March 2012

Cincinnati native Amy Hildebrand was born completely blind due to albinism, a disorder in which the body is unable to produce melanin (the pigment that gives color to hair, skin, and eyes).

Facial recognition service Face.com has announced a new feature in its API: age detection. After analyzing a photograph of a person's face, the software returns three values: minimum age, maximum age, and estimated age, along with the confidence level of the guesses. Applications for the new technology include enhanced parental controls and targeted advertising.

Here's a great 6-minute video in which PBS Off Book examines the impact three Internet phenomena -- Kickstarter, Creative Commons, and The Creators Project -- are impacting the world of art.

One of the biggest stories in the news over the past month has been the controversy surrounding the shooting of Trayvon Martin. Poynter has published an article that examines how the media has used photography to portray Trayvon Martin, the victim, and George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watchman who shot and killed him.

Vimeo has partnered up with Nikon for a new educational video series titled Do More With Your DSLR. The first video is about "working with available light", and is geared towards beginners who are just starting to figure out how to use their DSLR camera. You can find a more in-depth discussion of the concepts in the video (e.g. exposure, white balance, ISO) in this article.

Choices is a Warhol-esque (or Gursky-esque) project by photographer Richard Stultz, who visited various stores to document the mind-numbingly large number of choices consumers are faced while shopping.

Posing App is a new app that offers a pocket reference for poses -- helpful for both photographers and models. The 140 hand-drawn poses come in a variety of flavors -- children, couples, weddings, and women, to name a few -- and are accompanied by short descriptions that provide additional pointers. The is available from the iTunes App Store for $2, and will be released for Android soon.

The Guardian published an article yesterday that features a number of prominent photographers (e.g. Jane Bown, Martin Parr, Terry O'Neil, Platon) sharing about missed photo opportunities and their "worst shots". Platon has an interesting story regarding photographing Iranian president Ahmadinejad back in 2009 while snapping portraits of world leaders: …

Editor's note: This is a piece by photographers Bryan Formhals and Blake Andrews on how famous photographers' styles are copied over and over again. Please do not read or comment if you take things too seriously.

Maho Beach outside of Princess Juliana International Airport in Sint Maarten is famous for the fact that landing airplanes fly overhead at minimal altitude. It's one of the only places in the world where airplanes can be viewed in their flightpath just outside the end of the runway, and therefore is very popular with tourists and plane spotters. Austrian photographer Josef Hoflehner has a project titled "Jet Airliner" that consists of photos of massive jet airliners hovering over the heads of …

There may soon be a new member of the Canon Extender EF lens family. A recently published patent filed by Canon describes a new 2.8x teleconverter. A 400 f/2.8L IS II would become a 1120mm f/8 lens with the teleconverter attached, though Canon will have to restore f/8 autofocus to its top-of-the-line cameras before that combo would become useful.

After reading about the Wakhan Corridor in the New York Times, French photographers Fabrice Nadjari and Cedric Houin decided to visit the remote region in Afghanistan in the summer of 2011, walking for 24 days through a 140 mile stretch. Their project, titled "Traces of Time", involved capturing instant photos of the villagers they met: …

Apollon is a concept camera designed by product designer Gordon Tiemstra for his industrial design university project. The big concept is that the camera can be physically combined with your friends' cameras, allowing them to snap photographs together to create things like panoramas and 3D photographs. The images captured by any camera in the cluster is wirelessly transferred to all of the others, giving everyone the complete set of images that were snapped.

VU35 is a new brand by Lucas Desimone and Matias Resich that offers products created from wood and reused 35mm film -- a plastic material that's difficult to dispose of. Their first product is a minimalistic collapsible bookshelf called Filmantes, which uses strips of film to connect three wooden shelves.

Here's a tutorial by photographer Joe Edelman that teaches how you can build a studio lighting setup with fluorescent lights for under $200. You can find a detailed parts list over in the description of the video on YouTube.

Etsy seller Roberto Altieri creates unique iPhone/iPod charging docks out of old -- and hopefully defunct -- Pentax and Minolta SLR cameras from the 1960s and 1970s.

Last week camera testing service DxOMark announced that the Nikon D800 had earned the highest sensor quality score ever awarded. Roger Cicala of LensRentals wanted to see for himself how much of an advantage the D800's 36.3MP sensor had over its competition, so he did some sensor resolution tests on the camera, comparing it to the Canon 5D Mark III, 5D Mark II, and Nikon D700. His conclusion? …

Last November we featured a concept camera called Air that is worn on your fingers and snaps photographs when you frame scenes with your fingers. That concept may soon become a reality. Researchers at IAMAS in Japan have developed a tiny camera called Ubi-Camera that captures photos as you position your fingers in the shape of a frame. The shutter button is triggered with your opposite hand's thumb, and the "zoom" level is determined by how far the camera is from the photographer's face. Expect …

This past Sunday, Jupiter and Venus put on a show by lining up with our moon (a conjunction). Rick Ellis of Toronto, Canada managed to create the awesome photo of the event seen above by capturing 31 separate frames. Each photo was taken 5 minute apart and had an exposure time of 5 seconds.

