June 2013

So far, the partnership between Hasselblad and Sony hasn't been as enriching as both companies might have hoped for. Hasselblad's Lunar mirrorless camera was met with less-than-favorable reviews once people realized it was basically a re-branded Sony NEX-7 with a massive price tag.

But have no fear, the companies haven't stopped working together yet. In fact, if recent Hasselblad job listings are to be trusted, the company has three new cameras in the works.

The downside to being the photographer in any given group is that you inevitably wind up being left out of the majority of the photos. One simple little student concept camera seeks to change that by splitting in two and allowing both subject and photographer to take a picture at the exact same time.

At this year's NBA Draft, the Orlando Magic used the second overall pick to select former Indiana University guard Victor Oladipo. For Oladipo, this day at the draft represented the fulfillment of a life-long dream. And thanks to Google Glass, we get to experience a lot of that special day for ourselves.

It's been almost two months since we mentioned Sony's mysterious camera-focused smartphone code-named "honami." Thought to be a PureView and UltraPixel competitor, it's expected to add another powerful camera to the smartphone market, but so far Sony has kept a pretty tight seal on any potential leaks.

It was only a matter of time until spammers got ahold of Instagram, and yesterday it finally happened. Even though the Facebook-owned company hasn't yet made any moves into advertising, you may have noticed an awful lot of pictures of fruit on your feed this weekend.

That's because some spammers managed to hack many an Instagram account Saturday, posting random photos of fruit and singing the praises of a "miracle fruit diet."

Swiss photographer René Burri has had the opportunity to photograph some of history's most famous personalities. His photograph of Che Guevara smoking a cigar in his office in Cuba has become nothing short of iconic, and by a fortunate turn of events, he even met and photographed Pablo Picasso.

The video above is a short interview with Burri in which he tells the stories behind six of his best-known images, including the photos of Guevara and Picasso.

Full disclosure: I've never done commercial photography and don't exactly know what goes into making a picture for an advertisement. The only knowledge I have on this subject is the hours of behind the scenes work I’ve watched, the hundreds of magazines, blogs and tutorials I’ve read and, obviously, the billions of ads that have bombarded my field of view since the first moment I began to comprehend visual information.

When you’re in the process of building a photographic portfolio, you think long and hard about what type of photographer you'd like to be. I’ve read over and over that it's important to choose a specific area of the business in order to obtain the type of clients you're looking for. Before I began this research, I was under the impression that I wanted to be a commercial photographer.

When it comes to cameras, is bigger always better? Samsung didn't try to answer that question, but the company did shoot a funny video that shows pretty clearly that the general public seems to think the answer is "yes," even if there's no difference at all.

Street photographer and Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley Richard Koci Hernandez (known best as just Koci) lucked out when he won Google's #ifihadglass contest and earned the right to purchase (that's right, they didn't give them to him for free) a Google Glass pair and become a "Glass Explorer."

We also lucked out, because Koci has been able to do what many Glass Explorers can't: give us a street photographer's perspective on the revolutionary product that may one day do to smartphones what smartphones did to point-and-shoot cameras.

Photographer Harold Ross is a practitioner of "light sculpting." Visiting various outdoor landscapes at night, he uses LED flashlights and other sources of light in order to selectively illuminate portions of his images. The resulting photos, which together form a project called "Night," show various locations in a style that looks more like an illustration or rendering than a photograph.

Aspiring photojournalists probably have a hard time finding much inspiration these days. The profession was ranked 188th out of 200 in terms of desirability, the entire photo staff of the Chicago Sun Times recently got the axe, and a story from earlier revealed that even the successful ones sometimes get stuck on a 12-hour flight with an empty airplane seat as a subject.

So in case you've always dreamed about becoming a photojournalist but you happen to find yourself low on inspiration, here's a short video in which some successful photojournalists speak to the Museum of Photographic Arts about the craft they love and practice.

Google's Plus social networking site -- now in its second year -- has received a series of updates that are expected to make photo sharing on the service a bit more convenient, and a bit less painful. That's according to Google's Jon Emerson, who has posted some updates to Plus on his very own Google Plus page as of Friday.

"Can you help me with my camera?" I get that a lot, as I'm sure do most camera weenies whose geek credentials are a little too obvious.

And most of the time I'm happy to co-operate. Ideally, I get the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing somebody is going to have legible images of a key moment in their lives. At worst, at least there'll be one less uncontrolled on-board flash to blind me.

For his project "Memory Suitcases," Israeli photographer Yuval Yairi used his suitcases as a "canvas" for displaying his photographs. Each of the images shows a photograph of a scene in Israel displayed on the surface of old luggage.

It's rather obvious that money is to be made in the stock photo industry. Shutterstock founder Jon Oringer is finding tremendous success with his 55 percent stake his the company. Since filing for an IPO and selling its shares publicly last October, Shutterstock's stock value has more than tripled. In the process, Oringer has become Silicon Alley's first billionaire.

Shane LaVancher lives and works in New York City. The primary focus of his work is fashion and editorial assignments. His work is often compared to paintings, as they represent a collision between the worlds of fashion and art.

