Here's a documentary film about acclaimed American photographer Richard Avedon that originally aired in 1995. If you have 90 minutes to spare, watching this movie is a great way to peek into the mind of a master and become inspired to improve your own photography.
In addition to its big 5D Mark III announcement today, Canon also made some big updates to its high-end professional accessories, the biggest of which is the new Speedlite 600EX-RT. This new top-of-the-line flash unit replaces the 580EX II and uses a new radio-based wireless triggering system. Communicating on 2.4 GHz frequencies, the new flash avoids traditional directional limitations associated with optical transmitters and offers two-way wireless transmission of up to 98.4 feet. It also …
Samsung has developed what the company claims is the world's first CMOS sensor that can capture both RGB and range images at the same time. Microsoft's Kinect has received a good deal of attention as of late for its depth-sensing capabilities, but it uses separate sensors for RGB images and range images. Samsung's new solution combines both functions into a single image sensor by introducing "z-pixels" alongside the standard red, blue, and green pixels. This allows the sensor to capture 480x360 …
Having a flattering portrait as your drivers license photo is difficult to achieve, but so is having a portrait that stands out as being bizarre. Reddit user adambard successfully accomplished the latter. He wanted a novelty drivers license photo, so he decided to shave half his hair and the opposite half of his beard. Just in case you'd like to follow in his footsteps, you can view a step-by-step documentation of his process here.
Want to upgrade the camera on your iPhone for free? SmugMug has launched a new iOS camera app called Camera Awesome that puts a number of fancy features at your fingertips, including separate focus and exposure selection tools, a one-touch "Awesomeize" button, fancy guide lines (e.g. horizon, rule of thirds, golden rule), and effects (textures, filters, and frames).
The private photographs on your phone might not be as private as you think. Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that iOS has a loophole that allows third-party apps who have access to location information to also access (and copy) your entire photo library without any further notification or warning. A couple days later, Android was also found to have a loophole that's even worse -- any app that can access the Internet can copy photos to a remote server! Both companies have …
Having some dust or smudges on your lens' front element generally doesn't have a noticeable effect on your image quality, but photo enthusiast Alex Bowler recently discovered that having a dirty front element can do nasty things to bokeh. The before-and-after comparison above shows what Bowler's out-of-focus areas looked like before and after cleaning his lens.
Back in November of last year, we reported that Kodak had put its Kodak Gallery service up for sale and was hoping to offload it for "hundreds of millions of dollars". A couple months later Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and now the company has finally found a buyer for the photo sharing and printing service: Shutterfly. The sale price? Only $23.8 million. If the sale gets approved by the US Bankruptcy Court in March, Kodak Gallery's 75 million users will be transferred over to …
"33 RPM" is a project by Stockholm-based photographer Philip Karlberg that consists of still life photographs of various desserts spinning on various vinyl records. The combo above shows "'Don’t look back into the sun' by The Libertines: Sundae surprise."
Canon has officially taken the wraps off its new 5D Mark III DSLR, a followup to the 5D Mark II that offers a feature set that sits somewhere between its predecessor and the soon-to-arrive 1D X. The camera packs a 22.3MP full-frame sensor, the 61-point AF system found in the 1D X, 63-zone metering, an ISO range of 100-25600 (expandable to 50-102400), 6fps continuous shooting, a 3.2-inch LCD (1.04M dots), and 100% viewfinder coverage (up from 98%).
