February 2013

The vast majority of my photographic work is environmental portraiture, corporate and editorial photography, and interiors, some of my commercial photography does include product photos. Quite honestly, some of this stuff is pretty straightforward, take a nice representative image of the product on a clean white backdrop so it integrates onto a website (also white) seamlessly. Sometimes a client gives me a bit more artistic license, and sometimes I get to do a shoot that's just for me.

The idea behind stop-motion videos is pretty simple: snap a lot of photographs in rapid succession and then string together all the images afterward to animate them. There was a time when the dominant photographic processes weren't fast enough to create any meaningful kind of animation. Does that mean we'll never see a stop-motion animation created using tintypes? Nope. The video above is one example of a stop-motion video created with a super old photographic process: the dry plate tintype.

Earlier this week, we shared how photography student Mark Hilton has been hard at work constructing a 20x16-inch ultra-large-format camera by hand. If you found that impressive, get a load of photographer Tim Pearse's handmade 20x24-inch view camera.

The photograph above by Swedish Dagens Nyheter photographer Paul Hansen has been selected as the World Press Photo of the Year 2012. It's a powerful image that shows a funeral procession in Gaza City, with men carrying the bodies of two children while the body of their father trails behind on a stretcher.

For Valentine's Day today (you didn't forget, did you?), San Francisco-based self-proclaimed super nerd Doctor Popular decided to give his significant other a card packaged inside a 35mm film canister.

Starting today, you can download a free and legal copy of Photoshop. That's right -- free and legal. There's a catch, though: it's the original 1.0.1 version of the program that was released back in 1990.

Over the past 12 years, I have spent countless hours finding myself in places that many would deem “the middle of nowhere.” I’m not there in awe of the bland landscape, yet instead I am staring up into the blue sky in hopes that the tiny little air molecules above me will develop into beastly, photogenic thunderstorms.

Want to own a giant collection of vintage cameras, but don't want to spend a lifetime acquiring them one by one? If you have deep pockets and money to burn, here's your shot: collector Brain Cue of Alameda, California (kka20101 on eBay) is selling his massive camera collection that he has spent over 50 years building up.

Award-winning photographer Michael Wolf is raising some eyebrows with a new photo project titled "Window Watching." The series features photographs of high-rise apartment windows in Hong Kong, offering glimpses into the lives of people living inside the private residences. Basically, Wolf pointed a telephoto lens at open windows to photograph people going about their day-to-day-lives, without their knowledge and consent.

After shooting music events, Perth-based photographer Perry DeGennaro keeps the media …

In December 2012, Instagram took steps toward profitability by adding some controversial monetization-related sections to its Terms of Service. The resulting outcry led to key sections being restored to original 2010 versions, but that didn't stop a certain user named Lucy Funes from launching a class action lawsuit against the photo sharing service.

The latest news in the saga is that Instagram is now asking that the lawsuit be thrown out.

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, photographer Michael Falco is shooting a project titled "Civil War 150 Pinhole Project." His goal is to highlight the haunting beauty of civil war battlefields and to chronicle the various battle reenactments that are happening all across the country. To do so, he's using large format pinhole cameras that gives the poetic images an old fashioned look.

Los Angeles-based musician Paz Dylan recently pulled a pretty funny prank on the Grammy Museum in LA. He made a series of informational wall display pieces featuring strange descriptions and photographs of himself eating tacos, and then hung them up on the walls of the museum next to the real pieces. That's pretty clever, but get this: no one noticed, and the pieces stayed up for a month.

The photograph above is a piece he made for the "Wall of Fame."

Here's a crazy fact that's making the rounds on the Internet: if you live in Australia, it's currently cheaper for you to fly to the US and back to purchase a copy of Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection than to purchase it in your own country.

In December of 2008, as I was getting ready for a vacation trip to Brussels, I posted the above self-portrait of myself sporting my new winter coat to my Flickr account. I didn’t think much of it after posting it and I’d pretty much forgotten about it over the years.

Today, as I was reading some discussions about people having their photos used to create fake online identities I decided to use Google Image Search to see if any of my self portraits could be found anywhere on the vast Internet.

