February 2013

Last week we reported that HTC is preparing to launch a new camera sensor technology called Ultrapixels, which aims to improve image quality using a Foveon-style stack of three sensor layers. The smartphone imaging war is heating up, after all, an rivals like Nokia are investing heavily in photography technologies of their own (e.g. PureView).

We're reportedly just days away from seeing the official launch of the new HTC phone (which may be named the M7 or the HTC One), and leaks are beginning to spring. There's a good chance we now have the first product shot of the phone and the first published shot captured with the phone.

Earlier today, we showed you a number of time-lapse videos of Winter Storm Nemo that were created by people who were stuck indoors due to the heavy snowfall. New York-based photographer Brian Maffitt was also stuck indoors and he also turned to photography, but instead of shooting time-lapse photos, he turned to a different technique: long-exposure light painting.

His technique is rather interesting: instead of a flashlight, Maffitt projected a movie onto the falling snow in order to light up the snowflakes.

People on the East Coast of the United States was battered this past week by heavy snowfall and hurricane-level winds thanks to Winter Storm Nemo. The multiple feet of snow recorded in many areas were among the highest totals recorded in history (one town in Connecticut saw 40 inches!). Although the storm kept many people indoors, many of them decided to point cameras out their windows, creating beautiful time-lapse videos that show how quickly the snow piled up.

The time-lapse above was created by YouTube user miges3111, who captured 22 hours of the storm from his home in Connecticut using a GoPro Hero.

Jack over at the astrophotography blog The Landingfield has published a series of photographs showing what a digital camera's CMOS sensor looks like when viewed through a microscope. The sensor (seen above) was taken from a broken Nikon D2H -- a DSLR from back in the early 2000s.

A new controversy is brewing in the world of stock photography. Just last month, it came to light that Getty had agreed to license 5000 of its stock photos to Google while paying the creators of the images a meager one-time fee of $12. Now, one of Getty's most successful stock photographers is claiming that his account is being terminated in the aftermath of the first hoopla.

For a recent Music Issue of ESPN Magazine, photographer Mattias Clamer created portraits of 14 famous athletes in the style of iconic album cover photos. Clamer paid a huge amount of attention to detail, which resulted in many of the photos looking nearly identical to the covers they were meant to recreate.

Improperly handling people's photos is a huge faux pas that can generate a lot of furor. If you need an example, look no further than Instagram's policy debacle. But Flickr recently messed up, and the company is trying to apologize and clean up its mess as quickly and quietly as possible before it gets in the way of what has become a pretty remarkable renaissance.

According to Barry Schwartz of Marketing Land, due to a software bug, his and many other users' photos that were set to private were actually publicly accessible for nearly a month.

Here's another curious photography-related novelty item for those of you looking to fill your house with them (i.e. those of you who purchased the lens shaped vacuum cleaner and lens-shaped humidifier that we featured recently): it's a lens shaped pepper mill.

We've seen photography of the Moon, and photography taken on the Moon; people have even left photography gear up there. But this is the first we've heard of a photo from Earth, not only making it to the Moon, but staying there.

Fortunately, it was left there on purpose (Can you imagine? "Uhhh ... John ... we need to turn around, I forgot something..."), and the story behind the picture goes something like this.

Photographers are usually trying to get closer to their subjects, be that in the wild or on the street. The photographers of MUMUȘ Photo Hub in Bucharest, Romania, however, decided to take a step back ... actually quite a few steps back.

Smartphones are being used more and more to capture daily life photography, but many of its loyal users are perpetually stuck at the point-and-shoot level of photographic know-how. If that describes you, and you'd like to add a little more technical understanding to your brain, Photojojo has a new service designed just for you. It's called Photojojo University, a new educational service that teaches you photography lessons through bite-sized tutorials and assignments delivered into your email inbox.

Mug shots and airbrushing are both photography-related, but they aren't commonly found together in stories. Not so with some ongoing controversy over in Greece, though. The police there may soon be under investigation after releasing a number of mug shots that appear to have been Photoshopped.

Why would they 'shop photos of suspected criminals, you ask? The claim is that the images were edited to hide injuries that were inflicted by officers during (or after) the arrests.

A recent study performed by Tim Davies and his team at the Imperial College's Department of Life Sciences discovered that underwater pics taken by tourists can actually help track the movements of individual whale sharks.

In June of last year, we gave you a quick "photo trivia o' the day" lesson on the history of presidential photography. We told you that John Quincy Adams sat for what is currently the oldest surviving photo of a US President, that James Polk sat for the oldest of a US President in office, and that President Obama was actually the first to have his official photo taken digitally. That first of those three facts, however, comes with an interesting story.

