June 2013

Chances are that in your lifetime, you've seen the iconic "Tank Man" photograph. The year was 1989. A man standing alone before a line of tanks on Chang'an Avenue near Tiananmen Square. It's a picture that's inspired people all over the world. It's also been heavily suppressed in the very country it was taken.

Jeff Widener is the man behind the photograph, which he says was a "lucky shot". What the world doesn't know, however, is that Widener is so much more than the photographer behind one iconic image. He's spent years in Asia chronicling the stories and struggles of people.

In October of 2012, LA-based photographer Sabine Pearlman found herself ensconced in a Swiss WWII bunker photographing 900 different "specimens" of cross sectioned ammunition. Her resulting photo series, AMMO, shows the beauty and craftsmanship that went into creating these destructive little pieces of engineering.

Hey, professional and aspiring photographers! Are you tired of responding to attractive assignment offers only to find later that compensation for the work consists only of "valuable exposure" for your work? And then you have to explain that you can't feed your family on exposure?

Well fret no more. with the new Exposure Helper™, you can feed your family on exposure, allowing you to accept all the free assignments you want!

Rumors emerged last month that Fujifilm would be announcing an entry-level X Series mirrorless camera this summer. Looks like those rumors were spot on.

Photographs of an upcoming Fujifilm X-M1 mirrorless camera leaked today, showing a sleek and minimalist camera that looks like a stripped down version of existing X Series cameras.

VICE Magazine has withdrawn from it Web site a photo series depicting famous female authors committing suicide, after the piece drew widespread criticism for being "breathtakingly tasteless."

Check out this colorful photo mosaic created by photographer Bela Borsodi for the cover of the album "Terrain" by VLP (you can find a larger version here). Would you believe us if we told you that it's actually a single photograph?

Well it is.

Instagram announced the ability to shoot video earlier today, but before they did, two friends embarked on a project to make the best video they could while adhering to Instagram's previous photo-only limitations. The result was a 1,600 photo stop motion video dubbed Instagrammimation that has gotten a lot of praise from viewers.

It's common knowledge that JPEG compression leads to a loss of data, but it's difficult to really visualize the extent of that loss in a photo. A keen eye will be able to tell a difference, but it's still hard to quantify it.

Tom Scott wanted to bring the reality home to those who don't already understand it. So he took the pitfalls of JPEG compression and transferred them from the world of photos, to the world of Shakespeare.

Younger photographers may not understand it, or even feel the same way, but for photographers of my generation, your studio was not just a place to take photographs -- it was a reflection of you. It told the world who you were. If you didn't have one, then you weren't really a photographer!

To imitate photographer Nick Albertson's work, you'll need a camera, household items purchased in bulk, and an eye for the beautiful and abstract. Take a look at Albertson's project titled "Work in Progress," and you'll find photographs of things such as rubber bands, straws, and napkins. They don't look like your everyday objects, though: Albertson turns them into works of art by carefully arranging them into repeating patterns.

Earlier this week, we reported on rumors that Facebook was planning to unveil Vine-like video for Instagram on June 20th. Well, if you take a quick look at your calendars, you'll see that the fateful day has arrived, and the expected announcement along with it: Instagram video is now a reality.

Samsung today officially announced its new Galaxy NX mirrorless camera, the Android-powered mirrorless camera that leaked onto the web one week ago. The Galaxy NX is the world's first interchangeable lens camera that features 3G and 4G wireless connectivity.

Call it female empowerment; call it friendship; call it bonding... Whatever you call it, the newest trend in boudoir photography involves “getting your boudoir on” with your friends. Yes, according to the Today Show, groups of women are now stripping down to next to nothing with their besties for professional group boudoir photos.

Some estimates suggest that there are somewhere in the vicinity of 208,300 photos uploaded to Facebook every day. Of those, exactly zero are uploaded as part of comment threads. Up until now, Facebook users fond of replying to their friends statuses with photos were forced to insert a link. The newest update out of the Facebook camp suggests that this will no longer be an issue.

There has been a lot of talk recently about how best to succeed as a professional photographer, now that "everybody is a photographer." A recent post here by Alex Ignacio emphasized how important it is to “specialize and focus” -- Ignacio believes that if we don’t, we’ll “perish”.

As someone who trains aspiring commercial photographers, I agree that some doors may shut if you don’t specialize, but many more will open if you’re versatile.

Photographer Paul Nelson spends the majority of his time shooting commercial work for big name clients like MAC Cosmetics or Target. But when the flow of work began to slow to a trickle over the past couple of years, he embarked on a personal project that he hoped would remind him why he loved photography.

Thus was born Aviary. Shot in partnership with Springbook Nature Center, the photo series captures beautiful studio-style portraits of birds taking flight as they're released back into the wild.

