June 2012

The latest photo to go viral on the web is a photo about photos. Lost photos, that is. Earlier today a man named Roland van Gogh shared the above image on Facebook and on Reddit, stating, …

Way back in the day, when the first mirrorless cameras were released, I was on them like white on rice. I desperately wanted to love, well, any of them: the Sigma DP-1, Panasonic G1, Olympus E-P1, Leica X-1, and more all passed through my hands. Many people loved having a small camera that delivered high image quality. I loved that idea, too, but I didn’t love those first cameras because of what they couldn’t do. They couldn’t shoot high ISO. There weren’t many lenses. Autofocus times …

Ritz Camera and Image LLC officially filed for bankruptcy last Friday for the second time in three years. And while bankruptcy and financial trouble in general are, unfortunately, not uncommon in the world of photography these days, Ritz is making headlines because of their major unsecured creditors. Amon the biggest names on the list are Nikon, Sony and Fuji, all of whom stand to lose quite a bit of money as Ritz prepares to restructure.

Canon made a splash earlier this month by announcing its first EF pancake lens, the Canon 40mm f/2.8 STM. If you're considering this lens, one thing you should know is that the autofocus noise may interfere with your videos unless you use an external mic.

Ever wonder what camera gear NASA astronaut Don Pettit uses to shoot his amazing photographs from the International Space Station? Here's a portrait of Don floating around on with his massive collection of Nikon DSLRs and lenses. How much of the gear can you identify?

Typically, light painting requires a little bit of photography know how and some camera equipment that's up to the task. But a new product by Tomy may change all that, or at least give non-photographers and kids something to play around with when they're bored. Tomy's new light pen and app combo, which will retail for $30, allow the user to create rudimentary light paintings using nothing more than the pen and a free iPhone app.

Using the human eye to control cameras isn't a new idea -- Canon used to offer eye-controlled focusing in its SLRs -- but designer Mimi Zou's Iris concept camera takes the concept one step further by having the camera be entirely controlled by the eye. Shaped like a lens, the photographer uses the camera by simply looking through it. Focusing, zooming, and snapping photos are done by looking, narrowing/widening the eyes, and blinking (respectively).

Minority owner of the recently-crowned national champion Miami Heat, Raanan Katz, has been making waves all over the Internet the past few days over a controversial lawsuit regarding a photo of himself that he has deemed unflattering (seen above). The lawsuit is directed at both the originating blogger and Google (who refused to take down the photo), and according to paidContent, Katz is requesting that damages be paid him by both parties.

On Saturday night at the United States Olympic trials, sprinters Allyson Felix and Jeneba Tarmoh did something the sport had never seen before: tie on camera. Both runners crossed the finished line at exactly 11.068 seconds -- see the photo above -- and not even the high speed camera capturing 3,000 frames per second at the sideline could reveal a difference. Since this situation had never happened before, US Track and Field didn't have any rule in place for how to deal with it. 24 hours later, …

One of the questions that comes back most often when people learn what I do for a living is: how do you manage not to drop your camera? Up until Saturday, I could (somewhat smugly) answer that I am being very careful and have been lucky so far.

A couple of weeks ago Nikon became the center of a heated debate when, without explanation, they cancelled Korean photographer Ahn Se-hong's Comfort Women exhibit. The exhibit, which was scheduled to begin tomorrow on June 26th at the Nikon Salon in Tokyo, was complied by Se-hong over the course of 11-years, and brings attention to Korean women who were used as sex slaves or "comfort women" for Japanese soldiers during World War II. Needless to say, the decision came as quite a shock, …

Is your browser color managed? If not, the photographs you are looking at are distorted versions of what their creators intended them to be. Is the car above rendered in school bus yellow, or in a jarring purple?

You probably know of the iconic photograph titled Migrant Mother, but do you know the government photo project that led to its creation? Between 1935 and 1943, the US Government launched the largest photo project in the history of the country through its Resettlement Administration (RA) -- later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The project enlisted the likes of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to help educate citizens in the East about what was going on in the West, and the giant …

Here's a behind-the-scenes video in which photographer Mike Butler walks through how he went about planning and photographing the 35-storey Hotel Intercontinental in Downtown Miami using 8 1000W DP lights by light painting portions of the scene and stitching them all together in post.

The appearance of real world world objects changes depending on lighting, but photographic prints do not... yet. Researchers at HP and UC Santa Cruz are working on a method of printing images of objects or scenes that allows lighting to affect the image. For example, a statue in a print would cast different shadows depending on which direction light strikes the print. The technology is still in its early stages -- the prototypes don't look much like photographs -- but perhaps one day it'll be …

Photographer Jeff Cable purchased a couple Canon 5D Mark IIIs recently and discovered that although the camera offers both SD and CF card slots, you should avoid the SD slot if you want maximum shooting speed.

