March 2013

Here’s a fun contraption that could make breakfast that much more photographic each morning.

Under the FAA's remote control guidelines, most photographers and videographers can get away with doing as much UAV photography as they want. Problems arise when you try to turn your aerial photography into a business, as one Minnesota-based company found out earlier this week.

Some pretty amazing new software developed by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics is bringing something akin to cloning to the world of HD video. Using a step-by-step process, the software removes moving people or objects from video and then fills in the empty space with data from other frames.

Here's a cheap, long-lasting DIY option for those of you in need of another backdrop and/or reflector for your studio shoots. Put together by photographer Tiffany Angeles, this short video shows you all of the materials you'll need to create your own sturdy backdrop/reflector combo in the comfort of your own home.

"There's the kind of lighting you do because you want it to look like ambient light. And there's the kind of lighting you do just because you think it looks cool. This was [the latter]." That's how Greg Heisler describes this photograph he took of now-retired NBA star Alonzo Mourning for ESPN magazine.

Memoto has been making an appearance at the SXSW 2013 festival over the past week. When founders arrived at the show last Thursday, they wore two of the tiny lifelogging cameras they've been developing. The devices snapped one photo ever thirty seconds, and the duo soon amassed tens of thousands of point-of-view images capturing the things they were experiencing in Austin, Texas.

If you're curious about the image quality of the wearable cameras, the company has published a set of initial sample photos.

Unsharp Mask: the sharpening filter of choice for photographers everywhere. It’s a fantastic tool that can really take an image to the next level when used correctly and I’m here to tell you that you should never use it again. That’s right, bid it a fond adieu and stop using Unsharp Mask. Forever.

Japanese photographer Satoki Nagata moved to Chicago in 1992 to document the city and its people. His background is in neuroscience (he has a PhD in the field), but his passion is creating intimate documentary photography projects in his city.

During a recent winter, Nagata decided to try his hand at using a flash for street photography at night. Instead of mounting his flash to his camera, however, he decided to use it off camera. Combined with the light rain and falling snow, the flash turned many of his photographs into abstract and surreal images that almost look as though he overlaid photographs of stars.

At a launch event in NYC last night, Samsung unveiled its latest flagship smartphone: the Galaxy S4. It's a phone that looks remarkably similar to its predecessor, and one that is heavily geared toward photography. Having just launched a smartphone-style compact camera, the Galaxy Camera, Samsung appears to have stuffed many of the same technologies and features inside this latest smartphone.

If you're a sucker for natural wonders of the world and are constantly in search of places to add to your photography bucket list, you might want to look at paying a visit to Kelimutu, a volcano in Indonesia. It's known for the three crater lakes found at its summit, which are close in proximity but very different in appearance.

A few years ago, photographer Samuel Chapman of The Rocket Factory found himself with an annoying problem on his hands. After purchasing a number of neutral density filters for his DSLR, he found that Nikon's $2,000 14-24mm lens didn't have any good way of being used with a filter.

He had already paid hundreds of dollars each for his fancy filters, so he decided to make a makeshift adapter for the 14-24mm lens... using a sponge. The result is a product Chapman calls the "FX Sponge Filter Holder 5000."

Canon is planning to hold a product launch press conference on March 22, 2013, and it's letting various media outlets know by sending them slick black boxes with silver pens. Wait, what? Pens? Yup, and they're not just your everyday pen: Canon's invite pens contain a secret message in a manner worthy of a secret agent.

Between 2009 and 2011, Italian photographer Marina Rosso shot images for a photo project showing what life as a married couple looks like after nearly six decades together. Her subjects were Licia and Ryan -- her own grandparents.

Vice President Joe Biden's press secretary has apologized to a student reporter at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism's Capital News Service after the journalist was forced to delete photographs he shot at a domestic violence event featuring Biden and other politicians.

Here's a startling side-by-side comparison of news photos that has begun floating around on the social web. Both photographs show a large crowd gathered to witness the unveiling of a new pope. The top one was what AP photographer Luca Bruno saw in 2005 when Pope Benedict XVI was introduced, while the bottom one is what AP photographer Michael Sohn witnessed yesterday at the election of Pope Francis.

