Burning House is a series of photographs by artist Carrie Schneider that shows a small white house burning on an island in the middle of a lake. While the subject matter might not be too out of the ordinary, glance through the images and you'll soon find that the house appears to be perpetually on fire throughout the seasons.
Just over a month after making headlines with their $1 billion Instagram acquisition, Facebook have now made another power move towards their now obvious goal of interstellar domination photo-sharing supremacy. This time their target was the seven-person team behind the popular Android photo sharing app Lightbox. Unlike with Instagram, Facebook isn't acquiring the company; instead they're simply absorbing the Lightbox Team. According to their blog, Lightbox is no longer accepting sign-ups and …
Last year we featured a neat little origami camera created using a dollar bill by Won Park. If you've been dying to know how to fold one yourself, today's your lucky day. Be warned though: isn't definitely not an origami project for beginners.
Well, whether or not you agree with the Gizmodo post we featured yesterday, Flickr continues to add improvements to try and make itself more appealing to existing users and, perhaps, some older users that have moved on to other sharing options. Their newest improvement has to do yet again with photo sizes, only this time it's not the maximum display resolution in the lightbox, but rather how Flickr are bringing that same resolution to regular photo pages.
9 out of 10 adults in America believe that people are over-sharing sensitive personal information.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is planning on becoming more invested in photos and video with the next iterations of iCloud and, subsequently, iOS. The updates, which are expected to be announced officially at the WWDC starting June 11th, will include the addition of video synching similar to the current photo stream alongside some exciting photo-sharing capabilities.
London-based advertising and art photographer Atton Conrad does some pretty interesting mixing of fashion and light painting photography. He has done a number of images for magazines and ad campaigns that feature models wearing dresses manufactured from light rather than fabric. For each fo the images, Conrad paints the dress around the model in a blacked-out studio while remotely triggering the camera.
For those of us who remember it, Flickr was once an amazing place. More than just a website or a bucket of features, it was a vibrant community made up by professional photographers and amateur photo junkies alike. Before Facebook would even allow you to upload anything more than a profile picture, Flickr was the place you went to share your life in pictures. And then, at least according to an article on Gizmodo, Yahoo! happened.
If you've been browsing Facebook on your mobile device today you may have noticed something was different. That's because just yesterday the social-networking giant took a few tips from their recent acquisition Instagram by making the photos on both their mobile applications and mobile website up to three times larger. Individual posts and photos now show up using the width of the whole screen (as seen above) and even photo albums include much larger previews than before, helping you to decide …
Sadly the gravy train has left the station, at least where the Nikon D4 is concerned. In the past, D4 owners were pleasantly surprised when they opened up their treasured new possession to find that Nikon had thrown in a complimentary 16GB XQD card and reader, but no more.
Don't mess with Marc Jacobs. That's the lesson graffiti artists should take from a teensy little altercation between Marc Jacobs and the infamous graffiti artist Kidult. When Marc Jacobs employees awoke to a vandalized Soho boutique the morning after the Met Ball, they snapped a few photos before starting to clean it up. But instead of just stopping there and moving on, Marc Jacobs decided instead to turn the whole thing on its head, slap the photo on a t-shirt, and sell it with the caption …
This music video for the song "Solidified" by Gramatik features an interesting technique: custom bokeh shapes that move. We've featured creative bokeh techniques in the past, but they've all focused on floating words or static shapes. Director Brad Hasse went a step further by having his monster silhouettes in the out-of-focus light points move around and sing along. The technique involves placing tiny monster cutouts directly in front of fast lenses that are racked out of focus.
The image above is one-hundred percent fake. It has no connection whatsoever to the world of things. I created the bolts, lights, textures, and everything else in a free, open-source, relatively easy-to-use software package called Blender. It's easy enough that even a novice user like me is able to make a pretty convincing image. If you are a photographer that makes a living shooting still-life photos, this should scare you.
Beauty may only be skin deep, but apparently it's also scientifically measurable. At least that's what Lorraine Cosmetics was banking on when they put together the Britain-wide beauty contest "Lorraine: Naked." Contestants, who were not allowed to have had any plastic surgery, were asked to send in a photo with no makeup on, and after many different symmetry tests, input from experts and a nationwide vote over the top three, Florence Colgate emerged victorious.
Here's a humorous infographic by social marketing blog Flowtown on some common characteristics of Instagram fanatics.
Large portrait taking gigs can be a bit of a nightmare. If you're taking multiple portraits of a few hundred people, trying to sort through those and organize them so that they're easily found is no walk in the park. Fortunately, you can find an automatic solution to this problem on Robert Bieber's photo blog Bieber Photographic.
Digital camera sensors come in two flavors, charge couple device (CCD) sensors and complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) sensors. In this video, Bill Hammack the Engineer Guy offers a short explanation of how CCD sensors capture and store images, and how a color filter array is used to capture color photos.
NASA astronaut Don Pettit shot this beautiful long exposure photograph showing star trails and city trails from the International Space Station. The image was created by combining 18 separate long-exposure photographs.
