2012

A couple weeks ago we shared an interesting video in which a speaker and Canon 5D Mark II's frame rate were used to make water appear to be frozen in mid-air. This new video by YouTube user Brusspup takes the idea to the next level by making the water appear to travel upwards. He explains: …

In the 1970s and 80s the Czechoslovak secret police, among other things, were charged with surveying the population without their consent or, for that matter, knowledge. Taking pictures from under coats or inside suitcases, the secret police kept tabs on the goings on of the general public. And while the act itself is voyeuristic and creepy, the pictures turned out surprisingly well.

Check out this strange looking digital camera made by IKEA out of cardboard. It was included as part of a press kit at an event in Europe recently, and apparently the "disposable" camera might go on sale sometime soon in IKEA stores. It uses two AA batteries and stores up to 40 photographs in the built-in memory. Images can be downloaded to your computer using the USB connection that swings out from one of the corners of the camera.

After amassing 626 friends on Facebook two years ago, Tanja Hollander began to wonder how many of them were actually friends in the conventional sense. She then set out to answer the question by meeting each one of them and photographing them in their homes. The portraits are published on a website set up for the project, titled The Facebook Portrait Project, and each photo includes some information about the subject and their relationship to Hollander.

Over the last couple of weeks we've covered every aspect of the Canon 5D Mark III "light leak" issue. Starting initially as a rumor, Canon eventually confirmed that the camera's top LCD did, in fact, alter the exposure reading by 1/3 of a stop in dark environments. A week ago the company even put shipments on hold while they investigated the issue more extensively.

Kanaal van Djsanderdj created this stunning time-lapse video using photographs shot by probes sent out by NASA through the Cassini and Voyager missions. It offers a close-up look at the other planets in our solar system in motion. Here's a similar video we shared a year ago.

Here's a unique invention that could make many a photog's life easier -- especially if they're shooting tethered. The Tripad, which is available on the company's website for $100, is a laptop stand for your tripod. The unique design allows you to hang the Tripad over your tripod, and use the platform to hold your laptop, notebook, or other photography gear.

While many photographers aim for technical perfection, photographer William Miller goes the opposite route. After "rescuing" an old and barely functional Polaroid SX-70 instant camera from a yard sale, he began taking advantage of its glitches by viewing the resulting photographs as abstract art. He states, …

Here's a brief glimpse showing Nikon's new $59 WU-1a wireless adapter in action, being used to control a D3200 DSLR (the only camera supported at the moment) using an Android (the only mobile OS supported) smartphone. The video is in Chinese since it was created by Taiwanese website Mobile01, but it clearly shows the two main features of the adapter: transferring photos from cameras to phones and shooting remotely using the phone as a live view.

Photographer Isaac Gutiérrez Pascual of Spain shot this beautiful photograph of the sky that contains four different subjects: birds, clouds, the Moon, and Venus. It was shot using a Canon 5D and a 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens. NASA writes, …

Camera bags can get pricy, and when it comes to camera bags that travel well (i.e. on wheels) prices can really skyrocket. In fact, if you type "Rolling Camera Bag" into Amazon your first three options will run you $262.54, $171.07, and $249.00.

Here's amazing concept: use a seemingly random display of dots (like the static you see on a signal-less television set) to share photographs that only a camera can see. The International Federation of Photographic Art created this clever interactive video that asks you to grab your camera and follow the instructions. Set your aperture to f/5.6 and your shutter speed at 1s. Snap a photo of the screen filled with static, and prepare to be amazed!

The Olympics are a big deal, and an even bigger opportunity for the country's photographers. From the moment the next Olympic city is announced, preparations begin and an endless number of photo ops present themselves. That is, if the security guards don't start harassing you.

Sick of staring at giant darkroom timer while waiting for chemicals to do their work? Try replacing the timer with carefully selected music. Photographer Lauren E. Simonutti writes over at Lens Culture, …

When Thomas and Anneka Geary paid professional -- and we use the term lightly -- photographers Ian McCloskey and Nikki Carter of Westgate Photography £750 to capture the happiest day of their lives, they were probably expecting something a little bit better than what turned out: blurry and poorly framed shots captured from terrible positions that are being called "the worst wedding pictures ever". Not one of the photos showed the groom's parents.

Light painting and bullet time are both amazing photographic techniques on their own, but what happens when you combine them? The amazing video above by Richard Kendall and his team shows just that: three dimensional light painting captured with a 360-degree Matrix-style bullet time camera rig. The results are stunning.

Inspiration can come in all forms, and even though some people people might not find Instagram photography inspiring, online ambient music publication Disquiet had the great idea of asking musicians to compose music based on shots taken using the popular camera app.

