December 2011

Instagram is holding onto its place as the darling of the mobile photo sharing world. After adding a whopping two million new users in a month thanks to Thanksgiving and the release of the iPhone 4S, the app now has a shiny new trophy for its shelf: it has been selected as Apple's "iPhone App of the Year". The future is looking extremely bright for the 13-month-old, 7-man company: Goldman Sachs recently designated it as a potential IPO candidate and founder Kevin Systrom expects the membership …

Wanting a cheap and compact way to carry, protect, and manage his SD cards, Instructables member FrankenPaper discovered that the plastic cases that come with Sunstar GUM Soft-Picks are the perfect size for holding 2 cards. To keep the cards from jostling around and to track whether they're full or empty, he created an insert that you can print, cut, and fold yourself (download the PDF here).

For his project Alter Ego, photographer Robbie Cooper traveled around the world to shoot portraits of online gamers. He then combined his portraits with screenshots of the gamers' avatars in the various games they play, showing an interesting side-by-side comparison of what the people look like in the real world compared to what they choose to look like in their fantasy worlds. The project got its start back in 2003 after Cooper did a shoot with a CEO who used the game Everquest to communicate …

Tired of packing a huge mess of cables every time you go on a trip? The Magic Cable Trio is a 3-in-1 cable designed to cut down on your clutter. It lets you power and sync a wide range of devices ranging from phones, iOS systems (e.g. the iPad), music players, and compact cameras. Just make sure your device uses miniUSB, microUSB, or an iPhone dock connector. The three connections are daisy-chained, making it uber-compact and easy to manage. They cost $20 over at Innergie.

Want a clever way to use your Christmas tree as a photo display? Simply print 1.5-inch photos onto acetate sheets, tape them to the outside of translucent film canisters, and then illuminate them by sticking clear Christmas lights through the caps! …

Perhaps in response to the growing capacities and falling prices of SD cards, the CompactFlash Association has announced a new format to replace CF cards for professional photographers. It's called XQD, and has a size that falls between CF and SD cards (it's thicker than SD cards, but smaller than CF cards). The interface used is PCI Express, which has a theoretical max write speed of roughly 600MB/s, though the target for real-world write speeds at first will be 125MB/s. It'll start making …

Jill Gillen has a fun photo craft idea for customizing any clear hand sanitizer bottles you have sitting around the house: add photographs of trapped family members!

Norwegian photographer Rune Guneriussen photographs man-made objects in nature as if they belonged there. The objects are arranged to look like packs of animals, humans, and natural formations.

Sharp recently announced its AQUOS SH-01D phone, which is one of the few phones on the market that feature optical image stabilization. The phone is powered by Android OS, and features a 12.1 megapixel 1/3.2-inch CMOS sensor. The demo above shows how effective the stabilization is at canceling out small movements of the sensor.

It looks like Olympus ex-CEO Michael Woodford will be getting his wish after all as the Olympus scandal continues to unfold. A day after an independent panel issued a report that slammed the company's top management as being rotten (though at the same time finding no links to organized crime), the entire board of directors has indicated that it will step down. Perhaps confident that the company will soon be back on the right track, investors have pushed the stock price back up to over ¥1,100 …

Photographer Tome Lowe has spent the past two years working on TimeScapes, his debut feature film that presents a breathtaking time-lapse portrait of the American Southwest. Just to give you an idea of how epic the film will be: every time he releases a sneak peek of the film, the video goes viral and receives hundreds of thousands -- if not millions -- of views. This trailer is no different.

Clothing retailer H&M has sparked quite a bit of controversy after admitting that most of the models featured on its website are computer generated. The company says that pasting real model heads onto CGI bodies provides a better way of displaying clothes made for humans than using real humans to model them. Spokeswoman Nicole Christine tells ABC News: …

Diane Arbus might have one iconic photograph of identical twins, but Spanish photographer Maria Zarazua has devoted much of her career to finding and photographing them. Her goal is to show the intimate relationship between them, and their individualities despite being genetic carbon copies.

