There's nothing like a friendly competition among peers to make a road trip that much more enjoyable, and when you can get a few thousand people to join in and judge the outcome, that's even better. That's what photojournalists and friends Eric Thayer and Joshua Lott did recently when they found themselves in a midst of an impromptu Instagram battle.
If you have any photo books with glued bindings lying around the house, you'll probably understand how annoying the crease in the middle can be. If a photo is printed across both pages, you inevitably lose part of the image as it curves down in the middle, taking some of your sanity with it.
But where other photographers are opting for sewn bindings (the kind that lay flat) more and more, photographer I-Hsuen Chen went the other direction. His project In Between takes advantage of the dreaded crease by hiding the most important parts of photos in there on purpose.
Back in 1948, The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers defined high-speed photography as any 3 frames or more captured at a rate at or above 128 frames per second, but even back then high-speed cameras performed well past that mark.
The public domain video above gives us a short peek at how far high-speed photography tech had advanced by the mid-1960s, when Wollensak's Fastax models were some of the foremost high-speed cameras on the market, capturing action at speeds of up to 18,000fps.
Photographs like the one above by photographer Shikhei Goh go viral on a fairly regular basis. If the stories are to be believed, given enough patience and a little (or a lot) bit of luck, animals can be captured doing all sorts of amazing things.
According to an analysis published on Weibo, however, the stories can't (or rather shouldn't) be believed. Photos like these, the article claims, are staged by photographers who force pet store animals into awkward and unnatural poses.
It's the newly released Olympus E-P5 PEN. A 16.1MP Micro Four Thirds retro-styled pocket shooter capable of 9FPS. But will it raise your heartbeat to 100BPM? Let's find out.
Vermont senator Patrick Leahy is a lot of things: an expert marksman, the most senior senator on Capitol Hill, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and third line for the presidency, just to name a few. But even though he's had as successful of a political career as a Senator might ever hope to have, if you ask him what he would like to do full-time, he'll tell you photography.
For years now, the aging senator has made a name for himself as the senator who you never see without his camera. And although we've shown you his work in the past, in the video above, Leahy himself weighs in on his work and photography in general.
Last Thursday, we told you about the newest anti-paparazzi bill to hit the California State Assembly. Focused on expanding the definition of harassment, SB 606 was drafted for the specific purpose of protecting the children of celebrities -- some hollywood actresses have already spoken out in support of the bill.
As with many a legal mater, however, not everyone is in favor of the bill. While most would agree that protecting children from being harassed by paparazzi is a worthy goal, the NPPA is now officially speaking out against SB 606, warning the public that this bill's vague wording "threatens first amendment rights."
It's a day of awesome astronomical phenomenon on PetaPixel. We started off the day by sharing a stunning time-lapse by photographer Maciej Winiarczyk in which he captured noctilucent clouds and the aurora borealis at the same time.
And now, as you get ready to hit the home stretch and finish Monday on a good note, we have yet another amazing (and accidental) time-lapse capture: While photographing the 2013 Perseids Meteor Shower last week, photographer and designer Michael K. Chung was fortunate enough to capture an actual meteor explosion.
In July of last year, we introduced you to the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP), an effort by the NASA Ames Research Center to digitize some 48,000 pounds of 70mm tape shot by the five lunar orbiters that were sent up to photograph the surface of the moon in preparation for the Apollo missions.
Companies and researchers are always coming up with interesting new camera concepts and prototypes that approach snapping photos in some unique way. The most recent creation to make its way across our desks is the FlexCam, a panoramic camera array that does away with sweeping or stitching to create panoramas. Instead, you simply bend the camera itself.
The crowd surfing blow up ball at a concert isn't a new idea, but late last year HP and Almap BBDO took it in a new direction. As part of HPs "Making Memories Last" campaign, the company fit one of the massive concert beach balls with a high-definition camera and WiFi antenna.
Last week, we reported on a rumor that Canon has been investing heavily in a major European medium format camera manufacturer. Some believe the company to be Phase One.
