2012

Earlier this year, we shared a crazy example of how you can make water drops look like they're frozen in midair simply by passing the water over a speaker and using sound vibrations to sync the drops with the frame rate of your camera. Well, Japan's largest music channel, Space Shower TV, has taken the idea and turned it into clever commercial. What you see above is ordinary footage using this trick -- there's no fancy CGI trickery, reversal during post, or high-speed camera footage involved.

Nikon has officially announced the new 70-200mm f/4G ED VR, a lens that we first reported on last week. The specs that leaked a day ago were spot on: the lens features a fancy schmancy new Vibration Reduction (VR) system that offers up to 5 stops of image stabilization, raising the bar from 4.

Just as the rumors predicted, Nikon announced the new V2 mirrorless camera today. Succeeding the Nikon 1 V1, the V2 is a slightly-more-serious mirrorless camera than the recently-launched J2 (think V for "varsity" and J for "junior varsity"). Unlike the J2, the V2 offers more differences from its predecessor than a few minor tweaks.

One of the big ideas that seems destined to explode over the next decade is lifelogging, the ability to automatically capture and store one's life and experiences for future reference. Memoto is a new camera that's trying to be a pioneer in this emerging market. Its name and tagline should give you a good sense of what it does: "Memoto Lifelogging Camera: A tiny, automatic camera and app that gives you a searchable and shareable photographic memory."

Remember those hilarious underwater dog photographs that went viral earlier this year? Seth Casteel, the photographer behind those shots, emailed us yesterday to say that he had been invited onto Good Morning America to talk about his work and how he creates it.

Photographer Gary Land was recently hired by Nissan to shoot a series of car advertisement photographs featuring the famous Heisman Trophy-winning football players Charles Woodson, Bo Jackson, Robert Griffin III, and Herschel Walker. Luckily for all of us, the team produced a series of behind-the-scenes videos offering short glimpses into how the photographs were created, the gear they used, and tricks they came up with to their turn ideas into reality.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer held her first earnings call yesterday, and it appears that stockholders were pleased with the company's latest quarter figures: the stock price has been soaring since then. Among the areas that Yahoo sees promise in are Flickr and mobile, as well as a combination of the two.

We reported last week the Nikon is set to fill a gap in its lens lineup by introducing a new Nikkor AF-S 70-200mm f/4G ED VR lens -- a lens that should be smaller and cheaper than its f/2.8 counterpart. As we move closer to the lens' announcement (rumored to be sometime this week), new details about it are starting to emerge.

Elijah Solomon Hurwitz is an NYC-based photographer keen on documentary and street photography, and social and cultural issues. He has photographed in over 40 countries. Visit his website here. He also publishes a running log of photos (on Instagram as @elijahsol) and thoughts.

If you do any darkroom work, you probably regularly print contact sheets to peek at the positive versions of your B&W negative film strips. Did you know that your iPhone can be used as a quick an easy tool for this same purpose?

Bellamy Hunt over at Japan Camera Hunter has a fascinating account of what it's like to attend a photography workshop taught by famed street photographer Bruce Gilden, a "famously outspoken photographer who does not mince his words": …

Take a look at the portfolio of Washington D.C.-based photographer Cade Martin, and you'll feel like you're looking at movie stills from an upcoming live action Alice and Wonderland film. His beautiful, dreamlike photographs have themes of grace, beauty, repetition, and light.

Don't worry Canon 5D Mark III shooters: Canon didn't forget about you after all. Less than a week after announcing a highly-requested firmware update to the Canon 1D X to address AF complaints, Canon has revealed that a similar -- but even better -- update is also coming to the Canon 5D Mark III.

In the beginning of last month, Nokia was caught faking sample photos and footage in a promo video for the camera on its new Lumia 920 phone. A couple of weeks later, bogus information about camera sensors was found on the official website for Hasselblad's new Lunar mirrorless camera. This week, we have a new episode of "camera marketing fail" for you, this time brought to you by Phase One.

Back in September, we wrote that there was a new service by photo-book company Mixbook called Mosaic on the way. New details have been unveiled that offer a better look at how the service will work. In short: it's an iPhone app that's designed to make turning your photos into photo books as easy and as affordable as possible.

PhotoPlus is going down over in New York City in the second half of this week, and that's when we might be hearing a peep out of Canon regarding its rumored high-resolution DSLR. If there's any mention of the camera at all, it will probably at most be an "in development" announcement that confirms rumors but doesn't reveal too much else.

