June 2013

When a beta version of Apple's iOS software is released, you can bet developers are sifting through the code like mad to see if any new features have been added to the mobile operating system.

It would appear as if hidden in the code for iOS 7 beta 2 are camera-oriented features for use by developers. One feature apparently detects smiling in photos, the other detects blinking. These detectors may hint at features coming to the iPhone, iPod, and iPad cameras in the future.

You may remember Triggertrap from our coverage of it a little over a year ago. The iOS app, which has since made its way to Android as well, acted as a "jack of all trades" camera trigger that offered more than 12 different triggering options.

Several of those options -- such as the sound and motion triggers -- were geared towards high-speed photography, and a new update and flash adapter from the Triggertrap team are primed to take the app's high-speed photo capabilities to the next level.

For his project "Ordinary Behavior," illustrator and product designer Kevin Lck wanted to explore the relationship between humans and the technology that is devouring our souls has become such a large part of our lives. To do so, he chose five household objects and set about creating special cardboard replicas.

One of those objects (although it doesn't exactly quality as a "household object") was a Leica M3, and his black and white rendition is impressive even before you turn it around.

When Seattle-based photographer Eirik Johnson went to photograph the hunting cabins of the Iñupiat people of Barrow, Alaska, he found something more than he expected. The resulting summer and winter combination series, dubbed Barrow Cabins, turned into "a meditation on the passage of time."

Want a peek into how much freelance photographers get paid by Sun-Times Media? The issue is one that may be on many a photographers mind after the Chicago Sun-Times decided to fire its entire staff of photographers. Thanks to a "leaked" memo, we now have some idea.

Smartphones have been stealing market share from the big camera manufacturers for years now, and it doesn't seem like it'll stop anytime soon. Naturally, that leads to a healthy fear from companies like Canon and Nikon who, unlike Sony or Samsung, don't have players on both sides.

For its part, Canon has decided to start fighting back in the form of a new advertising campaign with the tagline: "don't let a call interrupt your photo."

In case you don't know it, cameras and lenses are prime theft targets. You may never think it's going to happen to you, but almost every day I hear from someone who is missing thousands of dollars worth of gear with no hope of getting it back.

My gear rental company has lots of experience with preventing theft and recovering stolen items. I'm not going to give specifics about all the exact measures we take; that would be like leaving a blueprint for those who want to steal our gear. But we've learned a lot and have at least tried everything I'm going to talk about today.

Back in 1985, TIME magazine was determined to get more subscribers. We know this because of the special TV offer you see above. If you happen to be around when this commercial aired, all you needed to do was call the number to get a TIME magazine subscription for 40% off, and a free 35mm camera!

The Emma Mærsk is one of the largest ships in existence. In fact, when it first launched in 2006, it was the largest. Measuring in at almost a quarter-mile long, it can carry more cargo than a 41-mile-long train, and sports the world's largest diesel engine under the hood.

If you ever take your camera on a safari to photograph animals in the wild, here's one animal you should be careful around: the giraffe.

Sure, it doesn't have a dangerous reputation like lions or other fierce animals at the top of the food chain, but if you're not careful around the world's tallest terrestrial animal---especially the hormonal ones---you may quickly find yourself in a situation that's strangely similar to a famous scene in the movie Jurassic Park.

Keeping tabs on all of the photos that go up on Facebook and/or Instagram daily is no easy feat. Some 208,300 photos are uploaded to Facebook alone every minute; when you're trying to make sure that each and every one of those complies with the community standards, mistakes are bound to happen.

Photographer Katie DelaVaughn of PhotoRaya and breastfeeding support site The Leaky Boob both recently found themselves on the receiving end of these mistakes.

The transition from being a "hobbyist" to being a "professional" photographer was slow and seemed to creep up on me. I've been professional now for 6 years (as in, it's been my only job), and you can find my work on my website. Here's the story of my journey.

