May 2012

When Hamburg, Germany-based photographer Florian Bison first saw a video of parkour, he was mesmerized by the concept and curious as to how he could integrate it into a photography project. That's when he came up with the Double Gravity series, a mixture of real and parkour/camera created gravity. The video above offers a behind-the-scenes look at how he created the final product, which was shot using a Nikon D700 with a Nikkor 24-70mm F/2.8 lens and a Pocket Wizard triggered Profoto B2 with …

After discovering that multiple websites had used one of his photos without permission, photographer Jay Lee began sending out DMCA takedown notifications to web hosts in an attempt to protect his copyright. One of the websites was owned by a woman named Candice Schwager, who had 14 of her sites temporarily taken offline as a result of the takedown request. Turns out Schwager is involved in both helping represent special needs children and helping a man named Louis Guthrie get elected as County …

If you think 14fps on a high end DSLR is fast, check out this video by Mike's Electric Stuff. In it, he does an extreme teardown of a cheap Panasonic Lumix compact camera and spends 30 minutes exploring and explaining the various components.

Hovering somewhere between "novel idea" and "pointlessly stupid," InstaCRT is a new iOS app that bills itself as "the world's first real camera filter." Photographs processed through the app are given a CRT monitor look that doesn't involve any digital fakery. Instead, your photo is actually sent to the creators' machine located in Stockholm, Sweden, where it's displayed on a tiny CRT monitor and then photographed by a DSLR. The new photo is then beamed back to your phone in less than a minute.

Since November 2011 I’d been thinking about an astrophotography project: take a photo of the moon each day from full moon to full moon, then combine it into a seamless movie that looks as if someone had moved the sun around the moon for one minute. I found similar videos, but most were simulations done in software, or photographic ones that weren’t very smooth. Seemed simple enough, mostly because I didn’t see the complications that would come along with this project caused by... physics.

For her most recent exhibition, Brooklyn-based Dutch photographer Anouk Kruithof wanted to do something revolutionary, to change the way we experience the typical art exhibit -- thus was born her exhibit "Untitled: I've Taken Too Many Photos, I've Never Taken Any Photos."

Life Backwards is a beautiful short by Ryan Jay and Alexander Shahmiri showing life on the streets of San Francisco moving in reverse.

It's strange to think that cartography laws could somehow affect the functionality of your camera overseas, but a recent article on Ogle Earth points out that just such a thing has been going on with GPS-enabled cameras as far back as 2010. The whole "investigation" into the matter began with the release of the Panasonic TS4 earlier this year. For some reason the press release cautioned that the GPS in the camera "may not work in China or in the border regions of countries neighboring China." …

It happens every time you press the shutter. Tiny circuits spring into action and furiously record the information from every sensor pixel onto your memory card. But pixel information is not all that is recorded. With every shutter press, your camera records dozens of interesting details about how the photo was taken. These details are tucked away deep inside the labyrinth of code that comprises your photo file. Photo editing softwares, such as Photoshop or Lightroom, can unlock some of this …

This amazing image has been going viral on the Internet, usually accompanied with the caption: …

Yesterday we shared some new sample photos published by Google showing what its Project Glass prototype camera glasses are currently capable of. The video above is the first sample video captured using the glasses, and is a short 15-second clip showing a first person view of someone doing flips on a trampoline. With current cameras, the only way to achieve this kind of hands-free footage would be to use some kind of (relatively) unwieldy camera strapped to the head or body (e.g. a GoPro mounted …

I try to stay involved as much as I can with students studying photography at different institutions in the area. Every year I go back to RIT and do a lecture on the business of photography and I feel it's important that I do so.

Caleb and Candra Pence had a couple unexpected guests crash their wedding in Kansas last Saturday: tornadoes! The two twisters touched down roughly 10 miles away during the ceremony but -- luckily for everyone involved -- were not moving. Wedding photographer Cate Eighmey took advantage of the rare situation by having the newlyweds pose with the twisters in the background. The resulting photographs have taken the Internet by storm (haha, get it?), and the Pences have spent their honeymoon in …

Google Glass team member Max Braun took to the stage at the Google+ Photography Conference yesterday to show off a prototype device, talk about the project's potential impact in photography, and show off some new sample photographs.

