October 2012

Joby sent out a press release today warning consumers that there are counterfeit versions of its popular GorillaPod flexible tripod floating around in the wild. While that isn't too newsworthy in itself -- what gear isn't being counterfeited these days? -- it's the juicy details surrounding the release that are quite interesting. Apparently the company directly confronted companies involved in making imitations during Photokina 2012 in Cologne, Germany last month.

Look around on the web, and you'll find plenty of photographs of Google's colorful offices in Mountain View (AKA the Googleplex) and around the world. Finding images shot from inside the company's tightly-guarded data centers is much harder, since only a handful of employees are allowed to roam the spaces where the "web lives." However, Google recently invited photographer Connie Zhou inside a number of its high-tech data centers. Gorgeous photographs resulted -- images that show incredible scale, mind-numbing repetition, and quirky colors.

Since it was announced back in 2006, Canon's 70-200mm f/4L IS lens has been an attractive option for photographers who want a lighter and cheaper alternative to the 70-200mm f/2.8 IS. For the price of one stop, one could get a lens that's nearly half as heavy (1.7lb vs 3.3lb) and significantly less expensive. Nikon shooters may soon have a similar choice as well: Nikon is planning to fill in this gap in its lens lineup by announcing its own 70-200mm f/4 a week from now.

SigZilla is gone now. You’ll be able to see its work in action if you watch the World Series. I wouldn’t be surprised if you catch a glimpse of it mounted to FOX’s Vision Research camera. Before it left, though, we were able to -- with a great deal of difficulty -- get it mounted in the lab and run one basic Imatest series.

Here's a neat idea of thinking outside the box: high-speed photographer Scott Dickson added a pair of sunglasses to an ordinary water balloon pop photograph, giving the splash some personality (and a "bowtie").

At a special event in San Francisco tonight, GoPro launched its latest action camera: the Hero3. Compared to the Hero2 that it succeeds, the new camera is both more portable and more capable. It's 30% smaller and 25% lighter, making it great for helmet cams and attaching to random things. The image processor inside is twice as fast, allowing the camera to shoot both video and photographs at faster frame rates.

It was almost exactly one year ago that Olympus fired then-CEO Michael Woodford and started a chain of events that culminated in one of the largest financial scandals in Japanese history. Woodford received an incredible amount of international attention for his role in the saga, since he was one of the highest ranking executives ever to turn into a whistleblower.

If you find yourself regularly shooting in the rain and in need of a better way to keep yourself …

Have you been getting rashes on your skin, or redness and irritation in your eyes? Do you own a Canon WFT-E7A Wireless File Transmitter? Those two things might be related. If you remember, a couple of months ago, Canon recalled tens of thousands of Rebel T4i/650D DSLRs due to an issue with their rubber grips that caused allergic reactions. The rubber had been overloaded with too much of certain ingredients, leading to an unexpected chemical reaction that caused white flaking. It turns out the faulty rubber was used beyond the Rebel: Canon has just released a product advisory warning that its file transmitter may have the same flaw.

For her peculiar photo project titled "Married Men," London-based photographer and lecturer Natasha Caruana spent a year going on dates... with married men. She ended up going on 80 dates with men found through a dating website geared towards people looking to have affairs. At each meeting, Caruana used a disposable camera and a digital recorder hidden inside a small red purse to snap photographs and record the conversation. The images were all captured without the mens' permissions, but do not reveal identities; the faces are carefully omitted from the frame. Caruana limited herself to a few pictures per encounter to avoid arousing suspicion.

Best known for his iconic V-J Day in Times Square image, photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt snapped some of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century's most famous faces. LIFE writes that the photographer had an interesting habit: jumping into the frame for self-portraits with his subjects.

We're shared a couple of "stacked star trail" time-lapse videos over the past few months (see here and here), but those videos comprised nighttime photographs taken from the ground. Photographer Christoph Malin recently decided to try his hand at the technique, but instead of using his own earthbound photographs, he used NASA photographs shot from the International Space Station. The resulting video, shown above, features the stars drawing trails across the "sky" while the Earth creates light streaks down below.

