We've by no means reached the limits of flash and hard drive storage capabilities, and newer WiFi capabilities open up a seemingly unlimited amount of cloud storage, but a group of researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland have taken the term "cloud" a bit literally. They've managed to store and retrieve two sequential images in a cloud of rubidium atoms.
After seeing some elegant black picture frames with brass edges in a designer magazine, Courtney of A Thoughtful Place realized that she could create the same look on the cheap by using some plain painter's tape and a can of brass spray paint. The project takes a couple hours to complete and a few dollars in supplies, and is a thrifty way to add a dash of style to your home if you don't want to shell out money for pricey frames.
If you live in the US and are used to selling cameras to overseas customers -- or if you live overseas and like to buy your cameras from US retailers -- your shipping choices just got a bit slimmer. In a statement released earlier, the US Postal Service (USPS) said that they will no longer be shipping any items with li-ion batteries in them internationally starting May 16th, declaring the batteries a "fire hazard". Lithium batteries power many personal electronic devices and have been found to …
You can light up particles in the air for a snazzy effect. The photos in this post were done by shining a powerful focused light into the air in various weather conditions during a long exposure. You need a light source that outputs some major power to pull off the effect. I used a Coast HP21 and a 3000 lumen Stanley spotlight for these shots. The photo above was shot while it was snowing.
Having released three (count em') new cameras yesterday, you'd think Leica would be spent; but it looks like they had one other camera up their sleeves, a special edition of their M9-P called the "Edition Hermès." If the name sounds familiar that's because it is: every few years Leica announces an "Edition Hermès" of one of their cameras in collaboration with Parisian house Hermès -- only this year they've also decided to include a making of video to go along with it.
Camera hoarder Stacie Grissom of Stars for Streetlights received a massive collection of old cameras from her uncle a couple years ago. She soon discovered that she wouldn't possibly have time to use all of them, so she took a few of the neglected and worn down ones and made a one-of-a-kind lamp for her home. The cameras were turned into the lamp base using a pipe and some cold weld, and the lamp shade was made using color slide film. If you have some broken cameras lying around and want to …
There have been a lot of rumors over the last month or two regarding Canon's imminent entry into the mirrorless world; and it now seems that we won't have to wait much longer before finding out. According to Canon Rumors, the new camera with its rumored APS-C sensor and 18-45mm kit lens could be announced before summer even starts. Canon's executive vice president Toshizo Tanaka was also quoted recently as saying, …
If you've ever been to the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy, you've probably seen the countless tourists standing around with their hands in the air, pretending to push the tower of (or hold it up) in forced perspective photos. Prankster Darius Groza decided to take advantage of this unique tourist tradition by photobombing the pictures with high fives.
We really enjoy DIY projects for photographers, and as such we've featured everything from the ultra simple to complex light-painting robots. But what excites us about Instructables' DIY tilt-shift adapter isn't just the durable plunger adapter you end up with, but rather the idea that one could manufacture their own camera accessories with a little bit of design skill and a 3D printer (check out Shapeways if you don't have one sitting around).
1 to 100 Years Project is an awesome portrait project by Belgian photographer Edouard Janssens in which he photographed 100 women and 100 men at each age between 1 and 100. His goal was to show the aging process in a positive manner and to provide an interesting visualization of the link between generations. He didn't handpick the subjects either -- all the participants volunteered through the project's website (excluding the kids, of course).
After dipping its toes in Apple's Mac App Store last July by offering Photoshop Elements, Adobe has now jumped in headfirst by listing its professional-caliber program, Lightroom 4. The download costs $150 and tips the scales at 388MB. Adobe might be a giant company, but it gets charged the same commission as any other developer: for every copy sold through the App Store, Apple pockets a cool $45.
Instacanvas is a new service that helps Instagram users make money by selling their photographs as canvas wall art. Users can display their images through the "online gallery space" on the site, and sell their images to buyers as canvas prints without having to do any extra work. Instacanvas acts as the middle man, doing all the printing and shipping, and takes a 20 percent commission from sales. The prints start at $40 for a 12x12-inch canvas and go up to $80 for a 20x20-inch one.
