April 2013

Lytro introduced refocus-able photos to the public when it unveiled the world's first consumer light field camera back in October 2011. Since then, a number of people and companies have been brainstorming refocus-able photo technology of their own.

One developer created a tool that can turn video footage into refocus-able stills. Toshiba and a company called DigitalOptics are both working to build Lytro-style smartphone camera modules. Next week, there's going to be a new contender: an app called FocusTwist.

Putting together presentations often involves breaking out either PowerPoint or Keynote. But while both programs are great, they're designed to work just as well for the high school student, business professional, and creative professional. Fortunately, there's finally a program that focuses on the last of these.

About a week ago, Red Bull Illume and Snap! Orlando revealed a collaboration they were working on called "Motion to Light," in which they paired the fluid motion of certain sports with light painting. Part one used photographer Patrick Rochon and a team of wakeboarders to capture some stunning pics. Now a week later, we have part two. And the sport of choice? Paramotoring.

As a photographer, it would be nice if you could always have your portfolio in your pocket so that you can show prospective customers your work right away. And even though there are portfolio websites that will allow you to display your work on your phone, you're not always around a solid data connection; and keeping your work on your phone isn't a good idea either, since high-res photos fill up a 16GB iPhone hard drive before you know it.

Thankfully, there's another option. Keep them on the i-FlashDrive by PhotoFast. A thumb drive that plays nice with both computers and iOS devices, this little guy can store either 8GB or 16GB and will allow you to keep any photos or other data easily accessible and in your pocket without taking up space on your phone.

The story of photographer Jacques Lowe and his iconic work chronicling the Kennedys and the era in US history known as Camelot is a tragic one. As President John F. Kennedy's official photographer for three years -- 2 before and 1 after he became president -- Lowe captured over 40,000 photos of the Kennedy family at work and play.

Because of the immense worth these photos held to Lowe and the general public, he took great care in choosing where he would store his negatives; he chose a fire-proof bank vault in the World Trade Center. On September 11th, 2001, his entire archive was lost.

Photographer Ole C. Salomonsen loves shooting the northern lights or, as he calls them, the polar spirits. And for his most recent film he went all out by putting together time-lapse photography of the aurora above cities, in front of starry backgrounds and above gorgeous fjords with a couple of mind-blowing video captures thrown in for good measure.

Aberrations, distortions, corrupt images; all of these are things we typically try to avoid in the world of digital photography. But the Glitché app does the exact opposite. Instead of trying to remove digital imperfections from your photos, the app piles specific distortions on, and in the process turns your pristine pics into "works of digital art" ... at least that's what they're calling them.

Hungarian photographer and retoucher Flóra Borsi created a popular series of photos last year titled "Photoshop in Real Life." The images imagined what various Photoshop Tools might be used for if they had physical powers in our world, and were quickly shared across the web.

Now Borsi is back with a new set of images that show off her Photoshopping prowess. Titled "Time Travel," the photos show Borsi inserted into various historical photographs of famous individuals.

Typical photography exists around the visible spectrum (think of the rainbow), but cameras are also able to pick up other wavelengths of radiation. Ultraviolet radiation, as the name suggests, comes after the violet section of the visible spectrum so is not visible to our eyes. However, some animals (birds, for example) are able to see UV.

UV reflectance photography essentially is recording the UV radiation which is reflected back from a UV source. A UV source emits UV radiation, and this is often referred to as UV light. However UV light does not exist, since light is visible and UV is not! UV reflectance is a fairly involved and arduous process without specialized equipment, however the results can be very rewarding.

Fine art photographer Aaron Ansarov's project Zooids contains beautiful, colorful, and abstract images that might look to you like something biological seen through a microscope. They're actually macro portraits of the Portuguese Man O' War, a jellyfish-like creature that is responsible for 10,000 documented painful stings worldwide.

When photographer Callum Cooper moved from Melbourne, Australia to London, England, one of the things that caught his eye was the uniformity (or "conformity") seen in the city's residential areas. Along a street, multiple buildings would have exactly the same architecture, and if it weren't for the minor differences in the facades, some of them can hardly be distinguished from one another.

Cooper then came up with the idea of exploring this phenomenon using photographs -- photos that would become a "structuralist film."

Over 100 million people around the world snap photos with Instagram on their phones now. If you like the look of Instagram filters but would rather not broadcast the photographs to the world every time you snap a picture, there's actually a (semi-old) trick you can use to save the pics without sharing them (for iPhone users, at least): all you have to do is turn on "Airplane Mode."

Between 2009 and 2012, Finnish photographer Petri Artturi Asikainen roamed the streets of Tokyo in search of subjects for his project 100 Years in Tokyo. His goal was to collect portraits of people for all the ages between 0 through 100. The result of the effort is a book that contains 202 beautiful portraits -- the faces of a man and a woman for each age in that range.

