2012

Most photographers and artists will never have the opportunity to make the kind of images that Andy Ellison does. As an MRI technologist at Boston University Medical School, Ellison has access to extremely expensive imaging machines. More specifically, he runs a research-only Philips 3 Tesla MRI machine. When he's not using it for official purposes, he experiments with it by placing various fruits, vegetables, and flowers inside. The resulting still images and animations are beautiful and …

Lytro has been upgrading its cameras and shipping them to store shelves all over the world as of late, and it's not planning to let up anytime soon. In addition to the newly added manual controls, the company is gearing up to jump into the world of 3D.

Unless you only shoot in monochrome, color likely plays a huge part in the experience of viewing your photographs. You may be aware of how you use them, but do you know how the colors in your images affect the people that look at them? PBS Off Book put out this fascinating video today that explores just how powerful colors are.

Just because a camera has bellows doesn't mean it's vintage. Just announced today, the new Lomography Belair X 6-12 has bellows as well. It's a portable medium-format camera that shoots auto-exposed photographs on 6x12 film -- the world's first camera to do so.

There's a new organization called Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC) that's training photographers around the world in first aid, in order to prevent what happened to Tim Hetherington from happening again. Pete Brook of Wired writes, …

Canon released a new firmware update for the 1D X this morning that gives the DSLR cross-type autofocus when using certain telephoto and extender combos that have a max aperture of f/8. The announcement page includes a list of lens/extender combinations that are now compatible.

There have been a number of projects in the past that asked people to capture videos and photographs all over the world during a single day. Montblanc wants to take the idea one step further: the luxury company has launched a photo project called "Worldsecond" that aims to have all its participants capture photographs across the globe at the same moment in time.

You know those carnival cutouts that let you stick your face in a hole for humorous photographs? A Chinese blogger named toshiya86 had the brilliant idea of creating these cutouts for her beloved cat Guagua's birthday. Humorous portraits resulted.

Well, that's quite a turn of events. Yesterday we reported that photo sharing app Color had denied rumors that the service would soon be shutting down. Based on the app's lack of users, we said that Color would need to find some traction -- and find it soon -- for the $41 million invested in it to pay off. Turns out they won't be needing a miracle after all, because they've reportedly already found one: the app will reportedly be acquired by Apple.

The Canon 1D X firmware update that Canon accidentally leaked yesterday is now official and available over on Canon's website. The upgrade adds two autofocus features that photographers have been asking for since the camera was released: illuminated AF points and the ability to use cross-type autofocus at f/8.

If you've been following the news over the past week, you probably know that the Space Shuttle Endeavour spent October 11-14 rolling through the streets of Los Angeles, going from the Los Angeles International Airport to its new home at the California Science Center. News crews and large camera-wielding crowds were constantly by the shuttle's side, documenting its progress.

You know that beastly Sigma 200-500mm that we've featured twice in the past two days? Turns out it's headed to the World Series to be used for some pretty ground-breaking imagery. A post today by Jakob Schiller over at Wired fills in some interesting details on what the lens will be used for.

Beauty retouching on still photographs of faces is both ubiquitous and controversial in some industries. You've likely seen your fair share of tutorials and demonstrations that show amazing feats of Photoshop, but did you know that the same 'shops can be done on video? And not just any video, mind you: 4K video.

New York-based photographer Trevor Paglen's photos blur the lines between a number of fields, including art, science, and journalism. For his project Limit Telephotography, Paglen used powerful telescopes designed for astrophotography in order to see things that people aren't supposed to: classified military bases.

Copyright infringement of photographs is anything but uncommon in this Internet age, as countless images are published all across the web every day without the owners' consent. The problem is so widespread that virtually everyone gets away with it. The ones that don't, however, are occasionally in for a good deal of pain.

Ever since the Canon 1D X and 5D Mark III were released, photographers have been complaining about sometimes not being able to see the black AF points in the new 61-point system. In July we wrote that Canon was reportedly working on a fix. It now looks like the fix may soon be upon us, in the form of a firmware update.

People say money can't buy happiness. Turns out there's another thing it can't buy: photo sharers. Despite raising a staggering $41 million in funding before even launching, the photo sharing app Color has been struggling to find users. Even after major pivots that changed the service's DNA, the app only has less than half a million active users.

One of the latest entrants in the at-home film scanning game is the Plustek OpticFilm 120. Just announced a few months ago and made available for pre-orders earlier this month, the OpticFilm 120 is a professional caliber scanner that can digitize both 35mm and 120mm medium format film. With a price tag of $2,000, it's not exactly wallet-friendly for the average film shooter, but is quite affordable when compared to other medium-format pro-grade scanners on the market.

Do you have old large format film holders lying around that you no longer have any use for? You can breathe new life into them by transforming them into nifty picture frames.

Joby sent out a press release today warning consumers that there are counterfeit versions of its popular GorillaPod flexible tripod floating around in the wild. While that isn't too newsworthy in itself -- what gear isn't being counterfeited these days? -- it's the juicy details surrounding the release that are quite interesting. Apparently the company directly confronted companies involved in making imitations during Photokina 2012 in Cologne, Germany last month.