This is, in fact, the proper way to carry the Nikkor 1200-1700mm f/5.6-8.0 super telephoto lens. Weighing in at 36 pounds and measuring nearly 3 feet in length, the manual focus lens was introduced in 1993 and had a hefty price tag of $60,000. It would be interesting to see how it stacks up against the magical Sigma 200-500mm.

Adobe is currently holding the launch event for the highly anticipated Creative Suite 6 in San Francisco today, making it a big day for Photoshop enthusiasts everywhere. Official release will be coming "within 30 days" according to Adobe, but the event has revealed enough to whet our appetites and give us some pricing options we can chew over.

Photography enthusiast Jeff Vier made himself a cheap DIY grid spot using a $5 gutter downspout adapter he purchased from Home Depot and a $0.50 bag of drinking straws. Simply cut all the straws to the same length (the longer the straws, the more focused the light), carefully arrange them inside the adapter, and then use super glue to fix them into place. Vier found that his makeshift adapter fit perfectly over his Speedlight 580 EX II without any adjustments.

After his daughter Lotte was born, Dutch photographer Frans Hofmeester began creating weekly videos of her to document her growth. Lotte recently turned 12, and Hofmeester decided to edit all the footage so far into this amazing time-lapse video showing twelve years of growing up in just under three minutes.

Remember those beautiful macro photos that showed the inside of musical instruments as giant rooms? Sao Paolo, Brazil-based photographer Valentino Fialdini did something similar, except instead of musical instruments he used small chambers created out of LEGO blocks. With some clever lighting and camera trickery, Fialdini captured the tiny rooms and corridors as to look like giant architectural spaces.

Here's an interesting video in which street photographer Matt Stuart shares some of his work and talks about his love for street photography. In an interview with More Intelligent Life, Stuart states, …

The Camera is a beautiful 7-minute-long short film by amateur filmmaker Peter Lewis about a solitary girl who finds a creepy mysterious Polaroid camera in an abandoned beach house. It's the first film Lewis has completed, and was shot using a Canon Rebel 550D T2i (and the Canon 50mm f/1.4 and Tamron 28-200mm) on a budget of $50 during a vacation in Nags Head, North Carolina. Lewis singlehandedly managed all the stages of production, including composing the original score, creating the foley …

Over the past week there have been several complaints lodged against Nikon claiming that the LCD screen on the D4 and D800 has a green cast when compared to the older models. Nikon, however, has responded by claiming that the D3s and D700 models were in fact the less accurate pair. According to Nikon Rumors, Nikon tech support is blaming the LCD on the D3s and D700, asserting that its higher display color temperatures leads to blue tinted images.

If you've ever found yourself wishing you could take an iPhone picture of the night sky -- or a cool slide under the microscope for that matter -- than your wish could soon become a reality. The startup Arcturus Labs are in the process of funding a new product called Magnifi, an iPhone case/adapter that allows you to attach your phone to a microscope, telescope, binoculars, or any other optical instrument.

The first sample images of the Nikon D3200 have just come out of Nikon France; and although they look great for the most part, the one low-light image confirms suspicions that Nikon may have gone too far putting 24.2-megapixels in the camera. More noticeable on the full-resolution photographs, you can tell that once the ISO is cranked up to about 1600, noise begins to play a significant role.

Flickr user boingr came up with a great idea for those of us who don't want to spend money on a flash diffuser from a camera shop -- head over to Home Depot instead. All he did was buy an Amerimax Home #85208 downspout funnel, shimmy it onto his Canon Speedlite 580EX II, and presto: Open-Top Flash Diffuser.

On July 24th, 2010 tens of thousands of people captured a video snipped of their life that day and uploaded it to YouTube where director Kevin Macdonald and executive producer Ridley Scott edited the lot of them together into a 95min feature film -- which you can now watch for free. On May 15th, it's the photographer's turn.

Nokia recently put together this ad for the new 808 PureView -- their 41-megapixel monster of a camera phone -- that they claim was shot using only the smartphone itself. Cramming too many pixels on too small a sensor rarely leads to good results, but sample shots and video in the ad don't look bad at all. Of course there's probably a "real-life results will vary" tag in fine print somewhere that we're missing; but where the pixel race is concerned Nokia have definitely proved that they are …

Here's an hour-long live video interview that Photoshelter recently did with Michele Hadlow, senior photo editor over at Forbes Magazine.

How does a Pulitzer Prize worthy photograph come into existence? For most of us the photos that are considered the best of the best each year seem somewhat untouchable; as if one has to be in the right place at the right time, and when they look down find that they also happen to have their camera on them. The truth,  however, is rarely so unanticipated. In the case of Craig F. Walker's 2012 Pulitzer Prize winning series, it all began with a hike.

