May 2012

Yesterday we shared some new sample photos published by Google showing what its …

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.

Recently I got an email from a young photographer asking me about the career of being a still life/food photographer.

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 Wyoming handling calls from the media.

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 …

Here’s an interesting video in which street photographer John Free shares a system …

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 bleeding. But now it seems they're ready to fight back.

Feast your eyes on this amazing stop motion music video idea for the song “Rivers and Homes” by electronic …

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 …

There are already options available for those people who want to use Leica …

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 can stick to just about any metal surface.

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 …

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 …

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 …

From Love to Bingo in 873 Images is an amazing short film created by …

4K video is the realm of high end cinematography gear right? Maybe not. Two new 16MP sensors …

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,

Like many interesting scientific discoveries, this one was an accident. Sean Murphy, an undergraduate student, was working alone in the lab on a set of faces for one of his experiments. He aligned a set of faces at the eyes and started to skim through them. After a few seconds, he noticed that some of the faces began to appear highly deformed and grotesque. He looked at the especially ugly faces individually, but each of them appeared normal or even attractive.