September 2012

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fighter Renzo Gracie was walking on the sidewalk at 22nd street and 10th avenue in Manhattan last night, when he noticed two shady-looking fellows following him. Suspecting that they were planning to mug him, Gracie began sending live tweets and photos to his 100,000+ followers on Twitter. Once the two men finally approached him, asking for a cigarette, he decided to launch a preemptive strike by beating the crap out of the would-be assailants... while live-blogging the …

Earlier this week, we shared a funky piece of camera equipment called the Bounce-Wall, which features a large card that serves as a surface to bounce your flash off when you're out and about. While the pricing wasn't available at the time, David Hobby of Strobist has since revealed that it'll carry a $99 when it's released later this month.

Sorry for the blurriness, but that's what you often have to live with in exchange for seeing cameras before they officially exist. Digicam-info has published leaked photos of the upcoming Q10 mirrorless camera and the K-5 II and K-5 IIs DSLRs.

What does your choice of Instagram filter say about your character and personality? Check out the Instagram Horoscope to find out. Marco Kaye and Sloan Schang over at the publishing house McSweeney's came up with a humorous list of interpretations. Here's a sampling: …

Nokia has already confessed and apologized for faking the optical image stabilization sample footage in a new promo video for its Lumia 920 phone. In case you weren't sure: yes, the sample still photographs in the video were faked as well.

Four years ago, Kai-Huei Yau had an idea. During a presidential election year, why not create a series of high school football preview photographs that tie into the political atmosphere? This year, the Tri-City Herald photographer finally put the idea into motion. His "Football Campaign 2012" series features portraits of local high school football players that make them look like they're running for office rather than preparing for a season of war on the gridiron.

Shepard Fairey avoided jail time after all. The Obama HOPE poster artist was sentenced today to two years of probation and a $25,000 fine for using an AP photo without permission and then destroying evidence to cover his tracks. The New York Times writes that the entire dispute will be an interesting case study for fair use law: …

This photograph of Japanese astronaut Aki Hoshide taking a self-portrait was published to NASA's amazing 2Explore Flickr account on Wednesday. It was snapped during a six-and-a-half hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station. The EXIF data embedded in the photo reveals that he was using a Nikon D2Xs with a 10.5mm fisheye lens at f/11, 1/500, and ISO 200.

In daguerreotype photography, the first commercially successful photographic process, a positive image is recorded directly onto a silvered copper plate. Although mercury is traditionally used to develop the plate, there's a way of creating daguerreotypes called the Becquerel method that eschews mercury in favor of non-lethal ingredients.

Photographer Mo Gelber was standing outside the Manhattan Criminal Court on August 16th when he noticed a couple being led in handcuffs toward the courthouse by two officers. Just as they were about to enter the building to be booked, the young man leaned in to his significant other for one last kiss. Gelber instinctively snapped a photograph, resulting in the picture-perfect image seen above.

Did you know that in California, "rights of publicity" are transfered to a celebrity's heirs after the celebrity dies? This means that photos of the famous individual may continue to be subject to the heir's licensing fees when the photo owners want to license them out for use in commercial products. A court ruling issued last week provides an interesting case study into how this California law can affect photography rights. PDN writes, …

Last week, a seascape photo I made showed up on link-sharing powerhouse Reddit. It caused a bit of a stir since it is a copyrighted image and was rehosted and posted without my permission. A lot of the photographers in r/photography and r/pics (where it was originally posted by a user) made it known that it was I who had created the work. I’m very grateful for both the exposure that posting gave me, and even more grateful for the support I received from my fellow photographers and Redditors.

In addition to the new X-E1 announced this morning, Fujifilm has also unveiled its upcoming version 2.0 of its X-Pro1 firmware. Autofocus has been a much-griped-about feature of the X-Pro1 (and the X100, for that matter), and the new firmware addresses that issue by improving the AF capabilities of the camera in different ways.

Shepard Fairey has spent the past few years fighting a messy legal battle with photographer Mannie Garcia and the Associated Press over his use of a portrait of Obama his iconic HOPE poster. He has raked in a significant amount of dough from the artwork, but may now face jail time for foolishly attempting to destroy evidence when the copyright infringement investigation began. The Smoking Gun reports, …

The bean bag is a tool that photographers sometimes use to stabilize their camera. Plop it down on a fixed platform, and the bag can do wonders for achieving sharper shots. Instead of buying a bean bag for a marked up price, you can easily create a do-it-yourself version at home. After all, it's just some beans in a bag... Digital Camera World has a step-by-step tutorial on how you can create one using some lentils and a pair of unwanted jeans.

The final hurdles have been cleared, and Instagram is now officially part of Facebook. The startup's 16 employees will be relocating from San Francisco to Facebook HQ in Menlo Park.

San Francisco residents were treated with a dazzling sight yesterday: a double rainbow all the way across the sky, visible from many parts of the city.

