Tensions are running high again on the Korean peninsula. As international observers watch closely for what move the North will play next, I thought it might be a good time to revisit some of my work from photographing in North Korea, undercover on-assignment, for the Globe & Mail in 2009.
If you've ever watched the evening news on television, you've probably seen photos and video captured by the powerful cameras on the station's helicopter. Here's something interesting: on a clear night, the long reach of the helicopter's camera can actually snap a clear photograph of the planet Saturn! …
Samuel Burns is a photographer based in Sydney, Australia who specializes in shooting minimalist landscape photographs using a large format camera. While the scenes chosen for his photographs are already simple and bare, Burns captures them with extremely long exposure times in order to give the locations a blurry and dreamy look.
Here's a new iPhone commercial Apple just released today on its website and on YouTube. It's a 1-minute-long spot that focuses on how the iPhone has shaken up the world of casual photography by becoming the world's most popular camera.
The web is abuzz over newly released photographs of Miss Korea 2013 beauty pageant contestants, and not in a way the photographer or the pageant were expecting. The photographs have sparked heated discussion on the topics of plastic surgery and racism.
Over the last week or so, my series 'Amazon Unpacked' has gone viral. The photographs were made to accompany an article researched and written for the Financial Times Weekend Magazine by Sarah O’Connor. The magazine came out at the start of February, and I put the gallery up on my website a week later.
Ever see those pictures where the stars streak across the sky in a big arc? Or maybe the whole sky looked like it was spinning? What you saw was star trails. The streaks were light left behind on the sensor or film from the star as it traveled across the sky in front of an open camera shutter. In fact, what are being recorded are stationary stars and the rotation of the earth as it spins past them. For me, the images seem to have a certain magic or mystery about them.
Last month, a rumor emerged saying that Olympus' upcoming E-P5 flagship Micro Four Thirds mirrorless camera would have a design inspired by the old Olympus PEN F. Today the first photograph of the camera leaked on the web, confirming that it will indeed carry a sleek new retro styling.
When photographer Caleb Cole sees strangers in public, he wonders about them -- the lives they lead, how they experience the world, how they make meaning of things, etc. This interest led him to start a self-portrait project titled "Other People's Clothes. It's a series of photos in which Cole steps "into the shoes of the types of people" he sees on a daily basis.
Lebanese photographer Alexy Joffre Frangieh is a professional time-lapse creator, and often puts his camera gear in extremely hot environments to create his shots. In order to help dissipate heat, he decided to give one of his kits a custom paint job. The resulting kit looks like something a military might officially assign its combat photographers.
Older Sigma lenses that were designed for Canon EOS film cameras often don't work correctly when mounted onto a new EOS digital SLR, even though the newer bodies still use Canon's EF mount. If you're an owner of such a lens, you might have heard that you can send it in to Sigma's service center for them to rechip it in order to make it compatible again.
A neat way to present a recap of a trip is to take all the photographs taken over many days -- both keepers and unwanted shots -- and string them together into a fast-paced time-lapse video. A problem with this type of video, however, is that the photos often fly by so quickly that it's difficult for your brain to distinguish between them and to pick out "highlights." …
There is no shortage of landscape photographs of mountains at sunrise on the Internet, but how often do you get to see photographs captured at the same time from the mountain's perspective? Photographer Todd Caudle ('Cloudman' on 500px) was able to capture these two viewpoints simultaneously yesterday morning by shooting with both his personal camera and a live webcam located at the mountain's summit.
The video above is a commercial Canon is running over in Japan to promote its new Kiss X7/Rebel SL1, the world's smallest and lightest DSLR. It shows how the camera is perfect for soccer moms who would like to capture action shots of their "super soccer kids."
What will future generations think of the cameras we're using these days? What will the cameras look like to them? Japanese artist Maico Akiba has a project titled "100 Years Later" that imagines what various modern commonplace objects might look like if rediscovered by people a century later. Among the objects are a number of cameras.
An old class photo taken in 1941 at Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High School is about to be auctioned off, and it's set to fetch quite a price. Why, you ask? Well, because a girl by the name of Norma Jeane Baker -- who later became famous as Marilyn Monroe -- both signed and was in the picture.
