February 2013

This striking photo, taken by Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin, has been making the award rounds recently, sweeping up first and second place trophies for the photog's mantle. According to the description, the photo portrays a "former Marine Corps sniper," and is part of a series of photos taken in a rough part of Rochester, NY called "The Crescent."

Pellegrin's ethics, however, are now being called into question by a BagNewsNotes article, which points out that the man in the photo, Shane Keller, was neither a sniper nor does he live in The Crescent -- he was headed to a shooting range at Pellegrin's request, as part of a portrait shoot.

Who owns public art illegally placed onto private buildings? That's a question that came up recently after a famous Banksy work in London was ripped out of the side of a building, shipped across the Atlantic, and put up for auction with an estimated final price of over half a million dollars.

In October 2012, LensRentals owner Roger Cicala reported that the Nikon D600 seems to collect more sensor dust than other DSLRs. Other owners began reporting the same thing, and different theories began emerging to explain the origins of the annoying specks.

When Imaging Resource reached out to Nikon for comment, it was told that Nikon customers are encouraged to have their cameras serviced if the dust becomes "bothersome." Nikon finally issued an official advisory this past Wednesday regarding the issue, but its message is the same.

If you're a fan of cinemagraphs, you should take a look at the nature cinemagraphs being created by 28-year-old Netherlands-based visual artist Marinus. He has been using frames from popular wildlife documentaries (BBC's Winterwatch, Wonders of Life, and Natural World), turning them into beautiful animated loops that offer glimpses into the great outdoors.

While we're on the subject of Android-powered cameras: Samsung announced a new camera model for its Galaxy lineup this past Tuesday. It's called the Samsung Galaxy Camera (Wi-Fi). As you can probably guess from the name, it's simply the original Samsung Galaxy Camera without the 3G/4G capabilities (and with a smaller price tag). In other words, you'll have to rely on Wi-Fi for connecting to the Internet rather than subscribing to a data plan for your camera.

Microsoft announced yesterday that it has entered into a patent licensing agreement with Nikon for Nikon's Android-powered digital cameras. While the details of the agreement were not revealed, Microsoft did say that it will begin collecting royalties from Nikon for certain camera models.

Bureaucratics is a project by photographer Jan Banning that consists of 50 portraits captured in 8 countries on 5 continents around the world. The goal: to offer a comparative look at the culture, rituals, and symbols of state civil administrations. Basically, Banning wanted to document the face of bureaucracy by capturing portraits of government workers at their posts.

The new Nikon D7100 DSLR wasn't the only interesting product announced by the company yesterday. Appearing alongside the camera was a new WR-1 Wireless Remote Control Transceiver. It's a remote control that can be used in multiple ways depending on your needs.

What do popping soap bubbles look like up close and slowed down? That’s what Gav and Dan of …

Back in March 2011, we featured an iPhone app that lets you use your iPhone as a makeshift light meter. The app apparently works pretty well, but if you've been looking for a fancier solution involving your iPhone, one has finally arrived.

It's called the Luxi, and is a small clip on accessory that turns your iPhone into a proper light meter.

Les Irvin, the man behind the biggest Joni Mitchell fan site on the internet, is being sued by celebrity photographer Charlyn Zlotnik over four photos that were uploaded anonymously in the comments section of his website.

If you're a fan of photography and of Bill Watterson's popular comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, you'll probably love what Oregon-based freelance photographer Michael S. Den Beste has been working on recently. He's using his Photoshoppin' skills to blend Calvin and Hobbes characters into photographs of real world locations that match the settings seen in the comics. The results are magical, beautiful, and oh-so-very-fun.

Sony's latest addition to their Xperia line of smartphones isn't known for its camera as is, for example, the new HTC One. But even though it doesn't feature "Ultrapixels" or 41 or the regular type like the PureView, it can capture 999 photos in just 68 seconds.

Fujifilm has released seven official sample photographs shot using the new X20, a slick little retro-styled compact camera with a 12MP 2/3-inch X-Trans CMOS sensor. The X-Trans sensors in Fujifilm's APS-C X-Series cameras (e.g. X-Pro1 and X-E1) are very highly regarded for their image quality and low light performance, so it's interesting to see how the same tech performs on a much smaller sensor size (APS-C sensors are about 6.5 times larger than the X20's 2/3 sensor).

Matthew Klint is an avid travel writer and loyal United Airlines flyer who spends almost as much time in the air as he does on the ground. Last year alone he traveled more than 200,000 miles, and his contributions can be found in the Washington Times, USA Today, BBC, Toronto Star, and his Live and Let's Fly blog.

But last week, Klint recorded an airline first for him on what was supposed to be a flight from Newark to Istanbul: he was kicked off of the flight for taking a photo of the seat in front of him, and then explaining why it was he had taken the picture.

If you often find yourself dreaming of photography while eating pastries, or (more likely) visa versa, then this is the camera for you. In all seriousness though, here's a fun little novelty product that made its way across our desk, which combines a 3MP camera and a fattening favorite, the doughnut.

