2012

Conflict minerals are minerals supplied by war-stricken parts of the world in which armed conflict and human rights abuses are prevalent -- minerals that are essential in the manufacture of consumer electronics. There has been a huge push recently to eradicate conflict minerals from the gadget industry, since the trade of these materials lines the pockets of unscrupulous folk and directly funds violence.

The folks over at Tucson, Arizona-based ArtsEye Gallery love the Holga so much, that decided to create a gigantic version of the plastic 120 format toy camera for an annual photo competition they host. They were originally planning to create it as a fun prop, but midway through the construction process, they had the brilliant idea of making it as a functioning camera.

If you've been looking for a way to hold "photo conversations" with friends and family as easily as you chat through text messages, Skype has a solution for you. The company has added one of the features requested the most by its millions of users: mobile photo sharing. Upgrade to the latest version of Skype's iPhone and iPad apps, and you'll be able to beam your latest snaps to anyone on your contact list without having to worry about things like file size limits or paying for MMS charges.

What would happen if Apple made a DSLR? Web video artist Adam Sacks thinks it would be a hit with iPhone users who use their phones for the sole purpose of taking pictures of food, applying filters to them, and then sharing them online. He created this humorous parody of an Apple commercial in which Greg Mansfield, the "Vice President of iPhone Product Design", introduces the iPhone 5. The new phone is reinvented as a DSLR to make everyone's life easier, and features a single app: Camera.

Sony's upcoming NEX-5R and NEX-6 cameras will look very much like... previous NEX cameras. Product shots and manufacturing photos of the two cameras have leaked onto the web through sonyalpharumors and digicam-info. The NEX-5R will look nearly identical to the popular NEX-5N (yes, that camera with that was plagued with a mysterious clicking noise for a time) and has a flip screen LCD on the back. SAR reports that it will have a 16MP APS-C sensor, phase detection AF, Wi-Fi connectivity, app …

Portland, Maine-based photographer Caleb Charland (whom we featured before) has a fascinating new series of science-based photos that show various alternative batteries created using things like apple trees and stacked coins. The photo above shows an experiment in which he powered a lamp using 300 apples in a Newburgh, Maine-orchard.

The number one reason for data loss is human error, and one of the other major reasons is the failure of storage mediums. When examining ways to store digital photos for a lifetime back in 2009, we noted that entrusting your data to the servers and engineers of major cloud companies (e.g. Amazon and its S3) was a better option than trying to back up your data yourself. Even though Amazon's S3 has long been an attractive option -- after all, many online photo sharing services use it for storing …

Canon has added two new beefy compact cameras to its SX ("superzoom") line: the PowerShot SX500 IS and the PowerShot SX160 IS. The main features of these two cameras is snappy autofocus speed and powerful optical zoom. Both cameras feature a 1/2.3-inch CCD 16 megapixel sensor, an ISO range of 100-800, 720p video at 25fps, a 3-inch LCD screen, and Canon's Intelligent Image Stabilization (which helps you shoot sharper images even when zoomed in, panning, or walking).

Leica User Forum member lm_user is one lucky photographer. For his birthday recently, his kids gifted him with this beautiful Leica M10 prototype digital rangefinder -- the only one known to exist.

Here's something interesting that we spotted over at Nikon Rumors: Nikon has an F rating with the Better Business Bureau, suggesting that the company's customer support leaves something to be desired.

The Leica Monochrom M won't be hitting store shelves until August 29th, but Chris Niccolls of Canadian camera shop The Camera Store was able to get his hands on a pre-release copy of the camera to play around with. In the hands on field test seen in the video above, he shares some of his thoughts on the camera, and then invites some street photographers to use it and share their thoughts as well.

Helsinki, Finland-based photographer Janne Parviainen has been light painting since 2008, and recently created series of experimental photos showing a technique he calls Light Topography. Using a single LED light for each image, he carefully traces over every surface in the scene while the camera's shutter is open. Fully tracing a room can take as long as half an hour. The resulting light outlines provide a trippy look at what each space contains.

Check out these beautiful crystal DSLR bookends! Created by photo accessory company Fotodiox, they're handcrafted 2/3-scale replicas of the Canon 7D DSLR with a zoom kit lens. In addition to holding up your literature collection, they can also be a nice addition to your desk as paperweights.

A couple weeks ago, we shared a rumor that Nikon is working on a compact camera powered by Android OS (said to be version 2.3 Gingerbread). New leaked photos are revealing what the camera will look like.

Photographer Emma Kisiel's project At Rest is both beautiful and morbid. On one hand, they show animals lying serenely inside a ring of rocks and flowers, but on the other hand, each one is of an animal that was stuck and killed by a car. What's startling is the variety of roadkill she manages to find: everything from a squirrel to an owl (when's the last time you saw an owl as roadkill?).

If you're a superstar athlete looking to swipe a sports photographers DSLR for some impromptu picture taking, here's a pro tip: do it nicely.