The DIA Parrot by Nodesign really sort of defies explanation. Even the press release, which should ideally describe the product the best, seemed to be lost for words:
Many photographers, especially those who used to shoot film, still enjoy the feedback and control offered by fully manual lenses. The only problem with using these lenses in the digital age is that modern camera bodies don't recognize them and therefore add no EXIF lens data to your images; adding that data up until now required you to install a command line tool such as ExifTool and learn complicated prompts. But now there's an easier way to make these changes happen inside of Lightroom.
To celebrate the end of the school year, the photojournalism students at Western Kentucky University created this music video for a song titled "Camera Hang Low" by Benny Sevs feat. the F-Stopz. It asks the important question that every serious photographer needs to answer: "Do ya camera hang low?".
Prior to the fancy graphics video game players enjoy today, classic games were based on simple geometric forms. German photographer Patrick Runte decided to do a quirky photo project exploring what these games might look like if translated to the real world. His series, titled Jump 'N' Run, shows people dressed in simple costumes of "characters" from games like Pac-Man, Pong, and Tetris.
Photographer Christian DeBaun of Charlottesville, Virginia captured this photograph that shows six living generations of daughters. The oldest is 111-year-old Mollie Wood, who was born in 1901. The youngest is 7-week-old Braylin Higgins. You can find more images from this photo shoot here.
In sharp contrast to the Leica way of doing things by hand, Canon has just announced that it is planning on completely eliminating the need for a human production line as early as 2015. So while your future Leica M10 will still be completely hand-made (with a price tag to match), your future 5D Mark IV (or maybe Mark VI by then) will be entirely robot-made.
PetaPixel is now a three-year-old blog. Our readership has continued to grow at a healthy rate over the past year, and recently we even added our first full time writer, DL Cade (if you follow this blog regularly then you've already seen plenty of his work). We've had a blast bringing you all the most interesting tidbits from the world of photography on a daily basis.
Metamorphose is a project by photographer Frederic Fontenoy that consists of slit-scan self portraits created in outdoor locations. The technique produces an effect that makes his body look like it's metamorphosing into some other life form.
Slow-motion video is usually the territory of expensive equipment like the Miro M120. Alternatively, if you're not looking to shoot professionally, you can always take the video you capture on your phone or regular camera and slow it down, but the results are usually choppy and (sadly) nothing you'd want to broadcast on YouTube. Fortunately, there is another way; iPhone videographers who own the 4S now have a free, fun alternative in a new app called SloPro.
Want to see how the world's most expensive camera was auctioned this past Saturday? The video above shows the 1923 Leica O-Series going up at the WestLicht Photographica Auction and being sold at the record-breaking price of $2.79 million after auction fees and tax. WestLicht points out that these cameras have been appreciating like crazy in recent years: the first sold in 2007 for $440K and a second sold in 2011 for $1.9M before this most recent auction. Each of the auctions set a new world …
Many words and/or phrases come to mind when you think of Kodak: photography, disposable camera, Kodak moment, and more recently bankruptcy. But we never thought we would be able to associate the phrases "nuclear reactor" and "enriched uranium" with the once-great photography giant -- until recently that is. That's because a few months ago a former Kodak employee let slip to the Democrat and Chronicle the existance of a little known, and never publicized, nuclear reactor hidden in the bowels of …
Here's a humorous short film titled "Smile" by director Dean Fleischer-Camp, who regularly asks people to pose for a photograph but then secretly records video instead. It shows how poses that look so natural in still photographs can look so completely awkward in videos.
David Shankbone (real name David Miller) has been called "arguably the most influential new media photojournalist in the world." And if you've never heard of him you may wonder: How did he achieve such a status? How did he get his work published by The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Forbest all while his actual day job isn't even as a photographer? He did it all by giving away his photography for free.
Italian designer Tommaso Guerra is known for transforming various objects into household design items. The wall-mounted swiveling lamp above was created using a 35mm camera, with a lamp shade as the lens shade. More photos here.
It looks like not even space photography has managed to escape the pixel war, but in the case of the Russian Federal Space Agency's Elektro-L weather satellite, we're not complaining. The video you see above is a time lapse put together from 6 days worth of 121-megapixel images taken every 30 minutes by the satellite. The images themselves are not composites of several either, they are just incredibly detailed photos of the entire planet taken from some 22 thousand miles away.
Tim Noble and Sue Webster are a London-based artist duo that creates amazing shadow art installations using carefully arranged objects. They use everything from trash to metal cans shot with BB pellets, arranged to cast shadows of people and skylines on the wall when a light is shined from a certain direction.
A team led by photographer Michael Forsberg and NET Television project manager Michael Farrell recently embarked on a large-scale time lapse project the likes of which you don't usually see. The project, which you can follow on their website, constitutes an attempt to visually document the Platte River -- a long-standing source of water and power to a large part of the United States.
