A couple of weeks ago we shared a rumor that today would be the day Adobe officially announced a few major improvements to Photoshop CS6, including support for Apple's Retina display. Well, as luck (or good sources) would have it, we weren't wrong. This morning Adobe announced several exciting updates to Photoshop and Creative Cloud.
A Canon patent filed in May of last year and published last week reveals that the company has a new optical viewfinder up its sleeve that offers both a compactness and 100% coverage. While 100% coverage is a standard feature in high-end DSLRs, the new technology may help bring it to smaller and lighter cameras that have traditionally displayed less than what is actually captured.
Tragedy struck Sacramento, California this past weekend after a photographer and high school art teacher was killed while taking pictures of trains.
For his project titled "Game Over," Brooklyn-based photographer Henry Hargreaves took a number of popular and instantly-recognizable children's games (and toys) and painted over all the colorful designs and branding with single pastel colors. He then photographed the games on backgrounds of the same color.
Photo-editing wizard Corey Barker of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals wanted a photo of his house decorated with Christmas lights but was too lazy to physically put up the decorations... so he did it in Photoshop. All the colorful lights and decorations you see above were 'shopped in.
Well that was fast... Just hours after Instagram launched a major update to its popular photo sharing app, Twitter dropped a bomb on the industry by finally unveiling its own long-awaited and recently-leaked retro filters. The move brings it into direct competition with what Instagram offers -- the two services virtually offer the same product now, except Instagram is solely focused on images while Twitter lets you Tweet text as well.
Instagram officially ended Twitter's ability to display embedded Instagram photos this past weekend. Twitter users aren't pleased, but Instagram is now trying to divert their attention away from what they no longer have to what they do. The company announced a major update to the iOS version of the app today, which includes a sleeker look, faster speed, and a brand new filter for Instagrammers to play with.
We live in a world that's teeming with digital photographs. More photos are now uploaded every two minutes than were created during the entire 1800s. Facebook is seeing thousands of photographs uploaded to its servers every second of the day, and Instagram was flooded with 10 storm-related photos per second during Hurricane Sandy.
With such a large quantity of photographs flooding the web, it's clear that visual data mining will be an in-demand market in the coming years as more and more people look to glean valuable images from the torrent of useless pixels. One of the companies trying to occupy this space is CrowdOptic, a San Francisco-based startup that's building some pretty interesting location-based photo curation technologies.
When Quebec-based photographer Patrice Laroche and Sandra Denis found out they were to become parents, Larouche came up with a funny and clever way of documenting the 9-month journey of pregnancy. The photo project involved paying a visit to a local gas station at various points throughout the process, snapping photos to show exactly how their daughter Justine came into the world.
Every few months, it seems, a fine art photograph is sold at auction for an astronomical price and then takes its place among the world's most expensive photos. The price tags are large, but pale in comparison to the hundreds of millions of dollar shelled out for the world's priciest paintings.
If you'd like a cheap and simple way to protect your camera lenses from rain and from drops, you can make a makeshift lens case using ordinary plastic bottles (e.g. water bottles, soda bottles). Here's a step-by-step guide on how to do so.
Last month, there was a total solar eclipse that was visible to people in Australia. Photographer Colin Legg captured the whole thing as three separate time-lapse videos (seen above). The short but beautiful clips show the moon passing in front of the sun, a darkness sweeping across the vast landscape, and the moon's shadow sweeping across the sky!
If you're at all interested in the history of photography, Henry Fox Talbot is a pioneer that you need to be familiar with. Although French pioneer Louis Daguerre is often credited with being "the father of photography," Talbot, based in England, had announced his own photographic process in the same year. Daguerre's daguerreotype process dominated the industry early on, but Talbot's process -- one that involved creating photographic negatives and then printing photos with them -- eventually became the standard model used in the 20th century.
Last month photographer Chris Crisman entered the photograph above, titled Butterfly Girl, into the World Photography Organization’s 2012 World Photography Awards. It was selected from the thousands of entries as part of a promotional campaign for the contest and in that process was spread out all over the Internet. From the Daily Mail to the Huffington Post, the story about the World Photo Awards and Chris’s photo made the rounds across the web.
