Rumors of a soon-to-arrive iPad Mini are heating up, but one photo gear company has beaten Apple to the "mini" game: Custom SLR announced its new M-Plate Mini today. It's the smaller sibling of the company's M-Plate Pro, which takes up more space because it includes a couple of extra connection points for attaching accessories (e.g. the company's strap and hand-grap strap mount).
Photographer Benjamin Von Wong shot the portrait above a couple of days ago using a Nikon D4, a $9,000 Nikon 400mm f/2.8G lens, and a few iPhones for lighting. The extremely shallow depth-of-field was achieved using 36 separate exposures and the Brenizer Method.
If you suffer from gear envy, you might want to skip over this post. Apparently children from wealthy Chinese families these days are traveling with fancy DSLR cameras while on vacation. A person named Liu Li Yang recently published a series of photos over on Chinese social networking service Renren that show a group of tourist children clutching expensive Canon and Nikon DSLRs and lenses.
A few weeks ago, we casually remarked that the best cameraphones today can probably snap better photos than top-of-the-line compact cameras from over a decade ago. Turns out that it's true.
A Swedish photography company called Skolfoto Norden received some embarrassing press this week after a girl discovered that she had three eyes in the official class portrait it shot.
If you're a photo enthusiast who uses Pandora for personalized music listening, you'll feel right at home using Art.sy. Just as Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to offer automated music recommendations, Art.sy has an Art Genome Project through which 20,000 images of art from 275 galleries and 50 museums have already been digitized, analyzed, and stored.
Want to proudly proclaim your love of photography with the clothes you wear? This week we're giving away a massive $500 gift certificate to Dodge & Burn, a T-shirt brand for photographers that prints stylish camera designs on high-quality shirts. The shirts normally retail for $29 each, so this prize is worth 17 shirts -- enough to wear a different camera shirt every day for two-and-a-half weeks!
Lytro's light field camera began hitting store shelves around the world today, and to celebrate, the company announced a couple of upgrades to the camera: manual new colors and manual controls.
Auckland, New Zealand-based street photographer Sim Ahmed of Aucklandia recently decided to spread the love of photography by displaying and offering his work for free on the streets of his city. After printing out 500 digital prints for 9 cents each three weeks ago, he began framing them, revisiting the locations where they were shot, and sticking them on buildings there.
Last week, we wrote that Nikon was tooting its own horn by claiming that both the D4 and D800 DSLRs had passed the European Broadcasting Union test, popularly known as the BBC test, making them the "first DSLR cameras fit for broadcast." Now it appears that the horns were tooted prematurely, as the BBC is refuting Nikon's interpretation of the tests.
Photographer Preston Turk has an idea for how to best store lens caps when they're not attached to lenses. Called the Stow-Away, it a universal lens cap holder that can hold most of the standard lens diameters (AKA filter sizes): 52mm, 55mm, 58mm, 62mm, 67mm, and 72mm. Turk designed the accessory to attach to the underside of cameras via the standard tripod mount. Giving your lens cap a quick shove underneath your camera will click it securely into place.
The next time you're photographing clouds, make sure those clouds aren't hovering over a location that's considered "sensitive". National Weather Service volunteer Michael Galindo learned this lesson last month after pulling over to the side of the road near Houston to snap a photo of storm clouds brewing in the distance (shown above). Problem was, between Galindo and the clouds sat the Lyondell Refinery.
Apple has issued an official response to complaints over the iPhone 5's purple flaring, and it mirrors what AppleCare Support said to a customer last week. A new support document has appeared for the symptom: "A purplish or other colored flare, haze, or spot is imaged from out-of-scene bright light sources during still image or video capture."
If you're forever alone and want to photograph yourself locked in a warm embrace in a doorway, check out this article by Japanese website Daily Portal -- one of the strangest photography tutorials we've ever seen.
There are new rumors floating around that a Canon 7D Mark II might not be too far off. Northlight Images writes that the camera will reportedly be announced early in 2013, in time for the trade shows CP+ in Japan and PMA/CES in the United States. The camera may be a successor to both the 7D and the 60D, offering more advanced features at a reduced price that targets the serious-amateur segment of the market.
We've featured a few projects recently that combined portraits of people with photos of nature and various objects. While the look can be easily faked in Photoshop, a more satisfying way to shoot this kind of shot is to do the double exposure entirely in-camera.
A number of years ago, a TSA agent named Pythias Brown accidentally left a camera out of some luggage he was screening. Not wanting to be reprimanded for his mistake, he decided to avoid any problems by secretly taking the camera home. This event opened his eyes to how easy it was to pocket passengers' belongings, and he began to steal more and more items in increasingly brazen thefts.