Remember that amazing 360-degree panorama captured from the top of the Burj Khalifa that we shared back in January? Photographer Gerald Donovan created that stitched panorama to show what Earth looks like from the world's tallest manmade point.

If you want to see what an actual "tiny world" photo looks like when captured from that same spot, look no further than the photograph above.

It truly is a cat and mouse game between software developers and software pirates. It's been that way for years. So when a company like Adobe decides to change up their entire business model to subscription-based to curb the piracy of their professional-grade product suite, you would expect it to take a fair amount of time before the pirates managed to find a workaround.

Perhaps not the case, at least according to a torrent link uploaded today to The Pirate Bay (one of the largest torrent-tracking sites on the Internet). Just one day following the official launch of Photoshop CC, the software has apparently been cracked and available for downloading illegally.

A young woman was fatally stabbed last night after photographing homeless men holding offensive signs while begging in Hollywood.

Up until now, the use of multibillion-dollar orbiting satellites has been extremely limited to space agencies and companies that, well, require satellites. But here's a radical idea that could change the future of man-made satellites as we know them.

It's a Kickstarter project called ARKYD, and it's intended to be the first publicly accessible space telescope ever.

The municipality of Tultepec in Mexico produces about half of all of the country's fireworks. Every year, more than 100,000 people flock to the area for a nine day event called the National Pyrotechnic Festival. There are activities common to a fair (e.g. food, music, dancing), but the biggest reason people attend is to experience the dazzling firework displays.

Photographer Thomas Prior traveled from New York to attend one of these festivals, and ended up capturing a collection of beautiful photographs showing people partying from within explosions.

Lytro has today taken their light field camera to the next step with the release of a new application for iOS, eliminating the need for users to connect the device to a PC or Mac computer to sync and manipulate photos.

On November 5, 1951, a 31 kiloton atomic bomb was dropped in the Nevada Test Site from a B-45 Tornado bomber. A camera in the air was documenting the test, and captured the video above showing what a large nuclear explosion looks like when looking down at it from above. Notice how the camera begins to shake when the shockwave of the blast reaches it.

In the past month and a half, Magic Lantern has seemingly made the impossible possible by bringing high definition RAW video to several Canon cameras and turning the cinema camera world upside down. With how fast these most recent updates have come out, it's easy to forget how much work has gone into Magic Lantern over the years.

A1ex from Magic Lantern's main development team wanted to remind us, and so he created this video representation of the work that the team has had put in to go from humble beginnings to the hack's current level of awesomeness.

Alexandre Buisse is a professional mountain photographer who also has a huge passion for paragliding. Beautiful things happen when those two interests come together. Buisse has captured some remarkable aerial photographs of landscapes in France and Italy while soaring high above the ground.

Most stock photography websites and agencies work the same way: photographers upload their work, set prices, and let clients browse for what it is they're looking for. If the client wants a photo of a family on the beach, they'd better hope someone came through. And on the other end, the photographer has to hope that they're putting work out there that people will actually want to use.

Advertising creatives Cassandra Nguyen and Grazina Snipas' new website PicoImages does away with that model, replacing it with more of a "stock photography to order" sort of system.

Want to make some business cards for your photography business that stand out from among traditional cards? Try making some in the style of 35mm film slides. Last week we shared photographer Lars Swanson's beautiful slide cards, and this week we have a step-by-step look at how you can make something similar.

When people take pictures of captive animals in zoos, oftentimes their goal is to shoot the images in a way that makes the animals appear to be in the wild. Photographer Daniel Zakharov does no such thing. Rather than make the glass, bars, and concrete disappear off to the sides of the frame, Zakharov intentionally captures the fact that the animals are found in unnatural environments.

George Lawrence was a commercial photographer with a knack for engineering and business. Born in Illinois in February of 1868, his career reached its zenith in the early 1900s when he took to the skies, creating incredible aerial panoramas using an invention of his called the 'Captive Airship.'

Earlier this month, Canon announced that there's a firmware update for the Canon EOS M on the way that will boost the mirrorless camera's sluggish autofocusing speeds by up to 2.3x. Given that AF slowness is one of the biggest gripes EOS M owners have with the camera, the news was likely music to many a EO M owner's ear.

If you want to see what this 2.3x looks like in real life, Korean photographer Daero Lee has published a number of comparison videos showing updated and non-updated EOS Ms focusing on things.

In this day and age, you're likely to have a hard time walking down the street and not seeing a camera somewhere. If it isn't held by the shutter-happy tourist in short shorts, it's the CCTV camera mounted at the entrance of the local subway station.

How does one maintain anonymity? Staying in? No! You put on fabulous privacy-protecting glasses under development by Japan's National Institute of Informatics.