Did you know that YouTube isn't just for uploading videos? Google's popular video hosting service also has a special feature designed just for photo slideshows. If you've never considered using YouTube for photos, you may have never noticed the option, but it's right there on the Upload page.

Swiss photographers Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs (yes, the ones who created a large format camera out of books) have a clever series of photos that uses wooden beams to play around with a few things photographers often think about: lines, angles, and perspective.

For each of the photos, the duo constructed a structure of wooden beams that blends in with buildings in the background from the perspective of the camera. The resulting scene looks as though the wood magically connects the lines of the buildings with the foreground.

Google announced a new "spring cleaning" initiative yesterday through which some of the company's not-as-popular apps and services will be terminated to allow attention and resources to be focused on the heavily used ones. The notice that sparked the most hoopla was the death notice for Google Reader, but another photography-related one was also included in the notice: Snapseed.

In what may be a sign of sad times to come for Nik Software fans, Google is saying that it will be abandoning Nik's Snapseed for Desktop photo editing app.

Kodak burned historic amounts of money in 2012, but is apparently still on track to leave bankruptcy sometime this year. The company released an annual report with performance figures and messages to investors. One of the glaring numbers in the statement was the fact that company lost $1.38 billion in 2012, almost double the amount it lost in 2011.

Clothing and cute pets are two subjects that have big followings online. Combine them, and you've got yourself something viral. Dave Fung and Yena Kim of New York City have brewed up a fun photo project that's quickly gaining a lot of attention. It's called Menswear Dog, and is what you might get if you combined The Sartorialist with a dog blog.

How well does your favorite photo hosting and/or sharing service handle the copyright information and EXIF data of your photographs? How do the popular services stack up against one another in this regard?

Metadata handling isn't often discussed when photo sites are compared, but that's what the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) has been devoting an entire study to. The organization has published its findings regarding which companies play nicely with your metadata, and which pretend it's not there.

The Sakurajima volcano in southern Japan has been quite active so far in 2013, and photographer Martin Rietze recently traveled to the site to document the eruptions through photographs. His images capture smoke billowing out of the crater, lava exploding in trails of orange light, and lightning flashing back and forth inside the dark ash cloud.

Fine art and portrait photographer Edouard Janssens -- the man behind the 1 to 100 years project we featured some time ago -- recently decided that he wanted to begin using large-format instant film to shoot an art series of "eerie" portraits. In order to do this, he had to painstakingly acquired several pieces of expensive gear, and during this search he stumbled on one very special find: a box of 8x10 Polaroid instant film that had expired in October of 1978.

We are in the midst of sea change -- a tidal wave might be more accurate -- within the medium of photography. While the lens is still firmly fixed to the camera body, the body itself appears to have imploded. The inner workings -- that is, the guts of the camera from Talbot’s days (when cameras were called “mousetraps” by his wife who was always tripping over them) -- have changed faster than anyone expected.

Most high-end digital cameras (not named Ricoh) aren't designed to be modular. If you want a new sensor in your camera, you'll need to buy an entirely new camera. Want to use a different lens system? You're out of luck.

What if there existed a universe in which all the major camera companies came together to form an extremely versatile modular digital camera? That's what Korean designers Dae jin Ahn and Chun hyun Park are attempting to answer with their concept camera design, called Equinox.

Yesterday we reported on a very early stage rumor that Canon may be building an ultra-portable DSLR that packs the punch and form of a DSLR in a body the size of a mirrorless camera. The rumor has heat up overnight, and now there's a first list of leaked specs that offer a better idea of what the camera may be like.

This portrait is of a little boy named Lucas who lives in Sydney, Australia. Like many children around the world, Lucas enjoys playing with toys, particularly his set of miniature trains and wooden railroad tracks.