Facebook takes the copyright infringement of photographs seriously. So seriously that it doesn't think twice about instantly -- and permanently -- nuking offending pages, regardless of how popular those pages are. Case in point: two months ago, popular trend hunting blog The Cool Hunter had its popular page abruptly deleted; the page boasted over 788,000 fans, contained five years' worth of content, and was a huge source of traffic for the company's website. Facebook has since stated that the …
21-year-old Kylie Woon hasn't been doing photography for very long, but in the two short years since she started dabbling in the medium, her surreal images have already become widely popular online. Her project Surreal-ity features beautiful dreamlike self-portraits in which she is seen floating and flying in all kinds of beautiful locations.
Update: Eye-Fi has released a firmware update that fixes this issue.
Inspired by photographer Richard Silver's time-slice photos that we featured last month, European Southern Observatory Fellow Gabriel Brammer decided to do the same thing, except with photographs of the ESO's Very Large Telescope in northern Chile instead of NYC buildings.
For nearly half a decade now, filmmaker John Downer has been pioneering the use of tiny cameras to capture photographs and videos from a bird's-eye view -- literally. He attaches extremely small and light HD cameras to the backs of birds in order to capture incredible point-of-view imagery of the animals going about their day-to-day lives.
Since 2006, Brooklyn-based artist Patrick Winfield has been creating incredible photo collages by photographing and recreating scenes using a large number of individual instant photo prints. Some of his pieces are composed by more than over one hundred instant photos! Although his work mostly featured Polaroid films early on, Winfield branched out into other types as well (e.g. The Impossible Project instant films) after Polaroid bowed out of the industry.
Lincoln, UK-based photographer Adam Rhoades came up with an interesting way of printing digital photographs using analog darkroom processes. By mounting his iPhone (displaying a photo) onto a 35mm enlarger, he's able to enlarge and focus his digital photograph on photo paper as if it were a negative being projected.
If you want to capture photographs or videos of otherworldly environments without using any computer generated imagery, one way is to create miniature worlds in your garage using a fish tank and salt water (a technique that has been used in numerous Hollywood movies). The video above is a tutorial on this trick by filmmaker and visual effects guru Joey Shanks.
Photographing a lightning strike from close-up is a difficult and dangerous task, but Toronto-based wedding photographer and weather buff Richard Gottardo managed to capture something even crazier: a double-exposure photograph caused by the bolt of lightning itself.
San Diego-based photographer Robert Benson had a curious problem a while back. He had a $6,500 Leica Noctilux 50mm f/1 lens, but no camera to use it on. Not being able to afford the Leica M9 at the time (and unsure if he wanted to ever buy one), he decided to make massive modifications to his Canon 5D Mark II so that it would accept any Leica M lens without needing an adapter. The frankencamera above is what emerged from the brand-change operation.
Here's the amazing official trailer for the upcoming documentary film Chasing Ice, which follows one man as he embarks on an epic photo project around the world:
From the rumors that have been floating around, it seems pretty clear that Canon will be unveiling a new high-megapixel DSLR at the end of this month. "Canon 3D" is one of the names that has been attached to the rumors, but Canon Rumors reports that a new one has emerged -- along with a hint at what the price might be.
If you own an iOS device, you've probably noticed that the Camera Roll in the native Photos app doesn't come with any way to mark photographs as private. For this reason, the App Store features a large number of apps (both paid and free) designed to offer that feature, allowing you to choose what to show and what not to when someone else is flipping through your photographs. If you want an easy way to "mark photos as private" without having to download a special app (or pay money for a fancy …
Starting in 2004, British photographer Julian Germain began a photo project shooting portraits of classrooms in North East England. The next year, he began doing the same thing for schools across the UK. It soon turned into an international project, as he began traveling to schools across the globe to document the environments young people are learning in. He calls the series Classroom Portraits. The photograph above shows a 4th grade math class in Cusco, Peru.
ReutersTV shared this video today in which its Social Media Editor Anthony De Rosa meets up with The Impossible Project VP Dave Bias to talk about the company and what it's up to. Bias gives a demo of the new Impossible Instant Lab -- similar to what we shared from Photokina -- showing how it takes iPhone pixels and "melts them back down into chemistry".
Well, that was abrupt. On Tuesday, we wrote that the Nikon D4 that Usain Bolt had famously used after winning an Olympic gold medal was up for auction on eBay, with the proceeds going toward educational and cancer research charities. After the story was reported worldwide, the high bid quickly rose until it hit $11,600 today. Then suddenly, it was gone.
Adobe has officially added lossy compression into the latest specification (1.4) for its Digital Negative (DNG) RAW file format. The new Lossy DNG, which first appeared as a feature in Lightroom 4 earlier this year, gives photographers a middle-ground between the quality of lossless DNG photos and the small file size of JPEG photos.