I've never been a huge fan of the social networking video service, Vine. Not for any real good reason, mostly just because I was already perfectly content with the amusing feed of static images my friends provided through Instagram. Also the Twitter inspired 6 second time limit, while somewhat alluring considering my short attention span, also meant there would be no videos of any real significance. Or so I thought.

Snapchat may be having a tiny little issue when it comes to iOS 7 usability. Apple's updated mobile operating system (which is currently in beta) reportedly allows users to screenshot Snapchat "snaps" secretly.

If you're a owner of a Fujifilm X-Pro1 or X-E1 and have been dying to see focus peaking brought to your camera, today's your lucky day. Fujifilm has announced a new set of upcoming firmware updates for those two cameras, and focus peaking is front and center as one of the big new features introduced.

Portland, Maine-based photographer Ben DeHaan has an unique---and slightly disturbing---series of portraits in a project titled "Uncured." Each of the photographs is shown in two forms: one shows what the image originally looked like, and the other is a portrait that's "melting."

Fujifilm's newest creation, the X-M1, was outed last week when photos of the entry-level X-Series interchangeable lens camera (ILC) leaked onto the web. But while the photos did reveal that the camera would pack a serious punch in a tiny package (in large part due to the lack of a built-in viewfinder), many of the camera's specs and features were still unknown.

Well, the day has arrived for Fuji to make the camera official, and along with some high-res press images, we're also getting a full breakdown of specs, pricing and an expected release date.

Pay a visit to photographer Jamie Diamond's website, and you'll find that one of her projects is a series of family portraits. The images look like standard family portraits: the members are posed in different places and positions, there are older members and younger members; everyone's dressed nicely, everyone's smiling.

Look a little closer though, and you might notice that certain things are a bit strange... or should we say "stranger"?

If Optimus Prime ever decided to retire from saving Earth and take up photography as a hobby, this is one camera he might consider using. Called the Hyper Suprime-Cam, it's a 870-megapixel ultra-wide-field camera that stands 3 meters (~10 feet) high and weighs in at 3 tons. The comparison illustration above shows what the camera looks like next to a 5.2-foot-tall girl.

Time-lapse videos are all the rage these days, but the one above is unlike any that have ever been made. It shows an ancient Egyptian statue spinning around in a glass on its own.

Photo sharing is big business. Just ask Snapchat's founders. The service (launched in late 2011) has managed to raise somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 million in venture capital funding, an investment that pegs the value of the company at a staggering $800 million.

“Down and Out in the South” is a series of studio portraits by photographer Jan Banning that explore the issue of homelessness.

Fast-growing and super popular image sharing service Imgur announced the release of their first official application for Android. Even though there's been a beta available since April, Imgur says their mobile application is ready for primetime. Now you can enjoy meme pictures and silly cats wherever you happen to be.

Were you able to capture photographs of the supermoon this past weekend? Photographer Alessandro Della Bella did. On Saturday, he set up his camera near a mountain in Switzerland and captured breathtaking photographs of the moon rising above a mountain peak in the horizon.

If you haven't been living under the rock for the past ten years, chances are you've seen a photo captured by Eric Draper. That's because he was the official photographer of former U.S. President George W. Bush.

Draper's eight years in the White House were nothing short of intriguing. From capturing the now-iconic photos of President Bush on September 11th to the handing over of leadership to Barack Obama in 2009. His unfettered access to the Presidency gave us some insight as to what life is like in the "bubble."

In 1962, then President Kennedy presented to the U. S. Congress a Consumer’s Bill of Rights. I decided to be a bit more specific and develop a Photography Consumer’s Bill of Rights.

Rising from the desert in the Middle East are mind-blowing structures and formations. One of those just happens to be the Burj Khalifa. It's the tallest man-made structure in the world, coming in at over a whopping 2,700 feet.

