2012

Adobe is getting serious about making Photoshop a serious tool for editing video. The sample video above was made entirely using an upcoming version of the program. Regarding why this is being added into Photoshop rather than left to Premiere Pro, product manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes states, …

Here's a super cool trick: instead of buying a special macro lens for your smart phone, simply use a drop of water! Carefully place a drop of water over your lens, carefully invert the phone, and voila -- instant macro shots with the cheapest lens you'll ever own. Alex Wild over at Scientific American has more details on the technique and some great sample shots taken with it.

I have to say I have one of the better jobs on the planet, at least for a photography gear-head. The part I like best — well, really there’s a lot of parts I like best — but one fun part is that my job description includes: Take things apart. See how they work. Learn how to fix them.

Haristobald recently captured a series of Superman photographs without the use of Photoshop or body painting.

Want to get closer to animals when doing wildlife photography? If there's access, your car can do the trick by serving as a photography blind. Scott Bourne of Photofocus writes, …

Last week we shared an interesting video that shows how Civil War-era tintype photographs were created.

If you're an Android user patiently waiting for Instagram to arrive on your phone, your wait may soon be over. Instagram founder Kevin Systrom showed off the company's upcoming Android version at the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas this past weekend. The app is currently in private beta, and is set to be released soon. TechCrunch's Kim-Mai Cutler writes, …

Have you ever wondered why newer Canon DSLR battery covers have a small rectangular hole punched into them? It's more than just for style: …

Here's a short one minute time-lapse video that took nine months to create. It creatively documents a pregnancy and announces a new baby girl. We shared a very similar one last year.

Kodak's film business just can't seem to catch a break. One week the company announced the death of its entire slide film lineup, Kodak announced today that it is increasing the price of all the surviving films by 15%, stating, …

Want to protect your gear from dings and scratches while customizing its look? Try using some carbon fiber vinyl film -- the kind designed for cars. When you're done with the application, you can also use some acrylic spray to make the "carbon fiber" look nice and shiny.

Instagram is reportedly in the process of securing new round of funding that values the 16-month-old company at a staggering $500 million -- 20 times what the company was valued at a year ago. Although the $40 million round has drawn a lot of interest from investors, many of the top VC firms have decided to stay away due to the high valuation and the fact that Instagram still needs to prove that it can turn popularity into profit. The 9-man company currently has over 15 million users and is …

PBS art series Off Book created this short video that presents a brief history of the animated GIF.

We've all seen photographers make mad dashes into group portraits, hoping to get into position before the camera's self timer automatically snaps a photograph. Apple wants to make those a thing of the past. A new patent filed by the company (#20120057039) describes a new and smarter self-timer system that uses facial recognition in addition to the standard timer. Using a picture of the photographer's face, the camera will wait until the shooter is in the scene before starting the countdown, …

Here's a quote by photographer Richard Benson on Lee Friedlander’s approach to photography (from his afterword in In the Picture: Self-Portraits, 1958-2011): …

If you want an extra personal touch at birthday parties, you can turn portraits of the birthday boy or girl into picture perfect party hats! Simply print out a portrait using a special template, turn it into a cone, add some fringe, and you're done. Eden over at Sugar and Charm has the low down.

Photo-sharing site Pinterest, the new darling of social media, has a copyright infringement cloud hanging over its head. The fact that anyone can upload and share copyrighted photographs through the site has prompted many sites -- most notably Flickr -- to ban "pinning" for copyrighted works. Up to this point, Pinterest has tried to avoid legal trouble by having a Terms of Service that places all the blame for copyright infringement on its users, but a new solution may be on the horizon: …

The Giottos Rocket is a popular tool used by photographers to remove dust from cameras and glass, but if you're in love with yours, you might want to think twice about flying with it. Reddit user gynoceros found out the hard way that some TSA airport screeners aren't too enthusiastic about the Rocket's shape. He writes, …

Photoshop guru Scott Kelby has released a free iPad app that teaches the lighting techniques he used for various photographs in his portfolio.