Using keyboard shortcuts while editing your photos can save you loads of time, and cheat sheets are a good way of learning them. If you're too lazy to print one out or save one as an image on your computer, there's an app called CheatSheet that's designed just for you. It's a free Mac App that runs silently in the background. Whenever you hold down the Command (⌘) key for ~3 seconds, it brings up a complete list of command shortcuts offered by whatever app you're currently using. We've tested …

Here's an interesting video in which street photographer John Free shares a system he's developed to take the confusion and guesswork out of practicing street photography, called "the five Fs". He says that contrary to popular belief, it's not about "seeing": …

When it comes to photography agencies, Getty Images reigns supreme. Founded in 1995 by Mark Getty and Jonathan Klein, the Seattle-based behemoth in many ways took stock and editorial photography into the digital age, causing the slow decline of "former-rulers" like the AP. Between Getty's editorial supremacy and the rise of an era where photojournalists find themselves replaced sometimes by average Joe's with smartphones, the last few years have consisted mostly of the AP trying to staunch the …

Feast your eyes on this amazing stop motion music video idea for the song "Rivers and Homes" by electronic music artist J.Views. After filming a traditional music video in upstate New York, the production team had 2000 of the individual frames printed out. The prints were then distributed during a recent tour in Israel to 300 fans, who held them up and posed for new photographs. The resulting photographs were then re-animated into a video showing the original music video running in stop motion …

Many consider Robert Frank's classic photobook "The Americans" (originally published in France as "Les Américains") to be one of the greatest photobooks of all time. Knowing this, Mishka Henner should have probably thought twice before using it as the subject of one of his forays into digital appropriation and, in this case, erasure.

If you've never really understood conceptual art, the video above will only serve to confuse and frustrate you more. Purple eccentric dinosaur eating mayo. If you've never heard of John Baldessari, the video above will bring you up to speed. Baldessari is an internationally renowned conceptual artist who's known for using found photography and appropriated images in his work. Photographer Cindy Sherman counts him as one of her biggest influences. The short documentary above gives a brief …

There are already options available for those people who want to use Leica lenses with their Fujifilm X-Pro1, but for those of you who prefer to use only equipment from your camera manufacturer themselves, you now have that option as well. The new M-Mount adapter from Fujifilm, priced at $199, will be available sometime in June and brings with it compatibility with Leica's wide range of high-end M Lenses. Fuji will also be releasing a firmware update alongside the M-Mount adapter in order to …

The Portrait Project is a series of 10 stitched portraits by London-based artist Evelin Kasikov. Each portrait is created with an actual Polaroid picture as the starting point, and is based on the same grid. The idea is similar to pointillism, but instead of dots she uses squares, crosses, and lines of different colors and weights. 10-15 feet of cotton thread does into each piece, and stitching them takes between two days and a week to complete.

Huge news came out of the Facebook universe today with little to no warning: Facebook has launched its own camera app. Seemingly out of nowhere, the social networking giant has launched its own "Facebook Camera" camera app that, of course, connects directly to your Facebook account, making it that much easier to take, upload, tag, and comment on your photos.

Tripods are great, even necessary for a lot of photographic situations, but one thing they are not is pocket-sized. Amateur photographers especially will often find themselves within reach of their camera, but too far from their tripods; and if you're just a photography enthusiast who likes to snap photos just about everywhere you go, forget carting around a tripod. That's the dilema Matthew Baty found himself in, and so he developed the Statc, an ultra-portable magnetic tripod head that you …

At first glance, photographer Timothy Pakron's "Silver Print" series of portraits might look like ink paintings or some kind of CG art. They're actually photographs created by hand painting developer onto photo paper in the darkroom instead of immersing the paper entirely in the solution.

