They say you shouldn't laugh at one's misfortune, but a prank pulled off by BlackBoxTV shows just how silly we look when we're terrified -- and it's pretty funny. That's because these mean geniuses pulled off a prank that absolutely terrifies some innocent folks just trying to get their picture snapped by a photo booth.
Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner was randomly selected and announced at the end of this post.
Time for a new giveaway, and this one is a doozie: for the first time in the history of this site, we're giving away a free DSLR. Not just any ol' DSLR, mind you, but a full frame camera. One lucky winner will be able to choose between a free Canon 6D or a free Nikon D600 -- a $2,000 value!
When my wife Sara and I finally decided to start planning our wedding (after a crazy Muppet Proposal proposal that seemed to tickle quite a few people's fancy) one thing that became very important to us was what to do with our wedding portraits/photography.
We are both photographers. Sara and I have experience in handmade processes (Sara is heavily into large format pinhole photography and albumen printing), and after the proposal thing went viral we had all kinds of photographers contacting us pushing their services in our face.
Styling your mirrorless camera after retro rangefinder cameras of old is popular among camera makers these days, and it appears that the next company to jump onto the bandwagon will be Panasonic. Late next month, the company will be announcing a new Micro Four Thirds camera called the GX7 -- the company's first rangefinder-styled camera.
Want to know how long it takes to visit every single subway station in Manhattan? Answer: It takes about nine hours.
That's what young couple James Doernberg and Kai Jordan found out last week when they visited each of the 118 stations in the system, snapping a self portrait at each stop.
One of the great workflow possibilities that was opened up by the advent of digital photography is the ability to easily create panoramic images. It's become trivially easy to generate panorama images, so much so that it's even become an integrated feature into smartphones.
What many photographers may not realize is that there are a number of other interesting results that can be created using panorama creation software, if you just keep in mind what the software is actually doing (and what you are actually telling it to do).
Photographer Rupert Jordan has been working on a quirky concept lately. He wanted to capture London's landmarks in an "unusual way," so he decided to use forced perspective to make it seem as if London is under water.
Last Thursday, the long-awaited and much-talked-about Lumia "EOS" 1020 finally made landfall. Equipped with a second gen 41-megapixel PureView sensor capturing photos from behind a 6-lens ZEISS system, the phone packs quite the photographic punch.
In order to take full advantage of this power, Nokia also announced a companion camera app dubbed Pro Camera that, we found out today, will also be making its way onto the Lumia 925, 928 and 920.
Camera equipment has long been attractive to the eyes of thieves. After all, it's generally portable, pricey, and a piece of cake to sell through channels such as Craigslist. In Northern California, robbers have begun targeting photojournalists at gunpoint in order to snatch their gear.
Developer Trevor Sehrer, a Google engineer by day, has been working on a website that aims to help combat the theft of photography gear. It's called Lenstag, and is an online equipment registry that makes it easier to report and track stolen cameras and lenses.
Gigapixel photography is all the rage these days, as photographers all over the world compete to hold the record for "world's largest photo," but one photographer in San Francisco is participating in a very different way.
Michael Shindler, a photographer at the tintype studio Photobooth, has built a custom giant tintype camera that shoots portraits that are the analog equivalent of a gigapixel photo.
About a month ago, almost every Canon website announced the release of the brand new EF-M 11-22mm f/4-5.6 IS STM wide angle for the company's mirrorless EOS M. We say almost because, at the time, no pricing or release date details had come down the pipe from Canon USA.
As it turns out, that's because the new lens for Canon mirrorless aficionados won't be arriving stateside at all.
In honor of Memorial Day, a couple of months ago, the folks behind the Sundance Film Festival decided to dig up a short honorable mention winner from 2007 and put it up on YouTube. Called Spitfire 944, the film show WWII Photo Reconnaissance pilot Lt Col. John S. Blyth telling his story and reacting to footage of a crash landing he made all the way back in 1944 that he had never seen before.
Back in May, we featured the volcano photos of photographer Miles Morgan, a guy who gets so hot to lava that he's had his shoes and tripod melt. If you didn't believe that shoe melting fact then, check out the crazy photo above: it shows photographer Kawika Singson with his shoes and tripod in flames due to the intense heat of lava.
Mark Kologi is known by many simply as "The Photo Man," and over the years he has bought, sorted and sold over three million forgotten personal photos. It's his passion, and the connection he has forged with his photos and the people who buy them shows in this short documentary by Ben Kitnick.
Update: The video has been taken down by the uploader.
The harmful effects of concert lasers when exposed to your camera's image sensor are well documented. In the past we've shared several videos (here and here) that showed three different Canon 5D Mark IIs rendered unusable after a concert laser passed over them for only a second.
And if it can happen to a 5D Mark II, you better believe it can happen to a sensor much more expensive than that. The video above shows what happens when a $20K RED EPIC's image sensor goes head to head with a similar laser. Gear lovers might want to look away ...