Lets say you find an imaginative kid, put a pen in one of his hands, put a camera in the other, and ask him to create a movie. What would you get? …

German student Hans Findling has some interesting architectural photos captured deep underground in subway stations around Europe. The images, snapped in Germany, Austria, and Spain, are generally devoid of the hustle and bustle you usually find inside a metro system. Findling chooses to focus on capturing the eye-catching patterns, lines, and symmetry built into many parts of these stations.

Photo printing company PhotoBox recently conducted a survey of 1,000 women aged 18-65 to find out how they feel about being in photographs. An interesting finding was that the women generally cared much more about how other women view the images than how men view them. Only 10% of women care about what men think of their photogenic-ness. Of the other 9 in 10 women, it's the 36-45 demographic that cares the most about being judged by other women.

Nokia faced the heat of the Internet yesterday after it came to light that a promo video for its new PureView image stabilization technology had been faked. The video, which was supposed to show off the company's fancy-schmancy new floating lens technology, didn't actually show real Lumia 920 footage, but rather footage captured using an actual stabilized camera. Nokia responded today in a blog post titled "An apology is due": …

While taking part in a contest to design an unconventional business card, artist Mikey Burton came up with the idea of using a rubber stamp. He writes, …

Fuji has announced its new, much leaked, X-E1 mirrorless camera. It features the same high-quality CMOS sensor as the X-Pro1, but packs it into a smaller and lighter body for increased portability. Specs include a 16.3 megapixel APS-C sensor, a 2.8-inch LCD, a pop-up flash, ISO of 200-6400 (expandable to 100-25600), shutter lag of just 0.05 seconds, focusing speed of up to 0.1 seconds, and RAW and built-in RAW conversion.

Over the past decade, many airports around the world have adopted special thermal cameras that can determine whether or not a passenger has a fever. The goal of these cameras is to prevent infectious diseases from spreading and causing an epidemic (or pandemic). Greek scientists Georgia Koukiou and Vassilis Anastassopoulos recently came up with a similar concept, except their thermal camera is used to detect drunk people instead of contagious people.

Since launching back in 2007, Gunnar glasses have received a considerable amount of attention in the tech world for their ability to combat computer vision syndrome (CVS). If you spend hours upon hours every day staring at your computer monitor while post-processing your photographs, you might have experienced the symptoms of CVS, which include eye fatigue, visual stress, irritation, burning, tearing, and dryness.

This promo video for Nokia's new "floating lens" image stabilization technology is causing a lot of discussion... and not for reasons Nokia should be proud about. After we included the video in a post today about the Lumia 920's PureView camera, commenters pointed us to a post over on The Verge revealing that the video was faked.

After Nokia unleashed its 41-megapixel 808 PureView phone back in February, most people thought that it would set the bar for future phones branded with the PureView monkier. "PureView" came to mean, "a ridiculous number of megapixels in a phone camera." Turns out that's not the case.

As we first reported back in June, Ritz Camera is putting itself on the auction block as it struggles to pull itself out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The public auction will be held tomorrow, and may mean the breakup of the largest camera store chain in the United States.

Fractal-like patterns are found widely in nature, "in phenomena including clouds, river networks, geologic fault lines, mountains, coastlines, animal coloration, snow flakes, crystals blood vessel branching, ocean waves and many others." The fact that it appears on a large scale in geographical formations means that many of these beautiful patterns can be captured as photographs from space.

For those of you who need to snap eye-level photographs of giraffes: Taiwanese gear manufacturer Fishbone has launched a crazy new tripod that literally reaches new heights of image stabilization. Called the Tree-pod, the tripod is designed for capturing photos or videos from way up off the ground. Dan Chung of DSLR News Shooter writes, …

DOGHOUSEDIARIES created this humorous glimpse into what the Fortune 500 company list will look like 18 years from now, in the year 2030. We see that "Undo Instagram Filters Inc." leads the pack with $2.88 trillion in annual revenue.

We're in the year of the camera's app. Not the camera app, which you use on your phone, but the camera's app, which is found on your camera. A boatload of new cameras this year will have Internet connectivity and app support built right in, giving photographers access to all kinds of custom features and functions that weren't easily available in the old age of cameras.

If you think male and female photographers sometimes have very different styles, the reason might go beyond their tastes and approaches to shooting. Men and women see the world differently -- literally. A new study by vision researchers have found that the two genders have different ways of collecting visual information.

Did you know that LCD screens and live view didn't arrive until a number of years after digital cameras hit the market? The first consumer digital camera that featured those technologies was the Casio QV-10 (seen above), which hit store shelves in 1995. However, the screen was purely for framing shots, not for eyeballing exposure, and it took roughly 10 years for live view as we know it to become ubiquitous.

