Here's a tutorial on how to do non-automated HDR for real estate photography using Photoshop CS5. The first thing you'll need is a sturdy tripod with a level. The closer you are to a leveled image, the less correction you'll have to do later.
When Fujifilm said that the X-Pro1's sensor "resolution and low noise will surpass rival 35mm full size sensor[s]", they weren't kidding. Photographers Christian Fletcher and Michael Coyne have both been testing out the camera, and have extremely positive things to say about it.
Evan Sharboneau over at Photo Extremist shot this crazy photograph of "a room filled with an obnoxious amount of money". It wasn't shot with a truckload of cash, nor was it created using CGI. Instead, Sharboneau used $871 in cash -- a total of just 29 separate bills. He spent 4 hours photographing the room 170 times with the money placed in different locations in each frame, and then spent 5 hours merging all the photographs together in Photoshop. You can find Sharboneu's video tutorial on this …
Ever wonder why camera manufacturers these days are describing often sensor sizes with fractions instead of millimeters? Roger Cicala of LensRentals explains: …
France-based photographer Fabrice Wittner has a neat project titled "Enlightened Souls" that consists of ghostly portraits created by light-painting with stencils (which are themselves created from actual portraits). Wittner first started the project in May 2011 after the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand.
While many photographers swear by optical viewfinders, it's clear that much of the camera industry is shifting over to electronic -- or hybrid -- ones to offer high-tech features such as overlaid information displays. Thankfully, many of the old problems that existed with EVFs (e.g. low resolution) are starting to disappear. Case in point: French company MicroOLED has just announced a new microdisplay that packs 5.4 million dots into the highest pixel density viewfinder ever seen. To put that …
17-year-old filmmaking student Sacha Powell shot this powerful slow motion film using a $500 Canon 550D/T2i, 50mm f/1.8, 18-55mm kit lens, and Sigma 70-300mm. On the software side he utilized Premiere Pro CS5, After Effects CS5.5, and Twixtor for faux slow motion. Impressive.
Say hello to the latest item in the PetaPixel Store: the Instant Photo Pendant Necklace! This beautiful pendant is designed to look exactly like a 1-inch tall Polaroid picture. Insert your favorite 0.8-inch square photos through a slot in the side, and keep it safe and snug with a clear plastic square (included). The copper and iron pendant is coated with white and comes with a silver-colored 18-inch chain. Buy one while supplies last for just $10 from our store (shipping is free for US …
Photographer Alicia Rius bases much of her work around searching for "hidden treasures". One particular series is titled "From the back seat of my car", and consists of unplanned photographs taken from the back of abandoned cars.
Elizabeth Giorgi of Being Geek Chic made this step-by-step video tutorial teaching how to make a stylish DIY camera wristlet using some fabric and iron-on fusible.
Canon's president Tsuneji Uchida announced today that he will be stepping down to pave way for a younger management team as the company fell short of expectations for the second straight year. Canon's stock price dropped 19% last year while Nikon's grew 4%. The total number of Canon cameras sold dropped 4% last year, likely a result of both a shift away from consumer cameras and the shortages caused by Japan's earthquake and Thailand's flooding.
Photographer Scott Sexton created this cinemagraph showing the aperture blades in a Canon 50mm f/1.8 opening and closing. It's like he made a cinemagraph of a cinemagraph being made.
Dame di Cartone ("Cardboard Ladies") is a project by Swiss-Italian photographer Christian Tagliavini in which he creates portraits of women that mimic the look of historical paintings. The styles include 17th century, fifties, and cubism.
Photographer and developer Ben Syverson has created an iPhone camera app called Mattebox that mimics the Konica Hexar, a luxury point-and-shoot from 1993 that was powerful enough for professionals but simple and intuitive enough for beginners. It's one of the most beautifully designed camera apps we've seen yet, and comes with a number of fancy features baked into it (e.g. dual stage shutter release, highlight recovery, advanced B&W conversion). The app costs $4 over in the iTunes App Store.
If you have an old mount for attaching a GPS or cell phone to your windshield, you can upcycle it into a suction cup tripod for your camera (just make sure it's not the flimsy kind that falls off on its own). What you'll need to do is flatten the mount surface and then install a tripod screw. Nano_Burger has a step-by-step tutorial on how he did this conversion over on Instructables. The resulting tripod allows you to fix your camera in locations that aren't accessible to tripods that don't …
German scientists have been awarded a Guinness World Record for "fastest movie" after successfully capturing two images of an X-ray laser beam 50 femtoseconds apart. One femtosecond is equal to one quadrillionth (or one millionth of one billionth) of a second. Here's some science talk explaining it: …
In a paper published in Science this week, Japanese researchers reported on a discovery that jumping spiders use a method for gauging distance called "image defocus", which no other living organism is known to use. Rather than use focusing and stereoscopic vision like humans or head-wobbling motion parallax like birds, the spiders have two green-detecting layers in their eyes -- one in focus and one not. By comparing the two, the spiders can determine the distance from objects. Scientists …
MoneyMaker is a suspenders-style camera strap by HoldFast that lets you shoot with three cameras at the same time while looking like a cop from old movies.
