2013

A trendy project in the photo world these days is collecting portraits of people of different ages. Photographers have photographed people of ages 0 through 100 based on location and gender, and some are doing the same project with short video portraits.

Seattle, Washington-based portrait photographer Chamonix Thurston-Rattue recently decided to start her own age collection project titled "100 Years of Beauty." Her goal is to create a portrait of a woman for each age between 0 and 100.

Photographer Chase Jarvis has a recurring dream in which he is floating in a sea of vividly colored clouds (don't we all?). So when Samsung came to him with a bunch of money and instructions to do whatever he wanted just as long as it highlighted the color capabilities of the company's Series 9 monitors, he decided to make his dreams come true -- literally.

His only demand from Samsung was that the company let him create an epic behind the scenes video that showed how his team brought the whole thing together.

Earlier today, the Nokia Lumia 925 that was teased yesterday became a reality. But more impressive than the phone itself, or the camera inside it, is actually the software running that camera. Announced as part of the Lumia 925, Nokia's new Smart Camera application will soon bring some pretty cool photo features to the Lumia lineup.

Here's a great photo series by artist Sonia Rentsch that quite literally takes the "fire" out of firearms. Dubbed "Harm Less," the series consists entirely of weaponry made out of only organic materials.

PetaPixel turns four years old today. As the blog continues to grow at a healthy clip, we’re slowly looking to …

The most common files stored on Microsoft's SkyDrive (and, we'd guess, just about any cloud storage service) are photos. As such, the company has decided to give its cloud storage service a facelift by providing a couple of highly-requested photo-centric features.

Dr. Neal Krawetz, a computer science PhD who specializes in non-classical computer forensics, online profiling, and computer security, made some pretty damning claims in a blog post recently. After taking a close look at Paul Hansen World Press Photo 2012 winner (seen above), he concluded that it was "a digital composite that was significantly reworked."

Hasselblad's luxury Lunar mirrorless camera is set to arrive in June 2013, but hands-on reviews of the camera are slowly trickling onto the Web. Photography blogger genotypewriter managed to get his hands on a Lunar recently, and published a short article sharing his thoughts.

The company LUMA Partners has gotten in the habit of occasionally mapping out various industry landscapes to show how a product or service gets from Point A (i.e. the creators, marketers, businesses, etc.) to Point Z (i.e. the buyers, brands and publishers), going through the rest of the alphabet in between.

Taking a leaf out of their book, director of kbs+ Ventures, Taylor Davidson, decided to borrow their format and do the same thing for the photography industry, mapping out how content gets from the photographers out into the world of consumers, brands and buyers.

In order to shoot the best Rolls Royce Wraith launch film possible, Angus Elliott and company pulled out all of the stops. In addition to using some very nice video cameras and all-around great filmmaking, they also wanted to shoot a bullet time sequence, for which they set up a 100 DSLR array. By their reckoning, that's the largest DSLR array shot in Europe.

Fortunately, filmmaker Jack Flynn was there to capture the process in action, and in the video above he gives us a behind the scenes peek at the making of the Rolls Royce Wraith launch video.

The iPhone has evolved in leaps and bounds since the smartphone first burst onto the scene in 2007, and one of the most impressive ways it has evolved is in its capability to take pictures. In the original iPhone, a camera was something of an afterthought; the current model has entire commercials dedicated to the camera.

But knowing intuitively that the camera has improved exponentially is a far sight from seeing it with your own eyes. And so, just like they did in 2011, the folks behind the popular iPhone app Camera+ got every model of the iPhone together took a set of comparison shots for your perusing pleasure.

Canon today officially announced its new 200-400mm f/4L IS 1.4x extender lens. No, that's not two products mistakenly smashed into one name -- the lens features a built-in 1.4x extender that can be activated with the flip of a switch.

"Aerialscapes" is a series of photographs by German photographer Jakob Wagner that was shot from the sky. The images in the project are sweeping landscapes of various locations around the world, showing formations that are both manmade and natural.

One World Trade Center was finished in New York City last Friday after the final section of the spire was hoisted up and installed. The skyscraper is now the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere and the third tallest building in the world based on pinnacle height.

To document and celebrate the completion of the tower, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey decided to fix a GoPro camera to the final spire section as it was hoisted up and installed. With its fisheye lens pointed straight down, the camera managed to capture some crazy footage (shown above) of what it looks like to be hanging 1,776 feet in the air.

Waterproofing is one specialization that compact cameras have had that smartphones (and their cameras) haven't, but that's about to change. Sony has launched a new phone called the Xperia ZR that will help smartphones further erode the point-and-shoot market by opening the door to underwater smartphone photography.

