Just in case you've always been wondering what it would look like to record footage with a camera attached to a spinning electric drill, French product designer Oscar Lhermitte did just that. The resulting footage is quite trippy, and would be a pretty unique way of capturing abstract photographs -- as long as you don't mind the risk of disintegrating your camera.
This looks like a screenshot of a satirical article by The Onion, but it's actually an actual story over on the Salt Lake Tribune. Turns out Utah is the latest state to introduce Florida-esque legislation that would make it a crime to photograph or videotape agricultural operations without permission from owners. Like in Florida, the bill's intent is to stop activist groups such as PETA from capturing covert imagery that allegedly show animal abuse.
Photoshop CS6 will have a new Iris Blur tool that lets you quickly add blur to an image that fakes a shallow depth of field. It's a one tool-process that eschews the traditional methods of using masks, layers or depth maps.
Adam Dachis over at Lifehacker offers a simple method for correcting underexposed photo with any image editor that supports layers, inversion, and Overlay blending mode. Simply create a duplicate later, invert it, set the blending mode to Overlay, and then adjust the opacity to suit your taste. While it's certainly not a pro photography trick -- other techniques including adjusting the curves and levels may be better -- it's a quick and easy tip that may be good to know.
When Los Angeles resident Hector Siliezar visited the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza with his family in 2009, he used his iPhone to snap some photos of a pyramid called El Castillo. After snagging a lightning strike in the third shot, Siliezar was surprised to see that he had also captured what appeared to be a beam of light shooting up from the pyramid towards the heavens. Jonathon Hill, a researcher who works with NASA's mars imagery, tells MSNBC that it's probably the result of an iPhone …
Instant is a newly launched Mac application that brings an Instagram-esque, Polaroid-faking app to your desktop. It allows you to turn any digital photograph into a Polaroid picture look-alike, and offers 28 different filters for giving your images vintage looks (8 of which are designed to look like Polaroid films). You can even add classic Polaroid frames to images and jot notes onto them. The app costs $7 and is available from the Mac App Store.
CNN published an opinion piece yesterday by photojournalist Nick Stern, who has some pretty harsh things to say about the spread of Instagram-style "fake images" in the news: …
Here's an interesting video tutorial by Destin of Smarter Every Day that shows how you can capture amazing photos of guns being fired and their muzzle flashes. Here's the "basic" idea: he uses a piezoelectric transducer to convert acoustical energy into an electrical pulse, which he sends through a pulse generator. The pulse from the pulse generator is used to trigger a flash and an high-speed exposure. This allows him to photograph guns at the moment they're fired in the same way many people …
Street photographer Eric Kim and DigitalRev host Kai Wong recently got together to do some street photography on the streets of Hong Kong. Kim and Wong have personalities that go well together (and look like brothers), making for some pretty humorous photographic entertainment.
The New York Times has launched a new Tumblr site called "The Lively Morgue" to breathe new life into items in the newspaper's photo archive (nicknamed "The Morgue"). Each week they'll be sharing several historical photographs found in massive collection.
Named after the fact that Google Street View cars shoot with 9 separate cameras, Canadian artist Jon Rafman's Nine Eyes of Google Street View website is an ongoing project that publishes strange scenes photographed by Google's automated cameras. Rafman writes, …
Former Olympus CEO Michael Woodford has gotten his wish: the entire Olympus board resigned this week in the aftermath of the company's epic financial scandal and stock tumble. They did, however, pick a new president and chairman before handing in their letters of resignation. Hiroyuki Sasa from the company's medical equipment marketing division was picked for president, while banker Yasuyuki Kimoto has been chosen as chairman. The changes are expected to be finalized at an April 20th …
The annual Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is considered to be the largest carnival in the world, with a whopping two million people roaming the streets. Keith Loutit and Jarbas Agnelli decided to turn their cameras on the city and the carnival last year, creating this stunning tilt-shift time-lapse video that makes the city look like a diorama and the attendees look like ants.
David Hobby has written up a great post over at Strobist on how he avoids shoot-ruining confrontations with police officers when shooting in public locations (we shared an example of a confrontation yesterday). His tricks include calling the police ahead of time and leaving notes on the doors of houses nearby: …
One of the new darlings of the Internet world is Pinterest, a photo-sharing social network that has exploded in the past year to become one of the world's most popular websites. In recent days, however, there has been concern over the fact that copyrighted images can be so easily reproduced and reused on Pinterest without the owner's permission. A week ago Pinterest launched a special "nopin" HTML meta tag that lets website owners prevent "pinning" on their sites, and last Friday Flickr became …
Photographer Benjamin Von Wong recently had the idea of doing a photo shoot that involved a model being lit on fire. He assembled a team of people -- including a person willing to be lit on fire and some fire experts -- and then set out to turn his vision into a reality. This interesting behind-the-scenes video shows how they went about capturing a burning man without using Photoshop to add in the flames.