French humorist Rémi Gaillard created this lighthearted video showing what happens when you photograph speeding cars (and other vehicles) dressed as a human speed camera.
The New York Public Library has a massive collection of over 40,000 vintage stereographs (two photos taken from slightly different points of view). To properly share them with the world in 3D, the library has launched a new tool called the Stereogranimator. It lets you convert an old stereograph into either an animated 3D GIF (which uses "wiggle stereoscopy") or an anaglyph (the kind that requires special glasses).
Babak Tafreshi of The World at Night created this beautiful time-lapse video of star gazers looking into the heavens while the stars sweep across the night sky. Check out Tafreshi's beautiful astrophotography here.
Nikon is now including the D700 in the discontinued products section of its Japanese website. The camera will be replaced with the 36MP D800, which will be unveiled on February 7th. What's slightly surprising is the fact that the D300S has also been "discontinued", even though we haven't heard much so far about its successor.
A couple weeks ago, 17-year-old Canadian teens Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad successfully sent a Lego man and four cameras to the edges of space on a weather balloon and captured photographs of the figurine posing with a Canadian flag at 78,000 feet -- three times the cruising altitude of jets.
A clearer picture is emerging of what the Fujifilm X-Pro1 will cost when it's finally on store shelves. The camera is now available for preorder over on Amazon Japan for the price of ¥135,000 (~$1,743). This suggests that the US price will be in the range of $1,600-$1,700. The lenses will likely be in the range of $600-$700 each. A PDF version of the owner's manual has also been released, and should be interesting to anyone who wants a closer look at how the camera works.
Earlier today my friend and fellow photographer posted a link to a craigslist ad from a woman in Seattle looking for a wedding photographer. The woman was upset because she thought that $3,000 for a wedding photographer was “wack” because all we do “is hang out at a wedding taking tons of photos and editing them” and that we are “making so much money it's crazy.”
Here's a cool sneak peek at some of the new features coming to the next version of Adobe Camera Raw. The adjustment brushes will have powerful new options for local adjustments, including temperature, tint, and noise. We also get to see the new dark interface that'll come by default with Photoshop CS6.
Pentax released a new compact camera today called the Optio VS20, which offers a feature we haven't seen before on a point-and-shoot: a second shutter release, zoom lever, and tripod mount for shooting vertically. The 16-megapixel camera is also smart about the orientation, as it packs an accelerometer that helps it intelligently display images the correct way. Other features include a 3-inch LCD screen and 720p video recording. It'll start shipping next month for $250.
French wedding photographer Béatrice de Guigné has a fun set of photographs showing what Barbie and Ken's wedding photographs might look like if captured by a trendy contemporary wedding photographer.
Light painting enthusiast Ian Hobson created this psychedelic long-exposure photo entirely in-camera. Can you figure out how it was created?
NASA has released another Blue Marble photograph of Earth. It calls this one the "most amazing, highest resolution image of Earth ever". The image is a composite created from a number of photos of Earth's surface captured on January 4, 2012, and weighs in at a massive 64-megapixels (8000x8000). You can download the full-res version here. Be warned though -- it might crash your browser.
Yesterday we wrote that Steve Jobs had been interested in Lytro's novel camera technology during the final years of his life.
Photographer Martin Schoeller traveled to the annual "Twins Days Festival" in Twinsburg, Ohio to photograph pairs of identical twins in his trademark close-up style.
Last week we featured an amazing video by a girl named Madeline who documented 2011 by recording 1 second of footage from each day. The video above by Sam Morrison is similar: Morrison's father bet him $100 that he couldn't do a backflip every day of 2011, so he made it his New Year's resolution to do so. After successfully completing the project, Morrison created the video above showing his favorite flips. The 365 individual videos can be viewed on this Tumblr page dedicated to the project.
