October 2012

In the Star Wars universe, Lightsabers are hand-built as part of their wielders' training, and each one is as unique as the person who made it. Photographer Matt Abelson seems to have the same idea about cameras: he builds high-quality one-of-a-kind pinhole cameras based on his own designs.

The Hyperscope (shown above) is one of his creations. It's a cylindrical can camera that takes medium-format roll film, and is crafted out of chunks of aluminum.

Back in June, a National Geographic crew was given the task of filming and photographing a cheetah running at full speed. While there are plenty of videos and photos out there showing this, the magazine wanted to track alongside the cheetah as it ran (rather than simply capture it from a fixed location). The short behind-the-scenes video above shows how they went about doing this.

For those of you who are desperate for Olympus to release a focus peaking feature for the OM-D EM-5, did you know that there's a trick you can use for "ghetto focus peaking"?

A French photographer named Nicolas recently found that the camera's "Key Line" Art Filter actually works quite well as a focus peaking feature. Simply turn on the filter, set your camera to shoot RAW+JPEG, and focus/shoot away. You can throw away the artsy-filtered JPEG files afterward, but the RAW photographs will be precisely focused thanks to the clever "hack"!

Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile have released a breathtaking new photograph showing the central area of our Milky Way galaxy. The photograph shows a whopping 84 million stars in an image measuring 108500x81500, which contains nearly 9 billion pixels.

British advertising photographer Tim MacPherson has a wonderful series of photographs showing children having fun in imaginary worlds created out of ordinary objects. Kids are seen couch surfing, skiing down stairs, and horseback riding on shelves. The project is titled, "Kids at Home and Play."

Apple has released a new OS X update that provides system-level compatibility with the RAW photos of a number of newer cameras that were launched over the past year, including the Nikon D600 and Canon EOS M. It's called the Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update 4.01, and allows newer RAW files to be viewed and edited in programs like Preview, Aperture, and iPhoto.

Recently, a friend and photographer Ben Jacobsen of Ben Jacobsen Photo got his work into a third gallery. One of the gallery owners asked him “Is your work Photoshopped?” This is also a popular question often asked at Art Fairs and Photography exhibits. Why is this question relevant to some viewers? If you are asking this, do you know what Photoshopping means? Better yet, What does that word mean to you, and what is it that you are asking?

Businessweek writes that Canon has lowered its sales estimates across all its camera …

Santa Fe, New Mexico-based photographer Brad Wilson decided last year that he wanted to photograph something "a little less predictable," so he decided to shoot fine art studio portraits of wild animals using all the things he has learned through years of shooting human portraiture.

Google has already photographed quite a bit of our world using a fleet of cars, submarine-style cameras, tricycles, and snowmobiles, so what else is there to include in Street View? Places where vehicles can't go, of course. The company has begun capturing 360-degree imagery using the Trekker -- a special backpack with a Street View camera rig sticking up from the top.

Want to enjoy some of the world's latest and greatest news photographs on your iPad? Reuters has a new app designed just for you. Called The Wider Image, it's a photo experience that's designed to bring beautiful photojournalism to life in your hands.

One year ago, the haunted house called Nightmares Fear Factory in Niagara Falls, Canada scored a major marketing win after its candid photographs of horrified guests went viral online. With Halloween 2012 only a week away, Jakob Schiller over at Wired caught up with the house's marketing director Vee Popat for the inside scoop of how the images are shot:

At one point in the attraction [...] the groups come to a spot where they trigger a Nikon D80 camera and flash at the exact moment where they encounter some unknown fright that is so scary it provokes grown men to hide behind their wives and friends to jump into each other’s arms.

The idea for the photos was inspired by photos of people yelling as they ride rollercoasters. Popat says the owner used to actually sit in the haunted house and take the photos himself. Just like amusement parks, attendees at Nightmares can purchase their photos after they’ve recovered from the excitement and the “best of” photos circulate on monitors in the lobby.

GorillaPod maker Joby announced a new product today designed for people who regularly use their smartphones for photography or videography. Called the GripTight, it's a universal tripod mount that'll work with most popular smartphones. It's basically a compact spring-loaded clamp with a tripod mount built into the bottom. Stretch the rubbery clamp over your phone, and it'll grip it tightly in place.

Earlier this year we received a call from across the Atlantic Ocean. The editors at Wired UK magazine had an incredibly ambitious project ahead of them that they asked us to be a part of: one week, four photographers, over thirty photo-shoots, and a triple gate-fold cover featuring sixteen of the brightest and most inspiring minds in the world at the MIT Media Lab. How could we say no?

The National Press Photographers Association announced this week that it will be joining a major lawsuit filed against NYC and the NYPD for civil rights violations during the Occupy Wall Street protests.