In an interview we published this past weekend, popular photo blogger Thomas Hawk predicted that one of the major trends over the next five years will be "monetization for non-professional photographers." Paul Melcher of Thoughts of a Bohemian made the exact same prediction today: …

Do you trust your hand-eye coordination enough to throw your Android smartphone into the air? If so, you can now use it for automated camera toss photography. ThrowMeApp is a new app created by programmer Anton Beitler, a student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Based in San Francisco, Kim Pimmel is a photographer, a user interface designer, a DJ, and a "maker." Take a look at his experimental light painting photographs, and you'll see each of these interests shining through. Pimmel has spent years experimenting with long exposure photographs that show different light sources as brushes. His beautiful images are created using custom rigs and common objects -- things like turntables, ping pong balls, fiber optic cables, pendulums, iPhone screens, and …

Donalee Moulton over at The Lawyers Weekly has an article describing how EXIF data is beginning to be accepted as valuable evidence in courtrooms -- at least in Canada:

Should Photoshop play a role in political correctness? Louisiana State University is drawing some criticism this week after it came to light that the university had used Photoshop to erase Christian crosses from the chests of body-painted fans.

Ross Ching has created a new people-less time-lapse video for his Empty America series. The featured city this time is Seattle, Washington.

We tend not to get too excited about sensor dust problems at LensRentals; we clean sensors on every camera after every rental, so it’s just routine. When we started carrying the Nikon D600, they all arrived with a fair amount of dust, but that’s pretty routine, too. Manufacturing and shipping can be a dusty experience.

Watch out Lensbaby. A recently published Olympus patent (No. 2012-199834) suggests that the Japanese camera company may be developing a selective-focus tilt lens of its own. The patent describes a technique for compensating for the "color shift" and image degradation that occur when using a tilt lens.

A couple of weeks ago, photographer Mike Simons of Tulsa World covered the annual college football game between the Oklahoma Sooners and the Texas Longhorns football. Known as the Red River Rivalry, the series considered one of the greatest rivalries in American sports. To capture what photographing the conclusion of such a big game is like, Simons decided to wear a GoPro camera on his head to record a first-person point of view.

If you have two minutes to spare, you've got to check out this time-lapse video by photographer Rob Whitworth. There are plenty of time-lapse projects on the web, but one thing in particular about this one caught out eye: the transitions. Whitworth came up with some of the most creative transitions we've seen so far in a city time-lapse. Scenes bounce between day and night. Shots zoom from one into another. It's like a roller coaster for your eyes.

People often laugh and poke fun at the cliche of impossible image enhancements seen in TV shows and movies, but you won't be laughing when you see what SmartDeblur can do -- you'll be gawking in amazement. Created by programmer and image processing expert Vladimir Yuzhikov, the program can magically reveal details in photographs that are blurry due to poor focusing and/or shaky hands.

There's a new rising star on Instagram, and he's only one year old and walks around on four legs. It's Trotter, a San Francisco-based French Bulldog owned by photographer Sonya Yu. Six months ago, Yu -- a professional food photographer -- began dressing Trotter up in various costumes and snapping clever portraits of the outfits.

Editor's note: "Tenzing Norgay" is the penname used by the author of this article. He is not related to the famous mountaineer.

Frank Said What? is an amazing new iOS camera app that can accurately describe any photo you show it. It's not just smart, it's witty too: "Frank" will usually give your photographs humorous captions. Some will make you smile, while others will make you laugh out loud.

Earlier this year, we shared the photos of Tim Noble and Sue Webster, London-based artists who are well known for creating amazing shadows using piles of carefully arranged objects. Perhaps inspired by their work, photographer Julian Wolkenstein shot a clever series of photographs a couple of years ago that show three people contorting their bodies in various ways to create intricate shadows on the wall behind them. The project is titled, Nova.

Last year, we wrote about Poladarium, a tear-off calendar that inspires you with a new Polaroid picture every day. Now, for roughly the same price, you can create one that features your own photographs. Instagram printing company Printstagram has launched a new calendar product that allows you to turn your Instagram photo stream into a beautiful stack of 365 8.5x7cm "Polaroid" pictures.

There was once a time when you could more easily spot a professional photographer simply by glancing at the camera equipment in a person's hands. Was it a beast of a camera with a gigantic lens attached to it? You're looking at a serious shooter. Is it a dinky pea shooter that is used with arms outstretched? The person is a tourist, newbie, or both.

Photography purists, you might want to look away. For the rest of you: remember that Craiglist listing we shared a couple of months ago posted by a couple looking for Hipstamatic wedding photographers? Among the hoards of enthusiastic Hipstamatic shooters who responded were Keith and Marc, hosts of the iPhoneography podcast TinyShutter. After being chosen for the gig, they drove down to Connecticut from Massachusetts and New Hampshire to capture the wedding with their iPhones.

Thomas Hawk is a San Francisco-based photographer and popular photography blogger. Visit his website here.