If you're a photographer in the UK, you might want to think twice about shooting and selling a photograph that has a similar composition to an existing photo. Souvenir company Temple Island Collection has won a copyright infringement case against tea company New English Teas after a photo of a red London bus was used on tea packaging. Photo copyright expert and lawyer Charles Swan states, …
Creating tiny planets by projecting panoramic photographs onto a sphere is something you've probably seen before, but Dutch photographer Wouter van Buuren creates his planets a bit differently. rather than shoot panoramas from the ground, van Buuren climbs to the top of towers, cranes, skyscrapers, and bridges and points his camera in every direction below. He then takes the resulting photographs and arranges them into compact worlds.
Design director Wayne Ford has written up a great piece on the career of American photographer Arnold Newman, who was in the vanguard of the "environmental portrait" movement that emerged in the early 1940s.
Crippled by its recent financial scandal, Olympus is in need of a bailout and has been open to the idea of forming a strategic alliance with other companies. The latest news is that Sony is on the brink of acquiring a 20-30% stake in the beleaguered medical device and camera company, a sizable increase from the 0.03% it currently owns. The alliance would combine Sony's expertise in making camera sensors with Olympus' expertise in medical devices. Fujifilm has also been named as a company that's …
Here's something that'll blow your mind (sorry that it's an ad): stare at the colored dots on this girl's nose for 30 seconds, then quickly look at a white wall or ceiling (or anything pure white) and start blinking rapidly. Congratulations, you just processed a negative with your brain! …
Heavier tripods are generally more stable than lighter ones -- wind doesn't affect them as much -- but hauling them around can be a pain. Instructables user Andrew Axley came up with the brilliant idea of making his simple tripod more stable by adding his own weight hook. The tripod is light when not in use and when you need extra stability you simply hang your camera bag onto the hook. All you need to do is figure out a way to attach a hook securely at the center -- Axley chose to drill a hole …
Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner was randomly selected and announced below.
In November of last year, Steve Jobs' official biographer Walter Isaacson revealed that Jobs had wanted to reinvent three things: television, textbooks, and photography. Last week Apple announced that it was reinventing textbooks with iBooks 2, which is intended to start a digital textbook revolution. The company is also rumored to be working on a Siri-enabled TV. Now, hints about what Steve Jobs wanted to do with photography are starting to emerge, and the murmuring is centered around one …
Destin of Smarter Every Day wanted to show how a DSLR shutter works, so he pointed a Phantom high speed camera at a Canon 60D and made this slow motion video showing the magic that happens every time you press the shutter.
Photographer Stephen Oachs over at Aperture Academy caused quite a stir yesterday after sharing some photographs he took of a Japanese photographer he spotted in Kenya. The photographer revealed that he was field testing a new Canon 200-400mm with a built-in teleconverter, but what caught Oachs attention was the camera body the man was using -- a Canon DSLR that he didn't recognize. He writes, …
PressPausePlay is an award-winning documentary film that poses questions on what the digital revolution has done to various creative industries: …
During his lifetime, MIT engineer and businessman Nick DeWolf founded the giant electronic testing company Teradyne and designed more than 300 semiconductor and electronic test systems. In his spare time he was also an avid photography enthusiast, carrying a camera with him at all times. After his death, his son-in-law Steve Lundeen began working to archive and share the enormous body of work. Lundeen is currently publishing the original sets of photographs to Flickr at a rate of 20-50 images …
To keep itself lean and focused, Google is planning to do some spring cleaning and shut down a number of non-critical projects and services that don't attract enough attention to keep alive. One of the services marked for termination is Picnik, the online photo editor that Google acquired back in 2010. The service will remain online until April 19, after which the team will be folded into the Google+ team.
Here's a satellite photograph showing what the Costa Concordia disaster looks like from space. On January 13th the gigantic Italian cruise ship ran aground and partially sank, killing at least 13 people.
Wells Fargo Advisors is becoming a pretty reliable source for news regarding cameras before they're actually announced. Just weeks after the Fujifilm X-Pro1 and Nikon D4 were announced early by the service, the soon-to-be-announced Olympus OM-D camera is now semi-official as well. The wire confirms that Olympus will be reviving its old OM brand for SLR cameras through a new line of mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras, and that the camera will sell for over ¥100000 (~$1300) in Japan. It …
Perhaps inspired by the vintage camera nightlights we shared last year, photographer Laura Merz decided to upcycle her old Kodak digital camera by turning it into a nightlight for her house. She writes, …
Perhaps lost amidst the excitement over new cameras at CES 2012 earlier this month was the SD Association's unveiling of a new Wi-Fi data transfer standard. This new specification should make it easier for other memory card manufacturers to jump into the Wi-Fi-capable memory card game -- an arena currently dominated by Eye-Fi (and more recently Toshiba).