Not many wedding photographers get to shoot a wedding portrait that receives over one million Facebook likes, and not many more go to a wedding expecting to shoot a graduation party. But that's the story of photographers Noah Kalina and Allyson Magda, and their experience shooting Mark Zuckerberg and Pricilla Chan's secret wedding.

Digital Camera World magazine created this handy free infographic showing the color temperature scale and where various preset white balance settings are found in it. You can download the full version here.

Over the last couple of days Google has been hosting the "Hangout In Real Life" Google+ Photographers Conference in San Francisco, and if anything has come out of the conference at all, it's that Google is intent on making Google+ the photo sharing service of the future.

Back in 2010, San Diego-based photographer Adam Elmakias launched a geeky fashionable line of gel bracelets based on various lenses. The Lens Bracelets took the web by storm, and now Elmakias is back with a new and improved "pro series" lineup of bracelets that are much more faithful representations of actual lenses by Canon, Nikon, Leica, and Zeiss. The new bracelets are based off $25K+ worth of popular cameras lenses, and are more detailed and more durable than the previous version.

Jack Robinson was a quiet man who mostly kept to himself, which explains why it was his boss, Dan Oppenheimer, who was left to take care of his estate when he passed. Little did Oppenheimer realize, however, that when he opened the closet in Jack Robinson's incredibly tidy apartment, he would find a collection of pristine portraits of celebrities that Robinson shot in his early days as a commercial photographer for Vogue.

The Staples Center in Los Angeles is the official home of two NBA basketball teams (the Lakers and Clippers) and an NHL hockey team (the Kings). All three teams are competing in their respective playoffs this year, and between May 17th and May 20th the arena hosted 6 games. This meant that the interior had to be broken down and set up for each team and each sport. The crazy time-lapse video above shows the six transformations in 1.5 minutes.

Kodak has been selling off its assets left and right as it tries to dig itself out of its financial hole. Most recently, it "successfully" sold its Gallery business to Shutterfly. But Kodak's most prized possession, and the sale it was hoping to make up the most ground with, is its massive collection of patents split into two portfolios.

Canadian fashion model Coco Rocha is quite talented at "freestyling" poses, or doing a bunch of useable poses off the top of her head in rapid succession. Last year a video showing Rocha doing 50 poses in 30 seconds went viral on the web. The video above shows her doing 19 "action poses" in just 30 seconds for a fashion cover shoot. Who knew modeling required so much cardio?

Chinese government officials never seem to learn. If you've been following us for a while, you may remember the Chinese government's Photoshop fail from last year, where three officials were supposedly inspecting a road, but instead looked more like they were floating above it. And on May 9th five more government inspectors were immortalized floating around, this time inspecting a park.

After announcing plans to stop production of APS last July, the time has finally come to say goodbye to Fuji's Advanced Photo System film. The 24mm cartridge film hasn't been a big seller for some time, and after Kodak stopped production last year it was only a matter of time before it disappeared for good. And even though (metaphorically speaking) there probably won't be a long line of mourners at the APS funeral, at the very least the film's memory will live on in the APS-C sensor format that …

From Love to Bingo in 873 Images is an amazing short film created by AlmapBBDO to advertise Getty Images. The team spent 6 months sifting through 5,000 Getty stock photographs to create this beautiful 1-minute story that shows 873 images at 15 images per second. And you thought flipping through your own personal photo archives was difficult...

4K video is the realm of high end cinematography gear right? Maybe not. Two new 16MP sensors announced yesterday by OmniVision may be bringing smooth 4K video technology to everything from compacts to smartphones. The sensors, which are the tiny 1/2.3-inch format, can record 4K (3840 x 2160) video at 60fps, or even higher resolution (4608 x 3456) at 30fps.

Dreamland is a series of diptychs by Italian photographer Francesca Guadagnini that's based around the simple question "where would you like to live?". Guadagnini shot portraits of the subjects and then photos of their answers as well, creating images that offer a small peek into the brain and personality of each person.

Artist Thomas Allen creates vintage scenes by cutting up pulp fiction book covers and turning them into dioramas. He also uses depth of field and lighting to add an extra dimension to the scenes.

