November 2012

Lens hoods and protective cases are nice accessories to have, but they're generally only bundled with professional L glass when it comes to Canon lenses. Canon USA almost never includes them with lenses that don't carry that distinctive red ring (or a green ring). Last week, Bryan Carnathan over at The Digital Picture recently noticed that the pre-order pages for the new Canon 35mm f/2 IS over on B&H and Adorama listed a hood and case as part of what's included. The news surely got many a …

With Christmas and the holiday season just around the corner, here's our annual roundup of the latest, greatest, and phototastic-ist gift ideas. The items are listed by price, so there should be something to fit every budget.

Art director Jim Lasser and his friend, photographer Ray Gordon, have a humorous ongoing photo project titled Namesake Motors. They observed that car makes and models often have names inspired by (or similar to) famous people or people groups, so they decided to shoot a series of images that play on words by pairing the cars with their namesakes (using the term very loosely).

If you've always wanted your photography prominently displayed in New York City's Times Square, Google can help make it happen -- as long as you're okay with adding some text to your picture and participating in a marketing effort. To show that its new line of Chromebook laptops is designed for all kinds of users, the Mountain View-based company has launched a new campaign called For Everyone. It's a giant photo gallery that invites the world to upload photos that answer the question, "who are …

Philippe Echaroux is a young French photographer who makes a living shooting portraits of celebrities (among other things). Recently, he carried out a personal project that had been brewing in his mind for some time: using his celebrity portraiture experience and style for spontaneous portraits of ordinary strangers encountered on the street. The short video above shows how Echaroux roamed around with his small team and set up makeshift photo studios for each of the portraits.

Are photo-sharing website content policies based on indecency or the mere appearance of indecency? That's what visual web magazine Theories of the deep understanding of things decided to test out yesterday. It uploaded an innocent -- but seemingly risqué -- photo of a woman sitting in a bathtub with her elbow resting on the edge (warning: it looks inappropriate). Lo and behold, the social network quickly took the photo down for violating the service's terms.

Siebe Warmoeskerken of De Vetpan studios is a photographer and woodworker based in The Netherlands. This weekend, he decided to combine his two passions by building a custom wenge wood edition of the popular Polaroid SX-70 Alpha instant camera.

Back in August we shared a mesmerizing stop-motion video titled "Dream Music: Part 2" and created by Marc Donahue and Sean Michael Williams. The team spent 6-8 hours of work photographing every 3-4 seconds of the 8-minute music video. All in all, the project took six months to complete. The video above presents a behind-the-scenes look at how the whole thing was done, with director's commentary, deleted scenes, and a bunch of time-lapses of the time-lapse being shot.

Back in May, a 1923 Leica O-Series camera became the most expensive camera on the planet after being sold for roughly $2.79 million at a WestLicht auction. That camera was a prototype camera, and just one of 25 made (only 12 of them exist today). If you're wondering what the most expensive non-prototype camera is, look no further than the latest WestLicht auction that was held earlier today. The Leica M3D seen above fetched a staggering €1.68 million, or roughly $2.18 million, becoming "the …

Earlier this week we reported that it is now easier for photographers in the UK to pursue copyright infringement cases without having to shell out big money for a lawyer. While that law change is likely a big boon for photographers, there are other proposed law changes that have some photographers up in arms.

Here's a humorous and lighthearted 5-minute video titled, "Fafa's Photoshop Tutorial." Created by the comedy series Glove and Boots, it's a short and sweet introduction to using layers in Photoshop... taught by puppets. Think Sesame Street meets Scott Kelby.

There are a number of lifelogging camera projects racing to be first movers in the emerging industry of cameras that can capture every waking moment of our lives for future reference. Examples include Google Glass, Vuzix, and Memoto). The Huffington Post has published an interview with Memoto co-founder Martin Källström in which he shares some thoughts on what the future holds: …

People who collect Leica M rangefinders or use them as luxury fashion accessories take great care to keep their cameras in pristine condition. Photographer Blake Andrews is not one of those people. He has been doing film photography since 1993, and his trusty M6 has plenty of battle scars from seeing heavy use over the years.

After the 2011 Tsunami in Japan, there emerged volunteer efforts to find, restore, and return precious photos swept away by the waters. CNN writes of a similar effort being done in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

Slovenia-based professional photographer Borut Peterlin was recently tasked with shooting a portrait of painter/illustrator/author Milan Erič for influential Slovenian magazine Mladina. Peterlin decided that he wanted to create a wet plate collodion photo, but spent weeks worrying about whether he would be able to accomplish it given the tight schedule of the on-location shoot.

There was some surprising news in the smartphoneography world yesterday: Amateur Photographer reported that Nokia's imaging chief Damian Dinning -- "considered the driving force behind the firm’s smartphone camera technology" -- would be leaving the company for personal reasons at the end of this month.

When his wife Osher became pregnant with their first child, photographer Tomer Grencel had the idea of documenting the pregnancy through a stop-motion video. Over the next 9 months, he snapped 1000 photographs at different points and with different creative concepts. After his daughter Emma entered the world, he spent a month combining the images into a single stop-motion animation that tells the story of Emma's journey from the womb into the world..

