headquarters, the office buildings of subsidiary companies, and the homes of executives involved in the fraud. The company is also looking to raise cash by issuing $1.3 billion in new shares. Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Samsung, and Hoya have been named as companies who are potentially interested in snapping up a piece of Olympus.

Photographer Anthony Chang created this amazing image of a liquid rose without any computer-generated trickery. He hung a glass rose upside down and snapped photos while pouring food coloring onto it.

Back in September we featured a project called This Was Found that promotes art by leaving framed prints out and about in the UK. Now, printing company Jondo is taking it to the next level with a project called Art Heist. They've left 26 gigantic, museum-quality 40x60inch canvases in various secret locations around Los Angeles. Find one, and you're free to take it home. Just make sure you have a good way of bringing home the massive photo!

Olympus has something big up its sleeve. In an interview with Impressjapan, manager Mr. Ogawa revealed that the company is working on a new mirrorless camera that features an "epoch-making" viewfinder -- presumably one that's even more advanced than the hybrid viewfinder found on the Fujifilm X100. The upcoming viewfinder sounds like it'll also be some kind of fusion between electronic and optical. There's not much that's know about the technology at the moment, but we should be hearing more …

Colin Mika and Brandon Vedder of All Cut Up Films created this amazing time-lapse video of Los Angeles by photographing the city through a "snow globe". They captured 4000 images with a custom rig, which consisted of a Canon 5D Mark II, a homemade tilt-shift lens, a light bulb filled with water, and paper cutouts for shaped bokeh.

EXIF data embedded in an image file can shed quite a bit of information about a photo, including how it was created and the owner of the copyright. It's useful, but can be easily stripped away. A new consortium led by three organizations (IPTC, 4A's, and ANA) is pushing to make metadata permanent.