2013

Camera-toting birders are flocking to a remote area of New Mexico to capitalize on what's being described as "the best photobomb in history." At least for people who are really into birds.

Although drone photography might lead you onto some sticky legal ground in some states, it is nonetheless often quite beautiful. It makes sense that those who have spent good money on drones are eager to put that money to use, and now they have an Instagram-like social network on which to share their results.

Film has seen better days. With legends like Kodak's Kodachrome gone, and staples like Fujifilm's Neopan 400 very recently following suit, most news about film is met with dismay and long drawn out "No's" (if you doubt it, check out the comment section on the Neopan 400 and Provia 400X discontinuation announcement linked above).

Do you always laugh and squirm when you look back at official school pictures from "awkward years"? You're not alone -- take a peek at the Awkward Years Project and you'll see what we mean. The project was started by a Utah-based graphic designer and photography enthusiast named Merilee, who's collecting then-and-now portraits to show people who have blossomed since their awkward teen days.

The mandate for Documerica was intriguingly broad -- "photographically document subjects of environmental concern" -- and photographers responded with striking images covering everything from pot-smoking form to toxic smog.

Every day it feels like there are another hundred or so timelapses posted online. While some of this is just the illusion of more exposure and access caused by the Internet, some of it is definitely real. The abundance of rapidly evolving technology and constantly dropping DSLR prices have created the perfect atmosphere for even the least experienced photographers to churn out a decent timelapse. And while some people will complain about this fact, it's really just the natural order of things.

Photographer Brad Hammonds is fascinated by a concept that he calls "emotional delay." It's the idea that no moment is truly experienced until it has already passed. In the time the moment is happening, the brain is processing it. By the time the experience comes, the moment is actually gone.

His most recent series Falling Through Space explores this concept in an interesting way, by trying to get the viewer to experience the terrifying moment in the photo while the subject himself (or herself) is still processing.

In the past, we've shared a few creative ways to take your fireworks shots to the next level. Be it shooting hand-held long exposures for an abstract result or refocusing during a long-exposure, the results can be quite stunning.

The video above combines a couple of techniques we've shared before, making wonderful use of bokeh and the refocusing technique to create a mesmerizing minute of footage.

So you want to create stirring nature documentaries. You could go the National Geographic way and risk trench-foot, snakebite and more in pursuit of the scenic wild. Or you could take the Boris Godfroid route: Schlep a few hundred pounds of bricks into a spare room, cover it with moss and other forgiving plant life, and let nature run wild in miniature.

Are you the type of person who enjoys using things built using your own two hands? 20-year-old Croatian tinkerer CroBuilder is like that too. He recently spent 10 hours in his workshop building a camera tripod from scratch.

They look as if they're a complete fabrication of one's imagination, but they aren't. German photographer Stefan Diller has managed to create worlds using microscopic images of plant and insect life, giving us a view of what our eyes can't quite see. The technology, called nanoflight, is described as "a revolutionary new way to visualize structures of the microworld," and has "the ability to move a virtual camera in eight degrees of freedom around the specimen."

Finnish lawmakers could soon rewrite the nation's copyright laws, as a citizen-originated initiative aimed at easing piracy penalties and protecting consumer rights makes it way to Parliament.

Some unlucky fellow was minding his own business in Disney World recently when he happened to accidentally walk in front of a couple as the man was proposing to his girlfriend. The moment wasn't just captured on camera (shown above) -- it has spawned a quirky new Internet photo meme.

Photographer Dave Hill has launched the world's first Instagram TV show, a science fiction series called Desert Friends. Created as "a side project with some friends," the show comes in short 15 second episodes and is about three friends who "are warped to a distant galaxy and need to get home."

Yesterday we shared an amazing time-lapse music video spanning 24-hours on a Parisian rooftop.  While the video did, in fact, make my jaw "drop" (there's a pun coming), it got me thinking about one of the most amazing music videos I've ever seen: "Drop" by The Pharcyde.

The photography world is abuzz with news that Canon may be planning to launch a high-end DSLR with a beastly 75-megapixel sensor. If you're drooling over the idea of shooting photos that can span billboards, you might want to hold your horses: the sensor may not be what you think it is.

Recently, I was looking through a photo gallery of a potential new hire and was a bit dismayed by her use of a particular photo enhancement editing choice. All of her photos were very overly processed with multiple styles, much like the photo below.  She did have a wonderful eye, and her composition and posing were really lovely. But her processing choices really distracted from the beauty of her work. The people in her photos didn’t look real.

There's no doubt about that fact that street photography is wildly interesting. There's just so much to it that makes it appealing. Real people, real moments -- good and bad. Best of all, there's something new to capture every day. And while many of us don't have the courage to get out there and point our camera at a stranger, it's interesting to see it happen, especially in a metropolis.

Filmmaker Cheryl Dunn (who is a street photographer herself) is working on a documentary called Everybody Street, which features the master street photographers in America's most populated city -- New York City. The trailer above gives a taste of what it's about (note: it's slightly NSFW).