In particular, on the UK news site The Daily Mail, the photo generated a ton of comments and sparked some controversy as to whether or not it was appropriate for a photography competition. This caused me to ask myself the question: "What defines a photograph?"
If you want to enjoy some eye-popping infrared landscape photographs, look no further than the portfolio of French photographer David Keochkerian. He photographs gorgeous landscapes using an infrared sensitive camera, which causes the green tree leaves to show up as golden yellow and silvery white, and turning spring into fall and winter.
After bidding farewell to the Super Wide and Silver editions of its Zeiss Ikon 35mm rangefinder earlier this year, Cosina is officially saying goodbye to the last of the Zeiss Ikons, relegating the whole line to the history books. The news, which began as a rumor based on this tweet by one of Cosina's retailers, has since been confirmed by The Phoblographer with the company itself.
Check out the two memory cards above. One of them is a counterfeit card while the other is a genuine one. Can you tell which is which? If you can't, we don't blame you. Japan-based photography enthusiast Damien Douxchamps couldn't either until he popped the fake card into his camera and began shooting. The card felt a bit sluggish, so he ran some tests on his computer. Turned out the 60MB/s card was actually slower than his old 45MB/s card.
While it's not unusual to come across counterfeit memory cards -- it's estimated that 1/3 of "SanDisk"-labeled cards are -- what's a bit concerning is how Douxchamps purchased his: he ordered the cards off Amazon -- cards that were "fulfilled by Amazon."
The Pacific Trash Vortex, also known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," is an area the size of Texas in the Pacific ocean in which there's 6 times the amount of plastic as there is natural plankton. Photographer Kim Preston wanted to draw attention to this growing problem, so she shot a series of photographs titled Plastic Pacific that features everyday household plastic objects made to look like the sea life they're choking to death.
Reuters has released this interesting behind-the-scenes look into what it was like to be a news photographer trailing President Obama as he made an official visit to the nation of Myanmar in November -- the first by a US president. The video offers a glimpse into how hectic the job is, as photographers must rush from place to place, out of vans and into venues, in hopes of capturing a historic and newsworthy shot.
The mobile photo sharing wars are heating up, and two of the big players, Instagram and Twitter, are in the process of trading blows. Back in November, it came to light that Twitter is currently working to build Instagram-style retro filters into its smartphone apps. Instagram retaliated this week by announcing that its photos will soon no longer be embeddable on Twitter. The latest news now is that Twitter is trying to spoil Instagram's holidays by pushing out its new filters by year's end.
Here's a photo that's currently going viral on the web. As with many other viral photos, it's being shared with all kinds of different descriptions, and people are simply passing it on to family and friends without bothering to verify whether or not the captions are real.
Since the moment I walked into Milford Photo looking to buy a professional camera in the winter of 2011, I have been exposed to constant judgment for being a rich, stupid and spoiled 13-year-old who wanted an expensive camera to take “artsy” pictures that I didn’t know how to take.
Contrary to society’s beliefs, I do not fit into that stereotype in any way, shape or form. Unfortunately, I am associated with this stereotype because that is the view society chooses to observe and overplay.
Yesterday we shared some news courtesy of the Wall Street Journal that Kodak had received a generous bid for its patent patent portfolio of over $500M. This was good news for Kodak, seeing as $500M was the mark the company had to hit in order to receive $830M in exit financing that would play a crucial role in helping Kodak dig its way out of bankruptcy.
However, all we knew at the time was that the bid was being put forth by a "consortium of bidders" out of Silicon Valley. Well, as it turns out, that consortium is being led by none other than the unlikely team of Apple and Google.
Back in 2011 and 2012, Paris-based photographer Max Riché shot a creative series of portraits of athletes (including several Olympians) in the French National Sports Institute. Titled "Becoming an Athlete," the project featured a strobed-style look that shows the athletes progressing from ordinary people to world-class athletes, all within single frames.