After being arrested on October 1, 2007 for using his cell phone to film officers making an arrest, Boston lawyer Simon Glik sued the city for violating his civil rights. Late last year the court denied a motion to have the case dismissed, and just yesterday it was announced that the City of Boston had come to a settlement with Glik, agreeing to pay him $170,000 for damages and legal fees. The decision last year and the settlement yesterday both reaffirm that the First Amendment protects the …

Architectural photographer Brett Beyer was recently commissioned by Cornell University to make a photograph of the interior of its recently completed Milstein Hall. The request wasn't for a standard interior photo, but for an aerial shot of the 25,000-square-foot studio space that looked as if you were looking down at it with the roof removed (think Google Earth but for the interior of a building). Beyer accomplished this by pointing his Canon 5D Mark II and 17-40mm lens down from the ceiling …

JumpFromPaper is a new line of unique handbags that uses thick outlines and bright colors to look like they popped right out of a cartoon. They look like they're completely flat and 2D, but they actually have room for things like cameras, laptops, and your everyday accessories. The bag seen here is called "Cheese!" and costs $99.

Silent World is a project by Paris-based artists Lucie & Simon that shows post-apocalyptic views of famous locations around the world. All but one or two of the people in each location are removed from the scene. Rather than use multiple exposures and compositing the images to remove moving objects (e.g. people and cars), they chose to use a neutral density filter -- one that's normally used by NASA for analyzing stars -- in order to achieve extremely long exposure times during the day.

Here's an oldie but goodie: back in September 2009, photographer Chris Weeks released this documentary about street photography titled Documenting the Human Condition. It's occasionally preachy and at times feels like a stealthy Leica advertisement, but should be interesting to you if you're at all interested in the practice of street photography.

A month after announcing massive losses of $2.9 billion, Sony is taking evasive action to rediscover itself and right its ship. The company announced a new corporate strategy today, devised by its new CEO Kazuo Hirai. Called "One Sony", the initiative identifies digital imaging as one of the three core pillars of the company going forward: …

TrekPak is a new padded camera bag insert that does away with the annoyances of velcro by introducing a new pin system for adjusting dividers: …

What would you do if you were given the task of creating a self-portrait within 20 minutes in front of an auditorium packed with people? That was the challenge given to photographers David Hobby, Martin Prihoda, and Gregory Heisler earlier this month at Gulf Photo Plus 2012 in Dubai. The video above shows what unfolded. It's like watching the photography equivalent of a freestyle rap battle.

According to the UN, one third of the world's food goes to waste -- mostly in industrialized nations -- while 925 million people around the world are threatened by starvation. To draw attention to this startling fact, Vienna-based photographer Klaus Pichler has been working for the past nine months on a project titled One Third, which consists of photos of rotting food. The food ranges from simple vegetables to cultural dishes from around the world, and everything is allowed to rot naturally by …

Sony is reportedly focusing on autofocus as one of the main battlegrounds it'll wage war on in the DSLR market. According to sonyalpharumors, the company is working on a new A99 SLT camera that's already being tested by photographers in the wild, and one of the main selling points of the camera is a whopping 102 autofocus points -- all of them cross type. For comparison, Canon's 1D X has 61 AF points with 41 of them cross type, and the Nikon D800 has 51 AF points with 15 of them cross type.

Here's a video in which renowned portrait photographer Nadav Kander discusses his approach to photography and portraiture. One thing that's interesting about Kander's method is that he tries not to connect with his subjects prior to photographing them: …

Photographer Tim Chao created this beautiful photo of a dark figure standing over the Chicago skyline by shooting a double exposure. It's titled "Metamorphosis", was shot with a Nikon FM on Kodak TX 400, and is part of a double exposure project titled "Worlds Within".

For her project titled Mirrors, Swedish photographer Ilar Gunilla Persson photographed various landscapes with giant mirrors placed in them. The mirrors give the scenes an surreal and artificial look, but all the shots were captured on film.