Continuous lights aren't used as often when shooting stills, but for those of you who enjoy using your SLR to shoot the occasional (or more than occasional) video, this cheap DIY ring light may be worth a shot. If you're going to attempt it, know in advance that you'll need to have a little bit of DIY savvy and a few tools handy (a soldering iron and a dremel tool), but as long as you're not afraid to get your hands dirty and do some basic electrical work, the final product seems to work pretty …
About a week ago Adobe sent CS5 users on a rampage when they not only announced the existence of eight "critical" vulnerabilities (split between Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash Professional), but also told users that they would have to upgrade to CS6 if they wanted a fix. Users of CS5 and CS5.5 were understandably outraged, but fortunately Adobe were listening this time and just yesterday changed their tune.
If you're the kind of person who hates expensive collectors items then you may want to look away; because a 1923 Leica O-Series just set a new world record and became the most expensive camera ever sold. The price? Approximately $2.79 million after tax. The funny thing is that the exact same model (there are 12 of the original 25 left in existence today) set the previous world record of $1.89 million last year at the exact same WestLicht Photographica Auction. And when you consider that the …
Admittedly, lighting tutorials are pretty common these days; but when it comes to a subject as vast as proper lighting in the studio, more info can't hurt. This 10 minute tutorial from The Slanted Lens by Jay P. Morgan runs you through the differences between octaboxes/octadomes and the traditional softbox, when it might be beneficial to use one over the other, and how to choose the proper octabox lighting setup to fit your needs. All pretty useful info if you ask us.
It goes without saying that nobody should ever test their camera's limits where durability is concerned (so please, don't try any of this at home); but in the interest of science (or lunacy?) someone volunteered their Canon 7D and asked the folks over at DigitalRev to see just how much the camera could really take before it gave up its digital ghost.
The focus shifter -- which, for now, is also going by the name "lens shifter" -- is a simple, lens-mounted, adjustable follow focus that works by attaching to the focus ring on lenses between 56 and 98mm in diameter. Using the attachable marker board you can then mark your focus and transition points in advance, shifting between them with ease when the time comes.
In this first episode of LitUp -- a series by [F]Network that is attempting to de-mystify the world of studio lighting -- photographer Joel Grimes takes you through his journey as he discovered how to properly manipulate and use light in his photography. The short video covers many areas: from drawing from different sources of inspiration (his came from Rembrandt), to how one should choose modifiers, to using continuous light sources for HDR photography and more.
Host Faas, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning AP combat photographer, passed away in Munich, Germany on Thursday May 10th. Best known for his striking work in Vietnam, he was perhaps one of the most famous combat photographers to date. More than just a photographer, though, Horst Faas was also an avid teacher of the art, and a photo editor who wouldn't take no for an answer.
A while back people were pretty disappointed when they found out that Nokia would not be bringing their 41-megapixel 808 PureView smartphone to North America at all. All megapixel race arguments aside, a lot of people wanted to give the camera a shot and see what those 41 million pixels could really do. Well, it looks like Nokia haven't entirely given up on the United States after all.
This video is actually part of a project called To Catch a Bike Thief -- which is trying to raise awareness about and, of course, prevent bike theft. This particular experiment was their way of doing some "aerial surveillance" of the area on a budget, but regardless of whether they achieved that goal, they did get some awesome aerial footage using only some wood, balloons and a fishing line rated at 20lbs. Viewers be advised that there is a little bit of cursing towards the beginning of the …
Those of you who were hoping that all of the Facebook/Instagram acquisition talk would end may not get a respite as soon as we thought. Although the original acquisition papers from Facebook stated that they would try to close the deal in Q2, a rumored Federal Trade Commission (FTC) competition probe may delay that closure by up to a year.
Hidden in-between all of the camera announcements from Leica at their May 10th event, was a lens that made quite a stir. At 50mm and f/2.0 the new Leica APO-Summicron-M ASPH lens doesn't seem like anything to write home about; and with a price tag of almost $8,700 it falls a bit outside most consumers' price range.
Photographer Jon Meyers has shot many different subjects at his studio in Eugene, Oregon; but the birds of the Cascades Raptor Center were a first. Fortunately, he and his videographer friend Michael Ferry chose to record this unique photo shoot and put together a behind-the-scenes video for anybody interested in how capturing a hawk mid-flight in-studio might work. Plus, it makes for a good way to start off a great weekend.
Learning to play a game and learning to use Photoshop follow two, very different patterns. In the first you "discover" how the game is played, you fiddle with the buttons, try combinations, have eureka moments and eventually become proficient at it. Learning Photoshop, on the other hand, requires extensive tutorials and help; books are available from thin "easy-to-use" instruction books to heavy tomes many hundreds of pages long.
If you pay close attention to presidents, or money (or preferably both in this case) you may have noticed that one particular famous photo of President Abraham Lincoln taken in 1864 was the inspiration for the photo we now see on the five dollar bill. But you may have also noticed that the President's mole is on the wrong side of his face on the money. Well actually it isn't, the "mirror image" on the five dollar bill shows the President as he was in real life. The original photo, taken using …