Dissatisfied with the way your smartphone photographs are turning out when the built-in flash is fired? When desperate times call for desperate measures, you can make your flash match the ambient light around you with the help of a colored gel. The flash is often just a tiny LED, though, so how do you comfortably "mount" the gel to your smartphone? Reader Todd Glidden has an answer: use an index card.

You've probably seen a good number of sample photos and videos from camera and lens tests before, but probably not quite like this. Filmmaker Anders Øvergaard puts a creative twist on the idea of "test videos" with this sample footage shot with only a Canon 550D/Rebel T2i and Tamron 18-270mm lens.

Toronto-based photographer Tom Ryaboi is one of the godfathers of "rooftopping", which involves climbing to the tops of skyscrapers, pointing a camera off an edge, and capturing cities from high perspectives that most people never experience. It's an activity that's not for the faint of heart; rooftoppers sometimes even dangle their feet off the edge of buildings.

Here's an old-ish video that's been making the rounds again lately (viral videos are like viruses -- they don't go away very easily). Titled "Camera shutter speed synchronized with helicopter blade frequency," it shows what can happen when your camera is synchronized with the RPM of a helicopter's rotor blades. The resulting footage makes the helicopter look as though it's just floating in the air!

4K-resolution video capabilities are finding their way into more and more cameras these days, even though monitors that can display the resolution currently cost as much as one or two family sedans. Heck, even the tiny new GoPro Hero3 can shoot 4K, albeit at a semi-useless 15fps.

"BYOB" is an initialism that's readily understood by college students who party. To artist Rafaël Rozendaal, however, it means something entirely different. In 2010, Rozendaal launched Bring Your Own Beamer, a series of novel "open source" art exhibitions in which participants were asked to bring their own beamers (AKA projectors). The recipe for the concept is extremely simple: find a venue with plenty of wall space (and outlets), invite a bunch of artists and art-lovers, and have images …

Dutch historian Jo Teeuwisse is back with another fascinating then-and-now project (we featured her work once back in 2010), this time titled Ghosts of War--France. The images show old World War II photographs of soldiers blended seamlessly into photos of the same locations in modern day France.

When Sony unveiled its "One Sony" game plan back in March after posting billions in losses, the company highlighted digital photography as one of its three main pillars going forward. It was a bit of a surprise, then, when Sony announced today that it will soon be closing a large lens manufacturing factory in Japan as part of the restructuring efforts.

A crazy story of photo survival has emerged over in New Zealand. Apparently a couple had lost their camera during the Christchurch earthquake last February. They found the demolished camera yesterday, 18 months after it got buried in silt, and were overjoyed to find that their precious photos were still readable.

Forget DIY camera mods for keeping your sensor cool: Nikon has a much fancier solution. A recently published patent by the company (No. 2012-198447) shows a camera attachment that's specifically designed to prevent sensors from overheating. It attaches to the bottom of the camera and blows cool air into the body through the tripod mount underneath. If computers have dedicated cooling fans, why can't compact cameras?

Photographer Michael Wolf began his career as a photojournalist in Hong Kong working for a German magazine. In the early 2000s, he turned to non-editorial photography with an unusual project called Bastard Chairs. Wolf had noticed that all over China, there were makeshift chairs that had been put together using whatever materials the owners could get their hands on. He began documenting these strange pieces of furniture, showing the creative ideas people in China had for sitting down.

Photographing wild gorillas is scary. Taking pictures of baby elephant seals? Not so much. In this amazingly cute video, Irish broadcaster Charlie Bird encounters a pair of friendly elephant seal pups while photographing on a beach in Antarctica. Apparently if you lie on the sand near pups, they'll come to you to cuddle and to investigate your DSLR.

Last month we wrote that DSLR blog EOSHD had learned from at least one Canon rep that the upcoming 1D C cinema DSLR was essentially a 1D X with tweaked firmware. This would mean that the 1D X is also capable of 4K video with "no heat or bandwidth issues." However, that claim is now being challenged by Canon Rumors, which writes that the cameras do in fact have some important hardware differences as well.

We first featured photographer Matthew Albanese's Strange Worlds project back in 2010, not too long after the project's inception. His amazing images appear to show beautiful outdoor scenes, but were actually shot on a tabletop in his studio. He creates extremely detailed dioramas that take months to complete, and then uses various photographic techniques to make the scene look like the real world. It's like the opposite of using tilt-shift lenses to turn the world into a miniature model.

When Adobe unleashed Photoshop CS5 back in April 2010, one of the big features that had photographers buzzing was Content Aware Fill. With a simple selection and a few keystrokes, the tool could magically delete a portion of a photograph and replace the void with details from the surrounding area. The tool was so revolutionary that when a sneak peek demo went viral, viewers began calling the video fake and too good to be true. It wasn't.