Dumitrana, Romania-based astrophotographer Maximilian Teodorescu recently got his hands on an 1800mm f/12 Maksutov telescope and decided to put it through its paces this past weekend. He decided to test out the imaging quality by using it to photograph the International Space Station passing in front of the moon in broad daylight. The beautiful photograph above is what he ended up capturing.

There's something to be said about humans building gargantuan structures made of metal and steel. We see them in most major cities, yet rarely get the opportunity to marvel at how they're assembled.

I first heard of Jim Mortram and his project ‘Small Town Inertia’ in the ‘Ones to Watch’ section of the British Journal of Photography. At first, I was happy that someone from my homeland, Norfolk, was making an impact in the photographic world. But of all projects I’d seen in BJP, Small Town Inertia was the only that gripped me.

Here's a short and sweet video in which underwater photographer and filmmaker Tom Campbell tells of an experience he had photographing a whale shark, the world's largest fish.

A photographer is suing the popular viral content aggregation website BuzzFeed for a whopping $3.9 million after he discovered that BuzzFeed had used one of his Flickr photos without permission in a comedy "roundup" article.

Under development in the Ishikawa Oku Lab at the University of Tokyo is a dynamic target tracking camera capable of keeping fast-moving objects centered in frame.

The term "hipster" is only decades old (at most) and has only become widely used over the past half decade, but what if the concept had existed in days of old? That's the idea behind photographer Leo Caillard's project, "Hipster in Stone." Combining his photography and Photoshoppin' skills, Caillard imagines what it would be like if ancient Greek sculpture subjects were hipsters.

Turns out that driver's license photos are useful for more than acute embarrassment. States, realizing they have a de-facto visual database of most of their residents, are increasingly plugging those photos into facial-recognition software and Facebook to solve crimes -- and worrying privacy advocates in the process.

Many of us know that feeling. That gut punch of shock and denial as we watch our camera fall from our grip or swing to the earth from an unsecured tripod. We've watched as it impacted with the ground with a hard thud or bounced amongst the rocks collecting more damage with every tumble as it travels farther away from the safety of your hands.

Long exposure photographs of stars and romantic engagement photographs aren't often found together, but that's the fusion wedding photography couple Robert Paetz and Felicia Wong have been dabbling with as of late. The duo takes their clients out into natural landscapes away from light-polluted cities and photographs them under the night sky. They call the resulting photos, "astro wedding photography."

Located the Mexican state of Puebla, Popocatépetl is the second highest peak in Mexico and an active volcano -- a really active volcano. It's one of the most lively ones in the country of Mexico, with over 15 major eruptions on record since 1519 and plenty of smaller explosions through the years.

Yesterday, Popocatépetl experienced another powerful explosion as the top "popped off" to relieve the pressure within. A webcam pointed at the peak was able to capture the whole thing, and the video above shows what the explosion and resulting shockwave look like in time-lapse.

Adobe officially launched Photoshop CC to the public today after announcing its major move to the cloud at its Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles last month. The program is now available for download through the Creative Cloud website.

The advent and continuous expansion of Google Street View has made it possible to explore far off places that we may never be able to visit in person. But where exactly does Google's reach end? One person deigned to find out.

Each year, an estimated 300 million animals are brought into the United States illegally to serve as exotic pets. In New York, many of those animals wind up at the New York City Center for Avian and Exotic Medicine, where the trained practitioners there nurse them back to health.

Animal photographer Linda Kuo's new series Displaced tells these animals stories and seeks to draw attention to this rarely mentioned societal problem.

Search giant Google has revealed that it's working on a global database it expects to help rid the Internet of child porn.

About a month ago, we shared some stunning footage that showed what London was like all the way back in 1926. The original filming was done by Claude Friese-Greene, whose father William invented the 'Biocolour' technique of capturing color film footage.

That particular video was a compilation of snippets that Friese-Greene had filmed in London when he returned form a 2-year journey. He called the final product The Open Road, and it was a 26-part series that took him all over Britain. Fortunately for us, much of it has now been digitized and uploaded bit-by-bit to YouTube by The BFI National Archive.

A handful of groups representing professional photographers are calling for a boycott of a Conde Nast photo contest whose terms they consider exploitative.

Underneath Manhattan's West Side Highway, at 135th and 12th Avenue, photographer Dave Bledsoe of FreeVerse Photography discovered something pretty cool: at least 100 old disconnected payphones stacked unceremoniously and rusting away.

Need a way to covertly transport your memory card loaded with digital photos from one place to another? You should look into using spy coins.

Covert Coins are a series of coins that have been precision hand-machined from actual coins and can be opened up to reveal a secret compartment.