BuzzFeed isn't the only blog that's routinely accused of using photographs without permission. American celebrity blogger Perez Hilton (above right) is being whacked with a $2.1 million lawsuit by New York Times photographer Robert Caplin (above left) for publishing 14 photographs without permission.

A beautiful photo of a partly cloudy day is, in and of itself, nothing special. When it's taken from the International Space Station looking down, however, it takes on a new meaning. The above photo was snapped by European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano the other day, and it shows what a cloud-covered Earth looks like from orbit.

When they were tasked with putting together a powerful advertising campaign for Crisis Relief Singapore, ad agency Publicis Singapore mixed heart-wrenching photos with a hard-to-swallow tagline to create something quite moving.

Ever since she started with Yahoo!, CEO Marissa Mayer has been making improvements big and small to every service the massive company has. One of the biggest changes came to Flickr, which received a full-blown overhaul. It makes sense, then, that Yahoo! would want to begin integrating Flickr into its other services, and that's exactly what today's update to Yahoo! Mail is bringing.

We've seen some pretty creative music videos in the past, ranging from a microscopic time-lapse to what looked to be a Google Street View music video. The latest creative musical endeavor that has caught our eye is a video by the California group The Grouch & Eligh (or G&E for short).

Working together with Colorado-based DJ Pretty Lights, they put together a video that combines traditional time-lapse and hyper lapse with stop motion for a mind-bending 'lyric lapse' experience similar to what we saw in Marc Donahue and Sean Michael Williams' Dream Music video.

Famed and well-respected optical systems manufacturer Carl Zeiss is taking a step forward to create a "more consistent" image of the brand -- a brand which, up until now, has been known as Carl Zeiss AG.

According to a blog post from earlier today, Carl Zeiss AG will simply go by the name ZEISS moving forward. The company is, of course, named after its optician founder.

We've heard it from light painters before: the air is their canvas. The great thing about light painting is the ability to create something great just about anywhere. But that doesn't mean that you have to start with a blank or un-interesting 'canvas,' so to speak.

Photographer Stefano Bellamoli decided to get creative about where exactly he created his light paintings, and so he took his lights and camera into the marble mines of Verona, Italy.

One of the hashtags that made its way around the Internet after Instagram video was announced last week was #RIPVine. That, of course, was referencing Twitter's 6-second looping video app that many believed would now be brought low by Instagram's new 15-second capabilities.

Unfortunately for Twitter, recent statistics seem to confirm this belief, even as Vine fights back by adding more features.

There are a couple of different types of imaging satellites currently orbiting our planet. On one end of the spectrum are specialized satellites that gather very high-resolution imagery in which you can identify objects as small as 3 feet across. On the other are the lower resolution satellites that beam down photos of larger areas.

California company Planet Labs wants to fill the space in-between, by providing an affordable middle-of-the-road option for companies interested in using it. To that effect, they're planning on launching 28 tiny, mid-resolution satellites called "Doves" into space before the year is out.

What kind of invention gets Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak excited? The simple kind. That's what got Woz to not only notice the credit card-sized Pocket Tripod, but feel so strongly about it he took to the Internet to sing its praises.

Google has had no issues expanding street view to some pretty amazing places. Thanks in large part to the company's trekker backpacks, we can now visit the Grand Canyon, explore Central Park and check out the view from the world's tallest peaks.

But the company isn't above asking others to help expand the "off-road" street view repertoire, and so Google is announcing plans to loan out those expensive Trekkers to worthy third party organizations.

When dog owners take their pets to a photography for studio, they're probably hoping for a series of portraits that make their little friend look "nice." That's most likely not the word that'll come to mind when you look at photographer Pablo Axpe's dog portraits in his project CANIO.

How long does it take for a photon from the Sun to reach your camera sensor (or film) and help form a photograph? If you answered "8 minutes," you'd be kind of right, and but also kind of wrong. An answer that's more correct is "at least tens of thousands of years."

For most of us, a simple photography can remind us of a time and place, and has really served as the de facto method of capturing a moment. From personal memories to iconic events -- there's a photograph to remind us.

Designer Amy Radcliffe has a different method of capturing a moment, however. It's a 'camera' that captures smell, not pictures. Radcliffe is working on the project at Central Saint Martins, an art school in London.

In April of this year, I travelled to the Indonesian capital of Jakarta for the first time. I was excited to visit this new city and start to photograph in one of the world’s most underreported emerging economies. I had read stories about the city’s challenges with water and flooding, which is why I wanted to photograph there and continue my work on environmental issues in developing nations. I wasn’t prepared for the shocking scenes that I was to witness in my time in the city.

"I wonder which one of us dies first?"

It was 2003, and a stray, morbid thought crossed my mind one night in a hotel in Iraq. I was in a room full of twenty and thirty-something photographers and journalists, in the Al-Hamra hotel in Baghdad. A few miles away, the grown-ups from major label news organizations had filled the Sheraton-Palestine hotel---the Al-Hamra was the low-rent downtown spill-over tent.

Canon will soon be announcing a 70D to replace the 60D in its mid-level lineup, and we have a pretty darn good idea of what that camera will be like. An advertisement for the camera has leaked onto the web, revealing just a couple of photos but a whole list of specs and features.