Nokia has released a set of sample photographs in order to show off the camera quality of its new 41MP 808 PureView camera phone. The 33.3MB ZIP file contains just 3 untouched JPEG images -- the largest of which (seen above) is a 5368x7152, 38-megapixel photograph that weighs in at 10.3MB. The quality is quite impressive, given that the images were captured with a phone.
After announcing its impending arrival last year, Adobe today officially launched Photoshop Touch for the iPad and Android-powered tablets. The app offers many of Photoshop's core tools: …
The brilliant marketing gurus over at Pentax came up with this photograph as a way of illustrating that the company's new Optio WG-2 is mudproof. Makes you want one, doesn't it?
Zurich-based designers Atelier Volvox have a project titled "Outsiders" that consists of various stuffed animals turned inside-out. The toys were purchased from second-hand shops, cut open, turned inside out, re-stuffed, and sewed back up.
Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania-based photographer Jason Macchioni was recently shooting a time-lapse project from an overpass at night when he was approached by police officers who demanded his ID and threatened to arrest him for wiretapping (Macchioni was recording video of the encounter). Macchioni tells us, …
We're on the verge of seeing the successor to the Canon 5D Mark II, the 5D Mark III, and photos and specs are already starting to emerge ahead of the camera's rumored March 2nd announcement. The camera will reportedly have a 22MP sensor, 61 autofocus points, 100% viewfinder coverage, a 3.2-inch LCD screen, dual CF/SD slots, and a price tag of around $3,500.
Nokia dropped a bomb on the cameraphone market today by introducing its new 808 PureView phone -- a phone that is capable of capturing 41-megapixel photos. The native resolution of the phone (16:9) produces 38-megapixel images measuring 7152x5368. The phone also allows you to capture 5-megapixel images by condensing every seven pixels into one, which dramatically reduces noise and improves image quality. Other features include a 4-inch screen, 16GB of built-in storage, a Carl Zeiss f/2.4 lens, …
Every year, graphic designer Everett Hiller and his wife throw a party during the holiday season. Afterwards, Hiller Photoshops the photographs captured at the gathering before sending them out to friends and family. He doesn't just fix white balance and removed red eye, but instead sneakily Photoshops various celebrities into the shots. Hiller finds source images of celebrities by doing a search on Google Images for the name -- ranging from presidents to movie stars -- and uses certain …
It might sound strange to use the verb "Love" in the title of a rant. But here goes.
For her project titled All I Own, photographer Sannah Kvist asked her friends to pile up all of their belongings into the corner of a room and then pose with the pile for a photo. The portrait subjects are all Swedish young adults that were born in the 1980s.
Here's a simple trick for those of you who find yourself always plugging in USB cables the wrong way on your first attempt: pay attention to the seam on the metal tip.
New service called the Catlin SeaView Survey is planning to do for the ocean what Google Street View has done for land. Using a special camera, the joint venture between the University of Queensland, Google, and insurance firm Catlin Group will use a specially designed underwater camera to capture interactive 360-degree panoramic photographs. The purpose will be to carry out one of the most intensive studies of reefs ever, starting with Australia's Great Barrier Reef. It'll go into full swing …
A French photographer who goes by the pseudonym Mani was recently in Homs, Syria documenting the urban warfare between government forces and rebel fighters. The video above, broadcast by Channel 4 News in Britain, shows the amazing footage Mani was able to capture by fearlessly putting himself in the midst of skirmishes.
Here's a short video in which renowned American photographer Mary Ellen Mark shares some thoughts on photography and iconic photographs.
Photographer Thomas Jackson, whose swarm photos we shared earlier this week, has a creative project titled The Robot that "offers a darkly humorous narrataive about a lone robot's failure to co-exist with the natural world." It's a series of photos that brings a cleverly arranged heap of metal to life.
Last week we featured some "sound painting" photographs by Martin Klimas, captured by using a speaker to vibrate paint. Here's a video tutorial by some Arizona State University Polytechnic students demonstrating how you can do your own "sound painting" photos. They use a thrift store speaker covered with a garbage bag and some Crayola poster paint.
Here's a photo essay that documents Magnum photographer Alex Webb's exploration of the streets of Chicago. In an interview with Leica, Webb states, …
If you have some unwanted 35mm negatives lying around and need a simple gift idea, you can try your hand at turning them into one-of-a-kind bookmarks. Simply cut out the actual frames from the film strip and replace them with actual photographs to create film strips that you don't need to hold up to the light to enjoy.