Want to buy all the camera equipment you need to start a photography business for just $15.35? All you'll need is... a time machine! Reddit user sneeden found this Sears Roebuck and Co. consumer guide for the fall of 1900. Two of the pages inside the catalog are for view camera kits that can help anyone "start in a pleasant and good paying business."

The majority of in-camera editing and enhancing, especially on the mobile front, is done via software. Software that, according to MIT's Rahul Rithe, "consume[s] substantial power, take[s] a considerable amount of time to run, and require[s] a fair amount of knowledge on the part of the user."

In order to bypass this problem, Rithe and his team of researchers at MIT have developed a new imaging chip that can act as a photographic "jack of all trades" when it comes to taking your smartphone photos to the next level.

Nikon has announced its latest DSLR, the D7100. As the successor to the D7000, the D7100 is an midrange DSLR geared toward serious photography enthusiasts, and is the new flagship camera of Nikon's DX-format DSLR lineup.

The BT Tower panorama, created by stitching together 48,640 images taken with 7 Canon EOS 7Ds, has officially broken the record for the world's largest panoramic photo. It was taken from atop the BT Tower in London, and you can see a tiny version of it at the top, but the real thing offers a massive, browsable 360-degree view of London in extreme detail.

Apparently if you shoot in certain environments that are cold enough, beautiful patterns of snow and ice form on the front element of your lens. This is what photographer Alessandro Della Bella's glass looked like as he was shooting at an altitude of around 10,000 feet on Mount Titlis in temperatures of around 1° F.

On Friday, February 15th, 2013, near-Earth asteroid 2012 DA14 did a flyby of our planet -- the closest approach ever of an object of its size (30 meters in diameter). Photographer Colin Legg of Western Australia decided to capture the close pass in a time-lapse video, and set up his cameras after midnight around 220 miles east of Perth.

He ended up capturing the amazing video above, while captures a shooting star burning a trail across the sky while DA14 slowly travels through the shot. The video also shows how much random stuff in the sky you can see if you have eyes/cameras sensitive enough to see it.

On April 8, 2011, Senator Jon Kyl was quoted on the Senate floor as saying, "If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does."

This is not a post about abortion or Planned Parenthood. This is a discussion about veracity and why it matters in photojournalism. In fact, about 3% of Planned Parenthood’s services are abortion-related. When Sen. Kyl was confronted with the facts, his office responded with “his remark was not intended to be a factual statement.”

A young Israeli soldier sparked outrage around the world and Web this past week after uploading an ill-advised photo on Instagram. The photo, pictured above, shows the back of a young Palestinian boy's head in the crosshairs of 20-year-old Israeli sniper Mor Ostrovski's rifle.

Los Angeles-based photographer Brice Bischoff has a project titled Bronson Caves. Between 2009 and 2010, Bischoff visited the caves in Los Angeles' Griffith Park with his 4x5 large format camera and some very large sheets of colored paper. He then used long exposure times to paint colorful blurs into the photographs by waving the papers around.

A recent photographic analysis technique developed by Professor Siwei Lyu and his team at the University at Albany - SUNY could lead to better forensic analysis of altered images. The technique takes advantage of the fact that, when splicing two images together, each will bring with it the specific noise pattern of the camera it was shot with.

So, when analyzing the obviously fake image at the top, the flamingo Tiger Woods is using in lieu of his golf club shows up as having a different noise pattern than the rest of the image.

Here's a video that may be very interesting to you if you've never tried your hand at creating a tintype with wet plate collodion photography. Oklahoma City-based photographer Mark Zimmerman recently strapped a GoPro Hero 3 to his head and went through the entire process of creating a wet-plate photo on aluminum, from flowing the collodion in the beginning, through exposing it using his large format camera, and ending with a finished tintype photo of a camera.

Parallax 3D images use two photos captured from slightly different vantage point to create the appearance of depth. In astrophotography, however, the distance between human cameras and distance objects are so great that real parallax generally cannot be achieved.

Finnish astrophotographer J-P Metsavainio has developed a brilliant experimental technique that overcomes this (kinda): he converts astrophotographs into 3D volumetric models, and then uses those models to create dazzling 3D animations of nebulae.

David Burnett is a traditional photojournalist whose style and work has remained relevant …

After having their photos and some specs leaked this past weekend, the Sony NEX-3N and A58 finally became real today through an official announcement by Sony. The new mirrorless and pellicle mirror cameras were unveiled alongside a set of new lenses, and offer some pretty standard upgrades to current models.

Google has put up a slick new website for the Glass augmented reality glasses it's developing, and today the company released a neat new video that offers a first look at what it feels like to use the glasses during "everyday life" (or perhaps, "while living the life").

In the middle of last year, The Economist released rankings for the world's most livable cities, and Hong Kong was found at the top. What many people don't know, however, is that there is a percentage of Hong Kong residents living in rather horrid conditions.

