This past Sunday, Jupiter and Venus put on a show by lining up with our moon (a conjunction). Rick Ellis of Toronto, Canada managed to create the awesome photo of the event seen above by capturing 31 separate frames. Each photo was taken 5 minute apart and had an exposure time of 5 seconds.
After being arrested on October 1, 2007 for using his cell phone to film officers making an arrest, Boston lawyer Simon Glik sued the city for violating his civil rights. Late last year the court denied a motion to have the case dismissed, and just yesterday it was announced that the City of Boston had come to a settlement with Glik, agreeing to pay him $170,000 for damages and legal fees. The decision last year and the settlement yesterday both reaffirm that the First Amendment protects the …
Architectural photographer Brett Beyer was recently commissioned by Cornell University to make a photograph of the interior of its recently completed Milstein Hall. The request wasn't for a standard interior photo, but for an aerial shot of the 25,000-square-foot studio space that looked as if you were looking down at it with the roof removed (think Google Earth but for the interior of a building). Beyer accomplished this by pointing his Canon 5D Mark II and 17-40mm lens down from the ceiling …
JumpFromPaper is a new line of unique handbags that uses thick outlines and bright colors to look like they popped right out of a cartoon. They look like they're completely flat and 2D, but they actually have room for things like cameras, laptops, and your everyday accessories. The bag seen here is called "Cheese!" and costs $99.
Silent World is a project by Paris-based artists Lucie & Simon that shows post-apocalyptic views of famous locations around the world. All but one or two of the people in each location are removed from the scene. Rather than use multiple exposures and compositing the images to remove moving objects (e.g. people and cars), they chose to use a neutral density filter -- one that's normally used by NASA for analyzing stars -- in order to achieve extremely long exposure times during the day.
Here's an oldie but goodie: back in September 2009, photographer Chris Weeks released this documentary about street photography titled Documenting the Human Condition. It's occasionally preachy and at times feels like a stealthy Leica advertisement, but should be interesting to you if you're at all interested in the practice of street photography.
A month after announcing massive losses of $2.9 billion, Sony is taking evasive action to rediscover itself and right its ship. The company announced a new corporate strategy today, devised by its new CEO Kazuo Hirai. Called "One Sony", the initiative identifies digital imaging as one of the three core pillars of the company going forward: …
TrekPak is a new padded camera bag insert that does away with the annoyances of velcro by introducing a new pin system for adjusting dividers: …
What would you do if you were given the task of creating a self-portrait within 20 minutes in front of an auditorium packed with people? That was the challenge given to photographers David Hobby, Martin Prihoda, and Gregory Heisler earlier this month at Gulf Photo Plus 2012 in Dubai. The video above shows what unfolded. It's like watching the photography equivalent of a freestyle rap battle.
According to the UN, one third of the world's food goes to waste -- mostly in industrialized nations -- while 925 million people around the world are threatened by starvation. To draw attention to this startling fact, Vienna-based photographer Klaus Pichler has been working for the past nine months on a project titled One Third, which consists of photos of rotting food. The food ranges from simple vegetables to cultural dishes from around the world, and everything is allowed to rot naturally by …
Sony is reportedly focusing on autofocus as one of the main battlegrounds it'll wage war on in the DSLR market. According to sonyalpharumors, the company is working on a new A99 SLT camera that's already being tested by photographers in the wild, and one of the main selling points of the camera is a whopping 102 autofocus points -- all of them cross type. For comparison, Canon's 1D X has 61 AF points with 41 of them cross type, and the Nikon D800 has 51 AF points with 15 of them cross type.
Here's a video in which renowned portrait photographer Nadav Kander discusses his approach to photography and portraiture. One thing that's interesting about Kander's method is that he tries not to connect with his subjects prior to photographing them: …
Photographer Tim Chao created this beautiful photo of a dark figure standing over the Chicago skyline by shooting a double exposure. It's titled "Metamorphosis", was shot with a Nikon FM on Kodak TX 400, and is part of a double exposure project titled "Worlds Within".
For her project titled Mirrors, Swedish photographer Ilar Gunilla Persson photographed various landscapes with giant mirrors placed in them. The mirrors give the scenes an surreal and artificial look, but all the shots were captured on film.
This photo is what you get when you point a massive 4.1 meter telescope (VISTA in Chile) at an unremarkable patch of night sky and capture six thousand separate exposures that provide an effective "shutter speed" of 55 hours. It's an image that contains more than 200,000 individual galaxies, each containing countless stars and planets (to put the image into perspective, the famous Hubble Ultra-Deep Field contains "only" around 10,000 galaxies). And get this: this view only shows a tiny 0.004% …
Rock Photographer is a new iPhone game that can be described as a mix between "Guitar Hero for photography" and "Pokemon Snap for adults".
