November 2012

Have you heard of the term sousveillance? It's the inverse of surveillance: instead of a camera pointed at individuals, individuals wear their own cameras on themselves to document their activities. Wearable-camera pioneer Steve Mann has written a fascinating piece for Time, titled "Eye Am a Camera: Surveillance and Sousveillance in the Glassage", in which he offers his vision of what the future will look like once wearable cameras such as Google Glass (seen above) become ubiquitous.

Ever since the launch of iOS 5 in mid-2011, iPhones, iPads, and iPods have accepted the "volume up" signal as a "take a picture" command, allowing Apple's headphones to double as handy remote shutter releases. If triggering your camera's shutter with a pair of earbuds in your hand isn't "hip" enough for you, check out this new iCA Remote Shutter by Japanese novelty photo company Gizmon. It's a dedicated shutter release for your iOS device that's designed to look like a roll of film.

Between 2001 and 2005, photographer Richard Hooker visited various bus stops across London and shot film photographs of the people waiting for their rides to arrive. The 136 photographs he captured show the city's incredible cultural diversity, explore how people relate to one another in confined spaces, and offer small peeks into personal lives.

If you have an old plastic kit lenses lying around, something that you are not using for anything serious, you can give it a new life as a macro lens by removing the front element.

A Brazilian model named Nana Gouvea is the latest person to feel the scorn of the Internet. After Hurricane Sandy plowed through New York City this past week, Gouvea decided that the wreckage presented the perfect opportunity to further her career. Going out into the devastation with her husband as a photographer, she posed for a photo shoot amidst downed trees and smashed cars. She then shared the resulting portraits through her Facebook page.

Here's a powerful video shared by The Economist a couple of years ago that features acclaimed British photojournalist Don McCullin talking about his 50 years of photographing war, atrocities, and human suffering. (Warning: it contains disturbing images.)

The winner of this year's Landscape Photographer of the Year contest, photographer David Byrne, has been disqualified and stripped of his title for violating contest rules regarding digital manipulation. His winning image, titled "Lindisfarne Boats" and shown above, is a black-and-white photo showing beached fishing boats with Lindisfarne Castle in the background.

It's no secret that Twitter was interested in acquiring Instagram before Facebook swooped in and snatched it up. Now, instead of running the popular photo-sharing app, Twitter is waging war against it. Twitter cut off Instagram's API access for the app's "Find Your Friends" feature a few months ago, but that was just the beginning. The next major bombshell announcement is coming soon: photo filters.

Well, this can't be good for photographers' rights: An anonymous man over in Seattle, Washington is causing a stir in his area and on the web by walking up to random people in various locations -- both public and private -- and sticking a camera in their faces to film them. When asked to explain his actions, he simply responds in vague statements such as "It's OK, I'm just recording video."

Facebook users here on Earth aren't the only ones shooting arm's-length self-portraits: NASA's Curiosity rover over on Mars is doing it as well! Curiosity captured the image above a couple of days ago using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), which is attached to an extendable robotic arm. The image is actually a composite of 55 separate photos shot using the 2-megapixel RGB color CCD camera.

There's some pretty big news over in the cinema camera world today. RED founder Jim Jannard announced that massive price cuts have been made to the prices of his company's high-end cinema cameras (which are also used for still photography).

A few years ago, photographer Sacha Goldberger discovered that his 91-year-old "mamika" (Hungarian for "grandmother") named Frederika was feeling lonely and down. To put a smile back on her face, Goldberger suggested that they shoot a series of silly portraits featuring Frederika dressed up as a superhero. Frederika agreed, and Goldberger's project Mamika was born. The photographs took the web by storm back in 2010, and the viral views gave Frederika a huge boost in cheer as people from all …

Earlier this year, New York Times gadget columnist David Pogue wrote a glowing review of the Sony RX100 large-sensor compact camera, calling it "best pocket camera ever made" and saying that "No photos this good have ever come from a camera this small." It seems like his review was on the mark: the camera has since received similarly enthusiastic reviews across the web and was awarded "Advanced Compact Camera Best Product 2012–2013" by the EISA. Now, Time has selected it as one of 2012's best …

Here's a nice little video in which photographer Matthew Jordan Smith tells the story of a portrait session he had years ago with American actor/dancer/singer Gregory Hines. After finding himself in a sticky situation with a subject that wouldn't offer the personality and emotion Smith wanted to capture, he reached deep into the knowledge of Hines that he had accumulated through his research; one particular fact saved the shoot.