Wonderful idea alert: to document the growth of her son, Reddit user dittidot faithfully snapped a photograph of him on his first day of school for thirteen years, from kindergarten through the end of high school. After he left for college, she lined up all the photographs for this awesome visualization showing him "growing up" (click here for a larger version).
The M Monochrom B&W rangefinder wasn't the only camera Leica unveiled today -- the company also announced two new models in its compact camera lineup. The first is the X2, successor to the X1 of 2009. It's an APS-C sensor camera that features 16.2-megapixels, a fixed 24mm Elmarit f/2.8 ASPH lens, a 2.7-inch LCD screen, and a hefty $2,000 price tag.
Have some slide film sitting around and no slide projector to show them off with? Diapod is a tiny product designed for you. It's a simple and lightweight slide projector that uses a tabletop tripod, aluminum body, and LED light to project your slide film photos.
Destin of Smarter Every Day recently shot some light-painting photographs using an RC helicopter loaded with colored lights. The maneuverability of the helicopter turns the great outdoors into a giant canvas on which you can light paint giant 3D shapes.
DPReview has published a gallery filled with sample photographs shot using the new Leica M Monochrom. The photographs are tack sharp and have a beautiful "film look" to them that is difficult to achieve by doing a conversion from color digital images. Watch out: looking at the gallery may be bad for your wallet.
Leica has officially announced its new monochrome digital rangefinder, the M Monochrom -- the world's first digital camera to do dedicated black and white photography. The camera features a newly designed 18-megapixel monochrome CCD sensor and "100% sharper imaging" due to the fact that raw data is processed directly without interpolation. The monochrome sensor allows the camera to achieve extremely low noise even upwards of ISO 10,000, and various programmed tones can be used to adjust the …
Artist Alan Belcher is known for pioneering a genre of art known as "photo-object" in which the disciplines of photography and sculpture are fused and explored in different ways. His latest piece is titled "_____.jpg", and consists of 125 ceramic sculptures of the ubiquitous Apple JPG icon. Each one was manufactured in China and then signed, numbered, and dated. They're currently on display at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in Manhattan. You can see a close-up view of the tile here.
Last year Olympus announced that it would be moving away from DSLRs in favor of mirrorless cameras. Today Samsung revealed that it's moving towards mirrorless as well, except from compact cameras instead of DSLRs. The company is converting its main Chinese camera plant to manufacture high-end mirrorless cameras rather than the cheap point-and-shoots it has made in the past.
Shoebox is an app by 1000 Memories that lets you turn your iOS or Android smartphone into a scanner for digitizing old paper photos (the photos don't have to be old, of course). The app goes far beyond manual snapping and cropping: it uses edge detection to help you crop, color balance to compensate for lighting, and auto-flattens the resulting image to adjust for your camera's tilt. You can download it for free through the iTunes App Store or Google Play.
Ara Solis is a creative series of photographs by Guatemalan photographer Luis Gonzalez Palma showing model ships sailing across seas of crumpled bed sheets.
Brooklyn-born and bred art cooperative United Photo Industries have a treat in store for any and all photography enthusiasts who happen to find themselves in New York between June 22nd and July 1st. In partnership with many different galleries, vendors and national institutions, United Photo Industries is putting together a photographic village it's calling Photoville -- and it'll be made almost entirely out of shipping containers.
The photos that went into the animation above were all created in-camera using software and a robotic arm programmed before hand with predetermined patterns. The project, known as LightPlot, started as an NXT Lego experiment in stop-motion photography by Ben Cowell-Thomas. He wanted to create a motion control rig for stop-motion using NXT, but as he was looking through some light painting projects online, he began to wonder how he could turn his lego project into a light painting rig.