We've mentioned Sigma's upcoming revolutionary USB dock before, but until today we had no idea when the product would become a reality or how much it would cost. Thankfully, Sigma has cleared that up for us, and thrown in a demo video to boot.
When Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two Boston bombing suspects, was discovered hiding in a man's boat just outside the perimeter police had set up to search for him, the cops took no chances. Rather than sending officers right in and risking injury, they enlisted the help of an impressive aerial camera to confirm his location and then keep watch as police tried to coax him out.
Somewhere in-between the point-and-shoot and ILC categories falls the superzoom, and it doesn't get much love. Often nearly as bulky as an entry-level DSLR, superzooms present a mix of features that only endear them to certain consumers. Sony's newly announced Cyber-shot aims to expand that market by shrinking down the traditional superzoom to tiny proportions.
'The Unseen Seen' is a project by Austrian photographer Reiner Riedler that captures the beauty of classic cinema in an unconventional way.
Miller's Professional Imaging is the largest professional photo lab in the United States, with facilities in Pittsburg, Kansas and Columbia, Missouri that offer a slew of printing services for hobbyists, semi-pro and professional photographers alike. In the above video, Chris Marquardt of Photography Tips from the Top Floor treats us to a behind the scenes look at the company's 40,000 square-foot facility in Columbia, MO.
Earlier today, brothers-in-law Daniel Fujikake and Mac Nguyen of HI Resolution Enterprises announced a new product for the photography enthusiast community that they're trying to get some help funding. Launched via Kickstarter campaign, the Snapzoom is a universal adapter that can attach a slew of optical scopes (i.e. binoculars, telescopes, etc.) to your smartphone in lieu of a telephoto lens.
There's often a degree of anonymity in online classifieds, as you often don't learn what a person looks like until you respond to their ad and meet them in person. Perth, Australia-based photographer Phil Hill has been working on a portrait project featuring the people who post listings to Gumtree, a free online classifieds website that competes with Craigslist.
Calgary, Alberta, Canada-based camera store The Camera Store just released this review in which Chris Niccolls takes a look at the new Canon Rebel T5i (also known as the 700D and Kiss X7i). The 1-minute-long video may be the most honest review of the camera yet.
A neat piece of photo-related home (or studio) decor: Brooklyn-based poster printer Pop Chart Lab has created a beautiful new poster called "A Visual Compendium of Cameras" that offers a brief visual history of photography.
Panasonic this morning announced two new cameras: a Lumix G6 Micro Four Thirds mirrorless camera and a Lumix LF1 high-end compact camera. Both cameras offer some pretty solid specs for photography enthusiasts.
I’d love to say I coined the term "Like farm", but it’s entirely possible I read it somewhere before, as a brief search on that term turned up other articles on the growing phenomenon of content farms on Facebook. For a while now, I’ve been watching my own news feed fill up with unattributed photos and artwork. And I think we've all seen the equally unattributed and ubiquitous quote art (either graphic design or simply pasted over photos). Although the amount of this content seems to rise …
Back in 2010, we shared some statistics from CareerCast's annual list of the best and worst jobs, and things weren't looking good for the photography profession. At the time, "Photographer" ranked 126th of 200 on that list, with "Photojournalist" coming in near the very bottom at 189th. Sadly, in the intervening years since we last shared the info, things haven't exactly gotten better.
In response to September 11th and London Bombings, the UK drafted a series of Terrorism Acts, giving their officers certain rights they thought would help fight terrorism. This included a section (58a) added in 2008 that made it illegal to photograph or film a police officer if the footage was likely to be useful to a terrorist. The police's interpretation of that section has since changed, but not before that "if" caused some newsworthy controversy.
Call it the an energy, call it an artist's personality, call it whatever you want, Canadian portrait photographer Christopher Wahl has it. One of the best and best-known portrait photographers from the Great White North, his pictures have been published in every major magazine in his own country, and many beyond its borders.
In 2010, then BU journalism student Johannes Hirn put together a photo essay titled "Will Box for Passport." The essay was based around a boxer by the name of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, better known now as "Suspect #1" or the "Black Hat bomber" from the Boston Marathon bombing.
If you're planning to attend the Kentucky Derby early next month, you might want to make sure you'll be content with capturing your memories with a smartphone or point-and-shoot. Churchill Downs, the racetrack that hosts the famous horse race, has unveiled new security measures that will prevent attendees from bringing certain items onto the grounds. Among them: all interchangeable lens cameras.