A new client walked into my studio with her three little children, the eldest of which had a session. The little girl was all dressed-up, but very traditionally, so after conferring with mom, we began the session. And it was one of those sessions where everything went right. Happy child, great expressions, and yet, mom was hovering, straightening an already straight bow, smoothing invisible wrinkles in her daughter's tights, "fixing" tiny details, some of which weren't even in the frame.

Have you ever noticed that the watches and clocks found in product photographs and advertisements usually show the time 10:10? If you haven't, pay attention the next time you're flipping through a publication and come across a watch ad---the rule is almost always true.

If you have noticed this, do you know why 10:10 is the default time for watch photographers?

I have sat staring at the computer monitor for the last hour and words refused to appear on the screen. Even in times of stress I can write out a quick blog, but the current situation with Aaron Hernandez has proved tough.

It is important to me to be respectful of the man that was killed and the ongoing investigation, as well as tell about the photoshoot and the side of Aaron that I met on set. With that said, please read this as a story about a shoot and not the lobbying of an opinion over the current investigation.

Back in March 2011, British adventure photographer Dan Milner went on a 9-day photo shoot in the Scottish Highlands for Transworld Snowboarding magazine. While there, he endured blizzards, 100MPH winds, -20° temperatures, and being headbutted in the lens by a wild stag.

It's true: the video above proves it.

After the Chicago Sun-Times laid off its entire staff of photographers at the end of last month, the newspaper's editor sent out a memo stating that employees would be trained in using their smartphones to contribute photography ("iPhone photography basics," it was called).

We may be starting to see the negative effects of having an army of staff iPhoneographers rather than photojournalists. The side-by-side comparison above shows what the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times newspaper covers looked like on June 26th, 2013, two days after the Stanley Cup finals.

It’s fun to print big, but when a client recently asked me to create an image more than four stories tall I have to admit it was really outside of my usual perspective.

The "best pocket camera of all time" now has a successor. Sony today announced the RX100 Mark II, the followup to its highly-acclaimed RX100 premium compact camera.

Sony now has two full frame compact cameras in its lineup---kinda. The company today announced the RX1R, a souped up (or perhaps stripped down?) version of the RX1 that shoots sharper photographs by ditching the anti-aliasing filter in front of the sensor. Aside from the lack of an AA filter, the RX1R and its sibling are virtually identical cameras.

The original title for this article was going to be “Group Buying Deal Review: Why WagJag Can Suck It”. After receiving an “offer” to participate in a group buying deal (also known as social buying or deal-a-day. Examples include Groupon and LivingSocial) from one of the larger local group buying companies in my area, it took me a few days, and some good advice from my wife to cool down and write this (mostly) rational analysis of the group buying deal economics.

Photographer John William Keedy has had to deal with an anxiety disorder for some nine years now. Never feeling like he quite fit in, and at times so nervous around crowds that he would only go to the grocery store when he was certain it was empty, he's intimately familiar with the type of neurotic behavior a condition like his can encourage.

His photo series It's Hardly Noticeable is an exploration of these neurotic, obsessive and strange behaviors that manifest as part of anxiety-based mental disorders.

It's not often an ad gets recognized as a phenomenal piece of cinematography, but that's what has happened for the short film 'Alma' (translated: "soul") produced by Sentimental Filme for the release of the Leica M-Monochrome at the Leica Store in São Paulo.

You've seen timelapse videos, and maybe even hyperlapse videos, but what about a juggle-lapse one? That Juggler Guy recently took his juggling balls and a GoPro camera on a trip around Iceland. What resulted is the mesmerizing video above in which the juggled balls are used for cuts between clips.

Remember the old ViewMaster toys? All you had to do was put in one of the special cartridges and you could go "sightseeing" in 3D. A new invention by entrepreneurs Ethan Lowry and Joe Heitzeberg harkens back to the old ViewMaster days, only instead of a cartridge, you have your iPhone -- and instead of just viewing 3D content, now you can capture it as well!

Sony is scheduled to announce followups to the RX 1 and RX200 tomorrow, but photos of the cameras have already begun appearing on the web.

When I saw the work of photographer "Fiddle Oak" last month, I was so blown away by the level of maturity, boldness, and confidence exuded from his images. He’s 14, people! And according to the story, he’s been creating shooting and manipulating the work since he was 8.

"Spec" is short for "speculative," and "spec work" is defined by the AIGA (which counts many photographers as members) as, "work done prior to engagement with a client in anticipation of being paid."

This is the classical definition, and it began in the creative industries, where a photographer would shoot images for a desired client and then show them the work in the hopes of being hired. Notice the very important distinction: the work was done BEFORE contact with the potential client. This "free" spec work was not solicited or negotiated.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has become a person of extreme interest in recent days, but thus far he's managed to avoid photojournalists' cameras fairly well. The same cannot be said of the empty airplane seat which was supposedly going to take him from Russia to Cuba this past weekend.

In an airplane full of disappointed photojournalists, the conspicuously vacant Seat 17A became in short order the most photographed empty airplane seat in the world.