A 22-year-old Houston artist named Uriel Landeros made news this past week after walking into Houston’s Menil Collection museum and vandalizing a priceless 1929 Picasso painting titled Woman in a Red Armchair. A fellow museum patron captured cell phone footage of Landeros spray painting the word "conquista" onto the painting using a stencil. The painting was rushed to the museum's conservation lab for an emergency restoration, and Landeros was just arrested and charged with two third-degree …

When Leica announced “Henri”, the M9 Monocrom on May 10th, it caused a lot of fervor on blogs and photography websites. The all black camera, named after the legendary black and white Leica photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson was devoid of almost all Leica markings and seemed niche even for the niche camera maker.

Dakota White and Andrew Hackbusch (AKA The Dash brothers) made this creative "backward world" short by reversing a single continuous shot of Dakota walking backwards.

Being a good photographer, you have a tripod. Maybe two tripods. Maybe even a big, heavy duty one for your big lenses, a standard one for everyday use, and one of those small, cool ones that folds up like a roadmap and you can carry it in your back pocket.

To celebrate its 100th year anniversary, Paramount Pictures gathered together 116 of Hollywood's most famous stars for an epic group picture. Photographer Art Streiber used 57 strobes to light the scene, and spent just under 6 minutes snapping 63 frames using a Hasselblad H2 and 150mm lens.

Typical photo books and resource books for photographers come printed and bound, which is not a bad thing. Digital as our photography has become, displaying it, or teaching people how to replicate it, are two areas in which ink on paper still rule. Dan Nguyen's The Bastards Book of Photography, however, breaks these rules, and in the process becomes both a great resource for beginners, and a re-think on book distribution and creation.

You know those amazing high speed photos and videos of bullets being shot through various objects? BMW Canada decided to take things a step further and use a car instead of a bullet. They drove a car at top speed across salt flats and had it smash through a giant glass apple, some giant water balloons, and a target. The resulting slow motion footage is quite amazing.

Around this time last year, we featured a video on developing film using coffee and vitamin C. And now, the folks behind the Caffenol blog (which was named after the nickname given to the "home brew" developer) have put together a video showing that it's possible to do something similar using red wine instead of coffee and photo paper instead of film.

H.Y. Leung recreated the special white edition of the Leica M8 rangefinder using LEGO pieces. The attention to detail is amazing, and you can even look through the viewfinder! You can find a couple more photos here.

All the way back at the beginning of 2011, Nikon Rumors confirmed that the image sensors in Nikon's D3, D3s, D700 and D3100 were all designed by the Japanese company itself. And now, a recent teardown of the D3200 by Chipworks shows that Nikon was behind the sensor found inside that camera as well. There has been speculation for a while that Nikon is distancing themselves from Sony sensors, and if rumors of the full-frame D600 sensor being made by Aptina turn out to be true, then the list of …

The video above was put together by the European art duo known as Sweatshoppe, and believe it or not, there was no post-production used in creating it what-so-ever. They call the technique -- which they pioneered -- video painting, and they make it happen by using custom-built electronic paint rollers and custom-designed software. As you can see, the final result is pretty awesome. For more info, check out the video's Vimeo page.

There's an overabundance of ways to share and organize your photos these days. From Flickr and 500px, to Facebook and Shutterfly, you can store and share your photos in many places. But according to Yahoo!, many people still use good ol' fashioned e-mail. Yahoo!'s senior director of product management Dave McDowell said that over 500-million photos are sent through Yahoo! Mail every day, and so in an attempt to streamline that process and better cater to the needs of their 300-million users, …

Ever since their financial scandal, Olympus has been looking to bring on a big name investor to help get them out of trouble. Earlier this month that investor seemed to be Panasonic, but when that fell through everybody looked to the remaining three possible investors -- Sony, Fujifilm and Terumo -- to see if anybody was going to make the leap. According to Japanese business daily Nikkei, that investor is Sony.

The photographs in Isabel M. Martínez's Quantum Blink project look like they were stitched together using Photoshop, but they were actually all created in-camera. She writes, …

Late last month several rumors pointed to the fact that Canon would be announcing two new cameras in June. The first, Canon's new EOS T4i, was already announced, but as June approaches its final days many were wondering if Canon had pushed back the announcement date for their much anticipated first mirrorless camera. Unfortunately, according to Canon Rumors, that does seem to be the case.

You know society has gone a little filter-crazy when a concept for Instagram glasses shows up on the scene, but we have to admit that Instaglasses make for an interesting idea. The basic premise is that Instagram fanatics aficionados would be able to use these to always see the world in filters. When they then glimpsed a scene that looked especially artsy with the Amaro or Inkwell filters applied, they could use a button on the side of the glasses to capture and upload that image to Instagram.

When photographer Michael Wolf had to move to Paris in 2008 because of a job opportunity for his wife, he wasn't too thrilled with the situation. He thought that living in one of the most photographed cities of all time, surrounded by the inevitable cliches of such a place, wasn't conducive to creative, unique photography. So he sat down at his computer and began browsing through the then only 6-month old Google Street View, which ultimately led to a unique photographical project that fit right …

On a trip to the famous Louvre in Paris, photographer and artist Taylor Holland found himself more drawn in by the highly ornate frames around the art than with the art itself. This got him thinking about a project that would challenge "the viewer’s notion not only of what art is, but the viewer’s own perceptions about where to find and appreciate art in various settings such as the Louvre." Thus was born Fra[mes].