The Photo Society has published an interesting article in which Kent Kobersteen, the Director of Photography at National Geographic magazine from 1987 to 2005, shares thoughts on what he looks for in photographers: …
Time-lapse photographer Randy Halverson (whose time-lapse of lightning storms we featured last year) is back again with another epic time-lapse film. This one is packed with shots of some of the most beautiful things you can point your camera at in the night sky: the Milky Way, auroras, and shooting stars. It's composed of thousands of 15-30 second exposures captured with a Canon 5D Mark II and Canon 60D at ISO 1600-6400, f/2.8, and 3 second intervals. Keep your eyes peeled at 53 seconds: you …
Buzzfeed has published a gallery showing every winning photo from the World Press Photo contest from 1955 to the present. It's a powerful set of photos that paints a pretty grim picture of humanity.
If you're relatively new to Photoshop, you might not know that it's possible to highlight and/or remove the various options in dropdown menus. All you need to do is play around with the Edit->Menus screen to make your commonly used options more visible and to reduce clutter by hiding options that you've never touched in your life.
Greek silkscreen printer Manolis Angelakis was recently tasked with designing a new set of business cards for close friend and photographer Alexandra Stamopoulou. Given her profession, he decided to create a stylish card that emulates the viewfinder of an old Zenit camera. The simple but effective design was silkscreened onto sheets of transparent vinyl.
Tech companies often like to create mini-documentaries featuring creatives who use their products -- last year both Intel and Brother made videos about fashion photographer Scott Schuman (The Sartorialist).
Photographer Noel Myles has been working for the past 15 years on "still films" of trees across the countryside of eastern England. He originally created platinum/palladium prints of the trees around the year 2000, and then photographed the trees a decade later using color film. He then combined pieces from the different photos into single mosaics, which he tells us are "the antithesis of the notion of a decisive moment".
Last year MIT grad Justin Jensen raised nearly half a million bucks through Kickstarter to launch CineSkates, a camera slider system that adds wheels to GorillaPod Focus tripods. Now Jensen and his startup Cinetics are back again with a new product called CineSquid, which provides a strong suction cup mount system rather than wheels. This allows cameras to be mounted onto things like cars, boats, and even airplanes.
If you've ever tried shooting in a dark location without using flash or a tripod, you probably know how difficult it can be to remove camera shake from your photos. Alex Jansen -- a photography enthusiast who's an officer in the US Army -- has written up an awesome tutorial on how you can apply some of the tricks used by rifle shooters to shooting with a camera: …
Photographer Thomas Jackson has an ongoing project titled Emergent Behavior that consists of surreal photographs of swarms of various things (e.g. leaves, plastic cups, ping pong balls) in various locations. The images aren't computer generated, but are rather composite images combining a number of photographs -- probably similar to the "flock of phones" tutorial that we featured a while back.
This amazing photograph of sailor Alex Thomson walking on the keel of an 8-ton yacht was created with courage rather than Photoshop. It was an ad for fashion house HUGO BOSS, which has sponsored Alex Thomson Racing since 2003. The conditions for the shot had to be just right, and the skipper had to carefully keep the yacht at a 45-degree angle for up to a minute to avoid crushing Thomson and the jet ski driver.
Flickr is reportedly set to push out a number of major design updates across the photo-sharing service's website. Adrianne Jeffries of Betabeat recently met up with Flickr senior product manager Markus Spiering, who gave her a sneak peek at a number of extensive changes to the interface that will be rolling out at the end this month.
After seeing the LEGO large format camera we featured last year, Norway-based photographer Carl-Frederic Salicath set out to create his own LEGO camera. Rather than go with large format, he decided to build a more complicated Rolleiflex-style twin-lens reflex camera that uses 120 film. Aside from LEGOs, he also used some matte ground glass, a mirror, and lenses taken from a binocular.
Photographer Rachel Hulin has a cute project titled The Flying Series that consists of photos of her infant son Henry flying.
If you're a fan of learning things through Khan Academy, then you might enjoy learning about how ISO works in this similar-styled tutorial by Dylan Bennett. Bennett might not have Salman Khan's soothing voice, but he does his best to break down the magic of digital camera sensors into easy to understand ideas. For a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of how things work, check out Cambridge in Colour's excellent tutorials.
Looks like Canon has some serious plans to jump into the mirrorless camera market. The company's G1X camera announced last month has a sensor large enough to compete with existing mirrorless cameras, but lacks an interchangeable lens system. A new patent filed by the company, however, reveals a new 18-45mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens for an APS-C mirrorless camera. It was filed back in 2010, so it seems that the company has been working on a mirrorless camera for quite some time now.
