June 2012

Back in 1967 Yoko Ono said that it was her ultimate goal "to make a film which includes a smiling face snap of every single human being in the world." And now that the 21st century has arrived she's one technological step closer to achieving that goal. Her new app, #smilesfilm, compiles all of the pictures of people's smiles taken and uploaded to either Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #smilesfilm into one easy-to-browse place.

If you've ever wondered when, or how, or why you might use a ring light or ring flash, this short lighting tutorial from The Slanted Lens should help you answer all of those questions. In this case, Jay P. Morgan was shooting for Zombie Juice soda and he took the opportunity to explain why he chose to use a ring flash, some of the disadvantages of ring flashes, and how he supplemented it to get the perfect shot.

You'd think the biggest name in DSLR online buyer satisfaction would be someone like Nikon or Canon, but according to J.D. Power and Associates, it's actually Pentax. J.D. Power and Associates released their 2012 DSLR Online Buyer Report a couple of days ago, and it was Pentax that took the crown, scoring 899 our of 1,000. The runners up, in case you're interested, were Nikon with an 891 and Canon with an 888.

Where the action cam market is concerned, GoPro is king. For the last few years if you wanted to go sky diving, snowbording, mountain biking, or any other extreme sport and video tape yourself doing it, you'd probably be strapping a GoPro to one of your appendages. Sony and JVC, however, are looking to get in on some of the extreme sports action -- and both are doing it in style with new action cam offerings.

Falling somewhere in the "really cool idea" category, this fully-automatic, working photo booth is made entirely out of cardboard. Everything from the outside to the gears, cogs and belts that make up the innards is all cardboard and 100% automatic. To use the machine all you have to do is insert your cardboard token and then sit perfectly still while the box exposes, develops and fixes a silver-gelatin photograph of you and yours.

Flickr announced today that it has partnered with Nokia to overhaul its geotagging feature. The new maps and satellite images will offer increased coverage (e.g. bye bye photos in ambiguous blobs of land), detail, and zoom. The company isn't turning its back on Open Street Map completely, though: the old map tiles will still be used in areas that aren't covered by Nokia's commercial maps.

"Science can be beautiful. Art can be scientific." This latest episode of the PBS series Off Book, titled "Seeing Beyond the Human Eye", looks into how science and photographic techniques are helping transform how we see the world.

This idea came to me after I had shot this photo in the daytime. I had been seeing a lot of celestial-type shots on the Internet, but most were just landscapes with no action. My main focus is action sports, and I love a challenge. I figured I would give it a try.

If you're creating a short film that requires a "through the viewfinder" clip, there's an easier way to create it than pointing your camera through an actual viewfinder (does anyone actually do that?). In the short tutorial above, Luke Neumann of Neumann Films shows how you can simulate the look of a viewfinder by overlaying your footage with some focusing screen images. All the necessary image and audio files are available as a free download.

Love to zoom? Samsung has launched a new camera for you. The WB100 is a new superzoom camera that features a 16-megapixel sensor and 22.3-579.8mm equivalent lens. Features include dual image stabilization (i.e. both optical and digital), 3D photography, live panorama creation, 720p video recording, ISO 80-1,600 and the option of being powered by either AA batteries of lithium-ion rechargeable ones.

Massive wildfires in the Rockies have destroyed hundreds of homes and scorched tens of thousands of acres over the past week. To get an idea of how massive these fires are, check out this photograph captured by a NASA satellite.

Ever wonder how much you're paying to keep your rechargeable camera batteries juiced? The answer: probably around a buck or two a year. Researcher Baskar Vairmohan of EPRI conducted a study to determine the effect of popular gadgets on our nation's power grid, calculating the annual electricity costs of various devices. He found that an iPhone uses $0.25, an iPad uses $1.36, a 60-watt light bulb uses $1.61, a laptop uses $8.31, a desktop uses $28.21, and a fridge uses $65.72. Camera batteries …

I often ask myself, “When and how it is it that I decided to become a commercial photographer?” The answer to this question is usually a long drawn out tale that goes back to when I was a junior in high school back in Miami. I’ll save you the long story and only share the story of my favorite photography class and assignment and why it was so great.

UK-based nothinghereok purchased an old engine off eBay to replace his old one and then began to document the disassembly process with his DSLR. He soon realized that the project would make a neat stop motion video, so he ended up shooting over 3,000 photographs during the 11 months of disassembly. After combining the photos and adding some music, this is what resulted.

Artists Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen have a two-year-long project titled 100 Posterworks that features B&W portraits in various locations, with standard compositions, featuring witty messages on hand-painted signs.

