July 2013

Attention photojournalists: As if times weren't tough enough already, a new startup wants to replace your work with Twitter-based crowdsourcing.

Last month we shared a couple videos showing how it's a bad idea to ask professional golfers to aim at your camera -- there's a good chance you'll end up with shattered glass and a pricey camera repair bill.

Bang. Pop. Zip. Zop. Welcome to the review of the Nero Trigger, a lightning, laser and sound sensor that will crank that shutter faster than you can. It also includes a timelapse, HDR and a DIY mode allowing utilization of external sources to trigger the Nero. As their ad copy claims, "Nero Trigger is built to help you shoot high speed photos for the occasions that your shutter finger would not be sufficient."

Photographer Joseph D.R. OLeary wants to live in a world where beards are appreciated as fine art. And so he's doing his best to shape this world into such a place by photographing beards and the men who grow them for his photo series Of Beards and Men.

We reported in December 2012 that Sony was planning to unleash a full frame mirrorless within a year. We're about halfway to that one year mark now, and as Sony gets ready to unveil its latest creation, new details are starting to emerge that paint a clearer picture of the revolutionary camera we'll be seeing.

It wasn't long ago that Flickr rolled out its massive redesign -- met by both boos and cheers -- that entirely changed the way you experience the photos sharing site. Now it's 500px turn. The premium photo sharing platform just announced its own redesign, focused around larger photos and a Focus Viewer feature that offers a "stunning full screen experience."

After a couple of months in beta, the photography review site DPReview is finally announcing the official launch of an online store that bears the website's stamp of approval. Named GearShop, it's a specialty camera store that will stock its shelves with only DPReview recommended and approved products.

When visiting Lancaster, Pennsylvania recently, Portland, Oregon-based photographer Lindsey Boccia made the mistake of not bringing her camera bag along for the journey. Boccia wanted to play around with analog photography, so she decided to buy some disposable cameras.

At the end of 2012, Swiss photographer Gus Petro took a trip to the United States, and was met with a sharp dichotomy. When he visited New York City, he found density in all its glory. But when he followed that up with a trip to the Grand Canyon, he was struck by the sheer emptiness of it.

Musician Beyoncé has a love/hate relationship with the camera; or maybe it's a hate/hate relationship. Regardless, her views on the subject came out at a recent show in Atlanta where the singer -- who has gone so far as to ban pro photography entirely -- told a fan to "Put that D**n Camera Down."

One of the neat features in Google's Glass wearable computer (and camera) is voice commands. Say "okay glass," and the device will start listening for an instruction from you. Here's an interesting (and humorous) piece of trivia: did you know that Google considered using "pew pew pew" as the activation phrase?

Yesterday, we shared the groundbreaking news that Magic Lantern's a1ex had managed to squeeze 3 more stops of dynamic range out of Canon's 5D Mark III and 7D by using a new feature dubbed Dual ISO. Today, we have a comparison that shows what RAW video shot on the 5D Mark III looks like taken both with and without the Dual ISO feature enabled.

Still life photographer Peter Schafrick recently built a custom contraption he calls "The Spinster." It's a mostly wooden device that allows him to spin paint-covered objects around an axis, capturing colorful images of paint being flung outward by centrifugal force. The resulting series is titled "Toys."

Rolling Stone magazine unveiled the cover of their August 1st issue yesterday, and immediately felt the Internet's wrath. That's because the cover -- often reserved for celebrities, rock stars, etc. -- features a photo of the infamous Boston Bomber #2 in the white hat: suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

I'm photographing a wedding in a couple of weeks. During one of our meetings, I asked the bride whether she and her fiancé had made a decision regarding their guests being allowed to photograph during the ceremony and reception. She started shaking her head, saying that it hadn't even occurred to her.

On Christmas Day of last year, we shared the news that Instagram was still dealing with fallout after their infamous Terms of Service mishap. Even after scaling back the Policy to pacify angry users, the company still faced with a class action lawsuit.

News photographers have a potentially valuable new tool with Covertimes, a new website that congregates images of front pages from newspapers around the world.

Here's a little something that might help start off your work day with a smile, or perhaps an "aww." This video above is a mock movie trailer put together by Fresno, CA firefighter Cory Kalanick using footage he captured of a kitten rescue and resuscitation he performed last month.

All of the updates coming out of Magic Lantern's camp recently have been RAW video related. And while there has been news enough on that front to keep us excited, we were happy to see something new coming from the ML team today.

There's a brand new service in town that's looking to help out those photographers who choose to share their images for free with the online community. Powered by Creative Commons, the new website Dotspin uses a hashtag and voting system to determine a photo's quality and give the photographer a chance to earn credits towards rewards such as restaurant gift cards.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters angry over the verdict in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin trial swarmed San Francisco streets this weekend in numbers huge enough to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge.

Wet plate photographer Rob Gibson believes that there are those among us who are "flame-keepers of the past," and if such people exist, he is certainly one of them. Like the others out there who continue to practice age-old photographic techniques such as the daguerreotype or wet collodion process, his passion harkens back to a simpler time -- a time he does his best to recreate with 100% accuracy through his lens.

There hasn't been a lot to report vis-à-vis of memory cards lately. With the exception of the occasional limited time price drop and creative idea (like the partitioned "Wise" CF Card from Amulet with its instant backup capabilities) the last few months have been somewhat silent.

Detroit police are investigating an incident last week in which a photographer for the Detroit Free Press was arrested and had her camera seized while covering a police action.