Businessmen around the world are watching Facebook's plummeting stock closely, but perhaps none more so than the folks over at Instagram. The world was shocked back in April when Facebook agreed to purchase the tiny startup for $1 billion, but one key fact is that the price was to be paid in a mixture of cash and stock. Due to the decline of FB stock, hundreds of millions of dollars have been wiped from the purchase price, which is currently valued at somewhere between $700 and $800 million.

Nikon Rumors published these first photographs of Nikon's upcoming high-end compact camera, the Nikon Coolpix P7700. The camera is the successor of the P7100, which was announced on August 24, 2011. This latest model will reportedly arrive almost exactly one year later, on August 22nd, 2012.

Good news for film photography lovers: Kodak film may be okay for at least a few more years. The company has signed new contracts with four major Hollywood movie studios that will allow it to provide film for movies at least through 2015.

German photographer Geraldine Lamanna has a great series of photographs titled "Powder Dance" that captures the elegance and powder of dance using white powder. Inspired by the music video for the song "Rolling In The Deep" by Adele, Lamanna coated dance instructor Olivia Maciejowski and two her dance students with powder, and then had them bust out their moves for the camera. The resulting photographs are meant to show "echoes" of the movement.

American portrait photographer Gregory Heisler (whom we featured yesterday) is probably best known for his 70+ cover portrait photos for TIME magazine. One of his most famous portraits shows a double exposure, "two faced" photo of President George H.W. Bush. The photograph, shot entirely in-camera, was used as the first TIME "Person of the Year" cover photo.

Geotagging is one of the big trends in photography these days, as more and more cameras allow GPS coordinates to be baked into the EXIF data of photos to document where they were taken. iOS app developer Reddyset wants to join in on the location tagging fun, but from a very different angle: taxitagging.

On of the neat things about working at Google is the fact that the company loves letting its employees hear from the world's best minds through the AtGoogleTalks. Through the series of lectures, Google invites well-known individuals to share on their area of expertise for 40-70 minutes. In addition to the thousands of politicians, musicians, and entertainers who have shared so far, there have also been a number of photographers invited for Photographers@Google presentations.

If you think modern day hard drives store a lot of data, get a load of this: researchers at Harvard have succeeded in storing roughly 700 terabytes of data in a single gram of DNA. The strands of DNA are treated much like other storage devices, except instead of using electric charge or magnetism to store information, DNA's four bases (A,C,G,T) are used.

Digital artist and programmer Joe Macirowski is one of the many people bemoaning the spread of Instagram-style filters to every nook and cranny of online photo sharing. Even though he enjoys Instagram itself, the fact that more and more people are using the filters to share their memories outside the app made Macirowski decide that something "had to be done." What he did was write Normalize, a new iOS app that is anti-Instagram... literally.

Legendary American portrait photographer Gregory Heisler was recently invited to give a talk to the American Society of Media Photographers in Oregon. Prior to the lecture, Stumptown Visuals caught up with him to ask him for some words of wisdom. What resulted was this 8-minute gem that contains a good deal of advice you can apply to your own portraiture.

You know that FBI anti-piracy seal that appears at the beginning of home movies? The one that's displayed alongside the messsage, "The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain
is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by fines and federal imprisonment"? Well, you can now use it to remind would-be infringers that your photographs are copyrighted.

If you have a free 20 minutes, here's a great 1958 documentary on the life and work of iconic landscape photographer Ansel Adams. Created while Adams was living at a house near the Golden Gate Bridge, the film provides a look into his home, interests, attitudes toward art, camera equipment, and photographic techniques.

We first shared photographer Rachel Hulin's The Flying Series back in February when it started getting quite a bit of attention online. The series consists of beautifully Photoshopped images of Hulin's baby boy Henry using his magical powers of flight. Since then, Hulin has added more surreal images to the set that capture Henry taking his skills to new locations and new heights.

What if the battery in your camera could be charged in the same amount of time it takes to microwave a cup of instant noodles? It sounds crazy, but that's what appears to be headed our way.

Remember Facebook's "zombie photo" problem? Photos that users deleted on the website actually remained very much alive on Facebook's servers, available to anyone who held on to the images' URLs. Earlier this year Facebook acknowledged the issue and promised changes that would ensure permanent deletion within 45 days.

Love bikes as much as you love cameras? Cycling company Minoura has a beautiful accessory called the Quick Release Camera Mount. It's a simple product that turns your bike into a tripod biwheel without sacrificing any aesthetics. It holds your camera securely to your handlebar using a standard quarter-inch threaded bolt, and features a front-wheel-style quick release clamp that allows you to quickly mount and unmount it.

Waterproof digital cameras are a great way to document adventures in and around water, but one thing you should be wary about is the fact that cameras sink. Despite being waterproof, shockproof, and a variety of other -proofs, the cameras require a separate floater strap that keep them at the surface of the water if they ever get separated from your wrist.