Watch out, Flickr -- Instagram is coming for you. The popular photo sharing app has quietly updated its website to include commenting and liking on individual photo pages. Previously the website was "read only", and any interaction with the social network was limited to its mobile interface. The new website, which also features larger images and a slick blue theme, suggests that the company may soon be breathing down Flickr's neck by expanding beyond mobile. However, it still noticeably lacks …

To celebrate Google+'s one year anniversary, photographer Alex Koloskov and retoucher Genia Larionova teamed up on a photo project to recreate the Google logo using photographs of paint. They tossed paint matching the colors of each letter into the air multiple times and picked out the best shapes, which were then combined in Photoshop.

When Picnik bit the dust several months back, it handed the web-editor baton, in large part, over the the Aviary photo editor. Since then Aviary has been running on all cylinders making consistent improvements and otherwise trying to get you to forget about that one Pic-something editor -- and it doesn't look like the company will be stopping any time soon. Having launched full-blown Android and iOS apps less than two weeks ago, Aviary has now secured $6-million in capital from several …

Here's a tutorial by photographer Stephen Davies on how you can create a pseudo double exposure photograph using a couple simple steps in Photoshop.

Music photographers in the UK have organized a boycott of indie band The Stone Roses reunion concerts (to be held this weekend) over a contract that they say is unfairly strict with their image rights. All press and music photographers are familiar with the typical restrictions that come with photographing an event or band, but the Stone Roses have asked the photogs to "assign to the Group, with full title guarantee, all Rights in perpetuity throughout the world..." A request for which the band …

If you're the owner of a Fujifilm X-Pro1 and you've been yearning for a little bit of zoom capability out of your lenses, then it looks like relief isn't far off. A couple of days ago Fujifilm announced the lens roadmap for the X-Pro1 (seen above), which shows that we'll be seeing a few zoom lenses added to the family, one of which will be here as early as this Fall.

Who says you can't make money selling photos taken on your iPhone? Certainly not the creators of a new app dubbed Foap, which allows you to do just that. The app is pretty easy to use: just download it for free off the iTunes store, upload your best pics, tag them so they're easier to find, and submit. After that every photo will have to be manually approved before it's put up on the Foap Marketplace for $10 a pop, $5 of which goes to the photographer.

Remember the mysterious camera NYTimes columnist David Pogue was gushing over earlier this month? Turns out it's the Sony RX100. In his review of the camera published yesterday, Pogue calls it "best pocket camera ever made" and writes, …

Video game developers have learned over the years that socially-shared achievements are a great way to encourage beginners to learn new tasks. Taking a page from their book, Adobe has a neat new game called LevelUp that encourages Photoshop learning using the same tricks. Available for CS5 and above, the extension encourages exploration and assigns missions to introduce features and tools that player might never have seen before. Tasks include removing redeye, whitening teeth, and replacing the …

It's a shame that the digital age brought with it such widespread copyright infringement and, sometimes, downright theft, but it's a reality we have to live with. Fortunately, there's a new website up on Tumblr that is looking to help expose the people who are taking credit for other's work, and in the process help to cut down on some of the blatant infringement many photographers deal with week in and week out.

Here's the live demo of Google's Project Glass that was given by co-founder Sergey Brin yesterday at the company's I/O conference in San Francisco. As we reported, they had five skydivers wearing the camera glasses beam footage of their jump live into the conference center through a Google+ hangout. If you think cameras are connected to the Internet now, just wait till Google Glass goggles are released sometime next year.

Earlier this month we reported on rumors of a significant Canon EOS 7D firmware update that was possibly in the works, and today that update became official. Not surprisingly, the rumors seem to have been spot on, as firmware v2 for the 7D brings many of the highly-anticipated and frequently-requested features that users of Canon's flagship APS-C SLR have been pining for.

Google demoed its much-hyped Project Glass at its I/O conference today, showing how the sleek camera-equipped "goggles" could one day allow point-of-view photos and videos to be beamed directly to others through the Internet. Four skydivers wearing the glasses beamed footage of their jump live through Google+ to the attendees in the SF conference center (see above video). They then "passed the baton" onto a group of bikers who did some tricks on the roof and then biked into the center, showing …

Thinking about recording video with your Canon DSLR? stillmotion put together this short video with 5 lens recommendations based on their video production experiences over the years. One recommendation is the 24-105mm f/4 IS "kit" lens that comes bundled with higher-end Canon DSLRs. This lens allows you to have image stabilization at the wide end (24mm), perfect for tight spots in which you can't bring bulkier stabilization systems.

After seeing hashtags for a TV show featuring a "Psychic Wayne" all over Twitter, Irish student Alan Rice decided to see what all the fuss was about. Of course, within a few minutes he had already decided that the show was, in his words, tripe. But after watching a little while longer he noticed something else: the pictures of the other off-air "psychics" that people could call looked a lot like stock photos.

We've all been there. Anybody who has ever done any work in the creative industry has had to deal with clients who have no understanding of basic business practices, or photography, or a little thing called payment. The above video was put together by the website Clients From Hell, where creatives can go and upload their most entertaining horror stories anonymously.