Now, murmurings of Canon's involvement in the medium format space are heating up. The latest word is that Canon may be planning to launch a digital medium format system of its own by the end of 2014.
The world of photography is awash with gear and accessories for an eager public. But not every invention is worthy of merit as seen by this glorious collection of “WTF were they thinking?”.
On your own mental list of "most perilous jobs," chances are Google Street View driver doesn't make it very close to the top. But one of Google's own wound up in a strange situation recently when a group of villagers in Thailand put him under citizen's arrest, believing him to be a spy for a government dam project they oppose.
Earlier this month, photographer Maciej Winiarczyk captured a rare and beautiful celestial light show. While shooting a time-lapse in Caithness, Scotland, he was treated to not one but two stunning natural phenomena when his camera captured noctilucent clouds and the aurora borealis at the same time.
Want to experience what it feels like to be a photojournalist in the midst of the violent protests and clashes that have been occurring throughout the country of Egypt? Check out the video above.
It was created by photographer Amanda Mustard, a self-taught freelance photojournalist who's currently based in Cairo, Egypt. When an anti-Islamic video went viral online in September 2012, Mustard went onto the streets with a GoPro mounted to her DSLR to document the resulting turmoil.
French smartphone device startup SmartMobilAccessoire is working on a new product called the Biiwatch. It's a watch-like device that's worn around the wrist, but instead telling you the time, it's designed to let you tell your smartphone when to snap a photo.
One of our popular posts back in 2011 was a quick video tutorial on how you can use Mod Podge to transfer photographs onto blocks of wood (we also shared a text-based tutorial earlier this year).
If you thought that was cool, get this: you can also do the same type of photo transfer onto pieces of beach glass!
There will soon be one more road in the United States named after a famous photographer. The city council in Tulsa, Oklahoma has voted to change the namesake of its "Brady street" from Wyatt Tate Brady to Mathew B. Brady.
Wyatt Tate was the founder of Tulsa, but also a racist and a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Matthew B. was one of the best known 19th century American photographers who documented the American Civil War.
"Fast Food" is a series of food photos by photographer Jon Feinstein. The images have a rather unusual look to them -- each food item is captured in front of a purely black backdrop, and is squashed on the surface as though it's being pressed against a pane of glass.
Well, actually they were: Feinstein created the images by scanning the foods with a flatbed scanner.
Ever since Google released the Photosphere feature for their Nexus devices, I have been obsessed with making tiny planets. The photosphere feature enables you to take 360 degree photos, essentially creating a "room" of photos. You also have the ability to turn your panorama into a "tiny planet". Android does all the work for you, and while you may get some errors with the stitched image, they usually turn out pretty great.
If you have some time today, check out this video series by digital filmmaker and photographer Rich Ferguson, created for the Edinburgh Libraries in the capital of Scotland. It's a brief tour through the collection of early Victorian photography held by the libraries.
NYC Grid is a website run by Paul Sahner that explores and documents New York neighborhoods, "street by street and block by block." One of the awesome reoccurring features on the blog is the before-and-after section, which features pairs of photos showing identical locations but shot decades -- or sometimes over a century -- apart.
In this tutorial I’d like to demonstrate that you don’t need expensive studio flashes to create a complex scene with subtle lighting. I haven’t yet seen anyone else do this quite the same way and there doesn’t seem to be a name for it, so I named the process “zone lighting”, a form of exposure blending by dividing the scene in different zones. But let’s start with a little bit of background about the project and its concept.
Swiss photographer Fabian Oefner recently gave this short 10-minute talk at TEDx Warwick …
Sick of carrying your tripod separately from your camera backpack? If you have certain types of backpacks, you can add your own strap loop system to the bottom to serve as a makeshift tripod carrying feature.
Looking to incorporate drone photography and videography into your wedding photo packages? Make sure you're a pro at flying the drone before getting it anywhere near your clients.
The video above is an example of what can happen if you're not.