Researchers have created the first comprehensive image of the entire 3x5-mile debris field around the sinking of the Titanic: …

Ever wonder how photographs were made back in the days of the Civil War? This video by the George Eastman House provides an interesting step-by-step look at how tintype photographs are created. It'll make you feel spoiled as a modern day photographer.

The first issue of Portland-based designer Ian Coyle's new online photography magazine, Edits Quarterly, is out. It features short narratives in film and photography, and the first issue is titled "Voyager". The web design is beautifully minimalistic and is an amazing way to consume images and the stories behind them.

Photographer Bjoern Ewers directed this creative advertising campaign for the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra that shows beautiful views of the insides of various instruments. Shot using a macro lens, each one looks more like a giant music hall than a musical instrument.

Rusidah Badawi lost her forearms in a tragic accident 32 years ago at the age of 12. After the amputation, the 44-year-old Indonesian woman was introduced to photography through a vocational rehabilitation centre for the handicapped. She immediately fell in love with it, and began a career working as a wedding and party photographer. Working primarily with film photography up until 2010, she switched over to digital when Canon sponsored her endeavors by gifting her with a digital Canon 550D …

Shaofeng Xu’s photo of a protestor climbing a high-voltage electricity tower won Honorable Mention in the Contemporary Issues category of the World Press Photo 2012 contest.

New York-based animator Adam Pesapane (who goes by the working name PES) creates some of the smoothest and most creative stop-motion videos we've seen. In the short video above, titled "Fresh Guacamole", he shows how you can create a guacamole dip out of random objects such as baseballs, golf balls, and dice.

Here's an interesting 20-minute-long documentary film titled Chimping in which Dan Perez de la Garza speaks to various photojournalists about their work and the state of their profession. Subjects include two Pulitzer Prize winners and an Emmy Award winner.

This past Sunday, a group of amateur astronomers in San Antonio, Texas successfully "flashed" the International Space Station with a blue laser and spotlight as it whizzed by overhead. While this might sound like an easy thing to do, it's much more complicated than you think. Astronaut Don Pettit shot the photo of the experiment seen above, and writes, …

Apple officially announced the new iPad today (called "the new iPad" rather than the "iPad 3"). It's a tablet computer, but its new features make the device much more camera-like than the iPad 2. There's a new 5-megapixel iSight camera on the back that features a backside illuminated sensor and a five-element f/2.4 lens. It's also able to record HD video in full 1080p. On the frontside is a 9.7-inch 2048x1536 retina display that packs 4 times more pixels than the iPad 2 and 1 million more …

KEH has published a helpful primer on memory cards that describes the different types, common error codes you might come across when using them, and how to take care of them: …

On December 31st, 2011, Oaida Raul decided pay a tribute to the recently-retired Space Shuttle program by creating a GoPro video of a Lego Space Shuttle model traveling up to the edges of Earth's atmosphere on a weather balloon. You can read an in-depth description of the mission and the components used -- the entire project was launched and completed in a span of about a week -- over on Raul's blog.

Nokia caused quite a ripple in the mobile phone market last week by announcing its new 41-megapixel 808 PureView smartphone. However, if you live in North America and have been drooling over the phone, here's some bad news: Nokia isn't planning to sell the phone on our continent. On the 808's official product page, Nokia has included a footnote that says "Excluding North America" for the phone's global availability. The reason may be that US carriers aren't willing to subsidize the $600 phone …

Not too long ago I finally got around to picking up a decent manual flash for exploring lighting and speedlight techniques. I picked up a Yongnuo YN-560 Speedlight Flash for Canon and Nikon, and my friend Sean was kind enough to send me his old radio triggers to play with. I was mostly all set to start exploring the world of off-camera lighting...

Photographer Steven Pippin creates unique photographs that capture the precise moment in which the camera used to capture the photo is destroyed by a bullet from a handgun. The images show the final moment of the camera's existence (with the help of a mirror) and are themselves damaged by the bullet passing through the film.

When commercial sports photographer Nick Laham arrived at photo day during the New York Yankees' spring training last Monday, he had to compete with a legion of photographers for space and time. He ended up occupying one of the bathrooms in the facility, turning it into a makeshift studio.