Last week, Canon reported its latest quarter's financial results, which included some big double-digit drops in revenue and profit. Now it's Nikon's turn to show the world how it's finances are doing. The company reported its latest quarterly results yesterday, and the numbers are decent.

When Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, an iPhone photo by photographer Nick Cope was one of the first to go viral and attract the attention of news organizations. American Photo has an interesting interview with Cope in which he shares what it was like to have the world pounce on his photo: …

Floating is a series of photos by photographer Andrew Brodhead that's beautiful and creepy at the same time. Set in various landscapes and locations, each image shows wrapped like a mummy in plastic, and hovering a few feet above the ground.

Officials over in the Canadian city of Winnipeg want to reduce gun violence and the number of firearms floating around, so they're turning to... photography? The police department has partnered up with camera store Henry's Photo and camera company Panasonic for a program called "Pixels for Pistols". Through the end of this month, anyone can trade in their gun for a digital camera.

Ever wonder what the average age of professional photographers is?

The Canon 6D is the first Canon DSLR to offer built-in Wi-Fi, which allows a smartphone or tablet to be paired with the camera to act as an external remote, viewfinder, photo viewer, and hard drive. If you want to see how the system works, check out this 5-minute video by Dave Etchells over at Imaging Resource. It's a short demonstration of the free EOS Remote smartphone app in action by Canon's Chuck Westfall.

Yesterday we shared a piece by photographer Kenneth Jarecke on why Instagram isn't fit for photojournalism. Now, from the other side of the aisle, Jeff Bercovici of Forbes writes that Time had great success after hiring five Instagrammers to document Hurricane Sandy: …

Roberto Baldwin of Wired writes about how an SF man felt the fury of the Internet recently after pretending to be a bus-smashing rioter photographed after the SF Giants won the World Series: …

photoBot is a new photography robot designed by Tommy Dykes, a designer and PhD student at Northumbria University. It constantly scans a room for photo ops by turning its head in a manner reminiscent of R2-D2 from Star Wars (which, in case you haven't heard, is now owned by Disney).

A blacked-out New York City wasn't the only rare photo op that Hurricane Sandy left in her wake. NASA solar physicist David Hathaway captured the above photo in Huntsville, Alabama two days ago after seeing the strange rings surrounding the afternoon sun.

Leica's new flagship digital rangefinder, the Leica M, was announced more than a month ago, but things have been very quiet in regards to sample photos demonstrating the camera's capabilities. If you've been dying see actual photos shot using the camera, today's your lucky day. Pandachief over at the forum HK LFC has published quite a few sample photographs shot in a low-light environment (it appears to be a dinner party).

Amazon has launched Cloud Drive Photos, an Android app that makes it easy to store and share photographs to and from the the cloud. It's a consumer-oriented app build on top of Amazon Cloud Drive, a cloud-storage service that competes with the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive.

Photographing people on park benches is nothing new in photography, but photographers usually capture different people sitting on different benches. Ukrainian photographer Eugene Kotenko did something different: he spent four years documenting the life of a single park bench outside his house.

If you just so happen to have both a C-mount CCTV lens and a M42-mount teleconverter lying around, try combining the two: you may find a makeshift macro combo on your hands.

Looking for a cheap fog machine or fog juice for your photography? Hurry out to your local pop-up Halloween store today: David Hobby of Strobist reminds us that these seasonal stores often offer deep-discounts of those things once All Hallows' Eve has come and gone.

In 2008, I had this kooky idea to take my then 4-year-old son out to an abandoned road and throw him into the air, since it seemed most fathers like to do this with their kids. There was this long, abandoned road near my house, so we set up there. After getting my Nikon D200, self-timer, and tripod ready, my son decided that he didn't want to be thrown into the air, so I just held him up instead. I then took another photo of myself looking up with my arms extended.