If you live in New York City, one of these days you might just stumble upon a bottle of Aunt JeMichael instead of Aunt Jemima while shopping for syrup in the supermarket. No, it's not a strange off-brand that somehow got mixed in with the big-name stuff, it's part of advertising and fine art photographer Mike Mellia's Self-Absorbed series.
When you're tasked with taking a famous person's photo, you often don't have much time with the actual person to go through a trial and error process and figure stuff out. Photographer Philippe Echaroux wanted to take things to the extreme and see if he could photograph a celebrity in less than a minute total.
Stefaan duPont and his girlfriend set out to travel the world for a year in March 2012, taking their cameras with them and leaving their careers as designers behind. That year served only to intensify duPont's love of photography, and when he returned, he mixed that love with another of his passions: taking stuff apart.
What resulted was a series of one-of-a-kind vintage camera lens bracelets created using old aperture and focus rings -- first made as gifts for family and friends, and now available to purchase.
We recently published an article about She & Him enacting an anti-photo policy at a gig. Signs were posted saying “At the request of Matt [Ward] and Zooey [Deschanel], we ask that people not use their cell phones to take pictures and video, but instead enjoy the show they have put together in 3D”.
It reminded me of a story my Father told me about a Frank Zappa concert. Apparently, people were given opaque-lens glasses at the request of Zappa and the band so that, audience-members could more fully experience the music without any visual distractions.
The United Nations has said that educating women is the key to breaking the cycle of poverty around the globe. Having taken that statement to heart, The Girl Power Project -- a collaboration between by The Collective Heart and Unstoppable Foundation -- is committed to empowering the girls of Uganda and putting a stop to generations of poverty, disease, abuse and illiteracy.
In order to achieve this goal they must spread the word, and photographer Margot Duane believes she can help.
Formula One car racing authority FIA instituted new rules this week banning photographers from track pits, after several spectacular injuries or near-misses this season. But photographers are saying such restrictions will do little more than reduce the quality of their work.
I've got a few days before my big summer vacation, so I thought I'd hammer out an incredibly impractical display technology!
Less than two months after the Chicago Sun-Times closed up its photo department and disbanded its staff photography team, a newspaper chain in Georgia has done the same.
Southern Community Newspapers Inc. (SCNI), a chain of seven Georgian newspapers (five dailies and two weeklies), is completely shutting down its photo department and putting photo-making responsibilities in the hands of its reporters.
Most portrait/wedding photographers are familiar with "Trash the Dress" sessions. A client, dressed in a gorgeous formal gown is photographed in a location in a less than elegant outdoor location, one usually involving water, and in the process the dress becomes "trashed." It's a fun juxtaposition and it's been popular for some time, but water and mud are one thing...
FIRE is another.
Thank God, I am now a gear minimalist focused on photography and a big fan of "limitation creativity" (i.e. you are more creative with less)... But here’s the truth, I used to be a huge gear junkie, basically having Gear Acquisition Syndrome (G.A.S.) as soon as I got a new camera. I had this problem since the very beginning, but now I am cured. In one sense I am trying to help those who know they have G.A.S. to stop having it and trying to prevent others from having it.
If you think your SLR camera is capable of taking high-resolution photos, the folks over at the Institute of Optics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences are about to put your gear to shame.
That's because they claim to have developed a 100-megapixel camera that captures 10,240 x 10,240 images, thanks to its square-format sensor. That's a whole lotta megapixels (though we fear in a number of years we'll look back at our marveling of this and laugh, whilst holding our gigapixel cameras). In fact, it's the highest megapixel camera in China, at the moment.
You know those computers in Minority Report and Iron Man that are completely controlled through hand gestures? One day soon, we may all be using Photoshop in the same way.
The video above is a short demo showing a Photoshop plugin that introduces some introductory gesture controls to the image editing program.
A year and a half ago, 23-year-old Seattle, Washington-based photographer Jeremy Veach adopted an eight-week-old pug named Norm. Since then, Veach has faithfully documented his pup's life by publishing daily photographs to Instagram.
The images have been a hit: his account @jermzlee has already attracted nearly 40,000 followers, and the cute "pug shots" are being featured on sites all across the Web.
A trove of 3,700 unpublished photos of iconic movie star Marilyn Monroe, each with full copyright included, will go up for sale at a Los Angeles auction late this month.
Here's some good news for the smartphone photographers out there who are sick of all the iPhone-only news that seems to flow down the pipeline daily. It turns out that anybody with an Android 4.0 and later phone can install a copy of the superior Android 4.3 camera app without even having to root their phone.
As a photographer, it's a good idea to always have your portfolio with you. Given the advent of smartphone photography, that's not much of an issue. Many portfolio websites offer mobile optimized versions of your site that you can easily show prospective clients on the go.
But if you're looking for a way to keep higher resolution photos on you to showcase wherever you might be -- or maybe a creative way to deliver final shots to clients -- you might wanna take a look at Cartable+Convenience.