Memphis-based photographer Haley Morris-Cafiero has long been aware of strangers making fun of her behind her back due to her size. So aware, in fact, that she has turned the whole concept into a full-blown photography project. Titled Wait Watchers, the series consists of Morris-Cafiero's self-portraits in public in which strangers can be seen in the background giving her strange looks and/or laughing.

Approximately 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women suffer from some form of color blindness. Given those statistics, it might not be a bad idea for photographers to occasionally consider how their work is being viewed by those who can't see the entire spectrum. And right on cue, a new online simulator from Etre is here to help.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is a bit of a space celebrity. Some of his hobbies include tweeting back and forth with William Shatner, posting recordings from space on SoundCloud, and even beaming down the occasional video of himself playing the guitar.

It's safe to say that paparazzi aren't exactly adored in most photography circles. Given the comments we typically get on most paparazzi stories, you could say they're loathed. But that doesn't mean they don't fascinate us all the same.

So if you've ever wondered what's inside a paparazzo's photography bag (or bags), today's your lucky day. In this video, paparazzo Henry Flores took the time to show Photoinduced what you'll find in his.

Here's an interesting bit of photography/movie trivia that surfaced recently. Remember the infamous HAL 9000? HAL 9000 was the AI villain from Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey series, and the main bad guy in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

When tasked with making the music video for the song HAVOC by While You Slept, Frokost films decided to get a little creative. In addition to shooting the whole thing in slow motion, they managed to shoot the entire music video using just one 18-second continuous shot.

When we run into issues regarding photo usage, the photographer is typically involved in one way or another. A company may be trying to use their work without paying, or they might find derivative works of their photography in an art show.

But in this case, neither of the two people involved actually took the photo in question, they were in it. David Bowie is leaning on EMI UK to change the cover art on the re-release of Morrissey's 1989 single The Last of the Famous International Playboys, because it features a previously un-seen candid photo of the two musicians hanging out in New York.

Photographic history doesn't get much classier than this: above we have what may very well be the first ever photograph of someone giving the middle finger. In a team picture of the Boston Beaneaters, pitcher "Old Hoss" Charles Radbourn was caught flipping the New York Giants the bird in the top left hand corner of the photo.

The IMAGO1:1 is the largest life-size self-portrait camera in the world. Exposing beautiful black and white self-portraits on 2ft x 6.5ft silver gelatin photo paper, it's a photographic marvel that is currently housed and used in an art gallery in Berlin.

Susanna Kraus, daughter of IMAGO1:1 co-inventor Werner Kraus, now runs the camera, taking photos for clients and exhibitions alike. But her dream is to respond to the many requests she gets from all over the world by taking the IMAGO1:1 on the road -- for that, she needs your help.

Here's an interesting project by multi-media journalist Rebecca Davis that captures what you might witness while riding the New York City subway over the course of one year. It's a 'flip book' put together using Instagram photos of everything from the bored commuter to the intimate couple.

Paparazzi working in the state of Hawaii might have to pack their bags and move back to the mainland. That's because a new bill requested by Aerosmith lead and part-time Maui resident Steven Tyler may soon ban celebrity photography in the 50th state all-together.

Chrysler hit a home run this past Super Bowl with its photographic "God Made a Farmer" commercial... so let the spoofs begin. Photo backup service Mosaic create the parody above titled "God Made a Photographer."

24-year-old photographer Sébastian Dahl is quite the adventurer. Back on September 15th, 2012, Dahl left his home in Oslo, Norway and began a hitchhiking journey that ended nearly three months later and thousands of miles away in Beirut, Lebanon. He snapped photographs along the way, creating a beautiful travel photography diary documenting the trip.

Want to win the most prestigious press photo contest in the world this year? It's okay if you don't shoot with the latest camera gear -- just make sure your work stands out from things that have come before.

Last August, we wrote about how renowned photojournalist David Burnett was spotted using a large format camera at the London Olympics. If you've been wondering how the photographs turned out, today's your lucky day.

Here's an inside look at how Burnett's project came to be, and the beautiful images that resulted.

The space agencies that run the Hubble Space Telescope may have some of the most powerful photographic equipment at their disposal, but every now and then they can still use a little help from amateur astrophotographers.

Amateur astrophotographer Robert Gendler created the beautiful photograph above showing the spiral galaxy M106 by compositing existing imagery captured by the Hubble telescope with his own photos captured from Earth.