Photographer Allen Mowery has a step-by-step tutorial on how to build a useful DIY flash mounting accessory using a ratcheting hand clamp and standard 1/4-inch threaded screw. It's a cheap DIY version of the Super Clamp or Nasty Clamp, and can help you place your flash in places that are inaccessible to light stands or traditional equipment.

Beta testers still have until the end of the month to play around with the program, but Adobe has now officially launched Lightroom 4 to the general public. The program features an improved develop module, a new map module, book creation, new video features, and space saving lossy compression for DNG files. It's also significantly cheaper than prior versions: the full program costs just $149, while the upgrade costs $79.

Director Ninian Doff made this creative music video for singer Graham Coxon's song "What'll It Take" by stitching together dance moves sent in by 85 of Coxon's fans from 22 countries around the world, turning them into one composite dancer.

One year ago we featured a novel new device called Instaprint, a location-based photo booth that lets people create instant prints of Instagram photos by simply tagging them with a specific tag. It constantly scans Instagram for its tag, and when a photo is found the image is immediately printed out as a Zink print. Now Breakfast, the company behind the prototype, is trying to turn it into an actual product. They're trying to raise half a million bucks through Kickstarter and a $400 …

Here's a nifty Photoshop tip by photographer Alex Wise on how you can use a Threshold layer to approximate black and white points in a photograph, and then use those points in the Curves tool to remove color casts from photos.

Want to see how Las Vegas has grown from 1972 through 2010? NASA created this unique time-lapse video using photographs captured by Landsat satellites. From this perspective, it almost looks like humans are a mold spreading across the face of a fruit.

Nikon caused a stir this past weekend after it was revealed that a promo video shown during the D800's launch in Bangkok actually contained footage that was both used without permission and that wasn't even captured with a Nikon D800. After a recording of the promo was uploaded to YouTube in mid-February, people began coming forward with reports that Nikon had used their videos without permission.

Photographers used to spend lifetimes building up their portfolios and networks before their work became widely known to a global audience, but with the advent of the Internet, the fact that anything can "go viral" is completely changing the equation for success.

Japanese website mono-logue released this short 30-second video comparing footage from the Canon 5D Mark II and the new 5D Mark III captured at ISO 12,800. The difference in noise levels is remarkable (be sure to watch it full screen and in HD).

For a recent advertising campaign to bring attention to its hydrogen-powered cars, Mercedes-Benz decided to make a car "invisible" by creating a novel cloaking device using LEDs and a Canon 5D Mark II. One side of the car was covered with several mats of LEDs that display what the DSLR sees on the other side.

Lytro's groundbreaking light field camera is finally landing in the hands of customers, and to give people a better idea of how the camera works, the New York Times has published an interesting diagram that shows what makes the camera tick. Here's what DPreview has to say about the camera: …

Photography enthusiast Kris Robinson used to handhold a flash above his subjects for macro photographs, but then he got tired of doing that and ran out of hands. He then came up with the brilliant idea of making a do-it-yourself contraption that attaches to his flash when it's mounted to the hotshoe. The light travels down a tube lined with reflective aluminum tape, and is bounced downward onto the subject through a diffused lightbox. For a couple sample shots, see here and here.

UK-based wildlife photographers Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas got the Internet's attention a couple years ago with the BeetleCam, a special remote controlled DSLR that allowed them to capture close-up photos of animals in the wild that photographers would have difficultly strolling up to. After the success of that experiment, they decided to return to Africa last summer with upgraded (and armored) versions of the BeetleCam in order to photograph lions in Kenya.

The last time C. Corey Fisk walked was in 1992. She has multiple sclerosis, an incurable disease that affects the central nervous system and gradually took her ability to walk and leave her bed.

But early February, she went on a photo walk with photographer John Butterill in the woods behind his house in Ontario, Canada -- all from her own home in northern California.

Here's a documentary film about acclaimed American photographer Richard Avedon that originally aired in 1995. If you have 90 minutes to spare, watching this movie is a great way to peek into the mind of a master and become inspired to improve your own photography.