Wandering to the highest levels of this building is undoubtedly on the to-do list of many photographers. Magnificent views, beautiful architecture. But for those folks who don't foresee a trip to Dubai on the cards in the near future, Google has you covered.

More than 75 years ago, aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared not far from the completion of her record-breaking attempt to circumnavigate the Earth at the equator. The wreckage of her plane was never found, and many believe that what's left of that wreckage is still somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.

Another theory, however, is that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan made an emergency landing on the reef surrounding the yet uninhabited island known as Gardner Island (now Nikumaroro). And some recently found aerial negatives of that island might hold to key to proving this theory right.

When it comes to great light painting photography, we've had cause to mention Darren Pearson on more than one occasion. His dinosaur light paintings were well-received, and his skeleton skater light painting animation was just plain cool.

So rather than continuing to pull bits and pieces of Pearson's work to show you every time something catches our eye, we've decided to introduce you to him and his work as a whole, and let the light painting enthusiasts among you follow to your heart's content.

Back in December, Dropbox acquired the photo storage service Snapjoy, seemingly getting ready to jump head first into the cloud sharing battle. At the time, the announcement on the Snapjoy blog rang with excitement, and even though they weren't going to be accepting new signups, they promised that "your photos are safe!"

Well, not anymore. As of yesterday, Dropbox has officially decided to shut down the service -- a decision that was confirmed by Snapjoy on its blog and through an email to all of its remaining subscribers.

Photographer Christopher Domakis has photographed both sides of the urban coin in China. Through two unrelated photo series, Hutong and Microcosm, he has managed to juxtapose the quiet closeness of the narrow Hutong alley neighborhoods of Beijing with the hustle and bustle of the rapidly growing urban developments in many of China's biggest cities.

If you've gone to a concert or public event or even certain art openings recently, you'll notice that something is amiss. In the past, people would look, enjoy and try their best to experience the moment when they attended such things. Now, many of them are doing their best to craft the most likeable smartphone photo.

The BBC's Newsnight is troubled by this trend, and so they set out to discover if the smartphone photography movement is doing more harm than good.

I’ve done it. I’ve switched over from a DSLR to a compact camera -- the Fujifilm X100. Well, technically, that’s not true since I didn’t really consider myself a DSLR user to begin with, but regardless of that, my main (and only) digital camera is now an X100. Here are my impressions after three weeks with the camera.

Photographer Rachel Elizabeth Seed never got to meet her mother. Also a photographer, her mother Sheila passed away when Seed was only 18 months old, and now she's on a quest to reconnect with her all these years later by creating the documentary film A Photographic Memory.

Shoot with Nikon DSLR gear and want to give your lens a paint job? Instead of doing it yourself---which, by the way, can produce some neat results---you can send your lens over to the Nikon Repair Center in Taiwan. In addition to fixing up damaged lenses--sometimes by boiling the parts in water---the center can also give your lens a sleek, white paint job.

Life magazine believed that pictures could change the world. And so, during the 40s, 50s and 60s, when the United States was at its most dynamic, Life provided the illustrations for the story of America.

Famed fashion photographer John Rankin Waddell and BBC Four went in search of the people who did this -- the photographers who led the charge and turned Life into a photojournalistic superpower. The documentary America in Pictures: The Story of Life Magazine (shown in its entirety above) is the result of that search.

AP Photographer David Guttenfelder is a conflict photographer. He's spent much of his photographic career capturing war through the lens of his camera. One thing he certainly never considered himself was a bird photographer.

But when he was sent on an assignment to illustrate a National Geographic piece on the illegal hunting of songbirds, he became one. And it slowly dawned on him that he wasn't just doing a documentary, environmental, or conservation piece -- this was simply another form of conflict photography.

Colonel George Everette "Bud" Day is a retired U.S. Air Force Command Pilot who served his country during the Vietnam war, enduring a stint as a POW and earning the Medal of Honor and the Air Force Cross.

