August 2013

Last June, something happened that won't be happening again until the year 2117: Venus eclipsed the Sun. Of course, seeing as Venus is both small and far away from us, the event wasn't an actual eclipse, but rather a "transit." The small dot that is Venus made its way across the Sun for the second time in 8 years and the last time for more than a century.

A lot of photos and time-lapses came out of that event -- a couple of which we shared with you here -- but this one has to be one of the most incredible we've run across.

For all intents and purposes, photographer Nick Brandreth was already doing very well as a photographer when he decided to go apprentice at the George Eastman House.

He had already had his work featured in the likes of the Wall Street Journal, but something had been missing ever since he stated shooting digital ... something he only really re-discovered when he dove into alternative processes.

Here's a good weekend project for those of you who have some old film canisters lying around, and a bit of DIY know-how up your sleeves. Those old film canisters done need to go to waste, with a little work you can turn them into tiny portable flashlights.

San Francisco-based photographer Rob Prideaux spends most of his time taking product shots and still-lifes for companies such as Google and Wells Fargo. His recent Smoke & Fire series, therefore, is a pretty big departure from the norm.

There's a legal battle currently raging in the state of Texas that concerns photography. More specifically, it concerns improper photography -- defined as photographing another person without their consent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of another person -- which was illegal until the state's Fourth Court of Appeals declared the statute prohibiting it unconstitutional.

About twelve months ago, PetaPixel very kindly published my article "The Vital Link Between Emotions and Creativity in Photography." Well, it's one year later and I’m back to tell you how I over came my "Photographers block" and share a few key lessons that I have learned along the way.

It looks like we don't have much longer to wait until the QX10 and QX100 Sony 'lens cameras' actually make their official debut. And just in time for the rumored announcement on Tuesday, we've got ourselves some more specs and photos of the groundbreaking system to share with you.

If you've been following the U.S. Interior Department on Instagram (like we suggested some time ago) you probably saw the 15 second time-lapse clip of the Yosemite Rim Fire that the department put up yesterday afternoon.

If you don't really think about it, it's easy to take video for granted. After all, you can pull out your cell phone and be recording video in a few seconds flat (even fewer if you have Pressy). But what if you were limited to older photographic techniques? No, we don't mean film, we mean wet plate photography.

Capturing even a 12fps animation for only a few seconds would seem an enormous task, and yet, that's exactly what director Kellam Clark and his 40-person crew -- altogether The Living Tin -- are doing. They're shooting video made entirely of collodion tintypes.

There have been several stories lately of musicians banning photography and asking fans to keep their cell phones in their pockets and enjoy the show. Most recently, Prince's "purple rules" had security guards at The City Winery in NYC snatching phones in mid-air and kicking people out.

The Unsound music festival taking a larger scale (though less aggressive) approach: festival organizers have banned photography and filming festival-wide, and are asking that festival attendees be the ones to do the enforcing.

There probably aren't a lot of people out there who would complain that taking pictures on their smartphone is inconvenient. Often, accessing the camera is a quick click or swipe away, and taking a picture another. Pressy takes it to the next level, however, by letting Android users do all of that and more with just a series of pre-programmed taps.

When I first heard of the CamRanger in October of 2012 in New York City at PhotoPlus Expo I was immediately intrigued.

I don’t actually own a laptop, so tethering to an iPad tablet has been a long awaited process with trial and error. My first experience was with the Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card; a memory card you place in your camera, the card transmits a wireless signal and supposedly you connect to that signal source, boom, you're tethered. Except it didn’t really work.

A lot of people love the "vintage look" in photography these days.

Of course, it's one thing is to capture it with the plethora of software readily available -- or by applying "vintage filters" (like the ones on Instagram) to a digital image -- and it's another thing entirely to get old technology to work for us today and create photographs just like we would have done 30, 40 or even 100 years ago.

Jovan 'Bonna' Lamb was born and raised in the Overtown neighborhood of Miami, Florida, an area marked by poverty and crime. As a teenager in the area, he'll tell you that he was "a young hoodlum ... becoming a thug" until something happened: he stumbled across a camera.

The most recent camera announcement news and rumors have come mainly out of the Sony camp, but it looks like Nikon has a couple of new cameras up its sleeve as well, including a new D610 that will finally put to rest the D600's sensor speck issue by replacing the camera all together.

It's obvious that Google is interested in mapping just about everything that is mappable via Street View, but even our future overlords they need some help on occasion. Although the company is willing to send employees with trekker backpacks to many an exotic location, when it comes to taking a virtual tour of local businesses, the search giant hires on "trusted photographers."

One such photographer recently sat down with Tested and told them all about the process of becoming a Google Business Trusted Photographer and taking Street View indoors.

For those art enthusiasts who just don't have the millions of dollars required to purchase their own original Van Gogh painting, Fujifilm has a solution for you. After seven years of development, the company's "Reliefography" 3D scanning and printing technique is ready to create near-flawless replicas of great works of art, which will be available to the public for tens of thousands instead of tens of millions.