The Olympus OM-D EM-5 is a powerful little camera, but what owners are using these days many only be a portion of what the camera is fully capable of. 43 Rumors writes that an anonymous hacker is claiming to have hacked the camera using some firmware update trickery. What he or she found was quite interesting: hidden and locked features such as clean HDMI 4:2:2 output and focus peaking!

My overview of American government goes generally like this: (1) Something happens. (2) The government passes some laws in response to it, adds on a few pork projects, and raises taxes to pay for the laws and the pork. (3) The laws (or pork) cause an entirely new problem. (4) Repeat.

The usual outcome of this cycle is that every year we have more laws and higher taxes. But every so often, some accidental side effect occurs and something awesomely good happens. So it was during the alphabet-soup days of New Deal government during the Great Depression. The accidental side effect was the Golden Age of American Photography. How it happened is rather interesting.

You might not recognize the name Kevin Van Aelst, but you might have seen his photography while flipping through popular magazines. The New Haven, Connecticut-based photographer specializes in editorial photographs that illustrate ideas in creative ways. In his images, you'll see eggs appear as light bulbs, paper airplanes formed from water drops on a windshield, and Hawaii in spilled punch. His work is often featured on the pages of numerous publications, including the New York Times, Time, Wired, GQ, and Money.

Shutterfly is making a habit of gobbling up photo sharing services that camera companies no longer want to run. Less than half a year after acquiring Kodak Gallery from Kodak for a meager $23.8 million, Shutterfly has now taken another photo site off the hands of a company very similar to Kodak: Fujifilm. The Japanese imaging company has agreed to dump its photo sharing and printing business SeeHere into Shutterfly's lap, shutting down the service on November 8, 2012.

Two years ago, director Ross Ching created a viral hit by showing Los Angeles in a time-lapse video in which every trace of cars and people was removed. That project was such a success that Ching tells us he's now planning to create an entire series based on the same idea, showing what iconic cities around America would look like if the humans within them suddenly vanished. The first stop in his "Empty America" tour was San Francisco, captured beautifully in the haunting video above.

Bird Photo Booth is the world's first bird feeder that doubles as an iPhone and GoPro photo booth. Invented by photographer and bird-watcher Bryson Lovett, the hardwood feeder uses food to lure your feathery friends into closeup portrait sessions. Photographs can be snapped remotely by pairing your iPhone with an iPad that's running a remote camera app.

Over the past decade, photographer Michael Benson has worked as a self-assigned curator of the past 50 years of NASA's interplanetary space exploration photography. His big idea is that the images produced during this period form an important chapter in the history of photography, so he wants to select and repackage images in a way that can appreciated by the general public. After browsing through massive numbers of RAW photos shot by space agencies, Benson composites and colorizes them into gorgeous wide-angle views showing what the locations would look like if the viewer were standing where the probe was.

Jonathan Dandrow believes that traffic enforcement cameras are "dangerous, invasive, error-prone, and unconstitutional," so he decided to find a way to turn camera technology against those cameras. He ended up creating the noPhoto, a high-tech license plate frame that makes it impossible for a red light or speed trap camera to snap a useable photograph of your plate.

Can you believe the proposal photo above wasn't planned? In fact, the photographer wasn't even aware of what was going on. It was snapped this past Sunday by 20-year-old Sydney University student Michael Keane, who visited Sydney's Bondi Beach early in the morning to capture photographs of the sunrise. After returning home to post-process the images, Keane zoomed into his photos and was surprised to find that he had accidentally captured a very romantic moment happening way in the horizon.

Compact cameras are becoming pretty serious photography tools when it comes to sensor sizes and lens qualities, but one thing they generally lack is an easy-to-use filter system. Interchangeable-lens photographers can usually just find a filter of the correct diameter and use it with their lens, but things get more complicated when you're dealing with fixed-lens cameras. Although using filters is possible with some models, the systems aren't very friendly: they're usually proprietary, expensive, or based on unwieldy adapters.

