June 2013

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.