April 2012

Sony Jumps Into the Photo Sharing Game with PlayMemories Online

Now that online sharing of images and video has become so commonplace, Sony has decided that they too want a piece of the pie. And their new storage service, dubbed PlayMemories Online, is how they intend to claim that piece. Launched only a couple of days ago, the service is now available in the US, UK, France, Germany, Japan and Canada and offers 5GB of storage for free.

Ethereal Portraits Taken Underwater

Here's a gorgeous series of underwater portraits shot by photographer Jacob Sutton, the same guy who did the LED snowboarding shoot that we featured a while back. It's titled "Underwater Girl".

London Olympics Won’t Allow Sharing of Photos and Video via Social Networks

Photographers have already lodged complaints against the security firm that tried to prevent them from taking photos of the Olympic sites from public land, but it seems that even stricter rules will be imposed on ticket holders once the games begin. According to a freelance photographer named Peter Ruck, the Olympic organizing committee Locog intends to prevent attendees from uploading images and videos captured at the games to social networks.

Once Magazine: A New Kind of Photo Magazine for Your iPad

As the cliche goes: "a picture is worth a thousand words," and Once Magazine is replacing many of the words that make up a typical magazine with pictures that speak for themselves. The relatively new publication has attracted a lot of attention since its first issue in September of last year -- not because magazines on the iPad are anything new, but because both their business model and their execution are fantastic.

Archive Containing 870,000 Rare Photos of NYC Now Open to the Public

Over the past 4 years the New York City Department of Records has been compiling an online database made up of rare photographs of "the greatest city on earth," and now that database is available to the public. The compilation consists of over 870,000 photos ranging in subject matter from landmarks to crime scenes put together from a Municipal Archives collection of over 2.2 million photos.

Portraits of Famous People Shot Using Various Photographic Techniques

Washington DC-based photographer Sam Hurd has a series titled "Epic Portraits" that consists of portraits of famous individuals captured using techniques such as the Brenizer method, freelensing, and compositing. What's neat is that each photograph has its own behind-the-scenes page detailing how it was created (the gear, goal, vision, story, and lesson learned).

Skywalking: A Dangerous New Photo Fad Popular Among Russian Teens

If you're afraid of heights you may want to look away, and you should certainly never make friends with these daredevil photographers from Russia. We here in the U.S. have memes, young Russian photographers, it seems, have "skywalking": the newest extremely dangerous photography fad to hit the Internet.

Almost (I’ll Make Ya) Famous

One year ago today I took a photograph that would change my life. A single frame turned my whole world upside down, and brought on a storm of media attention, praise, criticism, confusion, wonder, and doubt. After one hell of a ride this past year, I think today is a good day to finally tell this photo's story...

Descriptive Camera: An Instant Camera that Prints Text Instead of Photos

Many photographers enjoy receiving feedback about their created images. Services such as Flickr and even Instagram are built at least partially around sharing your images and, hopefully, receiving some comments and praise in return. There's something fascinating about having your work interpreted though someone else's lens, and when Matt Richardson invented his "Descriptive Camera" he kept this in mind.

Double Exposures of Nature Blooming Through Portraits of Young Women

Buried inside photographer Jon Duenas' extensive portfolio are a set of double exposures that seem to focus on the theme of nature blooming through portraits of young women. Sometimes the technique itself is novel; such was the case with the mix of light paining and bullet time we posted yesterday. But that doesn't mean that a photography technique that has been used time and again can't still produce fresh, unique, and inspirational results.

Connecticut Bill Could Make Police Liable for Interfering with Photographers

In the past year -- and especially with the growth of the "occupy" movement -- police interfering with photographers or pedestrians trying to snap a photo of them has been in the news quite a lot. Just yesterday we reported on the Olympics' security guards who landed in hot water after harassing photogs shooting from public land. In the past, this was no problem, as police officers had little to fear in way of personal liability when they interfered; however, a new Connecticut bill -- the first of its kind -- may soon change that.

Gear Doesn’t Matter — Except When It Does

If you follow any part of the photographic blogosphere, you’ve heard folks repeat this mantra over and over and over again: “Gear doesn’t matter.”

The basic premise of that dictum is as follows: making great pictures is about the photographer, not the camera or the lens or any other piece of gear. A good photographer can make a great image with a point-and-shoot that an amateur armed with a Nikon D4 and an 85mm f/1.4 lens can’t match.

Stealthy Street Photography by the Czech Secret Police

In the 1970s and 80s the Czechoslovak secret police, among other things, were charged with surveying the population without their consent or, for that matter, knowledge. Taking pictures from under coats or inside suitcases, the secret police kept tabs on the goings on of the general public. And while the act itself is voyeuristic and creepy, the pictures turned out surprisingly well.

Woman Aims to Meet and Photograph Her 626 Facebook Friends in Real Life

After amassing 626 friends on Facebook two years ago, Tanja Hollander began to wonder how many of them were actually friends in the conventional sense. She then set out to answer the question by meeting each one of them and photographing them in their homes. The portraits are published on a website set up for the project, titled The Facebook Portrait Project, and each photo includes some information about the subject and their relationship to Hollander.

Canon Defends 5D Mark III, Claims “Light Leak” Doesn’t Affect the Captured Image

Over the last couple of weeks we've covered every aspect of the Canon 5D Mark III "light leak" issue. Starting initially as a rumor, Canon eventually confirmed that the camera's top LCD did, in fact, alter the exposure reading by 1/3 of a stop in dark environments. A week ago the company even put shipments on hold while they investigated the issue more extensively.