Like many photographers around the world, Gabriele Galimberti enjoys traveling. During an 18 month span of travels, Galimberti visited and photographed children in a long list of countries around the world with each child posing with his or her favorite toys. Lucas was one of the kids Galimberti visited for his project, which is titled "Toy Stories."

Adobe is pushing hard towards cloud services and digital distribution. Its Creative Cloud software subscription service appears to be on a tear, with hundreds of thousands of subscribers paying monthly fees for always-updated software that traditionally came in boxes that carry hefty price tags.

Earlier this year, Adobe acquired portfolio service Behance in order to make the Creative Cloud more social, and now the company is making another bold move as it heads more and more toward the cloud: it will soon stop selling boxed copies of its Creative Suite software altogether.

Freshly launched over at SXSW 2013 in Austin, Texas, Imgembed is a new startup company that aims to promote the legitimate use of photos online. Well, it's actually the latest in a string of companies to tackle the embeddable photo concept. For photo purchasers, it's an easy way to find, pay for, and use images. For photographers, its an easy way to make your images available for purchase.

Leica's Hermes edition M9-P is a beautiful camera that comes with a steep price of $50,000. If you don't have a spare 50 Gs lying around waiting to be burned, check out this replica created by Halifax, Nova Scotia-based photographer Chris McVeigh using 114 LEGO pieces. Sure, it may not be functional as a camera, but it's a great conversation piece, and one that you can build yourself at home!

26-year-old freelance photojournalist Daniel Rodrigues landed the biggest 'win' of his photographic career this year when it was announced that his photo Football in Guinea-bissau (shown above) had won 1st prize in the prestigious World Press Photo competition's Daily Life category.

The win was more than a fancy new line on his resume: you see, just two years ago Rodrigues was flat broke, and this award will allow him to resume the career that he almost had to abandon to survive.

Stephanie and her husband Jonathan are huge fans of Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes. When the two got engaged and married in 2011 and 2012, respectively, they decided to use the comic as their theme for both their engagement photo shoot and their wedding. To capture the images, they recruited San Francisco-based photographer Junshien of Junshien International.

Canon's EOS M mirrorless camera is meant to offer DSLR-caliber image quality inside a compact camera-sized body. However, stuffing an APS-C sensor into a tiny form factor may not be the only way Canon is trying to go small. There are now murmurings that Canon may have a super small DSLR camera in the works for photogs who need a little extra portability.

Like many of us, astrophotographer Christoph Malin is a big fan of astronaut and fellow photographer Don Pettit. We've featured Pettit's photography several times before -- we even shared his entire talk from Luminance 2012 here -- but in the video above, Malin puts together a little bit of both into a fitting tribute to his favorite "astronaut, poet and astrophotographer."

Photoshop wizard Cristian Girotto's photo series L'Enfant Extérieur (the outer child) takes his subjects' inner children and brings them, quite literally, to the surface. In the series, Girotto explores what adults would look like if men and women never left the cuteness of infancy -- at least in some respects. Each photo, originally captured by photographer Quentin Curtat, shows the subject 'shopped to look like a toddler.

It’s fairly well known that not all lenses are created equal. Put that in combination with manufacturing variables and lenses don’t always perfectly align with the camera mount. Generally the differences are minor and for the most part negligible, but I buy old Minolta lenses from eBay and I want to get the best bang for buck out of them.

I started making micro adjustments to my lens/camera combinations when I first got Sony’s a77, and have now micro adjusted all my lenses for the a99 and D3. After reading what the Internet had to offer regarding “micro adjustment” or the “fine tune” functions higher level DSLRs offer, I quickly printed off some charts similar to rulers and taped them to my wall to start making adjustments.

Nancy Rose is a guidance counselor who lives on Canada's east coast. When she's not meeting up with people who need counseling, Rose enjoys spending time with a very special group of furry friends: squirrels that call Rose's backyard their home.

In recent times, one particularly dear friend and photo subject has been Mr. Peanuts, a friendly squirrel that lives to the left of Rose's yard, on a neighbor's land. Rose has Mr. Peanuts pose for all kinds of cute scenes by creating scenes with tiny props, and then convincing the little guy to pose using peanuts.