If you've been closely following the story of Instagram and its role in the world of casual photography, you might enjoy this humorous short film by photographer Grant McGuire. It's titled "Filter My Life."

When Matthew Allred isn't teaching photography to his students at the University of Utah, he's out creating incredible works of photographic art with the simplest of tools; the pinhole camera.

Allred calls his process 'Heliography', a term first coined by pioneering French photographer Joseph-Niépce in 1822 to describe his photographic invention. Allred's process is not too dissimilar from Niépce in the fact that he constructs his own cameras and even goes as far as formulating his own chemistry for the task.

Check out this DSLR Paparazzi lamp, created by Spanish design studio Monoculo Design Studio. It's a wooden hanging lamp that's shaped like a gigantic Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 camera lens.

Heads up, celebrities: nothing is too personal for the lenses of money- and star-hungry paparazzi photographers. Actress Evan Rachel Wood found out the hard way today after The Daily Mail published paparazzi photographs of her leaving a hospital with an ultrasound scan image clutched in her hands. The article was titled, "Baby's first picture! Pregnant Evan Rachel Wood can't stop smiling as she emerges with ultrasound scan." Understandably, Wood was furious.

A couple of weeks ago, Florida-based photographer Kelli Higgins shared the newborn photos above on her Facebook page.

Alan Friedman of Buffalo, New York is an amateur astrophotography enthusiast who captures amazing photographs of the Sun through a telescope in his backyard. His highly detailed photographs show the sun in ways you never see with your naked eye. Using special filters that allow the photos to be captured without destroying his camera or his eyes, Friedman creates images of our life-giving star that look more like something you might see under a microscope.

Bruce Livingstone knows his way around the stock photography industry, and he's doing his best to shake things up. After founding iStockphoto in 2000, he turned it into a microstock juggernaut, finally selling it to Getty Images in 2006 for a whopping $50 million. Now, as both Getty Images and iStockphoto are mired in a licensing controversy, Livingstone has a new stock photo business that may rock the boat even more.

Behold, a photograph of the moon. Can you see it? No, it's not that tiny bright crescent you see... The moon is that faint giant crescent. That tiny one to its left is Venus. Hungarian astrophotographer Iván Éder captured this beautiful photograph back in 2004 from Budapest, Hungary.

Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner was randomly selected and announced below.

Alrighty folks! Let's do a giveaway! If you're in need of a way to haul around your large collection of camera gear, this one's for you. We're giving away a massive collection of Gura Gear products: a backpack, three cases, three pouches, and three memory card wallets. The entire collection has a combined retail value of $612.40!

South East England-based photography student Mark Hilton came up with an ambitious New Year's resolution this year: he's in the process of building his own 20x16 "ultra-large-format" camera by hand. It's a camera that's designed to expose Ilford Harman Direct Positive paper.

Did you know that 90% of the cells in (or on) the human body are bacteria and other microorganisms? Have you ever thought about how many bacteria live on your DSLR camera? Chicago Tribute staff photographer Alex Garcia recently dove into this second question while visiting the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago.

Belgian photographer Francois Lenoir has written an interesting account of how he managed to snap an extremely rare photo of serial killer Marc Dutroux through prison windows with some good ol' fashioned patience (and a dash of good fortune).

Nashville, Tennessee-based food photographer Kyle Dreier has a curious project titled Pairings. The main theme of the photographs can be summarized with the questions: "What food really go well together?" and "What are the stereotypical food pairings?" Dreier finds a good and a drink that are commonly consumed together, binds them together with some string, and shoots a photo of the pairing.

Talking to computers is one of the exciting new trends that's emerging in the tech world, and in the future we may find ourselves casually talking to our gadgets as we go about our lives. One application of this that you may never have considered is photo editing: what if you could post-process your photographs simply by telling an image editor what you would like done to the images?

That's exactly what scientists are currently working on, and the research is further along than you might think. They're already playing around with a prototype version of an app -- one called PixelTone.

To promote this year's edition of its sports photography competition, Red Bull Illume is sending out a pretty slick promo. It's simply a USB drive loaded with a press media kit, but the presentation is so clever that we thought we'd share it with you (perhaps you can do something similar to promote your own photography business).