In a short segment titled "Photojournalists vs. iPhones" on The Colbert Report yesterday, Stephen Colbert weighed in on the Chicago Sun-Times' decision to lay off its entire photography department.
Canon has today announced to the masses the an 11-22mm f/4-5.6 IS STM lens, expanding the company's EF-M lens line with an ultra-wide barrel of glass fit for the EOS-M mirrorless compact system camera.
Here’s a dose of humor and creativity to put a smile on your face as we’re rounding the corner …
Perhaps Leica isn't spreading false rumors through a strange marketing campaign after all. Earlier this week, we wrote that Leica may have been leaking fake photos and specs of its upcoming Leica "M Mini" camera in order to make the real thing seem more attractive once it appears. That no longer appears to be the case.
Multiple sites are now reporting that those initial leaks and rumors were indeed true, and that the camera will officially be called the Leica X Vario Type 107.
I've been living out of my car and driving all over the country to create new work. This past Sunday, I stopped near Nashville, Tennessee to see my friend and fellow photographer Marissa Bolen. While there, we collaborated to put together a photo shoot -- a shoot that involved a homemade dam, water, milk, and girls covered with flour.
"Earthquake astrophotography light painting." How's that for a novel photography technique? It sounds strange, it's an apt description of how photographer Andrew Dare captured the squiggly photo above (on right). Dare was photographing the night sky with long exposures when an earthquake struck while his shutter was open.
Firefly photographs are commonly shot using long exposures from a tripod. The proper exposure depends on the ratio of the fireflies' luminosity to that of the background. That ratio is constant if we assume (as is usually the case) that the background lighting doesn't change much over the course of a session. We usually would like a rather long exposure because we want to see lots of fireflies in the final image.
The problem is that fireflies flash briefly, whereas the background illumination persists for the duration of the exposure. Over the course of a long exposure the background brightness builds up to the the point where it's as bright as the fireflies, and the image looks terrible.
Yesterday was the 24th anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square -- an event that has been immortalized in history by AP photographer Jeff Widener’s famous “Tank Man” photo we shared earlier today. What you may not know is that, in China, the government still does everything it can to keep the event shrouded in mystery, pretending it never happened.
The Internet, however, is having none of it, as memes depicting the tank man photo in ways that might avoid censorship nets spring up all over the place. One of the most viral is the photo you see above.
I'm not gonna lie; I was worried.
I sat in the movie theater with my box of buttered jalapeno popcorn (Jalapeno popcorn is created by tipping the container of jalapenos found in the condiment area onto your popcorn. They provide them for your nachos and hot dogs, but it is a shame not to use them on your popcorn. It is delicious and I highly recommend it. You will thank me for this.) I furrowed my brow with nervous anticipation, for this was no ordinary movie; I was awaiting the start of M. Night Shyamalan's "After Earth."
This beautiful photograph is titled "Last Dance of the Fairies." It was shot by Japanese photographer Yume Cyan in a forested area near Nagoya City, Japan.
Some might say that simplicity is a lost art these days. Where the digital realm is concerned, many of us judge a product based on how much it can do -- and camera apps are no exception. We want myriad filters, editing options, the ability to comment and like other people's photos in a social environment, and we want it all to be free.
Camera Noir is a new camera app that breaks every one of those rules including, unfortunately, the last one.
In light of the ever-tightening bond between camera manufacturing giants, Olympus is rumored to be working hand-in-hand with Sony to bring their 5-Axis image stabilization technology to Sony's upcoming A-mount cameras.
Pursuing a career doing something you love can be a terrifying thing, and so we often look to the people who have "made it" in our field as sources of inspiration. We see the work of a Heisler, Hobby or Arias, and it helps us to push through when times get tough, as they inevitably do in any pursuit.
And if, once in a while, we get the chance to hear these successful people to talk about how exactly they made it, and what it takes to be a successful photographer (or anything really), then we've gotten really lucky. In the video above we get exactly that, from eight of the world's best known and most successful photographers.
When the Chinese military moved into Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989 to forcibly remove pro-democracy protestors, an anonymous man famously decided to place himself in front of the long column of Chinese tanks that were rumbling into the area. Photos and videos of the incident were immediately published and broadcast around the world. AP photographer Jeff Widener's "Tank Man" photo, shown above, is widely considered to be one of the most iconic photos of the 20th century.
B&H Photo has had iPhone and Android apps for some time now, making it that much easier to browse through, learn about and purchase your photography gear from anywhere. And now, the superstore has announced the release of a brand new app designed specifically for the iPad.
If you're here to read about the Zeiss Touit 12mm f/2.8 for the Fujifilm X-mount, you've probably heard words like "great", "amazing", "superb", "lovely" and "well damped" used to describe this lens. It's wider then the Fuji 14mm and maybe, just maybe, as sharp as the Fuji 35mm. These too are all things others will say about this lens. The jury, however, is still out for this guy.
Is the photograph above the "perfect" Pinterest picture? It's a simple salad photo that originates from TV cooking show host Paula Deen's recipe website. Since being published, it has been repinned 300,000 times and liked 8,000 times on Pinterest. A Philidelphia-based analytics firm believes that it's the prototypical popular Pinterest photo.