Creative, imagination-filled wedding photographs are starting to become quite trendy -- at least online. Earlier this year, we shared viral photos of bridal parties running for their lives from a T-Rex and from Star Wars Imperial Walkers.

Chicago-based wedding photographer Steven Kowalski also joined in on the fun, creating the epic Star Wars-themed photograph above at a wedding earlier this month.

You're looking for an image to illustrate your ad promoting child-care services and find a portrait of an adorable tot, obviously free for the taking because it's on the Internet. What could wrong?

More than you could dream up in your worst nightmares, as promoters of the Montreux Jazz Festival have learned after misappropriating an image of a child who turned out to be the victim in one France's most notorious murder cases of recent times.

Were you smiling a lot Friday afternoon? Hope so, because that's when you and your 7 billion planetary neighbors got a rare portrait session from the Cassini spacecraft. Orbiting above Saturn almost a billion miles away, the craft turned its camera towards to Earth to capture some spectacular images of our planet foregrounded by Saturn's rings.

It was the first time in nine years that Cassini has been in orbit and taking scheduled photos of our planet, prompting NASA and friends to promote a "The Day That the Earth Smiled" event via social media.

Every once in a while someone gets really, really creative and it makes our jaws drop. Such is the case with UK pop artist Dan Black's timelapse music video for his song called "Hearts."

In short, the video (created by the folks at Chic & Artistic) features Black and company on a Parisian rooftop -- for a full 24 hours. That's right, one full day of shooting (from 11AM to 11AM!).

Spanish visual artist Sergio Albiac is offering the world a chance to meld with the universe in an innovative project that combines portraiture with images from the Hubble space telescope.

Albiac calls his "Stardust" project "an experiment in generative portraiture."

The western world was sent into a brief paranoid frenzy when whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked government information about the surveillance of the National Security Agency (NSA). I say brief, because it seems to have been forgotten by a large number of people; it seemed like it was just more news. The revelations, and more that followed, showed how the NSA record phone calls and data and more controversially; that they use information from emails and social networking sites.

Maybe you've read an article or two here regarding Socialmatic. They're the team who brought us the Instagram-inspired instant camera that made uploading images from a tiny device easy, and even allowing users to print their pictures from the device on-the-fly (more on that here).

If you're afraid of swimming in the ocean due to a fear of the unknown below you, you might want to skip over the post. A group of divers off the coast of California got a scare recently when they had an extremely close call with large humpback whales. They almost found themselves in the mouths of the feeding whales, and multiple cameras were there to capture what happened (note: the video above contains some strong language).

We're in the midst of Summer, and if you're one of the many folks who live by coastline, you have access to one of mother nature's most beautiful elements: the ocean. And while the lot of us prefer to purely listen to the waves crash from the comfort of the golden sands, photographer Sarah Lee has been taking her gear into the water and capturing surfers do their thing off the big island of Hawaii.

Having snapped scores of mesmerizing imagery of surfers beneath the waves -- as if they themselves were sea life -- Sarah Lee's art piqued our interest. How does she do it? Surely there's more to bringing your camera into the water and firing away, right?

The megapixel war appears to be alive and well. The rumor mill has been churning the past weekend after a report emerged that Canon is in the process of field testing a DSLR camera that packs a whopping 75+ megapixels.

"NYC Prism" is a project by New York City-based photographer Allen Skyy Enriquez (AKA The Zartorialist) that offers an unusual view of The Big Apple. The 6 images in the series might look like composite images created using Photoshop, but they're actually single exposures. The splicing effect seen in them was created by holding a prism in front of the lens to merge two views of each location into one shot.

“Monochrome is the new color” The world was introduced to color photography when Kodak introduced the revolutionary Kodachrome film in 1935. But fast forward to 2012, Leica decided that “monochrome is the new color”, and wants to turn back the clock with a digital rangefinder that shoots only black-and-white for $7,995. At this point, I can hear you screaming, “That’s the silliest way of spending eight grand!”

Singer Kanye West is being investigated by Los Angeles police for allegedly assaulting a photographer. Again.

The latest incident happened Friday at Los Angeles International Airport, when videographer Daniel Ramos approached the star, already well-established as no fan of celebrity journalism.

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but in the case of Suren Manvelyan's macro photography, it's just in the eye. After his extreme close-up photos of both human and animal eyes went viral one right after the other, Manvelyan decided to continue seeking out more beauty in the eyes of animals by releasing a part two to the amazing series we shared with you back in 2011.

In the past, we've had occasion to share some great color film footage that showed London and the UK as a whole all the way back in the 1920s. We've even shown you some stateside footage shot by a French tourist in the 1930s.

The latest bit of historical footage we've come across isn't in color (unfortunately), but it does show a New York City staple right after it was first built: The New York City Subway System.

Photographers are intimately familiar with the myriad filters available to them through Photoshop. Nothing like the Instagram-style "filters" we've come to hear about more and more often, these have names like Grain, Diffuse, Ocean Ripple and Pinch.

And although Adobe has had to deal with some negative reactions to its business model as of late, Barcelona based audiovisual studio Device decided to pay tribute to the company's filtering abilities by putting together this short animated tribute to all of Photoshop CS5's filters.