Riché has just released the behind-the-scenes video above that shows how he created the photographs.
After receiving much press coverage for its groundbreaking fusion of camera and smartphone, Samsung's $500 Galaxy Camera finally hit store shelves in the middle of last month -- AT&T store shelves.
Although the launch was done exclusively through what's considered to be the worst US carrier, it appears that Samsung will soon be branching out to additional providers. Verizon customers are reportedly next in line for the unique smartcamera.
New York City gallery W/------ (pronounced "with") seems to think that art buying has gotten a bit snobby, and that photographers have gotten a bit used to having unlimited chances to capture the perfect shot. Enter their new Disposable Cameras project, currently on display at the NADA art fair in Miami through this weekend. If you visit W/------'s booth at the fair, you'll find a wall of 24 hanging disposable cameras, each with a very hefty price tag.
Bestselling author and marketing guru Seth Godin published an interesting thought to …
With the release of the Canon 6D, the company's first Wi-Fi enabled DSLR, it was only a matter of time before the camera manufacturer began announcing products that took advantage of that wireless capability. Case in point: Canon has just announced a couple of new PIXMA photo printers that can communicate directly with your 6D, allowing those of you who ponied up the cash for the new full-frame shooter to print your photos over the air.
Do you ever clean the front element of your lens by fogging it up with your breath and then wiping it off with a cloth? If so, you might want to stop -- Nikon says the practice could be damaging to your glass. Apparently human breath contains stuff that isn't too friendly toward camera lenses.
Earlier this year, Australian artist Callum Cooper released a video called Full Circle that featured footage captured by a camera attached to a jump rope. It's a bit nauseating to watch, but the creativity of the project has led to hundreds of thousands of views for the short.
Cooper is back with a new project based on the same idea. It's titled "The Constant and The Flux," and you can view a portion of it above.
An anonymous reader emailed us with a complaint about the way Fujifilm is marketing the X-E1 in a non-gender-neutral way.
Russian photographer Andrew Osokin is a master of winter macro photography. His photo collection is chock full of gorgeous super-close-up photographs of insects, flowers, snow, and frost. Among his most impressive shots are photographs of individual snowflakes that have fallen upon the ground and are in the process of melting away. The shots are so detailed and so perfectly framed that you might suspect them of being computer-generated fabrications.
Over the last year, no news has been good news for Eastman Kodak. The company's slow and painful climb out of bankruptcy has involved everything from corporate greed to lost patent wars and sub-par auction outcomes. But just a few weeks ago a flickering light emerged at the end of the tunnel for Kodak in the form of $793M in conditional financing.
In fact, since we last reported on the story, the loan amount has gotten even bigger. That sizable $793M has been upped to $830M, every dime of which Kodak desperately needs to get its hands on if it ever intends to escape bankruptcy. But as the saying goes: there's no such thing as a free lunch -- and definitely not one worth $830M. The banks that have agreed to help Kodak out made the financing conditional: Kodak doesn't get the money unless the company's long-awaited patent sale exceeds $500M.
Back in October, we shared some photos taken inside a small Chinese studio lighting maker named NiceFoto. Now we have a look at what operations look like at a much larger manufacturer: Godox. It's reportedly the second largest studio lighting producer in all of China.
The saga of anti-virus pioneer John McAfee's run from the law is a strange one, but this much is clear: McAfee wishes geotagging wasn't a feature built into modern cameras. After a month of fleeing from Belizean law enforcement after a neighbor was found murdered, the software tycoon was finally taken into custody this week, largely due to a single photo loaded with GPS data.
We've all used a little bit of Photoshop magic to take care of a blemish or two when taking portraits, but Sony's newly announced Smart Skin Evaluation Program (SSKEP) is taking on blemishes in a whole new way. The sensor technology, which was announced just a few days ago, can actually go beyond skin-deep and take a peek at blemishes that haven't even surfaced yet.