When the BBC first captured the non-stop train ride from London to Brighton in 1953, it was simply because they wanted to show how the magic of time-lapse photography could get a Londoner to the seaside in only four minutes.

When 1983 came along, they decided to re-capture the journey to see the differences. And now, in 2013, it only seemed appropriate to continue the every-30-years tradition and capture the trip once again.

Good news isn't always easy to come by in the world of film; more often than not, the stories we run have to do with film being discontinued. But that's not always the case, and the most recent news out of Ilford should give film lovers something to smile about.

Over the years, we've seen some pretty incredible eclipse photos, be they composites that'll blow your mind or time-lapses that'll capture your attention for minutes at a time.

What we haven't seen nearly as much of are solar eclipse photos taken from space. What exactly does it look like when you turn the cameras the other way and capture the Moon's shadow hitting the Earth?

Check out the creepy effect seen in the video above, titled "Dancing Ghosts." It was created by photographer Micaël Reynaud, who photographed a group of people during the day using long exposure times, and then interpolated the resulting photos into a real-time video.

August 30, 2026
My dear child,

I can't believe that tomorrow at this time my little girl will be a married woman. I look back on the last 24 years and I want to do it all over again. I know that can't happen, but I do have my memories, at least.

Many believe that Instagram's recent acquisition of Luma means that the photo sharing app will soon be adding some cool features, including live filter previews and editing capabilities. Yahoo!, however, has beaten Instagram to the punch by adding all of this and more to the latest version of the Flickr iOS app.

Here's something that could very well be the "next big thing" in wedding photography: slow motion photo booths. Check out the hilarious video above for an example of what one such booth recently produced.

Swedish photographer and retouch artist Erik Johansson creates amazing photo manipulations -- in fact, we've actually featured his work before. This, however, is the first time we've had the opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look at how these manipulations come together.

In the video above he gives us a glimpse at how he created the manipulation Drifting Away, all the way from the first sketch to the final 123-layer manipulation.

When Nikon released its D800E and D7100, people were surprised to learn that these models did without the optical low-pass filter (AKA the anti-aliasing filter). The resulting images from these cameras were sharper, but more easily fell pray to moire patterns in certain situations -- in other words, it was a tradeoff.

But Nikon would like you to have your cake and eat it too, at least according to a recent patent the company filed with the Japanese Patent Office.

San Francisco-based interactive artist and freelance creative Ivan Cash recently had a neat idea: go out on the streets of San Francisco and ask random people to share the story behind the most recent photo on their phone (note: there is one racy photo and a few curse words dropped by some of the interviewees).

A few months ago, I was in Los Angeles and grabbed coffee with my friend Eric Steelberg. Eric's a talented cinematographer and mentioned a piece of gear he wanted me to check out. Expecting the latest digital gadget to appear out of his bag, I was surprised to see him pull out a large brick of a camera that I'd never seen before. It was a Polaroid 180 Land Camera from the 1970s.

Earlier this month, the Syfy channel -- which is owned by NBC Universal -- debuted a new show called Heroes of Cosplay. The show pits nine big-time cosplayers against one another as they try to make a name for themselves in this world of fantasy costume play.

It's a big show on a popular network that is backed by an even bigger company, so you can imagine how surprised photographer Bryan Humphrey was when he saw that the show has used his photos of some of these cosplayers without so much as asking permission or even notifying him -- and forget about payment.

When my grandmother was suddenly stricken by a massive stroke, my family had to make the heartbreaking decision to let her go. The doctor told us that even if she were to survive it, she wouldn’t be the person we knew. I remember thinking at that moment, 'if you could only know what kind of woman she is!' We all knew that it wouldn’t be fair to her to bring her back in a way that wouldn’t allow her to live her life her way.

Here's a cool project for those of you who enjoy shooting with both cameras and guns. Did you know that you can photograph a speeding bullet using only a sugar cube and no other light source? As it turns out you can, and Instructables user FPSoutback has the video to prove it.

When we see video of the Milky Way, it's usually not video per se -- more often than not it's a time-lapse. That's because the exposure time needed to capture the Milky Way in most situations makes shooting a standard video a challenge. One production company decided that technology had advanced far enough to give it a try though, and what they came up with was quite cool.

The Oxford Dictionaries is making headlines for its latest quarterly update, and it's not because it decided to loosen the definition of "literally" a bit (that happened a couple of weeks ago). No, this time the dictionary is turning heads because it has added, among other words, the word "selfie."

The 3D camera movement never really took off like some people hoped that it would, but that doesn't mean 3D doesn't have its merits. Many people still love the idea of capturing photos or videos in 3D, but they're not necessarily willing to buy/carry around a camera dedicated solely to that purpose.

