February 20, 2012

For Valentine's Day this year, Samsung created this short film that features custom bokeh shapes shot with Samsung NX gear. They come up with some pretty creative ideas for various shapes: pop a balloon filled with glitter to create a firework look, or shoot out of a car window at night to capture spaceships flying through space! If you're interested in learning how to customize your own bokeh, check out this video tutorial or the tutorial Samsung published alongside this video.

So I've been shooting some shows for some of the choral groups on campus at my school, and I've started to notice a trend: people make some stupid faces when they are singing. They can range from an approaching sneeze to a full-on O-face.

Kai Wong over at DigitalRev recently conducted this interesting experiment in which they spent a week training a newbie photographer -- an IT guy without any background -- to go up head-to-head in a studio environment against an actual photographer. The goal was to see whether they could fake it well enough so that one of Hong Kong's top photographers wouldn't be able to tell the difference in quality.

Here's some good news for all you iPhoneographers out there: Apple's upcoming iOS 5.1 update -- the rumored release date is March 9th -- will feature a new unlock screen that's designed to make accessing your iPhone (or iPod) camera as easy as unlocking your phone. They've decided to include a new fixed camera slider button next to the unlock slider -- simply slide this icon up to reveal the camera! Currently, the fastest way to access the camera is to double-tap the home button and then click …

San Francisco-based indie band Wildlife Control made this creative music video for their song "Analog or Digital" using both time-lapes and stop-motion techniques. They spent a day on at Ocean Beach in SF, shooting the entire video in one take as a series of 3,060 individual photographs. The fast playback makes the world around them pass in time-lapse, while their synchronized movements cause them to move around like stop-motion claymation figures. It's definitely not an easy feat -- they had …

In mid-January, Nikon sent an letter out to independent camera repair technicians across the US, informing them that "it will no longer make repair parts available for purchase by repair facilities that have not been authorized by Nikon Inc. to perform camera repairs." After July 13th, 2012, unauthorized repair shops will no longer be able to repair Nikon cameras -- a huge part of their business -- with official manufacturer-approved parts. iFixit writes, …

Do you feel like the quality of your photography falls short of where you want it to be? Don't worry: every creative goes through a period in their growth in which there's a disappointing gap between their "taste" and their work. Here's an inspiring video in which Ira Glass encourages people going through this to push through and to not give up.