The camera in your smartphone is good for a lot of things, and we're not just talking about Instagram and causing the sad yet inevitable demise of the point-and-shoot; now it can also be used to send and receive secret messages using light. A new Casio camera app called Picapicamera encodes messages or graphics using a sequence of red, green and yellow flashing lights, which another user of the app can then point their camera at to decode.

Everyday People is a photo project for Oklahoma newspaper Tulsa World by photographer John Clanton. The goal is to meet one new person in the community every day of the year, create a portrait of them, and display the image along with a short blurb about who they are.

In both still photography and video, camera work should generally be invisible to viewers, allowing them to focus on the subject being captured. The same is true for video games. Here's a nerdy yet fascinating analysis of the camera in the legendary SNES game, Super Mario World. It's so simple, yet so well designed that it's not something you've probably ever thought about.

Recently, Microsoft has been showing off many of the new features we'll be seeing in the much-anticipated official release of Windows 8, and the most recent sneak peek Microsoft gave us was of the new Photos app. The app offers a native way for Windows users to organize, view and share all of their photos regardless of what they were taken with or where they're stored.

Water drop photographer Corrie White creates pretty neat "time-lapse" videos of water drops falling and making splashes. The images aren't from the same splash: White shoots one photo of 350-400 individual drop attempts, with each photo delayed just a fraction of a second longer than the previous one. Combining the resulting images into a time-lapse (or stop-motion) video creates the result seen here.

Polaroid lovers will be happy to know that it doesn't look like the company is slowing down where the instant camera game is concerned. Late last year they unveiled the Z340 -- a futuristic digital instant camera in the classic Polaroid style -- and now they've officially announced their newer, sleeker Z2300. The Z2300 falls somewhere in-between Polaroid's big and bulky Z340 and the dinky (and somewhat unwieldy) PIC-300. In many ways it combines the best of both worlds in to a much more stylish …

Brazilian artist André Feliciano creates beautiful gardens that look rather ordinary from afar, but step a little closer and you'll notice that each individual flower is quite peculiar: it's shaped like a camera. Feliciano's colorful displays feature hundreds or thousands of tiny plastic cameras.

After we published our browser color management PSA yesterday, those of you reading this site on your iOS devices probably noticed that your browsers failed "the test". The reason? Color management is strangely absent from iOS. Software engineer Jeffrey Friedl, who discovered this fact a few months ago, writes, …

If you're a fan of hearing from photography greats and have some free time, check out his awesome documentary film about Henri Cartier-Bresson titled Henri Cartier-Bresson: L'amour Tout Court ("Just Plain Love"). It was directed by Raphaël O’Byrne back in 2001 when Cartier-Bresson was 92 years old, and features interviews with the legendary photojournalist as he talks about how various photographs were made.

Photographer Benjamin "Von Wong" has pulled of a flashy feat with fire: a multiple exposure shoot of a pyrotechnician at work -- all photographed and produced in his Nikon D800. That's right -- all in-camera, no stacking in Photoshop.

Here's an interesting graphic that's floating around the social networks (anyone know the source?) that shows why photography is more expensive than some people think it should be ("it's just pointing and snapping, right?"). If you like this, then check out our post back in January titled, "Why Wedding Photographers' Prices Are 'Wack'".

One day photographer Jimmy Hickey decided to do a photo project capturing "money problems personified", so he withdraw everything from his bank account in one dollar bills and created a money suit. The resulting project is titled "What Have We Done?".

A UK couple is very displeased after their wedding photographer lost all the images from their wedding during a scuffle in a pub.

Instagram's latest 2.5 update has swapped out their "popular" tab for a new "explore" feature which allows users to browse photos based on users and hashtags -- it's a more functional search system. Now, instead of seeing photos that have the most likes, users can search for hashtags based on events and topics, which also makes it possible for users to have wider circulation of their images.

Adobe promised Lightroom 4 as part of its Creative Cloud subscription plan, but didn't have it ready to go when the cloud service was launched back in April. Today they finally added the popular image editing program to the package, giving you some additional photo editing muscle for the same $50/month rate. Not bad, considering Adobe's $2599 CS6 Master Collection doesn't even include Lightroom.

At some point or another, as a creative professional, you will have the option to exhibit work to the public. Exhibitions are a great tool to market yourself, and your work to potential clients and art buyers.

In a world where everybody wants more for less, it’s hard to justify spending money on things which may or may not make your clients happier. I have always been a believer in the idea that you need to spend money to make money, yet I find other photographers are very split on this subject. I know photographers who are proud that they use the same camera and laptop they bought 5 years ago citing that their clients aren’t complaining so it must be working just fine.

Yesterday we reported on how US Track and Field saw its first "photo finish" tie this past weekend in an Olympic qualifying race. If you thought the finish line photo looked strange, it's not just you: it's not an ordinary photo. Journalist Daniel Rutter has written up a great article on how finish line cameras work: …

Editor's note: This post contains graphic photos that some readers may find disturbing.