The Kúla Deeper side-steps this problem. It's not a 3D camera in and of itself, but a DSLR add-on that enables your existing camera to capture 3D one second and 2D the next.

Those photographers in the wedding business know how strongly brides feel about the memories you're capturing on that day. Imagine how they would feel if you photographed their wedding and then up and decided to close up shop, without so much as telling anybody or fulfilling any of your standing obligations.

It seems outrageous, but that's exactly what one nation-wide wedding group did, taking with it 10TB worth of paid-for wedding videos that the brides and grooms may never see again.

If you thought you had a problem with Gear Acquisition Syndrome (or GAS) think again, you've got nothing on Mumbai-based photojournalist Dilish Parekh. The Guinness Book World Record holder for the largest camera collection smashed his own record earlier this month when he revealed that he now owns 4,425 cameras.

You remember that one time when you wanted to put four of your 16:9 aspect ratio wide-screen TVs side by side and watch the game in super-panorama? Yeah, neither do we. But apparently Panasonic does, considering the 64:9 ultra-wide camera system the company has developed.

You might not know this, but there was metadata before there was, well, metadata. Way back in 1914, Kodak introduced the Autographic system, a combination of autographic cameras and film that allowed you to permanently sign, date and title your negatives as you shot them.

Light Painting goes as far back as Pablo Picasso, and since the true formation of the medium with pioneers such as Dean Chamberlain, Eric Staller and Vicki DaSilva, there has been a mass of people trying their hand at the world of light painting photography. The advent of the digital camera and the popularity of DSLRs has only made this number grow exponentially.

In this sudden growth and glut of people experimenting -- and I include myself as part of that "glut" so please don't be offended or discouraged -- it can sometimes be difficult to find those truly special artists who are expanding the medium and taking it to the next level. Luckily, I'm here to help. Here are 10 amazing light painting artists you need to check out:

Hong Kong's tourism industry brings in about $37 billion in revenue for the city each year, and many of the tourists who contribute want to get a picture with the beautiful Hong Kong skyline and Victoria Harbor in the background while they're there.

But what are they supposed to do if their only chance to get that shot is on a hazy/smoggy day in Hong Kong? The government has the answer: giant fake skyline banners.

After watching the movie "The Last Samurai" at a theater back home in Southern California (where I'm originally from), my curiosity for Japan inspired me to go and discover what it's like. I took a couple of vacation trips out there and met a lot of good people before I found a job that sponsored my working visa to officially let me move out to Japan in 2005.

What if girls were Internet browsers? That's the question that fashion photographer Viktorija Pashuta had been dying to answer for a long time before she finally got her chance in Fashion Affair Magazine.

The resulting photographs try to capture the essence of each of the five major Internet browsers -- Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari -- in a high-fashion sort of way.

One year ago, in August of 2012, New York Times photographer Robert Stolarik was arrested for allegedly using his camera flash to interfere with police during an arrest. However, after taking a look at the evidence, it's the police officer who is in hot water and may face up to 7 years in prison after being indicted on three felony counts and five misdemeanors.

No, you didn't read the title wrong. Although it might seem like a bit of a strange concept, there is such a thing as an "underwater river," and Russian underwater photographer Anatoly Beloshchin actually got a chance to photograph this amazing phenomenon.

After weeks of speculation and leaks, Sony has seen fit to officially announce both its Alpha 3000 DSLR-style E-Mount camera as well as the rumored NEX-5T and three new E-Mount lenses. For details on the first of those, click here. As for the NEX-5T and the new lenses, it looks like the rumors were spot on.

In addition to a few rumored specs that have been thrown around, we've actually seen pictures of the new Sony Alpha 3000 camera taken both in the studio and out in the real world. But tonight the rumored camera became an official announcement when Sony unveiled the DSLR-style E-Mount camera to the world.

New York City-based photographer Supranav Dash is interested in India's occupations -- not the rich and glamorous ones, but the ones held by those who are lower in the society's Caste System.

For nearly 200 years, certain groups of people were not allowed to deviate far from their family's prescribed occupations. However, in recent years things have started changing. Many of the common age-old tradesmen jobs are rapidly disappearing, and Dash is using his photography to document them before they vanish completely.

Facebook today announced a new shared photo albums feature that allows multiple users to contribute photographs to a single album. This makes it easy to aggregate memories from events that were captured by different photographers. It also likely dampens the prospects of the countless collaborative album startups that are vying for a piece of the photo sharing pie.

People often comment on how similar sons look to their fathers, but how similar are they, really? Photographer Craig Gibson decided to find out, and created a photo project called "Boys and Their Fathers."

Are ordinary macro lens attachments for your smartphone not enough for you? Want to zoom in closer? 22-year-old mechanical engineer Thomas Larson has just the lens for you. It's called the Micro Phone Lens, and is a tiny little attachment that instantly lets you focus on and capture very small subjects.