March 2012

Michael Zhang

Canon AE-D Mirrorless Camera Concept

Olympus recently rebooted its OM line of film SLRs with the OM-D mirrorless camera, and many photographers are hoping that Canon will follow suit with one of its film bodies. Industrial designer and photographer David Riesenberg is among them, and recently decided turn what he wants to see into a concept drawing.

Michael Zhang

Adobe Releases Photoshop CS6 Beta: Redesigned UI and 62% More Features

Adobe has launched the public beta version of Photoshop CS6, which features a completely redesigned user interface along with new saving features (auto and background), new content-aware features (move and patch), new blur filters, an updated Adobe Camera RAW, and improved video editing capability. There's a 62% increase in features, with 65 of them inspired by user feedback. ACR 7 also features the same new engine found in Lightroom 4 that improves the performance of sliders.

Michael Zhang

Man Photographs Himself in a Pink Tutu to Fight Against Breast Cancer

After photographer Bob Carey moved with his wife to the East Coast in 2003, he found that life suddenly flipped 180-degrees from what he was used to. He then did what every sane, middle-aged, male photographer would do: he began photographing himself in a pink tutu to express himself. However, the project wouldn't stay random for long.

Roger Cicala

What Pancake Lenses Look Like On the Inside

I’ve always been fascinated by pancake lenses. It just amazes me that something that small can actually function. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we’ve been taking things apart to determine where and how (and sometimes if) the lenses can be adjusted optically. So, I decided to do two pancake lenses for mirrorless cameras side-by-side to see how they differed (the Sony 16mm f/2.8 E mount and the Olympus 17mm f/2.8 micro 4/3 mount). I wasn’t sure there would be much we could do with pancakes (and there wasn’t), but I still found the look inside rather interesting.

Michael Zhang

Portraits of People with Their Trash Bins

Singapore-based photographer Aw Zinkie's photo series "Republic of Pulau Semakau" explores the idea of a trash bin being an essential part of an individual's personal space, and a way of examining their identity. Her portraits show the subjects in their personal environments with their faced replaced by held up trash bins. The series also highlights issues of waste management in Singapore, and the fact that every individual's trash causes them to become a "founder" of the offshore Semakau Landfill.

Michael Zhang

Auroras, Meteors, and Photography from the International Space Station

Here's a fascinating video by NASA that explains what auroras are and what they look like from space. It's filled with beautiful photographs and time-lapse sequences captured by astronauts on the International Space Station. Astronaut photographer Don Pettit, who maintains a blog about his experiences, writes that taking pictures of Earth is harder than it looks.

David Cohen de Lara

Why This Photograph is Worth $578,500

Last week, a collection of 36 prints by William Eggleston was sold for $5.9 million at auction.  The top ten list of most expensive photographs ever sold doesn't contain a single work worth less than a cool million. Just a few months ago, Andreas Gursky's 'Rhine II' became the world's most expensive photograph, selling for $4.3 million.

Michael Zhang

Lost & Found: Snapshots Salvaged After the Japanese Tsunami

The Lost & Found Project is a volunteer effort that recovered three quarters of a million lost photographs after last year's devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Each of the snapshots was washed, digitized, and numbered, and twenty thousand of them have since been reunited with their owners.

Michael Zhang

Photographs of “Invisible Man” Blending into Beijing Locations

After his Beijing studio was destroyed in 2005, artist Liu Bolin (AKA "The Invisible Man") began a project titled "Hiding in the City" that show him blending into various locations around Beijing. The photographs aren't Photoshopped -- Bolin carefully has his body painted to blend in with each landscape.

Michael Zhang

Use a Red Dot Sight for Locating Subjects with Super Telephoto Lenses

Photo enthusiast Chris Malcolm needed a better way to aim his 500mm lens at fast moving subjects (e.g. birds in flight), so he upgraded his lens with a DIY sighting aid by attaching a non-magnified red dot sight:

They're designed to clamp onto a gun sight wedge mount, so some kind of adapter is required. I played with the hot shoe mount, but it was too flexible -- the sight needed re-zeroing at every mount, and was easily knocked out of calibration. The degree of precision required to aim the central focus sensor at the target via the dot also made parallax error a problem on the hot shoe. So I decided to mount it directly on the lens. Least parallax error, plus the geometry of the lens barrel and the sight mount naturally lines it up with the lens. To protect the lens barrel I glued the sight clamp to a cardboard tube slightly too small, slit open to provide a sprung grab on the lens body. The slit also handily accommodates the focus hold button on the lens barrel.