As people snap more and more digital photos, being able to organize those photos into useful sets is becoming increasingly important. Facial recognition algorithms are quickly becoming a standard feature in popular photo origination programs (e.g. iPhoto), but people-sorting is only the tip of the "semantic photo search" iceberg. Cloud photo service EverPix is one company that's currently working to take photo recognition beyond faces. Sarah Perez of TechCrunch writes, …

Need to bounce your flash but don't have a suitable wall nearby? Bounce-Wall is a new lighting accessory that puts a large card to the side of your camera, providing a bounce surface wherever you need it. David Hobby over at Strobist got to play around with one, and writes, …

Photographers sometimes put themselves in harms way in order to capture the perfect shot, but there's a fine line between taking calculated risks and foolishly putting your life in danger. This 16-second-long video clip shows a guy doing the latter, nearly earning himself a Darwin Award while trying to photograph drifting cars at the Karpacz 2012 races in Poland.

Photos and details of Nokia's upcoming Lumia 920 smartphone leaked earlier this week, revealing that the new flagship Windows phone will feature a 8-megapixel sensor, a 4.5-inch display, 32GB of storage, and wireless charging via a special pad.

If you're as passionate about cooking and baking as you are about photography, then the GAMAGO Telephoto Kitchen Lens Timer is a fun product designed for you. It looks just like a plastic zoom lens that comes in camera kits, except it measures time instead of freezing it. The focal length numbers on the side of the lens are seconds, not millimeters. Give the rubber grip a twist, and the countdown starts. Once it hits zero, the "lens" will let out a ring to let you know that your culinary …

If you're a street photography-loving New Yorker who's worried about being stopped and harassed by the New York Police Department, check out this official memo that was sent out to officers back in 2009.

Sony is attacking the mirrorless camera with a one-two punch this year. After announcing the Wi-Fi-equipped NEX-5R last week, the company is preparing to also release the NEX-6. The two cameras are nearly identical in terms of specs and features, except for one major difference: the NEX-6 has a built-in electronic viewfinder, while the NEX-5R does not.

On August 27, 2006, photographer Noah Kalina uploaded a highly influential video to YouTube. Titled everyday, the video was a time-lapse spanning six years of self-portraits showing Kalina staring expressionlessly into the camera. The video has since amassed tens of millions of views, and has spawned countless copycat projects and videos.

Mike Lerner is a freelance photographer who has worked with some of the music industries hottest stars. He is currently Justin Bieber's official concert photographer. Visit his website here.

Redditor bottleface was watching the live stream of Jay-Z's first annual "Budweiser Made in America" festival this past weekend, when something caught his eye. One of the concert goers standing in the front rows had made a pretty unique camera choice: a Macbook Air. While the fans around him held up smartphones to snap photos and record videos, the Macbookographer was proudly holding up his laptop with the FaceTime camera pointed at the performance.

Modder Andy Rawson needed an easy way to find air leaks in his 100-year-old house in order to improve its energy efficiency. Not wanting to spend thousands of dollars on a thermal imaging camera, he decided to go the DIY route. He built a box containing a 64-zone temperature sensor, and managed to connect the device to his iPhone via the dock. By overlaying the temperature data onto the iPhone's camera display, the $150 attachment instantly turns the iPhone into a cheap thermal imaging camera.

Steward Magazine has published a fascinating interview with photographer Anton Kusters, who spent two years documenting a yakuza gang in Tokyo, capturing highly intimate glimpses into what life is like in the criminal underworld.

Last week, we wrote about an emerging digital camera feature called "focus peaking", which lets users easily focus lenses through live view by using colorful pixels to highlight in-focus areas. Photographer Karel Donk wanted the same feature in Photoshop, which doesn't currently offer it, so he decided to create it himself.

Love it or hate it, you have to admit that Instagram is making a huge impact on the world of photography, changing the way images are snapped and shared. Among the 80+ million users who have shared 4+ billion photos are many of the world's most renowned photojournalists. Olivier Laurent over at the British Journal of Photography recently chatted with some of them, asking them about their thoughts on how Instagram is transforming photography as we know it: …

If you look at the product page of any "exotic" piece of camera equipment on Amazon, there's a good chance that you'll come across some humorous fake reviews left by photographers looking to poke fun at the product's features. Last September, we shared some funny reviews left for the Sigma 200-500mm, which looks more like a bazooka than a lens. Another one is the Hasselblad H4D-50, a medium format DSLR that costs $19,000... as an open box demo. You can probably guess what the reviews poke fun …

Looking for free lessons on how to get started with using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom to post-process your photographs? Look no further than the official YouTube channel of New York City camera shop B&H Photo Video. The store often invites well-known professional photographers to hold lectures on subjects they're knowledgable in and passionate about. The collection of videos aren't as shared as other shorter tutorial videos you'll find online due to their great lengths -- they run up to two …