Brand Spirit is a new photo project by NYC-based branding strategist Andrew Miller, who writes, …
Did you know that your morning cup of coffee can help you predict rain? It's a trick used by backpackers that can come in handy you're shooting outdoors without Internet: pour a cup of coffee and carefully watch the bubbles. Backpacker Magazine writes, …
Here's a stunning super slow motion video that shows Marina Kanno and Giacomo Bevilaqua of Staatsballett Berlin performing several jumps. The footage was captured at 1000 frames per second.
Want to see how your eyes stack up against other photographers when it comes to seeing colors? Try your hand at Color, a simple browser-based color matching game that tests you in how quickly you can match colors. It starts with simple matching, but soon moves onto more difficult challenges involving multiple colors. Be sure to leave a comment here reporting on the score you get!
Can't wait to use Instagram on your Android smartphone? The company has put up a new "coming soon" page for the impending Android app launch, and submitting your email address will provide you with a notification the moment the app becomes available to the public.
"Mimicry" is a photo project by Dutch photographers Ilse Leenders and Maurits Gisen that's based around the idea of uniformity. They write, …
For those of you balking at the astronomical prices paid for photos in the art world, get this: Leica is releasing a special new white version of the M9-P digital rangefinder in Japan, and has given it a price tag of ¥2,620,000 (~$31,770). The regular version costs $7,995, so buyers will be paying an additional $23,705 for rarity (only 50 will be made), a slick kit lens (it comes with a 50mm f/0.95), and the color white.
Hamilton College assistant art professor Robert Knight has a project titled "Sleepless" that consists of ghostly long exposure photographs of people tossing and turning throughout the night.
The digital photography course offered by Stanford (CS 178, which we featured last year) has an awesome page filled with flash applets that can help you gain a better understanding of certain technical aspects of photography. These include understanding how various factors affect depth of field, a visual look at how phase detection autofocus works, and a simple introduction to color theory.
Talk show host Ellen DeGeneres recently sent one of her staff members named Amy to a JCPenny to pose as a studio portrait photographer. As clients came in, Ellen watched the scene through a hidden camera and gave Amy exact instructions for what to say and do through a hidden earpiece. The resulting interactions between photographer and portrait subject(s) were hilarious.
Samsung may not be the only camera company dabbling with the idea of a digital Hasselblad 500CM-style camera: Sony is reportedly working on a new SLT camera called the "A1S" that features a "full frame" square sensor. sonyalpharumors writes that the prototype camera in development has the following specs: compatibility with existing Alpha and Minolta lenses, a 36x36mm square sensor with 37-megapixel resolution, a large body (larger than the Sony A900), a square electronic viewfinder, and a …
Framed is a beautiful and creative short film about a photographer taking pictures in the woods when he encounters something unexpected. French filmmaker Mael Sevestre filmed the entire thing using an iPhone 4S and built a custom rig for recording footage through the old twin lens reflex camera seen in the film.
Raleigh, North Carolina-based artist Scott Hazard creates abstract images by tearing shapes into multiple prints of the same photograph, and then stacking the images on top of each other. He uses the technique to create things such as smoke, clouds, and portals in walls. He calls the project "Photo Constructs".
Turns out the 36.3 megapixel sensor inside the new Nikon D800 isn't just a megapixel war marketing tactic: the sensor has been given the highest score ever awarded by camera equipment rating service DxOMark. Calling it a "complete success in every sensor-related respect", the lab states that the D800's sensor has become the new sensor of reference by which all other camera sensors will be measured. Furthermore, it boasts an "unmatched quality-to-price ratio" by being the cheapest (by far) among …
For his project titled "Horror Vacui" (latin for "fear of empty space"), photographer Federico Chiesa imagines what the villains and creepy characters of '80s films would be like if they were "still alive" today.
London-based photographer David Wilman recently did some experiments in which he used a Canon 5D Mark II as a digital back for his MPP 4x5 large format camera. He placed his lens-less 5D at the back of the camera at the film plane and then placed a black cloth over the two cameras to prevent any light from spilling onto the sensor. Light from the Schneider Kreuznach Xenar 4.5/150mm lens entered straight into the open mirror box of the DSLR without any physical link between the two cameras.