If you ever create a slideshow of portraits, you might want to avoid showing them aligned side-by-side with a gap in between. The video above shows a crazy optical illusion that researchers have dubbed the "Flashed Face Distortion Effect". By flashing ordinary portraits aligned at the eyes, the human brain begins to compare and exaggerate the differences, causing the faces to seem hideous and ogre-like. Researcher Matthew Thompson writes, …

Pancake lenses are becoming quite popular in the industry, especially with smaller mirrorless cameras, as their small form factor allows for greater portability. Canon will soon be jumping onto the pancake bandwagon with its EF line of lenses. Canon Rumors reports that Canon will be announcing a small, thin, and light EF 40mm f/2.8 pancake lens that should cost less than $300. Expect to see the lens announced next month along with the new Rebel T4i and a new EF-S 18-135mm IS II lens.

"Blind Self-Portrait" is a project by artists Kyle McDonald and Matt Mets that's based around a machine that can help you turn photographs into sketches. The machine constantly track's the subject's face using a camera and translates the image into a line-drawing and x- and y-coordinates. The user then rests their hand on the machine's "hand" and presses a pen into a piece of paper. The robot hand does the rest of the work, guiding the hand into drawing the photograph as the person sits back …

Pentax has officially announced its new K-30 DSLR, a mid-level weather-sealed camera that's geared towards active outdoor photographers. In addition to its durable build, the camera features a 16MP APS-C sensor, 6fps burst mode, speed autofocus with 9/11 cross-type points, in-camera stabilization (4 stops), 60fps Live View, an optical viewfinder with 100% coverage, a 3-inch LCD screen, dual electronic diables, 1080p HD video recording, ISO 100-12800 (expandable to 25600), and three body colors …

Are you so bad at photography that all your photographs are completely overexposed to the point of pure white? Good news: there may yet be artistic hope for you. The Hayward Gallery in London is planning to mount an "Emperor's New Clothes"-style exhibition titled "Invisible", which will only feature artwork that can't be seen. Pieces include Tom Friedman's "1000 Hours of Staring" (shown above) -- a blank sheet of paper that the artist stared at for hours upon hours over the course of five years …

Back in 2010, street artist JR won the $100,000 TED Prize to continue his massive photographic street installations. He then started the Inside Out project to encourage people around the world to use giant posters of portraits to "connect communities, make change, and turn the world inside out." The video above shows a talk JR gave at TED earlier this month to report on how the project is going and how it's changing the world.

Germany-based freelance photographer Michael Hughes is an avid traveler and has visited over 200 countries. Throughout his travels, he has been working on a running photo series in which he places souvenirs found at various locations into shots of the tourist locations themselves. The famous landmarks in his photographs are replaced with miniature models, pen holders, and even paper cups.

When photographer Robert Johnson of Business Insider was denied so much as a tour of the Alberta Oil Sands, he could have given up. Instead he chose a more... aerial approach, renting a Cessna 172 to secretly photograph the secretive operation from just over 1,000 feet.

Nokia made quite a splash earlier this year by unveiling the PureView 808 -- a smartphone with a large 41-megapixel sensor and a high quality Carl Zeiss lens. The 8-minute behind-the-scenes video above -- filmed entirely with the phone, by the way -- is the story of how this device was born, starting from a napkin sketch in a Tokyo bar. Nokia is currently the world's largest manufacturer of cameras, and devoted 400 employees toward the creation of the PureView 808.

When photographer Ian Spanier was assigned to shoot 4-time Mr. Olympia Jay Cutler at his home in Vegas, the budget wouldn't allow him to hire an assistant. Still, this was an important shoot, the editor of Muscular Development had stuck his neck out to get him this gig, and he wanted to do as good a job as possible. So instead of depending on natural light, or shooting with a standard top mount flash, he decided to hack together something better.

Depending on your subject matter, it can be a very good idea to take out a damage waiver when renting camera equipment. Wildlife photographer Andrew Kane learned this recently after renting gear from LensRentals for a shoot in Yellowstone. Here's his account of how the borrowed equipment ended up broken: …