That all changes with the new MagFilter by CarrySpeed, an easy-to-use filter system for compact cameras based on magnets rather than threads.

Since launching last year, JPEGMini has become a popular web-based option for trimming the file size of JPEG images without compromising their appearance. The web app magically shrinks photos by up to 5x while keeping the quality relatively unchanged. In May of this year, the company repackaged the technology for Macs as a simple space-saving app. Its next frontier? Mobile photo sharing and iOS.

People often say that, for whatever reason, dogs often look like their owners. 27-year-old Swiss photographer Sebastian Magnani has been attracting a good deal of worldwide attention lately for his photo project that takes that idea to the next level. Titled Underdogs, the series of photos features portraits showing dog faces carefully Photoshopped onto the bodies of their owners.

This photograph shows renowned British photographer David Bailey standing with 142 men who share his name. You might be wondering how such a strange photo concept came together. If you remember, last month we reported that Samsung had launched a unique marketing campaign that asked any UK resident named David Bailey to step forward.

Ever wonder how Google manages to capture street-level photographs of entire cities for its Street View? It's done using a giant fleet of camera-equipped cars. Google employee Masrur Odinaev recently shared this photograph -- taken by a Street View car -- showing one of Google's Street View car parking lots. We see a large fleet of Subaru Imprezas that have panoramic cameras mounted to the tops.

Turkey-based photography enthusiast Isil Karanfil created this beautiful image showing an entire sunset in a single photograph. Karanfil fixed her Nikon D60 in its view of the seascape, and then shot a single photograph every hour for seven hours between 3pm and 9pm as the day turned into night. She then took the resulting photographs, sliced them up, and combined them together using Photoshop for the image seen above, which she titles, "Sun Lapse".

We've shared examples of creative promotional mailers in the past, but we usually don't receive them. A few days ago, however, we received a small box from the folks over at Photojojo. Inside was a clever papercraft Polaroid camera that serves as both a press kit and a desk decoration.

Sigma's 200-500mm telephoto lens is so large (2.3 feet long and 34.6 pounds) and so expensive ($26,000) that many people just can't take it seriously. Last year we shared some hilarious customer reviews that poked fun at "the green monster." If you've been wondering how the lens actually looks, works, and performs, the folks over at LensRentals recently purchased a copy of the lens for their inventory and snapped some behind-the-scenes photos of their initial tests.

Grounded is a project by photographer Bob Croslin that features beautiful studio portraits of birds that are recovering from injuries at a bird sanctuary.

Is "camera toss" photography ready to go from fad to feature? Apparently Nikon thinks so. A recently published patent (No. 2012-189859) shows that the company has been thinking about building specific features into its compact and mirrorless cameras that would assist in using the technique.

It's seems like many photo enthusiasts are hating on Instagram and retro-filtered photos these days, but not photographer Richard Koci Hernandez. He has written a piece for CNN titled "Photographers, embrace Instagram," in which he explains why he thinks that "Smartphones have ushered in a golden age for photography."

We've featured a couple of projects involving cameras strapped to birds recently (see here and here), but photographing with birds is anything but a new idea. It was actually invented a little over a century ago, in 1907, by a German photography pioneer named Julius Neubronner.

A brief exchange during a passing conversation a few days ago got me thinking. Someone said something about how lucky I was to make a living as an artist. I immediately corrected them; while immensely thankful for my career, a job where I get to wake up every day and make images, I felt obligated to point out that most of the time I am not, in fact, an artist at all.

At best, assignment photographers are craftsmen, not artists, solving other people’s problems and putting other people’s ideas into effect in the most timely and cost-effective way possible; to think otherwise is delusional.

After months of dedicated hacking, Magic Lantern has finally been released for the Canon 7D. The new alpha version of the firmware add-on introduces a slew of new features to the camera, including focus peaking, zebra stripes, magic zoom, spotmeter, liveview customization, image review tweaks, and much more.