If you've ever played any of the Pokémon video games, you probably know it feels like to spend hours or days trying to capture a rare monster in order to fill in another entry in your Pokédex. National Geographic photographer Tim Laman knows that feeling through his photography project titled Birds of Paradise. Laman spent a whopping eight years photographing all 39 birds-of-paradise species in the rainforests of New Guinea -- the first time it has ever been done.

Want larger photos from your iPhone? Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am has a solution for you. The entrepreneurial musician will reportedly be launching a new iPhone attachment next week that will "turn your smartphone into a genius-phone" and boost the phone's camera resolution from 8 megapixels to 14 megapixels. Like the man who developed it, the device will have a quirky name: i.am+.

Soccer, known as football around the world, is played by hundreds of millions of people in hundreds of countries, making it the world's most popular sport. However, a large percentage of its enthusiasts are unable to afford actual soccer balls to play with. Instead, they fashion their own makeshift balls out of things they have on hand -- things like socks, rubber bands, plastic bags, strips of cloth, and string. The DIY balls may be difficult to use and ugly in appearance, but each one is a …

If you've been jostling with crowds today over Black Friday deals and are heavy laden with shopping bags, take a look at this sweet deal that won't be any extra hassle: Amazon is currently selling the full boxed version of Adobe Lightroom 4 for just $79! It's regularly priced at $150, and sometimes dips down to $100, but $79 for one of the most popular image editing programs is quite an attractive offer. No word on how long this pricing will last, but we're guessing that it'll go back up after …

Fujifilm is selling a cool Instax Mini instant camera kit over in Japan that makes it easy for new parents to do a 365-day photo project documenting the first year of their child's life. Called the Fujifilm Baby Box, the package includes an Instax Mini 25 camera (in either pink or blue), a photo album for holding the prints, a 5-pack of Instax film containing 50 shots, and a sheet containing 365 round stickers with hearts containing the numbers 1 through 365.

Tim Kemple is an action-sport and lifestyle photographer based out of Salt Lake City, Utah. Visit his website here.

Last week we issued a challenge asking readers to shoot a creative mirror self-portrait using an alternative style of photography. Reader Agustin Barrutia took us up on that challenge, and created a pair of wet plate photographs that take the concept of "mirror self-portrait" to a new level (they're unlike anything we've seen before). Both photographs are straight-out-of-camera wet plate photos that weren't manipulated digitally. Barrutia simply used "mirrors" (one doesn't involve a mirror, per …

The whole situation surrounding Nikon's D600 dust issue is turning out to be eerily similar to Apple's iPhone 5 purple haze problem. In both situations, there are people who are very bothered by the "flaw", people who wonder what all the fuss is about and believe the complaints to be overblown, and a slow response from the companies. Now Nikon is also doing exactly what Apple did: respond to complaints saying that what users are seeing is normal.

If you were watching the Thanksgiving Day NFL football games on TV today, you may have seen the above commercial promoting the Canon Rebel T4i entry-level DSLR. It's a humorous ad that asks "When was the last time something inspired you to be creative?" and shows a number of photographers putting themselves in uncomfortable (and unsafe) situations in order to capture the photograph they have in their minds eye.

A Seattle-based couple named Mike Matas and Sharon Hwang recently went on an epic cross-country road trip and documented it in a cool way. The duo, both product designers at Facebook, rented a car from a national rental company and spent two weeks driving from San Francisco to New York City. Over the course of their journey, the two snapped thousands of photographs documenting their adventures. After flying back home to the West Coast, Matas took 5,000 of the photographs and turned them into …

It has been widely reported that the new Nikon D600 full-frame DSLR suffers from a higher-than-normal amount of dark spots appearing on the sensor. Yesterday we shared one photographer's time-lapse video that demonstrates that the issue occurs right out of the box without any lens swaps.

Stephen Dowling of BBC News has an interesting piece that tells the story of the Lomography movement and how it may be instrumental in saving film photography.

Digiscoping is when a photographer attaches an optical telescope to a digital camera and uses it as a super-telephoto lens. Although the image quality isn't as good as an actual camera lens with the same focal length, it's a much cheaper option for people who already own high-powered telescopes -- bird photographers, for example. Nikon is no stranger to the digiscoping game, having released adapters for its DSLRs and compact cameras, but today it announced new accessories that bring digiscoping …

We've featured photographic recreations of old master paintings before, but usually they've focused on simple portraits rather than elaborate scenes. London-based photographer Maisie Broadhead went with the latter when doing her recent project "Taking the Chair." Working with her mother Caroline, Broadhead selected seven fine art paintings that prominently feature a chair. The duo then tried to accurately recreate the details of the scene for photographs.

Last October, Jennifer Lopez made headlines around the world after showing up at a Chanel fashion show in Paris with her 4-year-old daughter (wearing $2,400 in jewelry) and 25-year-old boyfriend in tow. Photographs of the trio sitting in the front row quickly made their way to the front pages of major newspapers and websites.