Spider Camera Holster just announced its newest addition to the holster family. Unveiled at WPPI Las Vegas, the company's new Spider Monkey does for accessories what the SpiderPro or Black Widow Kit does for your SLR -- it keeps them instantly accessible on your hip at all times.

If you've been looking for a basic photography course online, here's something to hold you over until you find the right one for you. This "Photography (Basic)" course was put together by the U.S. Navy in 1993. And thanks to Reddit user clutch70706, you now have access to the full thing in PDF format.

Madeleine Corcoran over at Duckrabbit has published a sharp criticism of photojournalist Samuel Aranda's decision to license his most famous conflict photo to Canadian electronic band Crystal Castles for use on their album cover and merchandise.

Cinetics, the people who brought you the CineSquid and CineSkates, introduced their newest alteration to a GorillaPod this last week, the CineVise. While the CineSquid enhanced your GorillaPod's legs with powerful suction cups, and the CineSkates put your camera on wheels, the CineVise (quite literally) clamps your camera onto any clamp-able surface you may need to secure it to.

New Zealand-based travel photographer Amos Chapple visited Iran on three personal trips between December 2011 and January 2013. While he was there, he photographed the country and its people as he saw them on the ground.

Lumio is an innovative new LED light idea that has been making quite a splash over on Kickstarter. Conceived by San Francisco-based industrial designer Max Gunawan, the lamp has raised nearly half a million dollars from nearly 5,000 backers over on Kickstarter -- after an initial goal of just $60,000. It's a lamp that's inspired by the design of a book: open the cover and the light turns on, close it and it shuts off.

Dutch photographers Thijs groot Wassink and Ruben Lundgren live in London and Beijing, and work together on photo projects as a duo known as WassinkLundgren. One of their collaborations is a set of street photographs shot on the sidewalks of Tokyo, Japan in 2009 and 2010. Titled Tokyo Tokyo, each of the pieces is a diptych showing the same "decisive moment" shot by both photographers at the same moment in time, and then arranged side by side.

Remember that beautiful cardboard Hasselblad created by designer Kelly Angood a couple of years ago and released as a PDF template? If you'd like to build your own but don't want to go through the trouble of printing the design onto cardboard and cutting out the pieces, you'll be glad to know that Angood is working on launching a do-it-yourself kit for the camera.

Fujifilm is best known for its camera and film products, but the company is now using its photographic expertise to invade new markets as well. The company is reportedly using its background in silver to create touchscreen displays that are bigger and more affordable than current offerings.

Gigapixel photography has become all the rage as of late, as photographers around the world are using special rigs to shoot numerous photos of a scene and then stitching them together into an uber-high-res panorama. Austrian photographer Kurt Hoerbst is taking the high-res photo-stitching concept and applying it to a different subject: human subjects.

Using wood as a canvas for photo prints isn't uncommon these days, but the prints typically use some kind of transfer process that applies a photo onto the wood. German architects Michael Ahlers and Roland Heuger have been experimenting with a new wood photo process since the summer of 2011. Their company Photocarver can take any photograph and cut them into wood blocks using straight cuts that vary in thickness as they go along.

When photographer Mike Brodie was 17 years old, he had his first train hopping experience in his hometown of Pensacola, Florida. Over a number of days, that train would take him to Jacksonville, Florida and then back. It was as short trip, but sparked a lifelong passion for train hopping and exploration in Brodie.

Brodie would then spend more than 10 years exploring the United States through train hopping, hitchhiking, and walking. Throughout his journeys, he would document the lifestyle through photography. Images from 2006 through 2009 have now been compiled into a photo project titled, "A Period of Juvenile Prosperity."

We've shown a number of photos of disassembled cameras in the past, but 19-year-old London-based graphic design student Stefan Abrahams went a step further with his camera deconstruction project. Instead of simply arranging the individual components neatly, Abrahams decided to turn the pieces into a typeface.