A decade ago, photographer Andrew Filer obtained the most detailed map of North Dakota he could find, and began a project of documenting the towns on it. Not just some of the towns, but every single named dot on the map. After years of dedicated work, Filer succeeded in photographing the entire state. He ended up visiting over 850 different locations and snapping 9,308 photographs.

Digital and mobile phone photography have made it easy for parents to document every waking (and non-waking) moment of a child's life, but what effect is this constant picture-taking having on kids? David Zweig has written up an article over at the New York Times arguing that our culture of photography is intruding on the preciousness of youth, and that parents should take fewer photographs of their children.

What do you get when you combine an accent light with a picture frame? Answer: the Geode. It's a new product by San Francisco-based home furnishing shop Ghost Nest that lets you light up a space while showing off your favorite photographs.

In the market for a new photo printer and not sure what to buy? Here's a tip: shelling out a little more dough on the printer itself could potentially lead to massive savings over time.

The reason is ink, sometimes called "black gold" (or... "colored gold"?). The general rule of thumb in the printer industry is: the cheaper the printer, the more expensive it is to keep it filled with ink.

If you still process your own film in a darkroom, you probably regularly toss empty film canisters into the trash can once you've popped off the cap and retrieved the film inside. The next time you're in there, try saving those canisters: you can upcycle them into neat magnets for displaying photos on your fridge -- perhaps even prints of latent photos that were once in those canisters!

The photo above is the album cover for Jay-Z's 2009 album Blueprint 3, featuring a photo of a pile of musical instruments and recording equipment with three red lines across the front. It might look Photoshopped -- an easy way to create such an effect -- but it was actually done with perspective trickery and good ol' fashioned hard work.

What if there were a disposable digital camera that you could eat after using? Sounds bizarre, but it already exists. Scientists in the US are working on uber-thin electronics that can be dissolved inside the human body once their job is done. Among the many possible uses being explored is photography.

Spinlight 360 is a relatively young startup company that makes modular flash modifier systems for speed lights. Its products are based around a ring assembly attached on the head of flash units that various modifiers can be mounted to, allowing it to be a "jack of all trades" of sorts when it comes to controlling light and shadows.

"Out of Place" is a clever series of photo manipulations by German photographer Robert Rickhoff, who starts with somewhat mundane photographs taken around town and then adds in elements that don't belong. A residential scene shows a "speed jump", streets are turned into skateboard ramps, and highways are transformed into volleyball courts. Each scene makes you look twice and smile at the absurdity of what it seems to show.

This is probably a "duh" fact for many of you, but one that some of you have perhaps never heard or realized before: Did you know that the flashes in the Canon Speedlite lineup are named after their maximum guide numbers? To figure out the power of your Speedlite, just take the model name and hack off the zero at the end to get the GN (e.g. 430EX has GN 43, 580EX has GN 58).

Don't have any more babies to transport? Old strollers can be repurposed as a way to wheel your camera gear from place to place. Just load it up with your camera bag, tripod, lighting equipment, and accessories, and you'll have yourself a mobile mini studio.

If you ever need some encouragement for sticking with photography when times get tough, you should read about the adventures of Frank Hurley. Born in Australia in 1885, he took up photography as a young man and eventually became skilled enough to be selected as the official photographer for multiple expeditions to Antarctica and for the Australian military in both world wars. Among his many photographic escapades, one stands out from among the rest: being stranded in the Antarctic for nearly two years.

It has only been a month since Sony announced its latest flagship full-frame camera, the A99, but …

You don't get to 200,000 followers without earning a few perks. A couple of months ago, we reported that a number of Instagram power users had been flown out to the US Open in New York as part of various companies' marketing campaigns. Free trips and freebies like that one are becoming more and more common for Instagrammers with large followings.

German photographers Marion and Dieter were visiting the Nuremberg Zoo earlier this month when they came across an odd sight: one of the polar bears named Felix was chomping on a $2,100+ Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS telephoto lens. Apparently another lady was trying to change lenses while standing at the edge of the enclosure, and accidentally let the 70-200mm slip out of her grasp and into Felix's territory.