Tourism Western Australia recently embarked on a $1.6 million ad campaign called 1001 Extraordinary Experiences. The campaign wanted to show just how gorgeous the state of Western Australia is by inviting people from all over the world to contribute photos they had taken there.
A total of 1001 entries came in, and the above compilation puts them all together in a one minute and forty second tour across the diverse landscape of this extraordinary region.
When Emil Nyström's daughter Signhild grows up, she'll have a number of baby photos showing how adventurous she was as an infant. Since Signhild was less than 1, Nyström has been creating whimsical conceptual photos of the girl in strange situations.
Time-lapse photographer Rob Whitworth (we've featured his work a number of times in the past) has released a beautiful new time-lapse video that offers a look into the Chinese city of Shanghai.
A couple of years ago, Irina Werning burst into the public eye when her series Back to the Future went viral. What started as a project were she would have relatives in Buenos Aires reenact old photos of themselves, has since expanded to a photographic phenomenon that has taken her all over the world.
The short documentary above gives us a chance to hear Werning's thoughts on the project: why she does it, how she puts the shots together, and whether or not she ever feels the project will truly be over.
It remains unknown just how popular Google Glass will be when it's available to the masses, but for the select group of individuals who are lucky enough to sport a pair today, the on board camera just got a bit better.
The folks over at NHK's (the Japan Broadcasting Corporation's) Science & Technology Research Laboratory have developed a groundbreaking multi-viewpoint, motion-controlled camera rig that could very soon be changing the way we view sports, among many other potential applications.
The rig is a robotically controlled system that links one camera to eight sub-cameras, all of which are pointing at the same thing. Basically, it's a bullet time rig that moves, enabling the people behind the lenses to take the technique of timeslicing to new heights.
If you've never attempted to photograph the night sky, be it a constellation or a planet, the idea may seem daunting. You may think that you need a specific type of camera or that you need to invest in a high-quality telescope.
While those things can be true in certain situations, astronomer Mark Thompson takes a minute in the video above to show you how to capture great photos of the night sky using very little in way of equipment.
There are those who don't mind being photographed, those who do, and those who are photographed so often they can't help but mind. Celebrities in particular must deal with an onslaught of photography every time they leave their home, and inventors Wilbert Leon Smith, Jr. and Keelo Lamance Jackson want to do something to help.
That's why they invented a new anti-photography photo-ruining device that may wind up putting the paparazzi out of work.
Here's a little bit of entertainment and humor for your Tuesday afternoon. At a recent mixer they hosted for creative professionals in the ad industry, St. Louis, Missouri-based Bruton Stroube Studios set up a slow motion photo booth and let the party-goers go at it. The above video is a compilation of some of the coolest shots.
Olympus isn't the only camera manufacturer finding ways to cut costs by getting rid of their low-end camera offerings. Tokyo-based Fujifilm is expected to dramatically slim down their compact camera line by fifty percent in the near future.
Unsplash is a new Tumblr creation by the folks over at ooompf that allows photographers to share a set of images for free (in exchange for exposure, we assume) while simultaneously allowing those in need of high-quality imagery a place to find it.
Yahoo's recent Flickr redesign has been met with mixed reviews. After the release, a large number of users took to the Flickr Help forum and tore into everything from the look and feel to the team responsible.
General opinion at Yahoo, however, is that this is a just a small subset (albeit a very vocal one) of users, and the company is displaying its commitment to the new Flickr with the first ever (to our knowledge) Flickr TV commercial.
Visual Supply Co is trying very hard to get people excited about the new and innovative products it has up its sleeve.
We've already shared the company's recent teaser for the new, completely free VSCO Cam -- a revamped version of the $1 iOS app that promises many improvements -- and now, VSCO is giving fans a closer look at one of those improvements with a new announcement, this one for an app called VSCO Grid that will integrate seamlessly with VSCO Cam.
It wasn't very long ago that Leica began teasing its Mini M camera on the homepage of their website. Purported leaks of Mini M began to surface, including photographs and specifications.
Slowly but surely, the black box labeled "Mini M" on the Leica website began to open up as the rumors continued to flow through the blogosphere. Some sources had confirmed that the rumors and images were, in actuality, the real deal. Others, on the other hand, were convinced the leaked images and specs were fakes.
It took 223 takes, 8 hard-boiled eggs, 5 microphones, 2 days and 1 camera, but Bob Boilen's Tiny Desk -- which is featured in the Boilen-created Tiny Desk Concert series on NPR Music -- has officially been moved to NPR's new headquarters.
Why did it take so much video? Because Boilen decided to film a Tiny Desk Concert featuring the band OK Go during the move, producing the above music/moving video in the process.
Just a few days old, a new Kickstarter project called "Spinpod" is aiming to improve your panoramic photos and videos through the use of a spinning pod designed for smaller cameras such as smartphones, GoPros and so forth.
I was on little road trip recently, when the need for BBQ became so overwhelming that I had to stop at the first restaurant I could find. It happens sometimes. I'm not proud of it, but when Pork speaks, I listen. Luckily, there was an adorable little BBQ place in the next town. A tiny little mom-and-pop joint, which in my opinion, are always the best.