Virgin America airlines is producing the "first-ever film made at 35,000 feet", titled Departure Date. It's a movie that takes place entirely inside the cabin of an airplane that's actually airborne. 20 hours of in-flight shooting was done on Virgin flights that spanned 3 continents and covered 28,000 miles. The film was written and directed by Kat Coiro and stars some pretty well known faces. It'll premier next month at LA Film Fest, and will soon be available in its entirety on the in-flight …
Most people are familiar with the famous Tank Man photo taken by AP Photographer Jeff Widener as tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square on June 5th, 1989. Taken from a 6th floor balcony of the Beijing hotel, the iconic version we've come to know is only one of 4 very similar photos taken that same moment.
Want to enjoy photographs on the web without the annoyance of words? Check out Wordless Web, a simple browser bookmarklet by Ji Lee and Cory Forsyth that instantly strips away all the text on any website.
The future of consumer photography could very well be with new sensors, or more compact interchangeable lens cameras, or 41-megapixel smartphones; but why not cameras that are wirelessly tethered together? Thats what SynchroCam can do, and for a free app it's pretty cool.
A fake war photograph by Canadian artist Jeff Wall was sold yesterday at Christie's in NYC for a staggering $3.6 million -- a new record for Canadian photographers and the third highest price ever paid for a picture. The 1992 photo, titled Dead Troops Talk, was captured inside a suburban Vancouver studio using models, borrowed military outfits, and fake blood. It shows a group of dead Soviet soldiers chatting with one another during the Soviet-Afghan war of 1986. The sold image is one of two …
In 1991 when the Rodney King beating was caught on tape it was a coincidence that someone happened to have a video camera with them. Today, nearly everyone carries one in their pocket. And the advent of social media means that a photo or video need only generate a few retweets before it goes completely viral. It seems that news -- especially bad news -- travels faster than ever; and it brings justice with it.
Google has published a second sample photo captured using its Google Glass augmented reality glasses. This time it's a 3MP photograph captured by Googler Sebastian Thrun while spinning with his son Jasper. It's an interesting example of the moments people will soon be able to capture if wearable, voice-controlled cameras become a part of how we document our lives. No word on whether the camera quality has improved since the first sample photo was released, but this latest one sure looks better.
The "Content Aware Fill" tool was one of the most lauded advancements in Photoshop CS5. Of course, the tool wasn't without its occasional glitches, but the ability to select a section and have the program clone it out automatically was still very impressive. But what if that's the only tool you want to use? What if you're a casual photographer who wants to remove unwanted sections in your composition without buying and learning a whole editing suite?
High definition video recording is a standard feature on digital cameras these days. If you've never really understood the terms 1080p, 1080i, and 720p, here's a short and sweet explanation that'll bring you up to speed. Benjamin Higginbotham of Technology Evangelist describes the differences between varieties and why you can consider 720p "better" than 1080i.
There are plenty of products on the market specifically targeting the photographer who shoots tethered to a laptop. But when it comes to putting your laptop somewhere other than the nearest unoccupied chair or table, we haven't run into many accessories that offer a versatile, "attach anywhere" sort of solution -- until we stumbled on the DigiPlate.
If you've ever watched a Japanese anime, or even American cartoons for that matter, you probably know that most of the characters have highly unrealistic body proportions -- giant eyes and tiny noses are the norm. Ideal Species is a creepy set of images by photographer Chris Scarborough that imagines what these proportions would look like in the real world. Yup, it's creepy.
Can't decide between the Canon 5D Mark III and Nikon D800? Dave Dugdale of Learning DSLR Video created this helpful video that offers a pretty comprehensive comparison of the cameras. It's a bit heavy on the videography applications of the camera, but should be quite informative nevertheless if you're at all interested in these cameras.
Back in 2006, a pornography publishing company named Perfect 10 attempted to sue Google over copyright infringement, claiming that the thumbnails displayed on Google's image search did not fall under "fair use." Ultimately, the Supreme Court wouldn't even hear the case, allowing the ruling that thumbnails are fair use to stand and handing Perfect 10 yet another loss (they've sustained many in this area).