Yahoo can't seem to catch a break where Flickr users are concerned. Just as everyone is coming to terms with the redesign that stirred a bit of an uproar on the Flickr forums, the company has introduced a new toolbar at the top of every page that has users upset yet again.
Privacy concerns abound in the digital age, especially where pictures are concerned. With massive social networks like Facebook and Instagram offering more-or-less on/off security with little in way of customization, apps that allow you to take your photos' privacy in your own hands by deleting the photo after a set amount of time have taken off (think Snapchat and Facebook's Poke).
Secret.li is such an app, only it takes a different approach at making the Facebook sharing of photos more secure by combing the self-destructing function of Snapchat with a few other privacy-focused features.
A federal court judge has ordered celebrity/fashion photographer Terry Richardson to surrender 142,000 shots of Lady Gaga as evidence in a lawsuit against the pop star.
His name is Onafujiri Remet and he is a street photographer from Lagos, Nigeria. His work was just featured in his very first photographic exhibition. He is handsome, he shoots Sony and... he is 3 years old. That's right, 3 years old.
If you ever get a chance to visit the National Media Museum in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, be sure to check out the Kodak history area, which contains various Kodak cameras that appeared in the history of photography. One of the exhibits is the "Queen Mary's Doll's House Camera," an amazing 1/8th-scale replica of an old Kodak 2C Brownie. As if the detail of the camera weren't enough, here's the kicker: the model is actually a fully functional camera!
If you've ever questioned the wisdom of insuring your camera gear, witness the methodical fury of basketball star and Kardashian spouse Lamar Odom wrecking a photographer's equipment.
You can quit squinting your eyes and holding your hats, folks. That's not a UFO coming in for a landing, it's Manfrotto's brand-spanking-new Pixi tripod. It's designed for smartphones and smaller cameras, and did we mention that's it's so tiny and cute? Oh yes it is!
Photographer George Steinmetz has made a name for himself by taking spectacular aerial images from his paraglider. But a recent flight over Finney County, Kansas landed him not in the pages of National Geographic, but in jail.
I did my first surreal photoshoot with a model this past weekend. Here's a breakdown of the process from start to finish.
We received a new press release out of the Nikon camp this morning, and although it didn't announce any fresh cameras or lenses, it was eager to share a different creation with us: My Nikon World. My Nikon World is a brand new Facebook app that seeks to "Challenge photographers to shoot, share and learn," mostly through friendly competition.
Film photography is similar in many ways to digital photography, and most of your standard digital photography techniques apply to film too. You just have to understand the peculiarities of film and its limitations and you’re good to go.
That will be explained in detail in this article, which presumes readers are already reasonably proficient at digital photography and are embarking upon film photography for the first time.
The productivity service IFTTT (short for "if this then that") is a popular digital "glue" that ties different web services together. If you want to create a Facebook status every time you get an email, or automatically upload new photos to Flickr, the app allows you to do that.
And now, with the release of the company's brand new (not to mention free) iPhone app, IFTTT's influence is spreading to include a decent amount of functionality for smartphone photography lovers.
After months of rumors about an "EOS camera," Nokia has finally announced its new Lumia 1020 photo-centric smartphone, a device that fuses serious camera functionality with the concept of a phone.
Don McCullin is a photojournalism icon. He's spent his life chasing haunting images that, more often than not, he's succeeded in capturing. And even though his career has taken him all over the world -- to Cyprus, the Congo, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, El Salvador, and the Middle East among others -- one thing has sed the same throughout his journeys: he's always shot film.
In this short documentary put together for Canon Professional Network by ICE Productions, he takes his first go at using a digital camera and discovers the potential (and potential pitfalls) of the technology.
Back in 2011, we shared a series of "Genetic Portraits" by photographer Ulric Collette that showed portraits of various family members spliced together to show the similarities and differences of those who share DNA. Photographer Andrew Ryan did something similar for his project Base Pairs, except he ventured along the analog route instead of going fully digital.
In her seminal essay On Photography, Susan Sontag writes that “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.”
This has never been truer than now as the ubiquity of camera phones has turned everyone into a photographer.
There's been a lot of talk about UAVs -- as in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (aka. Drones) -- lately, but what about Unmanned Acquatic Vehicles? When it comes to remote-controlled water drones that you can use to photograph underwater life, there's far less choice in the affordable/DIY range.
The new aquatic drone Ziphius is here to change that, as it makes its way to market sporting the title of world's first app-controlled aquatic drone.
How good can you get at something in 365 days? If you're former Microsoft exec Karen Cheng, pretty darn good. Her goal was to learn to dance in one year, and she spent that year documenting the experience and showing her progress right up to her final impressive performance in a San Francisco subway station.
You might have run into this problem before: you're out with a group of friends and someone suggests a group shot. At this point, as the resident photographer of the group, several smartphones will probably be passed your way, leading to several good photos, all of them missing you.
You could always ask a stranger to take the group photo, but the picture might not turn out right and you might prefer avoiding that interaction altogether. Thankfully, with Groopic, now you can.