Many photographers get nervous when the talk turns to street photography. There are step-by-step plans laid out for those who want to get over their fear of street photography, and entire articles dedicated to using telephoto lenses when taking candid street shots so you're less likely to invade someone's personal space even as you're photographing it.
But on the other side of this spectrum are photographers like Bruce Gilden and Eric Kim, who make no apologies about getting in their subjects' faces and practicing what might be called "invasive street photography." And if you've ever wondered where this cringe-worthy technique was invented, you need look no further than the above video of photographer Mark Cohen.
The advent of the GoPro has brought about a real surge in adventure and sports photography/videos. Suddenly amateurs have been able to capture some of their pro-level tricks and treks and share them with their friends and the Internet.
While some people tend to look down on amateur-level photography, I think most would agree that at least this avenue has actually made things far more exciting. What has made this instance so different? Well, while some are satisfied simply strapping their GoPro to their head and jumping on a mountain bike (exciting in and of itself) others have found some more inventive ways of utilizing their camera.
Major news website News.com.au made a pretty big mistake yesterday. At the top of an article titled "Bizarre: Man gropes woman's thigh, then photographs her", author Phil Hickey (or whomever was in charge) decided to use a photo of none other than DigitalRev TV's Kai Wong.
If you ever get a chance to photograph or film the launching of a virgin ship hitting the water for the first time, make sure you stay at a safe distance. The short 18-second-video above shows what can happen if you bring your camera a little too close to the action.
High-resolution photography is seemingly where it's at in today's day and age. NASA knows this, and as such, astrophysicists at both the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Maryland and Pennsylvania State University have stitched together a remarkable 160-megapixel UV image of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds -- our two closest neighboring galaxies (less than 200,000 light years away).
The June cover of National Geographic features a photo of explorer and director James Cameron comfortably posing underwater in front of what looks to be his submarine. Obviously a composite (and a bit of a deviation from Nat Geo's typical style) photographer Marco Grob uses the above behind the scenes video to explain both the how and the why behind this awesome photo shoot.
Colorful images of beach bum-packed shores are probably the best way to describe West Hollywood-based Gray Malin's collection, dubbed "À La Plage, À La Piscine" (translates to At the Beach, Pool).
I was cleaning out my gear drawer recently when I came across a couple of holders for Cokin filters. The filters had long since been sent to an eBay afterlife, but tossing the cases started me thinking, mainly about how I hadn't missed the things a bit.
Check out this aurora photograph captured last Friday night by photographer Mike Hollingshead. See those small red squiggly lines in the sky? That's an extremely rare form of lightning called a sprite. This photograph is one of the only times a sprite and an aurora have been captured in the same frame.
When the Chicago Sun-Times unexpectedly laid off its entire team of photojournalists last week, Al Podgorski was one of the photographers hearing the bad news at the meeting. Having worked for the paper since 1984, Podgorski's image-making instincts kicked in, and he shot the photograph above showing his colleagues learning that they were being laid off.
The photographer in the center of the frame is John H. White, the renowned photojournalist who joined the Sun-Times in 1978 and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982.
This one is a little hard to interpret, but a recently published patent application from Nikon seems to pave the way for a new lens mount.
(I'm not saying this is how the conversation went down at the Chicago Sun-Times last week, but I'm saying it could have.)
Good morning, everyone.
Is the entire photography staff here? ...26, 27, 28...yes, it looks like everyone is present and accounted for, so let's begin.
We don't need you.
If camera manufacturers were high school boys, building super telephoto zooms would be their equivalent of a pissing contest to see who can shoot the farthest or most accurately. Sports photographers would arrive at the stadium packing the biggest lens to win bragging rights, acting like Arnold Schwarzenegger slinging his Gatling gun in Terminator. But Canon’s super telephoto zoom, the EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM, is getting long in the tooth, and it’s time to say, “hasta la vista, baby” to that lens.
Eye-Fi has offered the ability to wirelessly transmits photos from a camera to another device for quite a while now, but there was a downside: you were required to connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot to do so (with the exception of the Eye-Fi X2). This presented a challenge to photographers shooting on location where a Wi-Fi hotspot may not have been readily available.
Eye-Fi has come forth with their new "Eye-Fi Mobi" product, which streamlines the process of sending images to a mobile device.
I was a kid in the early 90s and my brother would often drive me around. One day, on the radio, a song came on by the Squirrel Nut Zippers. My brother turned to me and asked, “Can you believe how popular this song is?” I didn’t understand what he was asking. “I like this song,” I said. “Yeah fine, but it sounds like it’s from the 40’s.” This was one of the first times in my life that I had become aware of time.
Not time, like wristwatch time. The grand idea of time. That long incomprehensible string that was here before me and that’d be here after I’ve gone. A pretty heavy concept to be born from listening to a Squirrel Nut Zippers song.
Fancy an always-in-focus lensless camera in your arsenal of image capturing tools? It could be a while, but we're one step closer thanks to "compressive sensing," a technology developed by Bell Labs in New Jersey.