Malcolm reports that the site "works amazingly well", making it "trivially easy to aim the lens at anything very quickly".

Michael Zhang

Childhood Toys in a Grown-Up World

After finding toys from his childhood in his grandparents' attic, photographer Julien Mauve decided to create a series of photographs that imagines what those toys would look like in our serious adult world. The series is titled "Back to Childhood".

Michael Zhang

BumpyPhoto Turns 2D Photographs into 3D Color Sculptures

At CES 2012 back in January, Casio showed off a 2D to 3D conversion service that turns photos into sculptures. Now a new Portland, Oregon-based company called BumpyPhoto is bringing the technology to the masses. With prices starting at $59, BumpyPhoto will take your standard photograph, turn it into a 3D model using their special software, and then create a color 3D relief sculpture for you.

Michael Zhang

Unbelievable Fantasy Photos of Ants

Photographer Andrey Pavlov's images of ants may look like they were computer-generated or created with dead insects, but they're actually real photographs of living ants. Pavlov spends hours setting up his fantasy scenes and then waits for his ant subjects to interact with his miniature props in just the right way.

Michael Zhang

Photo of Panasonic GF5 Leaked by Model on Instagram

Here's the first leaked photo of the upcoming Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF5. It was shared on Instagram (and quickly taken down) by Hong Kong-based model Angela Baby, who was likely working on a commercial for the new Micro Four Thirds camera when she decided to snap a photo using the iPhone app. 43 Rumors writes that the camera will have a 12 megapixel sensor, ISO 12800, snappy autofocus (0.09s), a revised touchscreen, and improved low-light performance.

Michael Zhang

Trigger Happy Turns Your Smartphone Into a Fancy Camera Remote

Trigger Happy is a new product that lets you use your iOS or Android smartphone as a fancy camera remote. It consists of an app and a one-meter-long cable that goes from your phone's audio jack to your camera. Besides acting as a simple remote shutter release for shake-free shots, the app offers bulb functionality for timing long exposures, an intervalometer for timelapse photography, HDR mode, and bramping. They're also working on lightning detection, audio waveform detection, face detection, and accelerometer-based triggering.

Michael Zhang

Photographer Steps On and Kills German Celebrity Earless Bunny

Photographers are supposed to document news rather than make it, but a clumsy German photographer had the ill fortune of doing the latter in the most horrible way this past Wednesday. The photographer was shooting at a media event at the Limbach-Oderfrohna zoo in Eastern Germany when he stepped backward and onto a three-week-old earless bunny named Til, instantly killing the little guy.

Michael Zhang

First Full Photos of the Samsung NX20

Dutch website Focus Media has published several photographs of the upcoming Samsung NX20 mirrorless camera, along with a list of specs. The camera will be slightly larger than the NX11 (there a thicker grip), and will offer a 20.3MP sensor, built in Wi-Fi for uploading images to the web, 8fps continuous shooting, ISO 100-12800, i-Function 2.0, built-in flash, an electronic viewfinder, 1080p HD video recording (with a separate button), and a 3-inch tilting screen on the back.camera/#ixzz1pJPIu4K9

Michael Zhang

Photographs Captured Over Years with an Open Camera Shutter

German photographer Michael Wesely has spent decades working on techniques for extremely long camera exposures -- usually between two to three years. In the mid-1990s, he began using the technique to document urban development over time, capturing years of building projects in single frames. In 1997, he focused his cameras on the rebuilding of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, and in 2001 he began photographing the Museum of Modern Art's ambitious renovation project. He uses filters and extremely small apertures to reduce the amount of light striking the film, creating unique images that capture both space and time.

Michael Zhang

Protobooth: A Photobooth That Shoots 3D Animated GIFs

Protobooth is a creative photobooth by design firm Digital Kitchen that captures 3D photos rather than static images. Comprising 3 Canon 5D Mark II DSLRs, 4 Macbook Pros, and some fancy software mojo, the Protobooth simultaneously captures three photos at the push of a button, saves them to a networked hard drive, stitches them using Automator, applies a Photoshop filter action to the image, and then saves it as a GIF.

Michael Zhang

Distress Your Film by Putting It Through a Dishwasher Cycle

There's a subgroup of film photographers who are dedicated to coming up with inventive new ways to distress film in order to achieve unexpected -- and occasionally beautiful -- results. Last year we shared that soaking film in rubbing alcohol does strange things to your images. Here's another crazy idea: put a roll of film through the dishwasher. Photographer Tom Welland did just that and ended up with some vintage-looking photos.