In an attempt to draw attention to the issue, human rights organization Society for Community Organization recently commissioned a series of photographs showing what a number of unacceptable living spaces look like when viewed from directly overhead. (Here's a larger version of the photo above.)

This is an incredible photo. The range of emotions expressed (anger, grief, despair), the position of the people and bodies, and proximity of the photographer to the subject make it an incredible moment in time. And because of these elements, this photo was deservedly named the World Press Photo of the Year.

It also looks like an illustration.

A more complete list of specs has emerged for the rumored Canon 7D Mark II. The camera may be a miniature counterpart to the EOS-1D X, likely featuring a smaller body, less features (maybe), less weathersealing, and a lower price point than the 1D X.

Photographer Ian Ruhter has released the latest video in his beautiful Silver & Light series, which follows along as he creates portraits around the United States using a giant wet plate camera van. The video above is titled, "Death Do Us Part," and is about the idea of letting go of fears.

Back in 2010, we humorously reported that chickens have image stabilized heads. Some people took the idea further, turning chickens into organic Steadicams and doing further research into the subject.

Moscow, Russia-based photographer Alexey Kljatov shoots incredibly beautiful photographs of snowflakes on the open balcony of his home... using a custom compact camera kit. That's right: rather than use fancy (and pricey) camera gear, Kljatov simply uses a 12.1MP Canon PowerShot A650 and some DIY macro gear that he put together.

NYC-based creative agency OKFocus has created a brilliant interactive music video for the song "Not The Same" by Tanlines. The experimental video is styled after Photoshop's workspace.

The "ultrapixels" that were rumored earlier this month have arrived. HTC announced its new flagship smartphone today. Called the HTC One, it features new camera tech that aims to shake up the world of smartphone photo snapping.

Animated GIFs are often created with a sequence of photographs, but UK-based artist INSA puts an interesting twist on the concept by mixing the concept with graffiti and time-lapsing. For his GIF-iti projects, he paints large-scale street art pieces on various walls and surfaces (e.g. the side of a truck) over a number of days. Once each version of the piece is complete, it's saved as a photographed with a camera fixed in a certain location.

After the series of graffiti pieces is completed, the photographs are strung together into unique animated GIFs.

Shooting a seasonal time-lapse poses several challenges. You have to figure out how to power the camera for a very long time, how to protect it from the elements, how to make sure nobody messes with it, and how to run your set-up for months without needing to check on it very often.

Fortunately, if you're interested in making your own long-term time-lapse, the people of Kontent Films have put together a step-by-step tutorial on Instructables that covers all the bases -- from building the enclosure to shooting the (many thousand) exposures.

New trend alert: Eric Wilson of the New York Times reports that fashion …

You may or may not know this, but Google Maps offers a Business Photos feature through which the search giant allows "Google trusted photographers" to provide street view tours of business establishments. That way, you can browse the local camera shop's selection before you ever actually go in.

But a small ski shop in France made headlines a couple of weeks ago by putting the feature to hilariously creative use. The store is Krakatoa in southern France, and when you tour their establishment, you'll find some very interesting things are going on in that store.

Grammy Award-winning Jazz singer Esperanza Spalding is currently in the midst of a legal battle with photographer Kevin Ryan over the cover art on her 2012 album Radio Music Society (pictured above). The cover shows Spalding sitting atop a vintage boombox that is actually a sculpture made of pictures attached to a wooden box.

Spalding and her people chose to use the piece on the cover after discovering it at Brooklyn’s Galapagos Art Space. The issue is that they neglected to credit or license Ryan, who was the photographer behind the photos on the box.

Portland, Oregon-based photographer and visual artist Jim Kazanjian is like the M. C. Escher of architectural photography. His art pieces appear to be photos of some of the strangest looking buildings found in the weirdest locations, but the reason the images are so dreamlike is because they came from Kazanjian's mind rather than the real world.

Are you a fan of small things? UK-based photo enthusiast Greg Dash is trying to launch "the world's first digital Lomo-fisheye." It's a pint-sized digital toy camera that packs a 170-degree fisheye lens.

We already know that buying 'new' camera gear online is no guarantee that you're actually getting something new. Even when the source seems to be trustworthy (ala Amazon), you just never know.

Film emulation software company VSCO has added another offering to its lineup of Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw plugins. VSCO Film offers the same high-end film emulation power as Film 01 and 02, except it's designed for mimicking the look of instant films rather than standard color and black-and-white film stocks.

In in 1946, the United States conducted a series of nuclear weapon tests at Bikini Atoll in what's known as Operation Crossroads. A total of two bombs were detonated to test the effects nuclear blasts had on naval warships. The second, named Baker, was the world's first nuke to be detonated underwater. Due to the unique properties of underwater explosions, the Baker test produced a number of unique photographs that the world had never seen before.

Sony has a couple of new cameras and a set of new lenses coming out, and we're starting to get a better idea of what we'll be seeing announced very shortly. Expect to see a new SLT camera called the A58, a new mirrorless camera called the NEX-3N, and a trio of A-mount lenses.