A wonderful hour-long interview with Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Olympus recently rebooted its OM line of film SLRs with the OM-D mirrorless camera, and many photographers are hoping that Canon will follow suit with one of its film bodies. Industrial designer and photographer David Riesenberg is among them, and recently decided turn what he wants to see into a concept drawing.
YouTube member Syejukoon mounted a GoPro camera to the back of his corgi named Riley using a customized backpack, and then went hiking with Riley in Los Angeles' Runyon Canyon Park.
Photographer Ilona Szwarc's project "http://www.ilonaszwarc.com/american-girls" is a series of portraits of girls in the United States posing with their avatars -- American Girl dolls that are customized to look exactly like their owners.
YouTube member eaglejm shot this video in downtown St. Louis to show the Canon 5D Mark III's high ISO video performance. Be sure to watch it full screen and in HD.
Adobe has launched the public beta version of Photoshop CS6, which features a completely redesigned user interface along with new saving features (auto and background), new content-aware features (move and patch), new blur filters, an updated Adobe Camera RAW, and improved video editing capability. There's a 62% increase in features, with 65 of them inspired by user feedback. ACR 7 also features the same new engine found in Lightroom 4 that improves the performance of sliders.
After photographer Bob Carey moved with his wife to the East Coast in 2003, he found that life suddenly flipped 180-degrees from what he was used to. He then did what every sane, middle-aged, male photographer would do: he began photographing himself in a pink tutu to express himself. However, the project wouldn't stay random for long.
Steven Alan and Ben Boutwell made this clever little short of themselves taking photos with a magical picture frame. It's titled "Frame of Mind".
Earlier this month the US Army published an article warning its soldiers that the ubiquitousness of geotagged photographs these days can present a serious security risk, citing a real-world example of something that happened back in 2007: …
German ad agency Jung von Matt created this brilliant series of photographs for a LEGO advertising campaign titled "Imagine". The images show famous characters from children's television shows in simplified LEGO form. Can you figure out each of the shows?
While a number of countries are taking steps to ban the unrealistic Photoshopping of models, Israel has gone a step further: the country has banned the use of underweight models themselves. Additionally, ads that are Photoshopped to make models look skinnier must also now carry a disclaimer. With the new law in place, all models appearing at photo shoots for ads geared toward the Israeli market must provide an up-to-date medical report proving that they aren't malnourished by the World Health …
I’ve always been fascinated by pancake lenses. It just amazes me that something that small can actually function. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we’ve been taking things apart to determine where and how (and sometimes if) the lenses can be adjusted optically. So, I decided to do two pancake lenses for mirrorless cameras side-by-side to see how they differed (the Sony 16mm f/2.8 E mount and the Olympus 17mm f/2.8 micro 4/3 mount). I wasn’t sure there would be much we could do with …
YouTube user Roy Prol created this fascinating animation that imagines what Earth would be like if our planet had Saturn-like rings. In addition to views from space, he show us beautiful renderings of what the rings would look like in landscape photos captured at famous landmarks (e.g. the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro) around the world.
Singapore-based photographer Aw Zinkie's photo series "Republic of Pulau Semakau" explores the idea of a trash bin being an essential part of an individual's personal space, and a way of examining their identity. Her portraits show the subjects in their personal environments with their faced replaced by held up trash bins. The series also highlights issues of waste management in Singapore, and the fact that every individual's trash causes them to become a "founder" of the offshore Semakau …
Here's a fascinating video by NASA that explains what auroras are and what they look like from space. It's filled with beautiful photographs and time-lapse sequences captured by astronauts on the International Space Station. Astronaut photographer Don Pettit, who maintains a blog about his experiences, writes that taking pictures of Earth is harder than it looks.
Last week, a collection of 36 prints by William Eggleston was sold for $5.9 million at auction. The top ten list of most expensive photographs ever sold doesn't contain a single work worth less than a cool million. Just a few months ago, Andreas Gursky's 'Rhine II' became the world's most expensive photograph, selling for $4.3 million.
The Lost & Found Project is a volunteer effort that recovered three quarters of a million lost photographs after last year's devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Each of the snapshots was washed, digitized, and numbered, and twenty thousand of them have since been reunited with their owners.
Back in 2010 we shared that MIT was developing a special camera that uses echoes of light to see around corners. Now, two years later, the researchers are finally showing off the camera in action. It works by firing 50 "femtosecond" (quadrillionth of a second) laser pulses 60 times at various spots at an angled wall. A special imaging sensor then collects the scattered light that's reflected back and uses complex algorithms to piece together the scene based on how long the photons take to …