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook took everybody by surprise when they acquired Instagram; the massively popular -- though not yet profitable -- photo-sharing application. A few days ago we learned that they may have only just beat Twitter to the punch. Now rumors are flying about that Mark Zuckerberg not only acted on his own -- without the Facebook board's knowledge -- but managed to lower Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom's asking price from $2 billion to the reported $1 billion that Facebook …

The Michael Jacksons, by photographer and social scientist Lorena Turner, is a study of people who make a living or perform as the late great Michael Jackson. In her own words:
It is an index of the refraction of Michael Jackson's public persona within the culture by exploring issues of fantasy, reality and representation as influenced by and filtered through cultural experience.

Innovation is why we love companies like Google. Several times a week, it seems, the company comes out with another program or product idea that makes us all smile (and secretly wonder how long we have until they've achieved world domination). Their best ideas, however, involve their user base -- and their latest expansion idea for Google Earth does just that.

Prison is no cake walk -- and rightfully so. Inmates of maximum security prisons have often done terrible things, things that in some states are still punishable by death. But is there a fate worse than death?

Some might say that the city of Rochester, New York is struggling; others might say that it's evolving. One thing's for sure though: Rochester -- nicknamed The World's Image Centre -- is changing. Because of this, and because of the city's rich photographical history (think Kodak), ten of Magnum Photos' photographers have chosen Rochester as one of three locations currently being documented across the United States.

This is probably the strangest and most awkward thing you'll see today. It's a short 5-minute video titled "The World's Most Downloaded Man" that chronicles photographer Fernado Martins' journey to meet Jesper Bruun, the world's best-selling stock photography model.

"Fake People Suck" -- now that's a tagline. In 2009 David Katzenstein and Sherrie Nickol began a fine arts project that involved asking people off the street to come to their studio and photographing them against a white background. The idea was to capture the striking diversity that's commonplace in New York. But after photographing about 50 people -- and due also to a steady drop in commissions from commercial and corporate projects -- they realized the potential the project had as a …

Stephen Shankland over at CNET has written an interesting behind-the-scenes look at how DxO Labs -- one of the world's premier camera testing services -- evaluates equipment. DxO Labs is based near Paris, France and was the result of a 2003 spinoff from a company called Vision IQ, which specialized in swimming pool safety. Since then, the group has published over 185 in-depth camera reviews on its website DxOMark.

When working with rim lights, or shooting into a significant backlight, glare becomes a serious issue. The typical solution to this problem is setting up flags on either side of your subject, but who needs flags when you have a spare piece of Coroplast sitting around your studio?

2008 marked the first time in history that more of Earth's population lived in cities rather than in the countryside, and by 2050 nearly 70% of the world's population will reside in large cities. A new series of satellite photographs captured decades apart by NASA's Landsat department and the U.S. Geological Survey offers a striking look at how human cities have spread across the face of the Earth in just a few short years. The image above shows Las Vegas in 1984 and in 2011.

Photo sharing apps for smartphones are a dime-a-dozen. Ever since Instagram achieved worldwide success -- and was rewarded with a $1 billion dollar buyout by Facebook -- many developers have tried to follow in their footsteps. That being said, finding a photo sharing app that stands out is rare, which is why the OpenPhoto app release this week struck a chord with us.

Comedian and musician Mike Falzone often records monologues on various subjects while going for walks. Here's what he has to say about professional Instagram photography. Little does he know that one of his "farfetched" examples is very much a reality.

Camera rating business DxOMark has published its in-depth sensor review for the Canon 5D Mark III. For Canon fans, there's both good and bad news: while the camera boasts the best sensor seen in a Canon DSLR so far -- besting the sensor found in the 1Ds Mark III -- its score of 81 is far below the Nikon D800's 95. DxOMark does, however, point out that the two cameras focus on different strengths: …

About a week ago rumors of an iPhone app that could shoot in RAW format raged across the Internet. The app in question, the 645 PRO by developer Jag.gr, was to be the first camera app for the iPhone to achieve this feat. And although by all accounts the app is a very impressive and useful app, it turns out that shooting in true RAW isn't among its features.

If you're ever photographing a baby that's sitting on anything above ground level, make sure you have a spotter near the baby at all times. This video shows why.

A member of Magnum photos since the 1960's, photographer Constantine Manos and his Leica rangefinder have been creating beautiful photography for many years. Perhaps best known for his work in Boston and Greece, much of Manos work revolves around his South Carolina upbringing and Greek heritage.

I’ve got a little story for you today, and a valuable lesson for photographers everywhere. On the Monday before last, a post that I wrote the week before started to go viral. I was receiving more traffic than I had ever experienced before, and from sites that I had never heard of. Fantastic. Only, along with the good news, we have some bad news.

Living Dolls is a series by Vancouver-based photographer and retoucher Hayden Wood that shows two models photographed and manipulated to look like plastic Barbie and Ken dolls.