The smartphone has not only revolutionized the way we live but also completely altered the landscape of modern photography. If you have any doubts just go to a concert and try to see past the ocean of glowing screens snapping shots or filming their own shaky and out of focus rendition of the show.

Every so often I get an email asking me to jump in on some forum argument or other. I rarely do that because of the language barrier.

Niagara Falls is (or rather are) a sight to behold, and while capturing the falls from a boat or one of the overlooks is impressive enough, why not take to the air? That's what YouTube user questpact did, creating the video above using his DJI Phantom quad-copter and GoPro Hero 3.

In Japanese, "Muku" means “clean” and “simple,” and that's what Muku Labs has done its best to create with its first product, the Muku Shuttr. A clean and simple little wireless shutter release that works with iOS and certain Android devices.

Some people say that the secret to striking it rich during a gold rush is to sell shovels. That's kind of what Roger Cicala is doing. With photography exploding in popularity as of late, Cicala has found huge success in loaning out gear to photographers who would rather rent than buy.

Can you trust camera reviews submitted by customers of online retailers? Not entirely, suggests a new academic study, and not for the reasons you might think.

I started getting into photography when I was in my mid-to-late teens. I bought a 35mm Minolta XG7 at a local yard sale during my freshman year, and around the same time I took a 3 week summer darkroom course at a local community college. I got really in to it, but when I finally finished high school I went straight into the workforce. I jumped around various manual labor and retail jobs until I was 21. This is when I got married, and shortly thereafter I began considering the distant …

It's official -- the point-and-shoot market is dying, while DSLRs and other interchangeable lens systems champion the cause for standalone cameras.

Earlier this year I tried Polaroid emulsion lifts for the first time. An emulsion lift (or emulsion transfer) is when the emulsion layer is removed from a sheet of instant film and then transferred to a different surface.

They say you shouldn't laugh at one's misfortune, but a prank pulled off by BlackBoxTV shows just how silly we look when we're terrified -- and it's pretty funny. That's because these mean geniuses pulled off a prank that absolutely terrifies some innocent folks just trying to get their picture snapped by a photo booth.

Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner was randomly selected and announced at the end of this post.

When my wife Sara and I finally decided to start planning our wedding (after a crazy Muppet Proposal proposal that seemed to tickle quite a few people's fancy) one thing that became very important to us was what to do with our wedding portraits/photography.

Styling your mirrorless camera after retro rangefinder cameras of old is popular among camera makers these days, and it appears that the next company to jump onto the bandwagon will be Panasonic. Late next month, the company will be announcing a new Micro Four Thirds camera called the GX7 -- the company's first rangefinder-styled camera.

Want to know how long it takes to visit every single subway station in Manhattan? Answer: It takes about nine hours.

One of the great workflow possibilities that was opened up by the advent of digital photography is the ability to easily create panoramic images. It's become trivially easy to generate panorama images, so much so that it's even become an integrated feature into smartphones.

Photographer Rupert Jordan has been working on a quirky concept lately. He wanted to capture London's landmarks in an "unusual way," so he decided to use forced perspective to make it seem as if London is under water.

Last Thursday, the long-awaited and much-talked-about Lumia "EOS" 1020 finally made landfall. Equipped with a second gen 41-megapixel PureView sensor capturing photos from behind a 6-lens ZEISS system, the phone packs quite the photographic punch.

Camera equipment has long been attractive to the eyes of thieves. After all, it's generally portable, pricey, and a piece of cake to sell through channels such as Craigslist. In Northern California, robbers have begun targeting photojournalists at gunpoint in order to snatch their gear.

Gigapixel photography is all the rage these days, as photographers all over the world compete to hold the record for "world's largest photo," but one photographer in San Francisco is participating in a very different way.

About a month ago, almost every Canon website announced the release of the brand new EF-M 11-22mm f/4-5.6 IS STM wide angle for the company's mirrorless EOS M. We say almost because, at the time, no pricing or release date details had come down the pipe from Canon USA.

In honor of Memorial Day, a couple of months ago, the folks behind the Sundance Film Festival decided to dig up a short honorable mention winner from 2007 and put it up on YouTube. Called Spitfire 944, the film show WWII Photo Reconnaissance pilot Lt Col. John S. Blyth telling his story and reacting to footage of a crash landing he made all the way back in 1944 that he had never seen before.

Back in May, we featured the volcano photos of photographer Miles Morgan, a guy who gets so hot to lava that he's had his shoes and tripod melt. If you didn't believe that shoe melting fact then, check out the crazy photo above: it shows photographer Kawika Singson with his shoes and tripod in flames due to the intense heat of lava.

Mark Kologi is known by many simply as "The Photo Man," and over the years he has bought, sorted and sold over three million forgotten personal photos. It's his passion, and the connection he has forged with his photos and the people who buy them shows in this short documentary by Ben Kitnick.

Update: The video has been taken down by the uploader.

If you live in New York City, one of these days you might just stumble upon a bottle of Aunt JeMichael instead of Aunt Jemima while shopping for syrup in the supermarket. No, it's not a strange off-brand that somehow got mixed in with the big-name stuff, it's part of advertising and fine art photographer Mike Mellia's Self-Absorbed series.

When you're tasked with taking a famous person's photo, you often don't have much time with the actual person to go through a trial and error process and figure stuff out. Photographer Philippe Echaroux wanted to take things to the extreme and see if he could photograph a celebrity in less than a minute total.