More and more photographers are attempting to build their own DIY lightboxes these days as they look for ways to easily digitize their film at home using a digital camera. However, a common problem that plagues these lightboxes is vignetting -- lighting is uneven and shadows form gradients near the edges of the surface.
Marta Crass of Knoxville, Tennessee is quite handy with cardboard. She runs an Etsy shop called CisforCardboard that's dedicated to her custom cardboard art. She handcrafts signs, wall hangings, letters, and anything else you can dream up... including cameras.
This beautiful video shows three years in the life of the Sun in three minutes. The photographs are shown at a pace of two photos for each day. Thus, there are a little over 2000 photos in this video that are shown at around 12 frames per second.
If you're ever in England and come across an old camper van with the words "Camper Obscura" splashed across the side, knock on the door and say hi to photographers Jonathan Blyth and Matthew Pontin. Since the summer of 2010, Blyth and Pontin have traveled widely around the South West of England, teaching people about photography from the rear cabin of the vehicle.
Having your laptop and photographs stolen usually isn't a good thing, but for photographer Melanie Willhide, it actually helped her career move forward.
From most angles, it looks like a bunch of lights flickering at random. But stand in just the right spot, and you’ll perceive moving bodies. Jim Campbell’s installation for Light Show – a new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London – is a powerful antidote to the high-tech obsession with performance, the endless competition to pack more megapixels into a smaller screen or sensor. It also provides fresh insight into human vision.
One of the big trends in the camera industry these days is the stuffing of "big camera" sensors into "small camera" bodies. After all, if you can get the same image quality from a camera that's smaller in size, why wouldn't you want to? (That's the idea, at least).
F-Stop Gear has decided to put together a miniseries of inspirational shorts about the pro photographers they sponsor. These f-stop pros are some of the best outdoor photographers in the business, and the company would like to give its fans some insight into the men and women behind the epic shots.
In an attempt to speed up its sizable network and lower costs, Facebook recently decided to begin using Google's WebP image format. The format was designed by Google as a space-saving alternative for PNGs and JPEGs. WebP provides lossless and lossy compression, support for an alpha channel, support for animation and more -- all at much smaller sizes and almost identical image quality.
Last week was full of horror, disbelief and touching compassion. It was also a week driven by photographs and discussion about photography. From the iconic photo by Boston Globe’s John Tlumacki on the cover of Sports Illustrated, to the hundreds of citizen photos turned in to the FBI, the story and the events that followed were driven by photography.
Do you ever have those times when you look up or around you and you see something like the scene above?
Duesseldorf, Germany-based photographer Jakob Wagner wants to show you how diverse photographs of the Atlantic Ocean can be. The images in his series "Madeiran Weather" are all of the same patch of coastal area, yet they are drastically different from one another due to the weather.
How do you solve the problem of professional concert photographers snapping unflattering photos of you during your live shows? One way is to ban them completely, and that's exactly what Beyonce is doing with her latest concert tour. Policies like hers may be growing in popularity among artists who want to control their image, but the policy is still causing quite a hoopla.
If you thought ordinary iPad photographers looked silly, wait till you spot someone in public with a telephoto lens strapped to the front (er... or back?) of their tablet. The iPad Telephoto Lens is a new external lens attachment for iPad users who would like to squeeze a little extra reach from their tablet camera.
Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how you can make a pretty nice flash diffuser for your macro setup for just a little time and a little money.
This will probably be of limited interest to most of you, but we like to know how things work, not just how well they work. We thought we’d take a couple of pictures when we disassembled a ballhead in case any of you were interested. Our demonstration partner today was a Benro B1 ballhead that had a stripped tension adjustment knob, but all ballheads work basically the same way.
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has been serving as one of the International Space Station's resident photographers. Every day he posts beautiful photographs showing what our planet looks like from orbit to his Twitter account, @cmdr_hadfield.
One of the big gripes people have with the idea of taking pictures with Google Glass camera glasses is that the device requires you to say "ok, glass, take a picture" in order to snap a shot. While this is great for situations when you need hands-free photography and don't mind saying a voice command, it would be highly inconvenient in situations in which you would rather not (or can't) talk.
