Destin of Smarter Every Day recently shot some light-painting photographs using an RC helicopter loaded with colored lights. The maneuverability of the helicopter turns the great outdoors into a giant canvas on which you can light paint giant 3D shapes.
DPReview has published a gallery filled with sample photographs shot using the new Leica M Monochrom. The photographs are tack sharp and have a beautiful "film look" to them that is difficult to achieve by doing a conversion from color digital images. Watch out: looking at the gallery may be bad for your wallet.
Leica has officially announced its new monochrome digital rangefinder, the M Monochrom -- the world's first digital camera to do dedicated black and white photography. The camera features a newly designed 18-megapixel monochrome CCD sensor and "100% sharper imaging" due to the fact that raw data is processed directly without interpolation. The monochrome sensor allows the camera to achieve extremely low noise even upwards of ISO 10,000, and various programmed tones can be used to adjust the …
Artist Alan Belcher is known for pioneering a genre of art known as "photo-object" in which the disciplines of photography and sculpture are fused and explored in different ways. His latest piece is titled "_____.jpg", and consists of 125 ceramic sculptures of the ubiquitous Apple JPG icon. Each one was manufactured in China and then signed, numbered, and dated. They're currently on display at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in Manhattan. You can see a close-up view of the tile here.
Last year Olympus announced that it would be moving away from DSLRs in favor of mirrorless cameras. Today Samsung revealed that it's moving towards mirrorless as well, except from compact cameras instead of DSLRs. The company is converting its main Chinese camera plant to manufacture high-end mirrorless cameras rather than the cheap point-and-shoots it has made in the past.
Shoebox is an app by 1000 Memories that lets you turn your iOS or Android smartphone into a scanner for digitizing old paper photos (the photos don't have to be old, of course). The app goes far beyond manual snapping and cropping: it uses edge detection to help you crop, color balance to compensate for lighting, and auto-flattens the resulting image to adjust for your camera's tilt. You can download it for free through the iTunes App Store or Google Play.
Ara Solis is a creative series of photographs by Guatemalan photographer Luis Gonzalez Palma showing model ships sailing across seas of crumpled bed sheets.
Brooklyn-born and bred art cooperative United Photo Industries have a treat in store for any and all photography enthusiasts who happen to find themselves in New York between June 22nd and July 1st. In partnership with many different galleries, vendors and national institutions, United Photo Industries is putting together a photographic village it's calling Photoville -- and it'll be made almost entirely out of shipping containers.
The photos that went into the animation above were all created in-camera using software and a robotic arm programmed before hand with predetermined patterns. The project, known as LightPlot, started as an NXT Lego experiment in stop-motion photography by Ben Cowell-Thomas. He wanted to create a motion control rig for stop-motion using NXT, but as he was looking through some light painting projects online, he began to wonder how he could turn his lego project into a light painting rig.
Virgin America airlines is producing the "first-ever film made at 35,000 feet", titled Departure Date. It's a movie that takes place entirely inside the cabin of an airplane that's actually airborne. 20 hours of in-flight shooting was done on Virgin flights that spanned 3 continents and covered 28,000 miles. The film was written and directed by Kat Coiro and stars some pretty well known faces. It'll premier next month at LA Film Fest, and will soon be available in its entirety on the in-flight …
Most people are familiar with the famous Tank Man photo taken by AP Photographer Jeff Widener as tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square on June 5th, 1989. Taken from a 6th floor balcony of the Beijing hotel, the iconic version we've come to know is only one of 4 very similar photos taken that same moment.
Want to enjoy photographs on the web without the annoyance of words? Check out Wordless Web, a simple browser bookmarklet by Ji Lee and Cory Forsyth that instantly strips away all the text on any website.
The future of consumer photography could very well be with new sensors, or more compact interchangeable lens cameras, or 41-megapixel smartphones; but why not cameras that are wirelessly tethered together? Thats what SynchroCam can do, and for a free app it's pretty cool.