The Panavision PSR 35mm movie camera that was used for most of the principal photography in the original 1977 'Star Wars' movie has been sold at auction for $625,000 -- the highest price ever paid for a movie camera. While the price is record-setting for both Star Wars memorabilia and film movie cameras, it still pales in comparison to prices seen in the world of still photography -- the most expensive camera was auctioned earlier this year for $1.9 million.

Photo editor Michael Davis on why clichés win photo contests: …

A recently discovered flaw in Facebook's abuse reporting tool allowed anyone to access private photographs of other users, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Until it was fixed today, the reporting tool allowed anyone who reported a public photograph's owner to also peruse that user's images, both public and private. After members of a bodybuilding forum discovered the security hole, they proceeded to target Zuckerberg's account and publish a number of his private photographs online.

Photographer Matthew Nicholson, the guy behind the amazing Lie-ca paper pinhole camera, is at it again. This time he's building a working paper camera that looks just like a Polaroid One Step Rainbow camera! Branded as the Fauxlaroid Land Camera, it will apparently use actual instant film that the user "processes" manually.

Photographer Rob Whitworth created this time-lapse of the crazy traffic found in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon), Vietnam.

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that Kodak may be "a shutter click from extinction": …

Back in June we reported that Haje Jan Kamps of Photocritic was working on a neat new universal camera trigger called the TriggerTrap. Since then, he has managed to raise a whopping $77,262 for the project through Kickstarter and is now announcing that the device has gone into production. The TriggerTrap can be triggered by pretty much anything you can think of thanks to its laser trigger, sound detector, intervalometer, and AUX-port. It'll cost $125 once it begins shipping in February 2012.

For her project titled "Elderly Animals", photographer Isa Leshko found and photographed various animals in the twilight of their lives.

Photographer Tim Allen spotted this sign outside the Aldwych tube station, an abandoned London Underground station that recently opened up for tours. While photography bans are pretty common, the station has decided to only ban DSLRs due to "their combination of high quality sensor and high resolution". Other cameras are allowed in, as long as they don't look "big" enough to shoot amazing photos.

Photographer Alexander Harding has a beautiful project titled "Visible Light" in which he turns light itself into the subject of photographs.

Here are five interesting interview excerpts with renowned street photographers. They're from Everybody Street, a documentary on NYC street photographers that recently finished raising funds through Kickstarter. The video above features Bruce Gilden.

Adde Adesokan of Germany captures beautiful portraits of strangers by snapping three photographs of their head, hands, and feet. The frames are then arranged as triptychs that creatively reveal who the subjects are.

Here's an interesting behind-the-scenes mini-documentary showing Scott Schuman (AKA "The Sartorialist") shooting his street fashion photographs in Tokyo, Japan. Unlike many street photographers, Schuman first approaches his subjects and asks for permission.

Here's a video in which business-savvy photographer Sal Cincotta shares some tips on how to turn your photography service into an experience that your clients will remember and be excited to recommend to others.

Think your lens is good in low-light conditions? Check out this Nikon D700 with a Nightstalker II night-vision system attached -- standard issue for the Navy's Combat Camera unit. PopPhoto has published an interesting article that offers a glimpse into what life is like as a US military photographer. You an also see an example photo shot with the above lens here.

Here's an informative lesson on shutter sync by photographer Matthew Gore, who writes, …

National Geographic photographer William Albert Allard has written an interesting blog post on how he got his job and how aspiring photographers can follow in his footsteps: …

Here's a cute and funny little short by filmmaker Nick Scott about school portraits, children, life and innocence.

