Not too long ago I finally got around to picking up a decent manual flash for exploring lighting and speedlight techniques. I picked up a Yongnuo YN-560 Speedlight Flash for Canon and Nikon, and my friend Sean was kind enough to send me his old radio triggers to play with. I was mostly all set to start exploring the world of off-camera lighting...
Photographer Steven Pippin creates unique photographs that capture the precise moment in which the camera used to capture the photo is destroyed by a bullet from a handgun. The images show the final moment of the camera's existence (with the help of a mirror) and are themselves damaged by the bullet passing through the film.
When commercial sports photographer Nick Laham arrived at photo day during the New York Yankees' spring training last Monday, he had to compete with a legion of photographers for space and time. He ended up occupying one of the bathrooms in the facility, turning it into a makeshift studio.
Photographer Allen Mowery has a step-by-step tutorial on how to build a useful DIY flash mounting accessory using a ratcheting hand clamp and standard 1/4-inch threaded screw. It's a cheap DIY version of the Super Clamp or Nasty Clamp, and can help you place your flash in places that are inaccessible to light stands or traditional equipment.
Beta testers still have until the end of the month to play around with the program, but Adobe has now officially launched Lightroom 4 to the general public. The program features an improved develop module, a new map module, book creation, new video features, and space saving lossy compression for DNG files. It's also significantly cheaper than prior versions: the full program costs just $149, while the upgrade costs $79.
Director Ninian Doff made this creative music video for singer Graham Coxon's song "What'll It Take" by stitching together dance moves sent in by 85 of Coxon's fans from 22 countries around the world, turning them into one composite dancer.
One year ago we featured a novel new device called Instaprint, a location-based photo booth that lets people create instant prints of Instagram photos by simply tagging them with a specific tag. It constantly scans Instagram for its tag, and when a photo is found the image is immediately printed out as a Zink print. Now Breakfast, the company behind the prototype, is trying to turn it into an actual product. They're trying to raise half a million bucks through Kickstarter and a $400 …
Here's a nifty Photoshop tip by photographer Alex Wise on how you can use a Threshold layer to approximate black and white points in a photograph, and then use those points in the Curves tool to remove color casts from photos.
Want to see how Las Vegas has grown from 1972 through 2010? NASA created this unique time-lapse video using photographs captured by Landsat satellites. From this perspective, it almost looks like humans are a mold spreading across the face of a fruit.
Nikon caused a stir this past weekend after it was revealed that a promo video shown during the D800's launch in Bangkok actually contained footage that was both used without permission and that wasn't even captured with a Nikon D800. After a recording of the promo was uploaded to YouTube in mid-February, people began coming forward with reports that Nikon had used their videos without permission.
Photographers used to spend lifetimes building up their portfolios and networks before their work became widely known to a global audience, but with the advent of the Internet, the fact that anything can "go viral" is completely changing the equation for success.
Japanese website mono-logue released this short 30-second video comparing footage from the Canon 5D Mark II and the new 5D Mark III captured at ISO 12,800. The difference in noise levels is remarkable (be sure to watch it full screen and in HD).
For a recent advertising campaign to bring attention to its hydrogen-powered cars, Mercedes-Benz decided to make a car "invisible" by creating a novel cloaking device using LEDs and a Canon 5D Mark II. One side of the car was covered with several mats of LEDs that display what the DSLR sees on the other side.
Lytro's groundbreaking light field camera is finally landing in the hands of customers, and to give people a better idea of how the camera works, the New York Times has published an interesting diagram that shows what makes the camera tick. Here's what DPreview has to say about the camera: …
Photography enthusiast Kris Robinson used to handhold a flash above his subjects for macro photographs, but then he got tired of doing that and ran out of hands. He then came up with the brilliant idea of making a do-it-yourself contraption that attaches to his flash when it's mounted to the hotshoe. The light travels down a tube lined with reflective aluminum tape, and is bounced downward onto the subject through a diffused lightbox. For a couple sample shots, see here and here.
UK-based wildlife photographers Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas got the Internet's attention a couple years ago with the BeetleCam, a special remote controlled DSLR that allowed them to capture close-up photos of animals in the wild that photographers would have difficultly strolling up to. After the success of that experiment, they decided to return to Africa last summer with upgraded (and armored) versions of the BeetleCam in order to photograph lions in Kenya.
The last time C. Corey Fisk walked was in 1992. She has multiple sclerosis, an incurable disease that affects the central nervous system and gradually took her ability to walk and leave her bed.
But early February, she went on a photo walk with photographer John Butterill in the woods behind his house in Ontario, Canada -- all from her own home in northern California.
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%).
Kodak announced today that it has decided to discontinue its color reversal (AKA slide) films due to a steady decrease in sales and usage. The films discontinued are Ektachrome E100G/E100VS and Elite Chrome Extra Color 100. The company estimates that based on current sales pace, you'll still be able to purchase the discontinued films for about six to nine months. If you were a loyal Kodak slide film shooter, it'll soon be time to switch over to negative film or to Fujifilm color reversal films.
"Global Rainbow" is an outdoor art installation by Yvette Mattern that consists of seven high powered lasers projecting a bright rainbow across the night sky. The rainbow was originally displayed in New York in 2009, but has since appeared in cities across the UK. If you're lucky enough to see the project in real life, be sure to take some photographs -- it's not every day you get to enjoy rainbows at night.
Here's a great diagram by Mobot that shows how the 41-megapixel sensor inside Nokia's new 808 PureView phone stacks up against other popular sensor sizes. It's pretty clear that they didn't just milk a small sensor for more megapixels as a simply marketing ploy, but instead came up with a sensor that's significantly larger than those found in other smartphones. Engadget also has a photo showing a comparison of sensor sizes, while Digital Trends has published an article on five reasons why the …
We're less than 24 hours away from the official Canon 5D Mark III unveiling, but official product photos and a detailed spec list of the camera have already been leaked onto the Internet. The photos are consistent with the pictures of the camera in the wild that leaked earlier this week.
Angel Falls is the world's highest waterfall as well as the inspiration for Paradise Falls in the Pixar film Up. Unless you're planning on visiting the falls in the heart of Venezuela in person, the next best thing might be this stunning series of 360° aerial panoramas recently captured by photographer Dmitry Moiseenko over two days from a helicopter. Pan around, zoom into the scene, and become immersed in the otherworldly landscapes found at Angel Falls.
Here's a simple lesson by Dylan Bennett on what depth of field is, how it works, and how to control it in your photography.
Parisian photographer Malo has fun portrait series titled "Un jour, mon enfant tu seras" (One Day You Will Be My Child) that imagines what a baby's future career might be.