A fake war photograph by Canadian artist Jeff Wall was sold yesterday at Christie's in NYC for a staggering $3.6 million -- a new record for Canadian photographers and the third highest price ever paid for a picture. The 1992 photo, titled Dead Troops Talk, was captured inside a suburban Vancouver studio using models, borrowed military outfits, and fake blood. It shows a group of dead Soviet soldiers chatting with one another during the Soviet-Afghan war of 1986. The sold image is one of two …
In 1991 when the Rodney King beating was caught on tape it was a coincidence that someone happened to have a video camera with them. Today, nearly everyone carries one in their pocket. And the advent of social media means that a photo or video need only generate a few retweets before it goes completely viral. It seems that news -- especially bad news -- travels faster than ever; and it brings justice with it.
Google has published a second sample photo captured using its Google Glass augmented reality glasses. This time it's a 3MP photograph captured by Googler Sebastian Thrun while spinning with his son Jasper. It's an interesting example of the moments people will soon be able to capture if wearable, voice-controlled cameras become a part of how we document our lives. No word on whether the camera quality has improved since the first sample photo was released, but this latest one sure looks better.
The "Content Aware Fill" tool was one of the most lauded advancements in Photoshop CS5. Of course, the tool wasn't without its occasional glitches, but the ability to select a section and have the program clone it out automatically was still very impressive. But what if that's the only tool you want to use? What if you're a casual photographer who wants to remove unwanted sections in your composition without buying and learning a whole editing suite?
High definition video recording is a standard feature on digital cameras these days. If you've never really understood the terms 1080p, 1080i, and 720p, here's a short and sweet explanation that'll bring you up to speed. Benjamin Higginbotham of Technology Evangelist describes the differences between varieties and why you can consider 720p "better" than 1080i.
There are plenty of products on the market specifically targeting the photographer who shoots tethered to a laptop. But when it comes to putting your laptop somewhere other than the nearest unoccupied chair or table, we haven't run into many accessories that offer a versatile, "attach anywhere" sort of solution -- until we stumbled on the DigiPlate.
If you've ever watched a Japanese anime, or even American cartoons for that matter, you probably know that most of the characters have highly unrealistic body proportions -- giant eyes and tiny noses are the norm. Ideal Species is a creepy set of images by photographer Chris Scarborough that imagines what these proportions would look like in the real world. Yup, it's creepy.
Can't decide between the Canon 5D Mark III and Nikon D800? Dave Dugdale of Learning DSLR Video created this helpful video that offers a pretty comprehensive comparison of the cameras. It's a bit heavy on the videography applications of the camera, but should be quite informative nevertheless if you're at all interested in these cameras.
Back in 2006, a pornography publishing company named Perfect 10 attempted to sue Google over copyright infringement, claiming that the thumbnails displayed on Google's image search did not fall under "fair use." Ultimately, the Supreme Court wouldn't even hear the case, allowing the ruling that thumbnails are fair use to stand and handing Perfect 10 yet another loss (they've sustained many in this area).
If film is dying, then tintype photography has been extinct for years, but there's still one studio/gallery in San Francisco that can immortalize your portrait using this classic method in as little as 20 minutes. This video done by Cool Hunting Video shows store co-founder Michael Shindler going through the whole process, from prepping the plates, to taking the photos with a modified camera, to developing the one-off direct positive. The results, as usual, speak for themselves.
Lee Filters is a world-class producer of high-quality filters for both photography and cinematography, and now we have a chance to see what goes into making these high-end accessories. Keep in mind that these filters aren't made by some machine on an assembly line; each Lee Filter is made by hand, and in this video Mike Browne shows you what that process entails from liquid start to solid finish.