The short 4-minute-long video above is probably the most inspiring thing you'll see today. It's the story of Jaleel King, a man who became wheelchair-bound at the age of 8 after being shot in the back by an angry neighbor. The blast from the sawed-off shotgun almost killed him, but he fought through that challenge -- and every other challenge that has presented itself since.
On September 22nd, more than 100 developers descended upon Berlin to compete against each other in building the best photo app they could within 24 hours. After a long, sleepless night and thousands of lines of code, 27 new photo apps were born. Here's a look at the top three that won the competition.
Here's a fun weekend photo project for you to try: turn solid glass objects into liquid by splashing water onto them. That's what Mexico City-based photographer Jean Bérard did for his series titled Liquid Glass. He set various glass vessels onto a table, and photographed them multiple times while splashing the water contained within and tossing water on from the outside.
What if there were an up-to-date live stream of photos from any location on Earth, allowing you to see whatever is happening "right now"? Well, there is: Worldcam is a simple web app that's designed to do just that. Simple provide it with two pieces of information: city and location. City is pretty straightforward, but location is the cool one; you can type things like businesses, buildings, parks, and more.
Here's an interesting piece of photo trivia for today: did you know that Apple's similarities with Kodak don't end with Steve Jobs modeling his career and his company after Polaroid? The ongoing dispute between Apple and Samsung is strikingly similar to the battle Polaroid had with Kodak many decades ago.
Photographer Kirsty Wiseman didn't want to shell out money for a real beauty dish -- she doesn't really need one -- so she built this funny-looking DIY beauty dish for a few pennies using a couple of Styrofoam bowls, a couple of cocktail sticks, and a piece of aluminum foil. After playing around with it, Wiseman was delightfully surprised to find that her gear hack actually produced decent results.
Tom Lacoste is a 23-year-old self-taught photographer based out of Bordeaux in Southern France. While most people do light painting using flashlights, sparklers, and perhaps flaming steel wool if they're adventurous enough, Lacoste chooses to photograph flames. Large flames.
The Canon 50mm f/1.0 was the fastest SLR lens in production before it was discontinued in 2000 and replaced with the f/1.2. There aren't too many copies of this lens floating around on the used market, so photographers who want to use the ridiculous aperture it offers must pay a hefty premium in order to purchase one; the lenses commonly sell for two or three times the original retail value.
Google recently reaffirmed its commitment to keeping recently-acquired Nik Software's high-end photography tools alive, which led some to believe that Snapseed -- Nik's popular photo editing app -- would be neglected or shuttered. That doesn't appear to be the case.
What would you capture if you had a day off on a hot summer day with $300,000 worth of camera gear lying around the house? That was the happy situation filmmaker Brad Kremer found himself in recently. The gear he found himself with at the time included an uber-expensive Phantom Flex high-speed camera, Zeiss super speed glass, a Canon 5D Mark III DSLR, and Canon L glass. He decided to put the gear to use (and flex his creative muscles) by inviting the neighborhood children over for a water …
A little over a year ago, Nikon launched its new 1 Series mirrorless system by unveiling the V1 and J1 cameras. This past August, the company launched the J2 as the successor of the J1, but it's 2nd generation counterpart, the V2, was strangely absent. Luckily for the J2, it won't be lonely for too much longer.
Nikon published a news post recently boasting that its D4 and D800 DSLRs had "become the first DSLR cameras to pass the very elaborate European Broadcasting Union (EBU) test, commonly referred to as the BBC Test."
Hello future. We have now entered the age in which wireless telephone carriers launch dedicated digital cameras. AT&T announced today that it will be the first major carrier in the US to offer the Samsung Galaxy Camera. The reason this upcoming Android Jelly Bean-powered camera will be offered by phone companies in addition to standard gadget retailers is because it's one of the first digital cameras that you can purchase a 3G/4G data plan for.
Gigapixel photographs are generally created by snapping a large number of photos of a scene using a special robotic camera rig, and then stitching those images together afterward using special software. Jean-François Rauzier creates similarly massive images, except his "hyperphotos" are all stitched together by hand.
We don't know how they do it, but College Humor's sketch videos often have famous celebrities making fools of themselves in the name of comedy. Above is a parody infomercial they released today featuring actor Patrick Wilson. He states that prior to his acting career, he worked as a stock photography model and was featured in over 133,000 stock images.
Eye-Fi, a pioneer in the Wi-Fi-enabled memory card market, has announced a new flagship SD memory card. The new Pro X2 doubles the capacity of the old one, from 8GB to 16GB, and increases the speed as well, from Class 6 to Class 10.