Look around on the web, and you'll find plenty of photographs of Google's colorful offices in Mountain View (AKA the Googleplex) and around the world. Finding images shot from inside the company's tightly-guarded data centers is much harder, since only a handful of employees are allowed to roam the spaces where the "web lives." However, Google recently invited photographer Connie Zhou inside a number of its high-tech data centers. Gorgeous photographs resulted -- images that show incredible …

Since it was announced back in 2006, Canon's 70-200mm f/4L IS lens has been an attractive option for photographers who want a lighter and cheaper alternative to the 70-200mm f/2.8 IS. For the price of one stop, one could get a lens that's nearly half as heavy (1.7lb vs 3.3lb) and significantly less expensive. Nikon shooters may soon have a similar choice as well: Nikon is planning to fill in this gap in its lens lineup by announcing its own 70-200mm f/4 a week from now.

SigZilla is gone now. You’ll be able to see its work in action if you watch the World Series. I wouldn’t be surprised if you catch a glimpse of it mounted to FOX’s Vision Research camera. Before it left, though, we were able to -- with a great deal of difficulty -- get it mounted in the lab and run one basic Imatest series.

Here's a neat idea of thinking outside the box: high-speed photographer Scott Dickson added a pair of sunglasses to an ordinary water balloon pop photograph, giving the splash some personality (and a "bowtie").

At a special event in San Francisco tonight, GoPro launched its latest action camera: the Hero3. Compared to the Hero2 that it succeeds, the new camera is both more portable and more capable. It's 30% smaller and 25% lighter, making it great for helmet cams and attaching to random things. The image processor inside is twice as fast, allowing the camera to shoot both video and photographs at faster frame rates.

It was almost exactly one year ago that Olympus fired then-CEO Michael Woodford and started a chain of events that culminated in one of the largest financial scandals in Japanese history. Woodford received an incredible amount of international attention for his role in the saga, since he was one of the highest ranking executives ever to turn into a whistleblower.

If you find yourself regularly shooting in the rain and in need of a better way to keep yourself and your gear dry, check out the tripod-mounted umbrella holder seen in the photo above. It keeps an umbrella fixed directly above you and your camera, allowing you give your full attention to photo-making. A quick trip to the hardware store will get you the ingredients you'll need: a few brackets, a pipe to serve as the holder, and some nuts and bolts. Most of the components come together quite …

Have you been getting rashes on your skin, or redness and irritation in your eyes? Do you own a Canon WFT-E7A Wireless File Transmitter? Those two things might be related. If you remember, a couple of months ago, Canon recalled tens of thousands of Rebel T4i/650D DSLRs due to an issue with their rubber grips that caused allergic reactions. The rubber had been overloaded with too much of certain ingredients, leading to an unexpected chemical reaction that caused white flaking. It turns out the …

For her peculiar photo project titled "Married Men," London-based photographer and lecturer Natasha Caruana spent a year going on dates... with married men. She ended up going on 80 dates with men found through a dating website geared towards people looking to have affairs. At each meeting, Caruana used a disposable camera and a digital recorder hidden inside a small red purse to snap photographs and record the conversation. The images were all captured without the mens' permissions, but do not …

Best known for his iconic V-J Day in Times Square image, photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt snapped some of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century's most famous faces. LIFE writes that the photographer had an interesting habit: jumping into the frame for self-portraits with his subjects.

We're shared a couple of "stacked star trail" time-lapse videos over the past few months (see here and here), but those videos comprised nighttime photographs taken from the ground. Photographer Christoph Malin recently decided to try his hand at the technique, but instead of using his own earthbound photographs, he used NASA photographs shot from the International Space Station. The resulting video, shown above, features the stars drawing trails across the "sky" while the Earth creates light …

The Olympus OM-D EM-5 is a powerful little camera, but what owners are using these days many only be a portion of what the camera is fully capable of. 43 Rumors writes that an anonymous hacker is claiming to have hacked the camera using some firmware update trickery. What he or she found was quite interesting: hidden and locked features such as clean HDMI 4:2:2 output and focus peaking!

My overview of American government goes generally like this: (1) Something happens. (2) The government passes some laws in response to it, adds on a few pork projects, and raises taxes to pay for the laws and the pork. (3) The laws (or pork) cause an entirely new problem. (4) Repeat.

You might not recognize the name Kevin Van Aelst, but you might have seen his photography while flipping through popular magazines. The New Haven, Connecticut-based photographer specializes in editorial photographs that illustrate ideas in creative ways. In his images, you'll see eggs appear as light bulbs, paper airplanes formed from water drops on a windshield, and Hawaii in spilled punch. His work is often featured on the pages of numerous publications, including the New York Times, Time, …

Shutterfly is making a habit of gobbling up photo sharing services that camera companies no longer want to run. Less than half a year after acquiring Kodak Gallery from Kodak for a meager $23.8 million, Shutterfly has now taken another photo site off the hands of a company very similar to Kodak: Fujifilm. The Japanese imaging company has agreed to dump its photo sharing and printing business SeeHere into Shutterfly's lap, shutting down the service on November 8, 2012.