Yesterday was the first day of summer, so it's only right that we would run across a product that is equal parts camera bag and cooler. The Camera Cooler, by camping equipment company Poler, combines the usefulness of a cooler and the looks/functionality of a camera bag into one multi-purpose product.

Two Halves is a series of landscape photos by Jeronimo Fantini in which each square-format shot is bisected neatly through the middle by the horizon line.

Ever since the move to digital, and especially with the advent of the camera phone, we've seen a huge spike in photography -- everybody is taking pictures. But even so, our four legged friends haven't really gotten in on the action. That may soon change, however, if a concept camera by designer Jaehwa Lee ever becomes a reality.

It looks like Nokia wasted no time putting the folks at Scalado to work for them. As we reported a week ago, Nokia is acquiring Scalado's developers, technologies and IP portfolio, and we're already seeing Scalado's well-known "rewind" technology make its way into Nokia's new Camera Extras app.

A camera's dimensions are often reported alongside its other specs (e.g. megapixels, ISO), but it's pretty difficult to gauge exactly how large it is by those numbers alone. RealSize is a helpful iPad app that helps you get a better sense of size by displaying gadgets on its screen at exactly the size they are in real life.

For all you DIY-ers out there looking for a fast, fun photography project, here's a quick way to create a make-shift fisheye lens for your camera using only a 200-degree peephole, some drawer liner, a PVC reducer and some tape. The final product certainly doesn't look like a professional fisheye lens -- this definitely falls into the "fun weekend project" category -- but even so, the results turned out better than you would expect from a 200-degree peephole and some PVC.

It's been almost three months to the day since the well-respected camera equipment rating service DxOMark crowned the Nikon D800 as its new king, giving the camera's 36.3MP sensor an incredible overall score of 95 -- but now its reign is over. The Nikon D800 has been officially beaten out, and appropriately enough it has happened at the hands of its nearly identical twin brother, the Nikon D800E.

Seattle-based techie Matt Harding became an Internet celebrity back in 2005 after a video of him dancing in various locations around the world went viral online. Now he's back again with a new 2012 edition that's sure to go just as viral. Harding spent months traveling to tens of countries around the world, capturing short clips of himself dancing with thousands of people. The project is titled, "Where the Hell is Matt?".

Musicians, and all creative types really, often cross over into other creative endeavors that may or may not have anything to do with the field they're famous for. It was only a few weeks ago that we featured a video of musician Moby talking about how much he loved photographing LA architecture. And today Leica has put together another of their "Leica Portraits," this one on soul musician -- and, of course, photography enthusiast -- Seal.

If you've ever gone out to try your hand at street photography you probably experienced your fair share of anxiety once you were out there. Taking photos of strangers, even on crowded city streets, takes practice and time, time that's mostly spent getting over the natural fear of taking people's photos without their permission. But the fact that it requires practice and time doesn't mean that a few good tips won't speed the process along significantly.

There's nothing new about creating 3D spacial diagrams using 2D photos, but what a group of Japanese researchers is currently working on may speed up and streamline the process so much so that anybody can use it. Their system uses no special camera equipment, all you need is a point-and-shoot and a wireless SD card so that you can upload form anywhere.

Scientists at Duke University have created a digital camera that boasts a whopping 50 gigapixels. The camera, dubbed AWARE-2, uses 98 separate 14-megapixel microcameras and a special spherical lens. Each microcamera captures a tiny portion of the scene and a specially designed processor stitches the images together. Processing the data is so hardware intensive that 97% of the camera is made up of electronics and computer components (the other 3% is the optical elements).

People either love or hate Instagram, but if you happen to fall into the former category then you now have a wearable option. That's right, you can wear your favorite Instagram shots. The company that makes this happen is called Instapparel, and it's easy enough to use: just authorize the website to access your Instagram account and you're off to the races. You can customize the size of the shirt, choose between color and cream, pick the size and placement of your photos, and then buy the whole …

We've seen 'Blue Marble' photos of Earth before, but this latest NASA photo is different: it's the first photo of its kind shot from above our planet's North Pole. The photo is a composite of images captured by a satellite as it passed over the North Pole 15 times at an altitude of 512 miles.

The camera obscura has been around for a long time (Middle Ages long) and typically consisted of a box or room with a hole in one side through which an image of its surroundings could be formed. As you can see from the example above, any room -- in this case a bathroom -- can be turned into a camera obscura given a small enough "aperture." Unfortunately, most rooms have big, blaring windows that let in too much light, and the only image formed on the opposite wall is a shadowy blob.

Do professional photographers belong in delivery rooms? More and more of them are showing up there. The New York Times has an interesting piece on the rise of birth photography as a up-and-coming niche: