August 2012

The photo above is the winning photograph in this year's National Geographic 2012 Traveler Photo Contest. It's a photo by Brooklyn-based photographer Cédric Houin titled "Butterfly", which shows a Kyrgyz mother and daughter using a sewing machine in their dwelling. His caption reads,

This image was shot in the Kyrgyz lands of the Wakhan Corridor. The intimacy of this everyday life moment, shot inside of a family yurt, is in total contrast with the harsh environment these nomadic tribes live in. On the right we notice a television and a sound console. These tribes live weeks away from any village by foot. In spite of being located at an altitude of 4,300 meters in one of the most remote areas of Afghanistan they are equipped with solar panels, satellite dishes and cellphones. Ancestral ways of living, with touches of modernity.

The image was submitted into the category Sense of Place (the other categories were: Travel Portraits, Outdoor Scenes, and Spontaneous Moments).

If you're a photographer looking for a gig on Craigslist, be careful. As with virtually all the types of "help wanted" listings found on the site, requests for photography services are often used by scammers as a way of luring the naive. Scammers also regularly send out emails to photographers advertising their services.

Israeli photographer Ido Nassimi wanted to geotag the photographs shot using his Nikon D90, but didn't want to shell out $200 bucks for Nikon's official GP-1 GPS receiver. Since he had a GPS Bluetooth receiver lying around, he decided to do some research and make it compatible with his DSLR. He ended up successfully building one for around $50.

Have you always dreamed of soaring high above the Earth... and dive-bombing other birds? If so, this might be the next best thing: some falconers over in the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi recently created a pint-sized helmet cam designed specifically for their hunting falcon.

Update: The account has mysteriously vanished from Flickr. This suggests that it was either fake, or something that wasn't meant to be as big of a news story as it was.

Capturing a single shooting star can make for a brilliant photograph, but what does it look like if you composite multiple meteors into a single image? Fort Collins, Colorado-based nature photographer David Kingham decided to find out recently during the ongoing Perseid meteor shower. The amazing photo seen above is what resulted.

Obvious Corp, the company that spawned Twitter, has unveiled a new project called Medium. It's a site that attempts to revolutionize how online publishing is done.

Time for our giveaway o' the week! This week we're giving away three (3) large canvas prints from LA-based Canvas Shop. The canvases measure 30x40x1.5-inches, and ordinarily cost $204 each. Three randomly selected winners will each win one print for showing off their favorite photo on their wall.

Melbourne, Australia-based wedding photographer Lakshal Perera shot this stunning wedding photograph a few days ago showing the newlywed couple in the foreground and the Milky Way floating in the night sky. The scene was extremely dim, allowing for a clear view of the sky. Perera captured it in a single exposure using a Canon 5D Mark III and 16-35 f/2.8L lens at 17mm, 71 seconds of exposure, f/5.6, and ISO boosted up to 4000 (wow). The couple is relatively sharp given that they had to stand still for 71 seconds!

American private equity firm Carlyle Group announced today that it has agreed to drop $3.3 billion to acquire Getty Images from private equity firm Hellman & Friedman. H&F purchased Getty Images just four years ago for $2.4 billion, so it seems that the stock photo company is doing decently well.

If you were challenged to a duel by a renegade photographer, how quickly would you be able to draw your lens? Would you be able to Quikdraw?

Preparing for a trip to a foreign country where you don't know the language? If you don't have an Internet-connected phone handy, a camera can help you out. Redditor Jhojgaard regularly travels to various countries around the world, and suggests that storing some key photos on your camera can come in handy when you're in a communication crunch.

Virtually all digital still cameras capture light using either a CCD or a CMOS sensor. Most consumers don't know the difference, and -- given the rate at which CMOS sensors are improving -- both sensors perform equally well in most cases (Leica is rumored to be switching over to the CMOS camp with its upcoming M10).

However, that's not what a PC World store in Ireland wants you to believe. The photo above shows an informational placard that was on display recently in one of its stores. The top image shows a scene shot with a CCD sensor, and the bottom image allegedly shows the "same scene" shot with a CMOS sensor. Hmmm...

The Portland Press Herald has agreed to fork over $400 to a woman named Audrey Ann Slade after its use of one of Slade's photos sparked a furious fair use debate online. The paper published a story last week about Reverend Robert Carlson, a minister who committed suicide recently after being accused of abusing young boys. Specifically, the piece reported on the fact that Slade's photos proved that Carlson continued to engage in on-campus events after resigning abruptly in 2006 from his position as chaplain.

A couple months ago we shared a creative photo project that showed various interior spaces from directly overhead, as if they were photographed by a fly on the ceiling. German photographer Michael H. Rohde has a similar project, except his photographs are shot from the opposite direction: directly below.

Are you the once-proud owner of a Canon Rebel T4i DSLR? Has your camera's grip changed from black to white? Have you developed a rash from touching the white grip? Apparently there's at least one of you out there, because Canon has issued a voluntary recall on nearly 68,200 of its T4i DSLRs. As we first reported last month, some of the DSLRs were loaded with too much "rubber accelerator", which can lead to a chemical reaction that causes allergic reactions.

The company issued an advisory at the time and offered free repairs, but is now cooperating with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in issuing the recall -- despite the fact that it has only received a single report of a "minor rash".

iPhone users who want to flaunt their inner photography geek can buy special skins or cases that transform their phone into a camera look-alike. That option wasn't awesome enough for photographer Jake Potts of Bruton Stroube Studios, who recently decided to use his phone's glass back to create an ambrotype photo using the wet plate collodion process!

The next time you're out in a non-light polluted place with your family and your camera, try using our galaxy as a backdrop. Hawaii-based photographer John Hook shot this ridiculously awesome photograph of him, his wife, and his daughter staring up at the Milky Way. As if that weren't perfect enough, there's also a shooting star photobombing the portrait in the lower right hand corner!

Recognize the warning message above? It's what Windows XP would show whenever you tried to rotate a JPEG image 90° using the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. If you're like me, you probably didn't think twice about it (and checked the checkbox), since you had done it many times already and hadn't noticed any difference in quality. After all, how hard can it be to turn a digital photo sideways? You just move the pixels around right?

Well, not really. The fact of the matter is, JPEG is a "lossy" compression algorithm that's geared towards storing and sharing photos without taking up too much disk space. Rotating these compressed images is usually done by decompressing, rotating, and then re-compressing. Since the re-compression is lossy (i.e. data is thrown away), this process results in slightly degraded photos (hence that warning).

As we shared last week, being a sports photographer at the Olympics is a difficult task: battling a round-the-clock schedule and a sea of competing photographers, hauling around a boatload of gear from venue to venue is just the least of your concerns.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That's the quote by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke that you'll find on Cardiio's homepage. It's a quote that is quite appropriate, given what the app can do.

The app is a touch-free heart rate monitor that can accurately tell you your pulse by simply looking at your face through your phone's camera.

Filmmaker Daniel Mercadante and his team at Everynone created this short film titled "Ball" using hundreds of photographs of spherical objects found through Google Image Search. The images are grouped by themes that beautifully transition from one to another.

Forget rings on your fingers or grills on your teeth: Japanese designer Jay Tsujimura thinks your camera is where bling should go. Presumably geared towards people who use pricey cameras as a fashion accessory and status symbol, Tsujimura's premium line of camera jewelry is designed to adorn hotshoes and shutter releases.

Stuff a few thousand dots per inch into a color print, and you have yourself a pretty high resolution image that most people would approve of. What if you could stuff 100,000 dots into that same inch?

By now, you've probably heard about Project Glass, Google's ambitious effort to develop a pair of Internet-connected, augmented reality camera glasses. Well, something similar was being explored for a different clothing item: the t-shirt...

Facebook has rolled out a new feature that may make privacy-wary Internet users cringe. It's a link called "seen by" that shows up under photos posted to groups. The link reveals a box that shows exactly who has seen the photographs -- timestamps and all.

Ingrid Lunden of Techcrunch writes that UC Santa Barbara professor Ben Zhao first noticed the feature last Friday after sharing a photograph of his daughter to one of his groups.

The new Leica M10 will almost certainly be announced at Photokina next month, and may have quite a few "firsts" for a camera in the M rangefinder lineup.

In addition to confirming the launch date, Leica reviewer Steve Huff writes that that the camera will likely hit store shelves in late February or early March 2013.

If you were to start a new clothing brand, who would you target? Athletes? Self-conscious youth? People with more cents than sense?

Earlier this year, NYC-based photographer Ted Rybakowski decided to focus on a relatively untapped demographic: photo enthusiasts who love themselves a good T-shirt. His clothing startup, Dodge & Burn, sells a line of T-shirts adorned with classic analog cameras. While we've featured a number of clever photo-centric shirt designs here before, Rybakowski's brand is the first we've seen that focuses entirely on T-shirt fashion for photogs.

Computer generated imagery is becoming ubiquitous in the world of filmmaking, but some people still prefer some good ol' fashioned elbow grease. Los Angeles-based filmmaker Vu Hoang of Westscape Media spent 7 months creating this stop-motion love story, titled "Love Drama". Why did it take so long? Well, Hoang and his small crew of 3 people created all the animation seen using 3,000 photographs -- photos that were shot frame by frame and individually cut out by hand.

San Francisco-based photographer Lee Materazzi doesn't just take pictures of people jammed into uncomfortable spaces. She also photographs people with their heads stuck into random locations for photos that make them look strangely headless. The quirky images have titles that include "Head in Table", "Head in Rug", and "Head in Sand."