November 2012

The Marks of a Leica That Has Not Been Used as a Fashion Accessory

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.

If you want to see what a Leica can look like when it's used as a camera rather than an accessory, Andrews has published a series of interesting graphics in which he treats his M6 as an artifact, pointing out various features that you definitely wouldn't see on a babied camera body.

BTS: Creating a Wet Plate Portrait Using an Ordinary Negative and an Enlarger

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.

Nokia Loses Its Head Honcho of Imaging, Face of PureView Technology

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.

9 Months of Pregnancy, 1000 Photos, and a 4-Minute Stop-Motion Story

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..

Gotta Catch ‘Em All: Photog Spends Eight Years Capturing the 39 Birds of Paradise

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.

Will.i.am to Launch iPhone Add-On That Boosts Resolution to 14MP

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+.

Photos of Makeshift Soccer Balls Used by Children in Africa

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 treasured possession of its owner.

Belgian photographer Jessica Hilltout decided to turn her attention and her camera lens on these one-of-a-kind creations, documenting "football in its purest form" in Africa. The project is titled AMEN.

Fujifilm Baby Box: Capture the First 365 Days of a Baby’s Life with Instant Photos

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.

Over the course of a year (and a little over 6 additional packs of film), parents can snap daily pictures and label the instant prints with the day it was taken on by sticking a heart to it.

Interview with Action-Sport Photographer Tim Kemple

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

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

Tim Kemple: Sure. I'm a photographer and film maker based in Utah. I grew up on the East Coast and spent my weekends as a kid climbing, skiing and wandering. I started carrying a camera to document my adventures.

Mind-Bending Reflection Portraits Shot Using a Wet Plate Camera

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 se) and "reflections" in clever ways.

The wet plate above is a self-portrait of Barrutia shooting the wet plate. That camera in the frame is the camera that captured the wet plate.

Nikon: Get a Cleaning if You’re Bothered by the D600’s Sensor Dust

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.

Funny Canon Commercial Shows What Photogs Will Do for the Perfect Shot

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.

Two-Week-Long Cross-Country Road Trip Captured in 3 Minutes and 5000 Photos

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 the time-lapse video above that shows their entire trip in 3 minutes and 30 seconds.

Theory: Nikon D600 Sensor Dust Problem Caused by Scratches in the Mirror Box?

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.

Photographer Daniel Gaworski has been experiencing the same problem, and decided to take a closer look at his D600. He discovered that his camera's shutter curtain contains scratch marks on the bottom flap (see above), particularly in one corner of the camera.

Nikon Announces a 1 Series Digiscoping Adapter for Using Telescopes as Lenses

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 to the 1 Series mirrorless lineup.

Accurate Photographic Recreations of Old Paintings That Feature Chairs

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.

Paparazzi Feeding Frenzy When Jennifer Lopez Appears at a Fashion Show

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.

Although the photos appear to show Lopez and co. peacefully sitting around, the environment created by the photographers there was anything but peaceful. Sébastien Bauer was sitting a few rows back at the time, and captured the above video showing what it's like to have frenzied paparazzi breathing down your neck as they look to score a widely-published shot.

The Ethereal World of Extreme Landscape Photographer Alexandre Deschaumes

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.

Princess Photographer: Nature Photos by Kate Middleton Seen Around the World

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 Acqui-hires 2-Person Team Behind Popular iOS Photo-Browsing App ISO500

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.

How to Quickly Resize Multiple Photos in Mac OS X Using a Terminal Command

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.

BTS: Using Shutter Drag to Shoot Motion-Blurred Photos of Dancers

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.