The photograph above may look like it shows a photo of apples mounted to a wall, but it actually shows real apples that were packed into a neat little square. Turkish artist and photographer Sakir Gökçebag has an entire series of photographs showing various fruits and vegetables carefully sliced up and placed into neat arrangements.

If you've been using Dropbox as a photo backup solution and the official iOS app for accessing your images in the cloud, you may have noticed that downloading photos to your device didn't give you the exact files that you wanted. Instead of beaming the full-resolution images to your Camera Roll, the app would shrink photos to a much smaller size to speed up downloading times. A 14MP 4592x3056 photo would only be saved at 960x638, for example.

This week, Dropbox finally updated the app and removed the resolution ceiling from downloads. Now you can save your entire photos from your backup to your iOS device without seeing it pass under a shrink ray.

Jonathon Keats of Forbes has a great piece discussing truth in photography and …

Electronics reverse-engineering company Chipworks has published an article that discusses and reviews Nikon’s …

Wedding photographers always try to prepare themselves for unexpected events and unplanned photo ops, but there's no way photographer Laura Kelly was expecting what happened this past weekend. While photographing couple Jocelyne Potvin and Patrick Sullivan on their wedding day, an unexpected guest came in to the frame: Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Mikko Lagerstedt is a self-taught photographer based-in Finland who only started shooting back in December 2008. Since then, he has captured a number of hauntingly beautiful landscape photographs showing both stars and self-portrait silhouettes hovering over the horizon line. His latest project is simply titled "Edge", and features "atmospheric photography" of the Finnish landscape.

Earlier this year, we shared a crazy example of how you can make water drops look like they're frozen in midair simply by passing the water over a speaker and using sound vibrations to sync the drops with the frame rate of your camera. Well, Japan's largest music channel, Space Shower TV, has taken the idea and turned it into clever commercial. What you see above is ordinary footage using this trick -- there's no fancy CGI trickery, reversal during post, or high-speed camera footage involved.

Nikon has officially announced the new 70-200mm f/4G ED VR, a lens that we first reported on last week. The specs that leaked a day ago were spot on: the lens features a fancy schmancy new Vibration Reduction (VR) system that offers up to 5 stops of image stabilization, raising the bar from 4.

Just as the rumors predicted, Nikon announced the new V2 mirrorless camera today. Succeeding the Nikon 1 V1, the V2 is a slightly-more-serious mirrorless camera than the recently-launched J2 (think V for "varsity" and J for "junior varsity"). Unlike the J2, the V2 offers more differences from its predecessor than a few minor tweaks.

One of the big ideas that seems destined to explode over the next decade is lifelogging, the ability to automatically capture and store one's life and experiences for future reference. Memoto is a new camera that's trying to be a pioneer in this emerging market. Its name and tagline should give you a good sense of what it does: "Memoto Lifelogging Camera: A tiny, automatic camera and app that gives you a searchable and shareable photographic memory."

Remember those hilarious underwater dog photographs that went viral earlier this year? Seth Casteel, the photographer behind those shots, emailed us yesterday to say that he had been invited onto Good Morning America to talk about his work and how he creates it.

Photographer Gary Land was recently hired by Nissan to shoot a series of car advertisement photographs featuring the famous Heisman Trophy-winning football players Charles Woodson, Bo Jackson, Robert Griffin III, and Herschel Walker. Luckily for all of us, the team produced a series of behind-the-scenes videos offering short glimpses into how the photographs were created, the gear they used, and tricks they came up with to their turn ideas into reality.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer held her first earnings call yesterday, and it appears that stockholders were pleased with the company's latest quarter figures: the stock price has been soaring since then. Among the areas that Yahoo sees promise in are Flickr and mobile, as well as a combination of the two.

We reported last week the Nikon is set to fill a gap in its lens lineup by introducing a new Nikkor AF-S 70-200mm f/4G ED VR lens -- a lens that should be smaller and cheaper than its f/2.8 counterpart. As we move closer to the lens' announcement (rumored to be sometime this week), new details about it are starting to emerge.

Elijah Solomon Hurwitz is an NYC-based photographer keen on documentary and street photography, and social and cultural issues. He has photographed in over 40 countries. Visit his website here. He also publishes a running log of photos (on Instagram as @elijahsol) and thoughts.

PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Elijah Hurwitz: Until this last year I wouldn't characterize my story as particularly unique. I grew up in a 'planned community' suburb of DC/Baltimore finding ways to get into/avoid trouble and playing video games. Studied business at a midwestern state college, and then spent the next ten years in marketing roles for technology and entertainment brands in Seattle and NYC. I've always been really into music, traveling and the outdoors. I better put the brakes on, this sounds like an online dating profile.