The title sort of gives it away, but did you know that there is an online archive that contains high-resolution film scans from every Apollo mission? The gallery contains all of the incredible photos taken during each of the missions -- from Apollo 1 all the way through Apollo 17 -- with some 1,000+ photos from Apollo 11 alone.

About a week ago, the stock photography website Dreamstime got in touch with us to offer us some exclusive information. Having recently added a "search-by-camera" feature, they had compiled a huge amount of statistical data on the most popular cameras being used by their 150,000+ contributing photographers.

Well, keeping in mind that Francis Bacon once said "knowledge is power," we told them to go ahead and send the stats over. What we received was a veritable smörgåsbord of interesting (and perhaps useful) information.

There's nothing boring about the miracle of life. Growing somebody inside you in nine months is undeniably miraculous, but watching it happen in real time would make for a very long video. That's why the photographically inclined often choose to document the life creation process using some form of time-lapse photography.

Silence is Grey, that's the message behind architect and advertising creative Rodríguez Moranta's photo series of the same name. Consisting of the same photo, taken from the same place almost every day for two years at sunrise, the series is a study in solitude.

Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros are due on stage in 15 minutes and I walk up to the doorstaff ticket in hand. They tear the ticket and ask to look in the camera bag for deodorants and liquids. I'm not too sure why. This is the Trinity Centre in Bristol with a capacity of 650 and normally holds community events.

The doorman tuts and says “Interchangeable lens.” I'm a bit confused. “Tour manager has said no interchangeable lens cameras, sorry.” I returned to my car, out the equipment in the boot and went back to the gig.

Digital image editing technology -- culturally controversial uses aside -- has enabled us to do some pretty amazing things. In the past, we shared a video that showed how the Internet came together to restore a WWII veteran's Navy photo to its former glory.

This time, we get to see the process in action, as Redditor thehatersalad shows us the impressive restoration and colorization work he did on an old photo of user f2ISO100's grandmother -- time-lapse style.

Unfortunately, the news that a particular type of film is being discontinued is anything but surprising these days. And even though we haven't had reason to report any such news for a little while, we can once again cue "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen, this time in honor of Fujifilm's Neopan 400 B&W film and Provia 400X slide film.

There has been a good deal written about the similarities of the camera to the eye as well as the computer to human memory. What I would like to do is clarify the uniqueness of the human brain from camera technology and at the same time show the similarities between brain function, photography and cognition.

It's the weekend, which means we get a chance to share something inspirational with you that you might not otherwise have the time to sit down and enjoy in the middle of the week. This week's contender is an hour-long documentary, put together by the BBC One show Imagine..., about legendary photographer and filmmaker William Klein.

Photography has made inroads into all sorts of industries. For instance, the Snap Fashion app we shared a couple of weeks ago lets you take photos of clothes and then shows you where to buy them. But the most recent interesting application we've run across comes to us via a company named Shloosl, who will copy your house key for you using nothing more than a couple of smartphone photos.

Taking high-quality, magazine-worthy skateboarding photos doesn't have to involve you carting around tons of gear. Sure, it might be nice to have the lighting power, but as photographer Matt Price shows you in the How To video above, you can still get great results with only what'll fit in an average camera bag.

When it comes to aerial photography, things are getting more and more complicated. Setting up a drone business in the US is getting to be a major headache in some states, and other options (e.g. paragliding) might just get you arrested if you fly over the wrong thing or take off from the wrong place.

AirCam is a solution, albeit an expensive one, that frees serious aerial photographers to do their thing -- and do it in style.

Scott Schuman (aka. The Sartorialist) hit it big in fashion street photography. But not all fashion photographers work in a studio or on the street. Many have made many-year-long careers photographing from what is referred to as "the pit" at fashion shows.

The video above lets these photographers tell their story, as the Sartorialist asks them questions about the nuances of fashion photography from the pit, and the unwritten rules that newbies should take note of.

Crayola Crayons -- the tools with which many a toddler has decorated many a refrigerator door -- all have interesting real-world names. Some strange colors like 'Flesh' have been understandably renamed. But many equally interesting colors have remained staples in the coloring world, and it's these colors that photographer Daniel Seung Lee and art director Dawn Kim set out to capture in their collaborative series Crayola Theory.

At the end of last month, a couple of job listings on Hasselblad's website revealed that the company was working on two new compacts and a DSLR. Part of their partnership with Sony, the hope was that these upcoming models would do better than the Hasselblad Lunar, which fell flat once people discovered it was basically a rebranded Sony NEX-7 with a much larger price tag.

Well, images of the first of those three cameras have leaked, but it doesn't look like Hasselblad is breaking the mold. Dubbed the Hasselblad Stellar (in keeping with the space theme), the first of the two rumored compacts looks to be a Sony RX100 made with more exotic camera housing materials.

Let me say this right at the outset. This is not another high and mighty rant against cell phone cameras, Instagram, "art" filters, Lightroom presets, etc. You’re not about to read another gripe about everything that photography has become in the twenty-first century, even though I was afraid that’s what it would sound like when I started writing this.