Photobucket is quietly one of the 800-pound gorillas of photo sharing. First launched back in 2003, the nearly-10-year-old service boasts a staggering 100 million users, putting it in second place behind the picture sharing juggernaut, Facebook. As the demise of MySpace showed, however, the mantra for online services needs to constantly be "innovate or die".

Earlier today, we poked fun at a clip from the TV show CSI showing some pseudo-scientific photo enhancing. Many of the comments on YouTube also poked fun at the mention of "corneal imaging", in which the investigators used to obtain imagery from the reflections seen in an eyeball. Turns out corneal imaging is a real thing...

Shooting photos of the letters of the alphabet isn't anything new, but London-based photographer Amandine Alessandra's method of creating her letters is. Armed with only her arms and a camera, Alessandra shoots long exposure photographs of herself waving her hands in the shape of each letter. The project is titled Dance with Me.

Mirrorless cameras are designed to offer DSLR-esque sensors inside smaller form-factor bodies, but so far the only company offering full frame mirrorless cameras has been Leica with its M line of rangefinders. That may soon change. sonyalpharumors is reporting with certainty that Sony is working on putting a full frame sensor in a NEX mirrorless camera.

Magically enhancing photographs to solve crimes is a staple of crime and detective dramas. To ordinary folk who have never touched a program like Photoshop, the enhancement technology might sometimes seem believable -- after all, government technology is always decades ahead of civilian tech, right? However, to anyone who has any experience in photo editing, it's pretty obvious that certain things just aren't possible. Completely changing the camera angle in a photo, for example.

Photography instructor Mike Browne of PhotographyCourses.Biz has a clever way of teaching the basic principles of flash photography. He uses water from an ordinary garden hose as an analogy for light, showing different ways you can go about soaking your portrait subject.

The New York Times has published a great interview with Michael H. Osterreicher, the general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association and the editor of the organization's advocacy blog. In it, NYT Lens Blog co-editor James Estrin asks Osterreicher about photographers' rights and the trend of people being stopped while shooting public locations.

Before Instagram, there was Hipstamatic. Hipstamatic was one of the pioneers and heavyweights in the retro filter photo app space, but when Instagram came along, the price advantage (free vs. $2), ease of use, filter selection, and built-in social network allowed Instagram to turn into the new 800 lb. gorilla of mobile photo sharing.

Remember that new Flickr account we reported on yesterday that appeared to be owned by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer? Turns out it actually wasn't her, and was quickly taken down after becoming a big story in the blogosphere.

Last month, nearly three hundred programmers descended on Dropbox's headquarters in San Francisco for the third annual Photo Hack Day. In the span of 24 hours, they threw together 70 new apps using the APIs of different photo services. $10,000 in prize money was distributed to the top three apps. Here's a look at the three best hacks that popped out of the competition.

Artist Simon Beck needed a way to get exercise without aggravating his problematic feet, and discovered that walking around in the snow with rigid boots and snowshoes resulted in the least amount of pain. He then came up with the amazing idea of doing crop circle-style designs in large expanses of untracked snow.

Starting in 2007, Disney and portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz have collaborated on a series of advertisements called the Disney Dream Portrait Series. Each ad features a portrait of one or more celebrities dressed up as famous Disney movie characters. Along with the advertisements, Disney has also been releasing some behind-the-scenes glimpses showing how the photographs came together. The video above shows actress and model Olivia Wilde posing for Leibovitz as the Evil Queen from Snow …

I love photography. I love the idea of capturing a moment in time, an event, an abstract scene or just a snippet of life that would otherwise go unrecorded, only to be forgotten over time. I have no formal training, no gallery exhibitions, no commissions and not even a particularly large following on Flickr or any other social media.

Soviet photo equipment collector Vladislav Kern recently purchased this crazy camera contraption. Upon first glance, it might look like a 8mm motion picture camera that an ordinary tourist might use, but take a closer look (or open it up) and you'll see that the design is simply a façade. The device is actually a still camera that exposes 35mm film using a smaller lens on the right side of the body!

Instagram has rolled out version 3.0 of its photo sharing app, which now boasts over 80 million users around the world. The new release focuses on improving the browsing experience for photos, with geotagging being one of the core ideas. There's a new Photo Maps view that's similar to what you can find on services like Flickr. The page overlays photos onto a map, allowing you to browse images based on where they were shot.

Remember Danny Cohen? He's the photographer who plastered a 43-foot banner onto a bridge in an effort to become David LaChapelle's photo assistant. He recently came up with another creative photographer promo, this time in the form of a pop-up card.

San Francisco-based photographer Lisa Kristine has spent the past 28 years documenting indigenous cultures in 70 countries on 6 continents around the world. More recently, she has been working with the organization Free the Slaves, using her photography to document the monstrosity that is modern day slavery.