A week ago we shared a funny "leaked advertisement" for a fictional camera called the Instagram Snap. The video poked fun at the possibility that Instagram would use their $1 billion buyout from Facebook to build a ridiculous "real-world" camera -- basically a Polaroid camera with "sharing" features (passing a photo to another person by hand) and "filters" (coffee filter = spill coffee on your picture). Ironically enough though, a concept of just such a camera has recently come out, and it …
Back in February the New York Times launched a new site called "The Lively Morgue" for regularly sharing photos from its historical archive of the same name. The video above gives an interesting behind-the-scenes glimpse at this amazing underground archive that stores millions of historical photographs and 300,000 sacks filled with negatives.
A few weeks back an amazing Nikkor 6mm fisheye lens resurfaced for sale in London for an eye-popping $160,000. The lens was quickly snatched up by a camera collector. For those of you who missed out on buying the lens but would still like to see how 160 grand worth of fish-eye performs in real life, the folks who were selling it at Grays of Westminster put together a video just for you.
Photographer Nicholas Hendrickx has a quirky photo series titled "The Adventures Of Mr. Fly" in that features macro photographs of a (presumably dead) fly engaging in various human activities.
Everybody know the famous Beatles album cover of the four superstars crossing Abbey Road, but did you know that you can visit the intersection yourself and re-create the photo? Well you can, and what's more, there's a 24-hour webcam pointed right at the intersection that will capture you and your friends doing what tourists do at that intersection every week -- annoy local drivers.
If you like PES' stop-motion videos in which random objects are prepared as food, you'll love this creative music video for the song "Get By" by Delta Heavy. It's mind-boggling to think about how much time and energy went into preparing and photographing each individual still: director Ian Robertson shot 11,008 photographs and selected 3,184 for the final cut. 10 hours were required just to animate the 18 frames showing the Rubik's Cube equalizer. Animation took a total of 32 days. You can find …
It's usually a bit anti-climactic when a company unveils a product that was all but completely leaked beforehand, but the new Olympus TG-1 iHS is still a very exciting addition to the rugged camera market. In the end it's about quality, and on that front Olympus are delivering in big ways, prompting some to say that the TG-1 is probably the best rugged camera on the market.
Photographer Stefan Koppelkamm first photographed East Germany in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the reunification. He revisited the same locations a decade later, and rephotographed them from exactly the same viewpoints to document the drastic social and economic transformations that came about during the time between the photos.
Here's an interesting 1981 interview with American street photographer Garry Winogrand in which he talks about his life, his work, and -- interestingly enough -- how he finds the term "street photographer" stupid.
The GNU Image Manipulation Project, more popularly known as GIMP, has just released version 2.8; the first complete GIMP overhaul since 2008. For those who don't know (and there probably aren't many) GIMP is famous for being a slightly more complicated (and a lot more free) alternative to Photoshop with fewer features. And it seems that, right on cue with the Adobe CS6 release, GIMP is trying to close the gap between the two products that's been widening these last 4 years.
A few years ago, graphic designer Grey Jay was asked by a company to create a Photoshop action that would emulate a "toy camera" look for photos. He came up with an action he calls the "Holgarizer" and, after some tweaking and adjusting, has made it freely available to the public. If a messy cross-processed look is what you're after, Jay's filter does the job. You can download the ZIP file here.
Some time ago Sony announced a new series of "stacked" CMOS sensors that would bring a new level of quality to smartphone cameras. And now, several months later, rumors are floating about that Sony's new LT29i smartphone -- codenamed the Hayabusa -- will be packing a 13-megapixel version of the new tech.
If you're planning to hang a bunch of picture frames on a wall, Marissa Waddell of Roost suggests laying them out on the ground to figure out frame placement. Once you're happy with how the frames look, simply take a large sheet of wax paper and outline the frames. The paper can then be used as a guide for where to hammer in nails on the wall, giving you the exact layout you came up with.