Canon isn't the only one that's reportedly testing multiple high-megapixel full-frame camera prototypes: Sony is as well. Rumors that Sony will soon be joining the high-megapixel DSLR/SLT war are heating up. sonyalpharumors writes that prototypes are already in photographers' hands: …

Self-taught photographer Alexander Deschaumes only started making photos back in 2003, but his dedication to the craft and his thirst for jaw-dropping landscapes have brought him a long way since then. Deschaumes braves extreme weather and hazardous landforms, going to locations that many landscape photographers would never dare venture, all for the sake of his images. The 2-minute video above offers a look into his world of extreme landscape photography.

If you're a photography enthusiast who wants to have your images seen by as many eyes as possible, it helps to be royalty. Just ask Kate Middleton. The Duchess of Cambridge has published a number of photographs shot during a recent trip to the Bornean jungle in Malaysia. The photographs were quickly shared by major news outlets around the world, from The Guardian and BBC News in the UK to TIME magazine and CBS in the US. Publicity isn't hard to come by if you're a princess photographer.

500px is on a tear. The service has been growing like a weed as of late, and appears to have some ambitious plans in the works. The company announced today that it has acqui-hired (i.e. buying out a small company mainly for the team's talent) the two-man development team Pulpfingers, creators of the popular iOS 500px browsing app ISO500.

Hiroshi Hiyama over at Phys.Org reports that smartphones are crushing the point-and-shoot industry, putting compact cameras in the same group as video game consoles and portable music players -- devices that are having a hard time competing against all-in-one phones. The numbers are crazy: …

If you use a Mac and regularly need to resize batches of photos, there's actually a tool built into your operating system that lets you do just that without having to open any image editing program. It's called "sips", which stands for scriptable image processing system. It's extremely easy to use, but you'll need to know how to use Terminal to take advantage of it.

If you use a major-brand DSLR, you should be keeping a close eye on the new $899 Sigma 35mm f/1.4 (above center). It undercuts the popular (but pricey) lenses of rival camera makers by hundreds of dollars, and appears to have build- and image-qualities that are equal to (if not better than) those lenses.

I was recently offered the opportunity to direct a filler piece by Filler Magazine that involved telling a beautiful love story through fashion and dance. I also shot a series of artistic still photographs in which I used shutter drag to add motion-blur to the images. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at the shoot.

Many of Canon's announcements as of late have been for its full frame DSLRs, but the company hasn't forgotten about all its APS-C customers. It will reportedly be refocusing on its EF-S crop sensor gear at the beginning of next year, with announcements of new lenses and a DSLR.

We humans may be apex predators, but we're rather tiny when compared to the sheer scale of nature and landforms. Polish photographer Jakub Połomski captured this fact through his project titled, "The Scale of Nature." Połomski visited the Alps in France and Switzerland between 2008 and 2012, and shot a series of aerial photographs showing mountain climbers being dwarfed by the awe-inspiring snow-capped mountains they're traversing.

Bryce Bayer, the Eastman Kodak research scientist who invented the Bayer Filter back in 1975, passed away on November 13th at the age of 83. Bayer filter mosaics are used by nearly every digital camera, allowing a single sensor to capture a full-color photograph with the help of some "mathemagic".

It's a story that's becoming more and more common: someone uploads tactless photos to the Internet, the Internet disapproves and collectively pounces on the person. It happened after Hurricane Sandy when a Brazilian model decided to do a photo shoot amidst the devastation, and it has happened again. The target of the Internet's fury this time is a woman named Lindsey Stone, who posted the above photograph to her Facebook page.

Back in October, we wrote that the Nikon D600 suffers from excessive sensor dust in the upper left hand corner of the frame -- something many owners have been reporting and a flaw confirmed by review sites such as DPReview. Toronto-based artist Kyle Clements wanted to test this himself, so he bought a new D600, pointed it at a white piece of paper, shot 1000 frames, and created the time-lapse video above.

Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and even people who don't ordinary take pictures are likely dusting off their cameras in anticipation of capturing snapshots of family gatherings. Photography wasn't as cheap back in 1926, so people needed a little more encouraging. The above ad placed by the Master Photo Finishers of America tries to do this is a slightly morbid way: …

Earlier this year, we shared a beautiful short documentary, titled "Silver & Light", which featured Los Angeles-based photographer Ian Ruhter and the gigantic wet plate photographs he shoots using a van that he converted into a massive camera. Since then, Ruhter's work has received a good deal of attention; the video now has nearly 1 million views, and Ruhter has been traveling around the country and using his special photography to tell the stories of people he meets.

Japanese photographer Shinichi Maruyama has an interesting series of photos simply titled, "Nude." Each image shows an abstract flesh-colored shape that's created by a nude subject dancing in front of the camera.

Photographers based in the UK now have an easier and cheaper legal path to take if they discover someone infringing upon their copyrights. Chris Cheesman of Amateur Photographer writes that photographers can now receive do-it-yourself justice without having to hire a lawyer: …

Product photos for clothing lines typically feature generic, attractive models, since the point of the images is to make the clothes accessible and desirable to consumers. Yuekou, an online clothing store in China, has found great success by using a different approach: its photos for teen girl outfits feature a 72-year-old man.