March 2013

In October of 1967, at the age of 24, Charlie Haughey received a draft notice from the US Army notifying him that he would be spending a tour of duty in Vietnam as a rifleman. A couple of months after he arrived, his commanding officer put a camera in his hands and asked him to start taking pictures for Army and US newspapers. His only instructions: "You are not a combat photographer. This is a morale operation ... "

Haughey brought back nearly 2,000 negatives from Vietnam, shot between March 1968 and May 1969, none of which ever saw the light of day until very recently.

'Showrooming' is something that's having a big effect in the camera equipment industry and something that many brick-and-mortar retailers are trying to address. It's when consumers walk into a store not with the intention of actually purchasing a camera or lens, but instead to play around with them and evaluate them in person before making the actual purchase for a lower price online.

One store over in Brisbane, Australia has come up with a novel strategy (but not so consumer friendly) for combatting showrooming. To ensure that only customers looking to purchase products walk through their doors, the store is charging a $5 fee just to browse its wares.

A neat way to capture the passage of time is to photograph one scene multiple times throughout a day, slice up the resulting photos, and then combine them into a single composite image showing all the different hours as slices. In the past we've shown examples of this technique done in cities and with sunsets.

Chinese photographer Wei Yao of Reuters used this same concept, but instead of shooting photos over a number of hours, his image spans days. Instead of focusing on the passage of time, his image highlights Beijing's serious pollution problem.

My name is David Lo, and I am a street photographer who enjoys taking vintage cameras, digitizing them, and then using them for street photography. This is a walkthrough on my process of modifying a camera.

Photographer Ernie Button has a unique project called Vanishing Spirits in which he photographs the bottom of Scotch glasses once the whisky has evaporated way. The residue creates textures and colors that make the photographs look as though they're images of otherworldly planets.

100 million users are uploading 40 million photographs on a daily basis to Instagram. Of these images, 43% of them dont have any retro filters applied to them. That leaves 22.8 million filtered photos hitting the social network every 24 hours.

Marketing firm Marketo recently poked around with some of Instagram's statistics, and then decided to assign personality profiles to some of the service's most popular filters. It's like Instagram meets Chinese Zodiac.

If you're the proud owner of a Wi-Fi-connected digital camera, there's something you need to be aware of: your camera could be used to spy on you.

At the hacker conference Shmoocon 2013 last month, German security researchers Daniel Mende and Pascal Turbing reported on findings that Internet-connected cameras can easily be exploited and turned into spy cams.

Holsters are becoming pretty popular for keeping camera gear on your hip and at the ready, and now Washington-based gear company Rhino Camera Gear wants to bring the concept to batteries. It has unveiled a new product that's designed to cut a few seconds out of the time it takes you to switch out empty batteries for fresh ones.

The accessory is called the Rhino Battery Holster, and moves your juiced batteries from inside your camera bag to your side.

My name is Chris Rusanowsky, I am a 22-year-old freelance photographer based out of Los Angeles, California. In February of 2012 I took a trip to document poverty in Manila, Philippines for 32 days.

Former Olympus president Tsuyoshi Kikukawa may soon spend up to five years of his life in prison for his role in Olympus' massive financial scandal that rocked corporate Japan back in 2011. Prosecutors allege that Kikukawa orchestrated a coverup of $1.7 billion in company losses, one of the biggest frauds in Japanese history and the country's equivalent of America's Enron scandal.

This post could also be titled "How Not to Photograph Endangered Male Animals." The video above was uploaded to the Web by the BBC back in 2009 and shows photographer and zoologist Mark Carwardine finding and photographing a rare parrot in a New Zealand forest. Unfortunately for Carwardine -- and hilariously for the rest of us -- he gets closer to the bird than he was planning to.

Photographer Bertrand Kulik was standing at his window in Paris last week when he noticed something peculiar about the horizon. Although his view is ordinarily quite beautiful because of the Eiffel Tower dominating the cityscape, this time it had something he was treated with a bright and colorful horizon rainbow painted across the sky in the distance.

Did you know Instagram's mobile app can be used to view movies? Okay, okay, you won't be able to watch the latest Hollywood blockbuster on it, but it's possible to enjoy glimpses of old school silent films.

The clever idea was discovered Canadian advertising agency Cossette to promote the upcoming Toronto Silent Film Festival, and involves using the app's slideshow view to zip through still photos as if they were images in a flipbook.

Sunday morning: time to survey the damage from last night's party. As I walked around the apartment picking up empty beer bottles and cups, wiping up spills, and putting the furniture back, I remember having a distinct feeling that something was amiss. A quick survey of the apartment, and it hits me. My DSLR was missing.

Even as I frantically searched every nook and cranny of the apartment I knew the answer: someone had stolen my camera.

Back in 2010, we shared how artist Luke Jerram had created a wedding ring that can project tiny slide photographs when placed in front of a light source. After seeing that idea, Cambridge-based engineer John Ding decided that he wanted to make something similar for his sweetheart, Becky.