This photo is what you get when you point a massive 4.1 meter telescope (VISTA in Chile) at an unremarkable patch of night sky and capture six thousand separate exposures that provide an effective "shutter speed" of 55 hours. It's an image that contains more than 200,000 individual galaxies, each containing countless stars and planets (to put the image into perspective, the famous Hubble Ultra-Deep Field contains "only" around 10,000 galaxies). And get this: this view only shows a tiny 0.004% …

Rock Photographer is a new iPhone game that can be described as a mix between "Guitar Hero for photography" and "Pokemon Snap for adults".

Brand Spirit is a new photo project by NYC-based branding strategist Andrew Miller, who writes, …

Did you know that your morning cup of coffee can help you predict rain? It's a trick used by backpackers that can come in handy you're shooting outdoors without Internet: pour a cup of coffee and carefully watch the bubbles. Backpacker Magazine writes, …

Here's a stunning super slow motion video that shows Marina Kanno and Giacomo Bevilaqua of Staatsballett Berlin performing several jumps. The footage was captured at 1000 frames per second.

Want to see how your eyes stack up against other photographers when it comes to seeing colors? Try your hand at Color, a simple browser-based color matching game that tests you in how quickly you can match colors. It starts with simple matching, but soon moves onto more difficult challenges involving multiple colors. Be sure to leave a comment here reporting on the score you get!

Can't wait to use Instagram on your Android smartphone? The company has put up a new "coming soon" page for the impending Android app launch, and submitting your email address will provide you with a notification the moment the app becomes available to the public.

"Mimicry" is a photo project by Dutch photographers Ilse Leenders and Maurits Gisen that's based around the idea of uniformity. They write, …

For those of you balking at the astronomical prices paid for photos in the art world, get this: Leica is releasing a special new white version of the M9-P digital rangefinder in Japan, and has given it a price tag of ¥2,620,000 (~$31,770). The regular version costs $7,995, so buyers will be paying an additional $23,705 for rarity (only 50 will be made), a slick kit lens (it comes with a 50mm f/0.95), and the color white.

Hamilton College assistant art professor Robert Knight has a project titled "Sleepless" that consists of ghostly long exposure photographs of people tossing and turning throughout the night.

The digital photography course offered by Stanford (CS 178, which we featured last year) has an awesome page filled with flash applets that can help you gain a better understanding of certain technical aspects of photography. These include understanding how various factors affect depth of field, a visual look at how phase detection autofocus works, and a simple introduction to color theory.

Talk show host Ellen DeGeneres recently sent one of her staff members named Amy to a JCPenny to pose as a studio portrait photographer. As clients came in, Ellen watched the scene through a hidden camera and gave Amy exact instructions for what to say and do through a hidden earpiece. The resulting interactions between photographer and portrait subject(s) were hilarious.

Samsung may not be the only camera company dabbling with the idea of a digital Hasselblad 500CM-style camera: Sony is reportedly working on a new SLT camera called the "A1S" that features a "full frame" square sensor. sonyalpharumors writes that the prototype camera in development has the following specs: compatibility with existing Alpha and Minolta lenses, a 36x36mm square sensor with 37-megapixel resolution, a large body (larger than the Sony A900), a square electronic viewfinder, and a …

Framed is a beautiful and creative short film about a photographer taking pictures in the woods when he encounters something unexpected. French filmmaker Mael Sevestre filmed the entire thing using an iPhone 4S and built a custom rig for recording footage through the old twin lens reflex camera seen in the film.

Raleigh, North Carolina-based artist Scott Hazard creates abstract images by tearing shapes into multiple prints of the same photograph, and then stacking the images on top of each other. He uses the technique to create things such as smoke, clouds, and portals in walls. He calls the project "Photo Constructs".

Turns out the 36.3 megapixel sensor inside the new Nikon D800 isn't just a megapixel war marketing tactic: the sensor has been given the highest score ever awarded by camera equipment rating service DxOMark. Calling it a "complete success in every sensor-related respect", the lab states that the D800's sensor has become the new sensor of reference by which all other camera sensors will be measured. Furthermore, it boasts an "unmatched quality-to-price ratio" by being the cheapest (by far) among …

For his project titled "Horror Vacui" (latin for "fear of empty space"), photographer Federico Chiesa imagines what the villains and creepy characters of '80s films would be like if they were "still alive" today.

London-based photographer David Wilman recently did some experiments in which he used a Canon 5D Mark II as a digital back for his MPP 4x5 large format camera. He placed his lens-less 5D at the back of the camera at the film plane and then placed a black cloth over the two cameras to prevent any light from spilling onto the sensor. Light from the Schneider Kreuznach Xenar 4.5/150mm lens entered straight into the open mirror box of the DSLR without any physical link between the two cameras.