Yesterday we reported that the online communities of Reddit and 4chan were attempting to identify the attacks behind the Boston Marathon bombings by crowdsourcing publicly available photographs from the scene. We blurred the faces in the photos we shared, since it was likely the people in them are completely innocent.

At least one (much larger) news source didn't. The New York Post actually took one of the photographs being circulated by vigilant photo detectives and ran it on the front page of its newspaper. The headline: "Bag Men: Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon."

Yesterday at noon, after 20 months of planning and work, the Digital Public Library of America finally made its debut. An initiative of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, the DPLA aims to provide anyone with Internet, access to a massive online archive of content including ebooks, manuscripts, works of art and, of course, photographs.

Warfare is often reduced to headlines in the news and numbers on a page, but it's important to remember that there's a human side to it. The soldiers fighting are fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters of people back at home. This is the truth photographer Melissa Cacciola wants to remind the world though her project "War and Peace."

The series consists of 48 tintype photographs of 24 active duty military personnel and veterans. Each subject is photographed both in uniform and in civilian attire.

It's obvious that building a subway station would consist of digging a very large artificial cavern under the earth, but actually seeing one in progress is pretty incredibly. And thanks to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Flickr stream, we can.

Here's a short inspirational video by photographer Joel Sartore in which he talks about shooting for National Geographic and living "a photographer's life." He talks about what it takes to be that kind of photographer, and even though his list includes everything from a palate that can handle strange foods to a Type A personality, it seems that the quality Sartore has in spades is a healthy sense of humor.

People often give iPad photographers a hard time for trying to use an unwieldy tablet as a casual snapshot camera. Tom, the iPad photog seen in the video above, is one person who is glad he was using his iPad as a camera. You see, his iPad-ography saved him from a good deal of pain.

The Boston Marathon bombing was a horrific event that took three lives and left more than 170 people injured; the idea that somebody would try to profit from that is unthinkable. And yet, someone already has.

PechaKucha is a presentation style that gives presenters exactly 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide to get their point across. Designed by architects Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham in Tokyo in 2003, what started as a weekly show-and-tell format at their firm has become a world-wide presentation phenomenon that recently broke into the world of photography.

Instagram has been used in many different ways. We've seen the app inspire an awesome DIY photo booth and even become the tool of choice for certain photography projects. However, we never expected to see the day when you could use your Instagram photos to customize your footwear. And yet, that's exactly what you can do with Nike's PHOTOiD web app.

Remember that giant wooden Nikon 14-24mm hanging lamp we featured back in February? The designer, Spanish studio Monoculo Design, is back with another interesting piece of photography-inspired home decor -- this time for Canon shooters.

The latest creation is a stool that's designed to look just like a Canon 8-15mm fisheye zoom lens.

Two years ago, photographer Chris A. Hughes purchased a 1914 French Richard Verascope camera (shown above) from an elderly man who was clearing out his camera collection in preparation for retirement. When he got into his car after the purchase, Hughes was surprised to find two packages of slides in the camera's leather case.

Upon closer examination, he discovered that the photographs on the slides were captured by a French soldier during World War I.

Yahoo! just released a new weather app that takes advantage of beautiful photos provided by the company's Flickr community to pair in depth weather information with gorgeous photos of your city experiencing similar weather. The idea is that users don't just want to know the weather (numerically speaking), they want to see it.

Back in 2010, we featured the beautiful macro bug photographs of a Belgian photographer named Frans, who uses a custom laser camera rig to capture insects mid-flight. Inspired by fotoopa's work, biochemist and photography enthusiast Linden Gledhill decided to pursue the same photographic subject.

We reported yesterday that the FBI has issued an open call for photographs and videos that may help provide clues in the Boston Marathon bombing case. Since that time, investigators have begun circulating photos of two "possible suspects" spotted in images of the scene, suggesting that analyzing crowdsourced images has indeed been useful in this case.

It's not just government law enforcement that is attempting to use public photographs to identify the attacker, though: the large online communities Reddit and 4chan have also begun carrying out their own crowdsourced photo analysis.

Here's a little photographic history lesson to get your Thursday morning started off right. Did you know that the woman many sources believe was the first female photographer was an English botanist by the name of Anna Atkins?

Atkins repurposed the cyanotype process (discovered by Sir John Herschel in 1842) from a way of making photocopies of notes and diagrams (i.e. blueprints) to a way of making photograms of plants.

According to a recent analysis of its 2012 wedding insurance claims, Travelers Insurance cites the photographer as the most common cause of wedding day mishaps. In its breakdown of the numbers, 24 percent of all wedding issues (the largest chunk) were vendor-related, and 58 percent of all the claims filed under that category involved photos or video.

Wow. The rumor of a new Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8 lens we shared earlier today has just been confirmed by Sigma. The company has just officially announced the lens, which is the world's first lens that offers a fixed f/1.8 aperture throughout its zoom range. That's a pretty big deal.