Ding spent the next two years designing a silver pendant that can project a photograph. He ended up creating what he calls the "Projecting Pendant."

Photographer Jesse David McGrady has a super simple trick for adding a hazy, ethereal effect to your photographs: wrap a plastic sandwich bag around your lens. It sounds ridiculous and silly, but the results you get are actually quite nice!

In this post, I will share some of my techniques and experiences of backing up photos using a tablet while traveling.

Like most other landscape/nature/travel photographers, when I am on a multi-day or multi-week photo tour, I face the problem of backing up my photos from the memory cards. A laptop computer is a nature choice for most people. With a laptop, we can copy files between the memory cards, laptop disk drive, and external disks. We can even do some light editing.

Russian photographer Vitaliy Raskalov recently visited the Great Pyramid of Giza with two of his adventuring photography buddies: Vadim Mahorov and Marat Dupri. Unlike most camera-toting tourists visiting the famous site (the pyramid is the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), the trio was not content with sticking to visitor-approved areas: they decided to risk prison time by sneaking to the top of the pyramid and photographing that rarely-seen view.

Here's a tutorial on how to capture an exploding water balloon in the precise moment the balloon pops, while the water still holds the shape of a balloon. I didn’t want to invest any money in laser barriers or something similar, so I built a very simple mechanism. It doesn't give me perfect timing, but it produces acceptable results.

By all accounts, a job at one of the major tech or social giants is to be envied. With atmospheres focused on camaraderie and innovation, you would expect that working for Google or Twitter would be pretty fun -- and now Twitter has the office cam to prove it.

Put together by Mo Kudeki (an International Engineer at Twitter) as part of one of the company's quarterly hackweeks, the camera is set up in an oversized bird house at Twitter's new San Francisco office where it takes pictures of willing visitors and employees.

I'm Google is an interesting Tumblr blog started in 2011 by Baltimore-based artist Dina Kelberman. It's a running blog collage comprising Google Image Search photographs and YouTube videos. Kelberman writes that the content is compiled into a "long stream-of-consciousness": as you scroll down through the seemingly-never-ending flow of imagery, you'll notice that the sections of similar images flow seamlessly from one to another based on form, composition, color, and theme.

This camera is a poor man's large format camera. It is made with a simple shoebox acting as a dark room.

French photographer Julien Mauve has always been fascinated by light, and his project "After Lights Out" is an interesting study of the subject. The series is based on a simple idea: what would it look like if darkness overtook our world, and only a single source of light were present to pierce the darkness?

Each of the scenes seen in Mauve's photos are completely devoid of artificial light except from a single source, through a single window.

Retro filters are still doing their steady march toward becoming ubiquitous across camera and photo-sharing mobile apps. Today, Google announced a new update to its iPhone and Android Google+ apps that adds these filters for people who want to make their photographs look "retro."

In 2007, Lindsay Scallan of Newnan, Georgia took her camera -- complete with underwater housing -- on a trip to Hawaii. It was on that trip, during a nighttime scuba dive in Kaanapali, that Scallan lost her camera to the deep blue. Understandably, she didn't expect she would ever see it again.

But as we've seen in the past, the rule is "never say never" when it comes to finding long-lost photographs. Six years later, the Canon Powershot washed up 6,200 miles away on the beaches of Taiwan where a China Airlines employee picked it up, and began searching for the owner.

Dear Getty Images: I quit.

I just sent Getty Images the email above, which, I think, is how I terminate my relationship with them. Hopefully. I’m not 100% sure, but I can’t seem to figure out any way to do it online, so I’m hoping that email works.

One half of the face above is a photograph, and the other half is a highly detailed computer generated rendering created using a program called KeyShot by Luxion. Can you tell which is which? If you can't tell, why should we? (Okay, to be honest, we're not sure either).

Joseph Flaherty over at Wired writes that KeyShot and other programs that can generate photorealistic renders are being widely used for product photos these days, and are quickly killing off jobs that were once held by photographers.

About a month ago, the fact that Australian customers pay so much more for Adobe CS6 that it's actually cheaper to fly to the US and get it went viral on the internet. At that point, Adobe had already been summoned in front of Parliament to explain the "price gouging," and had even dropped their monthly Creative Cloud subscriptions to reasonable rates in response.

Now, Adobe -- alongside Apple and Microsoft -- have finally been forced to keep that appointment. And during the meeting, each of the three companies gave the Australian Parliamentary Committee a few reasons as to why exactly Australian customers have to pay so much more for some of their products.

With the cost of my local neg scanner in London being £40/hour for a Hasselblad Flextight, I have been digitising using a DSLR for a quite a while. The results can be extremely good as long as a little time is put into the setup to begin with.

Hunger Pains is a very... different series of portraits by NYC-based photographer Ted Sabarese. For each of the photographs, Sabarese asked his model one simple question: "What are you craving at the moment?" He then took the food described, had them turned into clothing items, and photographed the models wearing the things they'd like to eat.