If film is dying, then tintype photography has been extinct for years, but there's still one studio/gallery in San Francisco that can immortalize your portrait using this classic method in as little as 20 minutes. This video done by Cool Hunting Video shows store co-founder Michael Shindler going through the whole process, from prepping the plates, to taking the photos with a modified camera, to developing the one-off direct positive. The results, as usual, speak for themselves.
Lee Filters is a world-class producer of high-quality filters for both photography and cinematography, and now we have a chance to see what goes into making these high-end accessories. Keep in mind that these filters aren't made by some machine on an assembly line; each Lee Filter is made by hand, and in this video Mike Browne shows you what that process entails from liquid start to solid finish.
A week ago we shared a funny "leaked advertisement" for a fictional camera called the Instagram Snap. The video poked fun at the possibility that Instagram would use their $1 billion buyout from Facebook to build a ridiculous "real-world" camera -- basically a Polaroid camera with "sharing" features (passing a photo to another person by hand) and "filters" (coffee filter = spill coffee on your picture). Ironically enough though, a concept of just such a camera has recently come out, and it …
Back in February the New York Times launched a new site called "The Lively Morgue" for regularly sharing photos from its historical archive of the same name. The video above gives an interesting behind-the-scenes glimpse at this amazing underground archive that stores millions of historical photographs and 300,000 sacks filled with negatives.
A few weeks back an amazing Nikkor 6mm fisheye lens resurfaced for sale in London for an eye-popping $160,000. The lens was quickly snatched up by a camera collector. For those of you who missed out on buying the lens but would still like to see how 160 grand worth of fish-eye performs in real life, the folks who were selling it at Grays of Westminster put together a video just for you.
Photographer Nicholas Hendrickx has a quirky photo series titled "The Adventures Of Mr. Fly" in that features macro photographs of a (presumably dead) fly engaging in various human activities.
Everybody know the famous Beatles album cover of the four superstars crossing Abbey Road, but did you know that you can visit the intersection yourself and re-create the photo? Well you can, and what's more, there's a 24-hour webcam pointed right at the intersection that will capture you and your friends doing what tourists do at that intersection every week -- annoy local drivers.
If you like PES' stop-motion videos in which random objects are prepared as food, you'll love this creative music video for the song "Get By" by Delta Heavy. It's mind-boggling to think about how much time and energy went into preparing and photographing each individual still: director Ian Robertson shot 11,008 photographs and selected 3,184 for the final cut. 10 hours were required just to animate the 18 frames showing the Rubik's Cube equalizer. Animation took a total of 32 days. You can find …
It's usually a bit anti-climactic when a company unveils a product that was all but completely leaked beforehand, but the new Olympus TG-1 iHS is still a very exciting addition to the rugged camera market. In the end it's about quality, and on that front Olympus are delivering in big ways, prompting some to say that the TG-1 is probably the best rugged camera on the market.
Photographer Stefan Koppelkamm first photographed East Germany in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the reunification. He revisited the same locations a decade later, and rephotographed them from exactly the same viewpoints to document the drastic social and economic transformations that came about during the time between the photos.
Here's an interesting 1981 interview with American street photographer Garry Winogrand in which he talks about his life, his work, and -- interestingly enough -- how he finds the term "street photographer" stupid.
The GNU Image Manipulation Project, more popularly known as GIMP, has just released version 2.8; the first complete GIMP overhaul since 2008. For those who don't know (and there probably aren't many) GIMP is famous for being a slightly more complicated (and a lot more free) alternative to Photoshop with fewer features. And it seems that, right on cue with the Adobe CS6 release, GIMP is trying to close the gap between the two products that's been widening these last 4 years.
A few years ago, graphic designer Grey Jay was asked by a company to create a Photoshop action that would emulate a "toy camera" look for photos. He came up with an action he calls the "Holgarizer" and, after some tweaking and adjusting, has made it freely available to the public. If a messy cross-processed look is what you're after, Jay's filter does the job. You can download the ZIP file here.