Yesterday we were whimsically wondering what life would be like if we could Photoshop away some of life's more unpleasant moments, and today we've stumbled onto a different approach in the form of the Retouch Mirror. The mirror, which will cost you about $85 from Atypyk, is a fun bathroom accessory for photographers who want to make their morning routine feel more like a post-processing session. If you don't want to drop $85, you can always convert your existing mirror into a Retouch Mirror …
Just like in real estate, for which good photos of homes can make a huge difference in attracting potential buyers, animal shelters often see spikes in adoptions when the animals are advertised with attractive photographs. For this reason, Arizona-based photographer Michael Kloth visits shelters on a weekly basis to offer his services to local adoption agencies.
The big Leica announcement in Berlin is only three short days away, and as it draws closer more and more details about the highly-anticipated M9-M monochrome rangefinder are leaking. The most recent updates involve pricing and design. It seems that the new rangefinder will feature an all black body, much like the M9-P, with a Leica Monochrome engraving on the top plate. In fact, Leica Rumors is reporting that the M9-M will essentially be an M9-P with a monochrome sensor and a slightly higher …
There are a number of products out there that make child photography more child friendly by distracting the kid with colorful or disorienting objects. The newest member in this space is iCandy, a DSLR mount that turns your smartphone into a tool that makes your camera more appealing to youngins. For the low price of $99 (yup, it's kinda pricey), you can elicit smiles and other expressions by displaying photos and videos on your phone as you snap away at infant faces. The creator is currently …
On May 2nd, news started coming in that the previous day's MayDay Occupy protests in New York had turned violent towards photographers. At first, people viewed the assaults as unplanned, isolated incidents; but since the attacks took place, a piece on Anarchist News has been released to set the record straight: photographers, apparently, are the enemy.
One of the notable features of Alfonso Cuaron's 2006 film "Children of Men" is Cuaron's use of long, single-shot sequences, including a complicated urban warfare shot that's nearly eight minutes long. Refocused Media examined the movie and found that there were 16 shots longer than 45 seconds. The 31-minute compilation video above shows all of the shots in chronological order.
The big news spreading across the internet is that Adobe CS6 officially released today. The announcement, which confirms previous rumors of a May 7th ship date, came late last night and means that we can all finally get our hands on Content-Aware Move and all of the other features we've been dying to try.
Reuters photographer Kevin Lamarque recently got a call that summoned him for a top secret assignment: travel on an unannounced trip to Afghanistan with President Obama. After getting back, Lamarque wrote up an interesting behind-the-scenes blog post documenting his experience: …
You may remember photographer Benjamin Von Wong from last week's behind-the-scenes video of his photo shoot with the band The Agonist. In that video he showed you how he put together a very creative, cinematic composite shot that really stood out from other band photos. In this video, Benjamin runs you through the lighting challenges unique to black and white photography, and how he chose to overcome them.
Behind the scenes videos, like the one earlier about Dave Hill's Ford Fusion shoot, typically show off a photographer's technique, or the challenges he or she faces when trying to get a certain shot. But Aspen-based photographer Tyler Stableford's Buckley AirForce Base shoot posed some unique challenges.
Offering a very cinematic, editorial-style look at tradesmen doing their work, Japan-based photographer Yohei Shimada’s Workman series is an impressive display of photographic talent. The series was born out of necessity and a lack of subject matter in Shimada's small hometown of Nara. Having moved back there after completing an internship in Tokyo and coming into his own as a photographer, Shimada had to turn to the people he knew -- including his parents and friends -- to capture the series …
This behind the scenes video shows photographer Dave Hill shooting a very complicated composite shot for a Ford Fusion ad. Not every one of the photos you see him working on in the video made it into the final composites, which you can see here, but you've got to appreciate the amount of work something like this takes to get right; not just in post-production, but during the shoot as well.
Here's a great DIY project we found over on Lomography that'll help you to display your favorite photos, give them as gifts, or maybe even do a bit of self-promotion in a unique way. All you have to do is get some 3x3 prints of your favorite coaster-worthy photos, some 4x4 tiles made from the material of your choice, some foam or cork for the bottoms, some Mod Podge and a sponge applicator. This might even be a good way to put some of those already square Instagram photos to work for you.