Two years ago, director Ross Ching created a viral hit by showing Los Angeles in a time-lapse video in which every trace of cars and people was removed. That project was such a success that Ching tells us he's now planning to create an entire series based on the same idea, showing what iconic cities around America would look like if the humans within them suddenly vanished. The first stop in his "Empty America" tour was San Francisco, captured beautifully in the haunting video above.

Bird Photo Booth is the world's first bird feeder that doubles as an iPhone and GoPro photo booth. Invented by photographer and bird-watcher Bryson Lovett, the hardwood feeder uses food to lure your feathery friends into closeup portrait sessions. Photographs can be snapped remotely by pairing your iPhone with an iPad that's running a remote camera app.

Over the past decade, photographer Michael Benson has worked as a self-assigned curator of the past 50 years of NASA's interplanetary space exploration photography. His big idea is that the images produced during this period form an important chapter in the history of photography, so he wants to select and repackage images in a way that can appreciated by the general public. After browsing through massive numbers of RAW photos shot by space agencies, Benson composites and colorizes them into …

Jonathan Dandrow believes that traffic enforcement cameras are "dangerous, invasive, error-prone, and unconstitutional," so he decided to find a way to turn camera technology against those cameras. He ended up creating the noPhoto, a high-tech license plate frame that makes it impossible for a red light or speed trap camera to snap a useable photograph of your plate.

Can you believe the proposal photo above wasn't planned? In fact, the photographer wasn't even aware of what was going on. It was snapped this past Sunday by 20-year-old Sydney University student Michael Keane, who visited Sydney's Bondi Beach early in the morning to capture photographs of the sunrise. After returning home to post-process the images, Keane zoomed into his photos and was surprised to find that he had accidentally captured a very romantic moment happening way in the horizon.

Compact cameras are becoming pretty serious photography tools when it comes to sensor sizes and lens qualities, but one thing they generally lack is an easy-to-use filter system. Interchangeable-lens photographers can usually just find a filter of the correct diameter and use it with their lens, but things get more complicated when you're dealing with fixed-lens cameras. Although using filters is possible with some models, the systems aren't very friendly: they're usually proprietary, …

Since launching last year, JPEGMini has become a popular web-based option for trimming the file size of JPEG images without compromising their appearance. The web app magically shrinks photos by up to 5x while keeping the quality relatively unchanged. In May of this year, the company repackaged the technology for Macs as a simple space-saving app. Its next frontier? Mobile photo sharing and iOS.

People often say that, for whatever reason, dogs often look like their owners. 27-year-old Swiss photographer Sebastian Magnani has been attracting a good deal of worldwide attention lately for his photo project that takes that idea to the next level. Titled Underdogs, the series of photos features portraits showing dog faces carefully Photoshopped onto the bodies of their owners.

This photograph shows renowned British photographer David Bailey standing with 142 men who share his name. You might be wondering how such a strange photo concept came together. If you remember, last month we reported that Samsung had launched a unique marketing campaign that asked any UK resident named David Bailey to step forward.

Ever wonder how Google manages to capture street-level photographs of entire cities for its Street View? It's done using a giant fleet of camera-equipped cars. Google employee Masrur Odinaev recently shared this photograph -- taken by a Street View car -- showing one of Google's Street View car parking lots. We see a large fleet of Subaru Imprezas that have panoramic cameras mounted to the tops.

Turkey-based photography enthusiast Isil Karanfil created this beautiful image showing an entire sunset in a single photograph. Karanfil fixed her Nikon D60 in its view of the seascape, and then shot a single photograph every hour for seven hours between 3pm and 9pm as the day turned into night. She then took the resulting photographs, sliced them up, and combined them together using Photoshop for the image seen above, which she titles, "Sun Lapse".

We've shared examples of creative promotional mailers in the past, but we usually don't receive them. A few days ago, however, we received a small box from the folks over at Photojojo. Inside was a clever papercraft Polaroid camera that serves as both a press kit and a desk decoration.

Sigma's 200-500mm telephoto lens is so large (2.3 feet long and 34.6 pounds) and so expensive ($26,000) that many people just can't take it seriously. Last year we shared some hilarious customer reviews that poked fun at "the green monster." If you've been wondering how the lens actually looks, works, and performs, the folks over at LensRentals recently purchased a copy of the lens for their inventory and snapped some behind-the-scenes photos of their initial tests.

Grounded is a project by photographer Bob Croslin that features beautiful studio portraits of birds that are recovering from injuries at a bird sanctuary.

Is "camera toss" photography ready to go from fad to feature? Apparently Nikon thinks so. A recently published patent (No. 2012-189859) shows that the company has been thinking about building specific features into its compact and mirrorless cameras that would assist in using the technique.