"The Catch" is one of the most famous plays in American football history, and Walter Iooss Jr.'s photograph of Dwight Clark leaping into the air is one of the game's iconic images. Paul Lukas of Uni Watch has published an interesting analysis of the photograph and why it "works": …

Three years ago, an Illinois man named Michael Allison was arrested for videotaping police in public in accordance with the state's extremely strict wiretapping laws. He faced up to 75 years in prison for his crime, but a few months ago an Illinois judge ruled that the laws were unconstitutional and threw out the case. However, the State of Illinois is now appealing to the Supreme Court to have the dismissal overturned.

These photos might look like they were computer generated, but they're actually unmodified photographs. Ron Brinkmann took 6 mirror tiles and made a box with them with the help of some duct tape. He then placed a camera inside and triggered shots using the timer.

Japanese camera ads are sometimes very different from those you might see in the US. We're still trying to figure out whether this is a commercial for the Fujifilm X10 or a trailer for an upcoming horror movie...

Tired of using generic black lens caps? There's a new company called Blink that's trying to bring some color to the world of lens protection. It's currently trying to raise $55,000 through crowdfunding to manufacture a line of 58mm lens caps in 6 designs, which are designed to make people smile when they catch a glimpse of your camera. The caps are significantly more expensive than your standard lens cap though: you'll have to donate $25 to the campaign to land one of them.

Here's an old clip in which Steve Jobs talks about how he sees the world: …

Knowing how long to develop film for is easy if you use popular films and developers, but what if you want to use some obscure combination that isn't well documented? If that's you, check out the Photocritic Film Development Database. It's a simple service that outputs development times for 1440 different film/developer combinations. For combinations that aren't officially published, creator Haje Jan Kamps has come with a formula that estimates the time -- a formula that he says is surprisingly …

Here's an amazing time-lapse video that was made using time-lapse photography shot over six months in the beautiful state of Oregon. This interview quote by Ben Canales gives a glimpse into how much dedication this kind of project requires: …

Falling Apart is a series by Japanese photographer Yuya Takeda that consists of synthetic photographs of apartment buildings. It's reminiscent of Andreas Gursky's sweeping architectural photographs.

Knobroom is a free add-on for Lightroom that lets you use the knobs and sliders on a MIDI Controller to edit photos in Lightroom. Unlike PADDY, which we featured last year, Knobroom is also available to Mac users. The brief demo above shows Lightroom being controlled with a Behringer BCF2000. Freelance photographer Max Edin has written up an informative review on setting up and using the add-on.

Have a habit of losing your lens caps? Add a clip to them to keep them attached to your camera strap when not in use! All you need are a lapel clip -- the kind found on old wired cellphone headsets work great -- and some strong mounting tape. It's basically a DIY version of the Nice Clip, which we featured back in October.

Kurtis Hough of Portland, Oregon made this informative step-by-step video on how you can quickly lose $2,400 in just 24 seconds. It was shot using a Canon 5D Mark II.

Evolution is a series of photographs by photographer Ted Sabarese showing people with fish they resemble.

Here's another sign of the changing times: so many camera shoppers are turning to the Internet for deals that some cameras shops are now charging fees for customers who want to test out their cameras. The Daily Telegraph writes, …

Having trouble framing shots when "shooting from the hip" and not looking through (or at) your camera? Lifehacker suggests pointing with your left hand index finger to improve your accuracy. Simply press the finger against your lens, parallel to your camera's line of sight. The idea is that while we point at things all the time, aiming a camera isn't quite as intuitive (though it comes with practice). By making the camera an "extension of your body", you might be able to aim it more naturally!

Photographer Grover Schrayer captured this amazing photograph of a rainbow in candle smoke.

Ever wonder what National Geographic photographers go through to get the beautiful shots that appear in the yellow-bordered magazine? The Photo Society -- an interesting new website created by the magazine's Photographer’s Advisory Board -- recently surveyed 45 Nat Geo photographers about hazards they've encountered while on assignment. All the incidences were then counted up and turned into a fascinating table showing how "glamorous" the photographers' lives are. You can also read short …