When he was asked to be on the cover of Smithsonian's Air & Space magazine, it was portrait photographer Robert Seale who got the honor of photographing him, and for our sakes, he put together a behind-the-scenes video while he was at it.

Creating a 3D scan of an object can be done several different ways. We've seen everything from long distance laser cameras and hacked Kinects used to great effect. Computer engineer Giancarlo Todone's take on creating a 3D reconstruction takes another approach: using focus stacking.

Mirroring your time-lapse footage can yield a trippy, ethereal quality to an otherwise standard video. Riding on the Japanese monorail, for example, is nothing particularly special. Creating a hyperlapse of the experience, while cool, probably won't stand out.

A few users, however, have come up with some interesting takes on a monorail hyperlapse by mirroring the footage and taking you on a much stranger journey.

Most high-end cameras come with diopters that allow photographers to calibrate the viewfinder to match their eyesight. Adjusting the diopter is easy: simply stare through the camera while turning the little dial or knob found next to your viewfinder (the one with the +/-). Once the scene is sharp (assuming the lens is focused), you're done!

Apparently one of the dangers of diopter adjustment---for some camera owners at least---is accidentally stabbing your eyeball with your finger.

New York City offers a plethora of photographic opportunity. Massive architecture alongside a vibrant and diverse population makes for plenty of work for photographers of all types. But have you ever thought about the myriad signage and typography that New York has to offer?

Matthew Anderson and Daniel Hunninghake did, and so they created NYCType back in 2007 to highlight it. The site brings together photos of New York City's signage under once virtual roof.

On November 18, 1933, aviator Jimmie Angel became the first American to catch a glimpse of the tallest waterfall in the world -- a natural wonder that would eventually be named for him. Four years later, he returned to Venezuela and Angel Falls, crash landing on top of one of the flat-topped mountains in the area and having to hike 11 days with little food or water to the nearest village.

Photographer Philip Lee Harvey wanted to see these places for himself, and so he followed in Angel's footsteps, photographing the breathtaking sights along the way. The behind-the-scenes video above shows you how that adventure went down.

Latte art is something that's often the subject of photographs, but have you ever seen an latte artwork that is a photograph?

A coffee business over in Taiwan recently came up with the idea of providing a unique product to customers by having photographs of their faces printed directly onto the foam of the coffee they're ordering!

Fujifilm's upcoming "entry-level" X-M1 X Series mirrorless camera was outed today after photographs of the camera were leaked onto the Web. We now know what the camera will look like, but many of the camera's specs and features are still unknown. The size and weight of the camera haven't been revealed yet, but it's actually possible to determine the relative size of the camera to other X Series mirrorless cameras using just the leaked photos.

The use of social media has become vital for the news-reporting agencies and outlets of the world. Mix that in with the ubiquity of mobile phones, and it means there are cameras virtually everywhere, and organizations like the Associated Press know this.

When The Impossible Project announced its Impossible Instant Lab back in September 2012, it turned to Kickstarter to raise $250,000 to fund the project. After the Internet got wind of the smartphone-to-instant-photo printing device, the fundraising campaign blew past its goal and ended up with a total of $559,232 from 2,509 supporters.

Today the company announced that the Impossible Instant Lab will be hitting store shelves on August 29th, 2013 for a retail price of $299.

It all started with a photograph she took of her grandmother, Cecil Peterson, then 101 years of age. From that point, California-based Sally Peterson had transformed taking a picture of one centenarian into a full-fledged project after asking a nearby nursing home if there were any centenarians living there.

Why is it that some photographs go viral online while others are left by the digital wayside? Are there certain elements in photos that make them more "sharable" to Internet users?

Curalate, a company that creates social media analytics software, decided to tackle this question by analyzing the photographs published by brands to Pinterest.

Here's an example of photography being used to deliver a powerful message in a creative way: Singapore-based suicide prevention organization Samaritans of Singapore recently ran a series of ads recently that highlight the challenge of spotting depression.