Custom photo frame maker Alphabet Photography has scored one of the first big viral marketing wins of this holiday season by releasing the creative video above a couple of weeks ago. In it, they play the popular Christmas tune Carol of the Bells using various objects inside the warehouse in which the company's photo frames are made.
Canon has issued a couple of service advisories to notify customers of known issues with the 6D and 1D X DSLRs. The former camera has a YouTube problem, while the latter has some autofocus issues for certain customers.
Self-portraits snapped with an outstretched arm can be seen everywhere these days, from profile pictures on Facebook to filtered shots on Instagram. Among iconic historical photos? Not so much.
However, Cape Town, South Africa-based newspaper Cape Times has launched a brilliant new advertising campaign that imagines what those photos were look like if they had been captured with arm's-length "selfies".
You may have heard that there are 12 Hasselblad film cameras sitting on the surface of the moon at this very moment, left there by astronauts who needed to lighten their vessel's load as much as possible. However, did you know that at least one of those cameras was left there to test the durability of the gear?
A little earlier today, we reported on how Sohail Mamdani of BorrowLenses had discovered that one particular Nikon D600 he was testing was consistently overexposing photographs by two stops. After searching long and hard for the cause, he stumbled upon the culprit: the D600 wasn't closing the aperture blades to the correct opening size.
If Adobe Photoshop tools could work their magic in the real world, what would people use them for? One obvious application would be as a beauty product, which would allow people to 'shop actual faces instead of photos of faces. Budapest, Hungary-based photographer and graphic designer Flora Borsi recently shot a series of photos that humorously depict how it might work. The project is titled, "Photoshop in Real Life."
Once upon a time there was an industry largely dominated by two companies. Their domination, over some 30 years, was so nearly complete that they became understandably a bit arrogant. After all, their products were the biggest, the best, and by far the most popular.
Well, what do you know: upgrading a Fujifilm X-E1 is easy! A photographer named Richard over at Fuji Rumors figured out how to transform his $1,000 X-E1 into a $6,400 Leica M9 digital rangefinder. The upgrade costs just pennies -- it only requires four strategically placed decal stickers.
Gear reviewer Sohail Mamdani over at BorrowLenses was testing the Canon 6D and Nikon D600 last week by shooting nighttime photos of San Francisco Bay, when he discovered something strange: the DSLRs exposed the scene differently even when all the settings were identical in full manual. The photograph above was captured using the D600 at f/8, 30s, and ISO 100 (in JPEG mode).
In certain countries around the world, death row prisoners who are about to face execution are offered a special last meal to eat. Authorities do their best to accommodate the special food requests, and these choices are often published to the media after the execution is carried out.
Photographer Henry Hargreaves decided to do a photo project to document what these last suppers comprised and what they might have looked like. He looked up the requests of some of history's most notorious executed criminals, recreated those meals, and photographed them. The project is titled "No Seconds."
I was standing at the top of the stairs in the Suzzallo Library on the University of Washington campus, looking down at my phone when someone tapped me on the shoulder from behind. I turned to see an older gentleman who gestured towards the hardwood box resting on the handrail of the stairway.
When Nik Software was acquired by Google back in September, one of the prized catches -- besides Nik's impressive suite of high-end photo editing software -- was Snapseed, a highly popular photo editing app for iOS. Many people suspected that Google was gearing up to fight more directly with Instagram, now the Facebook-owned 800lb gorilla in the mobile photo sharing space.
Whether or not that was the motivation, it certainly seems like the case now: Google today launched Snapseed for Android, and has also made the app free for both platforms.
Who are the people behind Instagram's most-followed handles? Soon-to-be-shuttered iPad newspaper The Daily wants to know, and has a video series titled "#No Filter: Behind the Lens with Instagram's Biggest Stars." They're creating short profiles for each iPhoneographer to give a glimpse into their lives and their motivations.
You've probably heard of The Blue Marble, an iconic photo of Earth captured in 1972 from 28,000 miles away by astronauts on the Apollo 17 spacecraft. Well, NASA has just released a number of photographs titled "Black Marble." They offer the same perspective as the iconic photo, except these new images show what our planet looks like at night!