I know there are a few guides out there for home processing, some of which were instrumental in helping me get over my fears. All of these other guides seemed to be a little incomplete and that lack of detail made me wait longer than I should have before taking the plunge. In reality, it’s easy to do your film at home. Let me show you!

Want to play around with lens filters that add splashes of color to your photographs? Stanford design students Olivia Vagelos and Martin Bush want to help you out. They've designed a new line of color-splashed lens filters that can transform "the feel" of your photos.

One of the advantages of digital photography is having information about how each photo was shot embedded within the photograph's file itself. This EXIF data is something photographers commonly jot down in notebooks as they walk around and shoot with their analog cameras.

Photographer Oriol Garcia wanted a better solution than manually writing down shot times and details. Since most people have smartphones now, why not make an extremely easy to use app that can document the info of every photograph taken? He ended up creating an app called PhotoExif that can do just that.

If you make your money unscrupulously as an identity thief, you might want to refrain from sharing about your life through photographs online. Two identity thieves in South Florida found that out the hard way earlier this year after they were busted thanks to an Instagram photograph of food.

Last Friday, Nokia launched its new Lumia 928 smartphone that has a strong emphasis on photography. The device features PureView technology, optical image stabilization, a Carl Zeiss lens, and a xenon flash.

It was exciting news for photo-lovin' Nokia fans, but sit tight: there's more to come. Nokia will reportedly have a major launch event tomorrow to unveil a phone that has some serious photography chops.

Patriots Day. This Massachusetts holiday celebrates the battles of Lexington and Concord, which were the first battles of the American Revolutionary War in 1775. The day always begins with battle re-enactments. Then the Red Sox play an 11AM game, and during and after the game there is the running of the Boston Marathon, a race that first ran in 1897.

A couple of weeks ago, the Magic Lantern team announced that they had discovered a RAW DNG Live View output on the 5D Mark II and Mark III. At the time, they could only get 14 frames per second for only 28 frames before the camera needed to buffer, but the team was confident that they could eventually increase the speed to 24p and pull a true RAW video feed out of the camera.

A little over a year ago, we shared the story of photographer Bob Carey and his wife, a breast cancer survivor. Over the past year, Carey and his Project Tutu have done a great deal to raise awareness for breast cancer. By going around the world and photographing himself in a pink tutu (and nothing else), he's done a lot to further the cause for breast cancer victims and their families.

You don't have to be high-brow to put together a creative photo series; you don't even need to travel the deserts of Tunisia. Sometimes, all you need is a container full of something, the willingness to toss it in the air, and the skill to capture the result. That's what Belgium-based photographer Manon Wethly has done, shooting various airborne containers filled with stuff and uploading the resulting pictures to her Instagram account.

Thanks to the prevalence of digital photography and the fact that camera stores seem to be closing left and right, it can be hard enough to find film in the first place these days. But if you shoot with ultra large or specialty format films, your job is even more difficult. Thankfully, Ilford is here to help.

Harman technologies Inc. -- the folks behind the manufacture of Ilford film -- are opening their annual window during which photographers can order as much custom-manufactured specialty film as their hearts desire.

For their most recent international foray, the DigitalRev producers decided to send Kai, Lok and Alamby on a 36-hour trek across London to take photos. They were tasked with travelling to and photographing 10 of London's best known landmarks, using old film SLRs on day one, and digital cameras the next.

In September 2010, visual artist and filmmaker Rä di Martino set out on a quest to photograph and document old abandoned film sets in the North African deserts. The project had started when she discovered that it was common practice to abandon these sets without tearing them down, leaving them fully intact and crumbling over time, like archeological ruins.

Martino spent that month traveling around Chott el Djerid in Tunisia, finding and photographing three Star Wars sets in all for her photo series No More Stars and Every World's a Stage.

Nikon DSLR owners who want to control their cameras from their PCs have a few options available to them. But while most of them offer basic functionality (i.e. aperture, shutter speed and shutter release control), the free, open source software digiCamControl seems to offer a bit more.

Relics of the Future is a short documentary that follows Toronto-based fine art photographer Toni Hafkenscheid as he explores the world of once-futuristic architecture through his tilt-shift lens. In the 1960's, these buildings and monuments were considered "visions of the future;" now they stand, as one interviewee put it, "on that fence between futuristic and nostalgic."

The National Socialist Movement held their 2013 national convention in Atlanta, Georgia, protesting undocumented immigration and contemporary political policies. The NSM boasts of being the nation's largest "white civil rights groups" and aligns itself with other like-minded individuals across the nation. Spanning across the majority of the 50 states, the NSM retains its presence through regional and local leaders.

Here's a look at the convention and how I documented it through photographs earlier this year.