The idea of fitting electronics into a film SLR in order to capture digital photos with it is not new. The thing is, most of the ideas we've shared ranged from April Fools jokes to promising concepts that never seem to advance beyond that.
The DigiPod is the first product we've seen actually become a reality. It's a digital cartridge that fits inside your old film SLR, and if it makes it to market, it could be quite groundbreaking.
When husband and wife photography duo Loren Doyen and Adrian Whipp drive around for work, it might look to most people like they're hauling around a tiny mobile home. The trailer is actually their Lumiere Tintype Photobooth, one of the world's first fully mobile tintype portrait studios.
Some sad news has emerged from the Midwest today: The Kansas City Star is reporting that a former employee and blogger committed suicide yesterday outside a local police station. Prior to ending his own life, 60-year-old Martin Manley created his own memorial website that includes detailed information about his life, including photographs captured over the years of himself and his experiences.
Benjamin Zank is a young fine art photographer based in New York City. He caught the photography bug a few years ago, at the age of 18, after picking up a Pentax ME Super 35mm film SLR from the attic of his grandmother's house, and has been creating incredible concept images ever since.
Earlier this week, we got a close look at how Sony's upcoming "lens cameras" will look, thanks to a set of leaked press photos, and now we have a better idea of how they'll work, thanks to some leaked owner's manual pages.
We were introduced to the “Ghetto-Flo” lights after reading the excellent blog of New York-based photographer Brad Trent. He had mounted 4 standard workshop fluorescent light fixtures into light-stand mountable strip lights. “Ghetto-Flo” because they're similar in use to the much more expensive Kino-Flo lights, though there are advantages to the later (variable power and output).
From the annals of "How Low Can You Go?" comes word from Hawaii of a stolen camera whose memory card had a family's only photos of a two-day memorial service.
Photographer/rights crusader Shawn Nee is back in the news, this time after he was detained and handcuffed by Los Angeles police for "interfering with an investigation" while taking photos in a public place.
I have a passion for automotive photography at night, but for the most part I'm forced to shoot static images. Long exposures require a stable support for your camera and that's only achievable when everything's locked down -- including the car. Sure, light painting, traffic trails and even the occasional star trail all help to introduce dynamism to static automotive images but sometimes there's no substitute for shooting the car whilst its moving.
Even though most camera bodies these days use some sort of Lithium-ion battery, chances are there's still some gear in your bag that still runs off alkaline batteries. If you've ever found yourself in need of checking the charge on those batteries but you happen to leave your volt meter at home (I know ... what were you thinking!?) here's a cool little life hack that'll give you the info your need.
Sob alert: Fashion/celebrity photographer Terry Richardson says he's likely to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars due to a recent ruling in a suit against Lady Gaga.
LA-based documentary and street photographer John Free has been practicing and teaching street photography for over 30 years. He's taught workshops in LA, New York, Paris and London, and his work has appeared in Newsweek, Smithsonian, US News and World Report and more.
In other words, he has many years worth of experience to offer (which is probably why he teaches workshops), and in the short YouTube video above he makes a little bit of his knowledge available for free.
Reuters photographer Yves Herman captured this peculiar photograph at a match between the Belgian and French national soccer teams yesterday. The photograph has attracted the Internet's attention due to the fact that it makes 28-year-old soccer player Mathieu Valbuena look like a child playing among men.
As post-production software continues to become more and more powerful, researchers are doing their best to keep up by developing new methods of spotting digital photo fakes. In the past, we've seen that noise patterns and even Twitter trends can help spot fakes, but a new method out of UC Berkeley is taking a look at something else entirely: the shadows.
It seems like new and improved camera gear pops up every couple of weeks these days, leading to an endless cycle of discover, buy, sell and repeat. Well, if you're the kind of person who always wants to have the newest gear around, and you're constantly selling off your old gear on eBay to make it happen, the website has just officially announced a new feature that will make your life much easier.
Called My Gadgets, the new eBay feature can keep track of all of the gear you own and let you know about how much you can expect to make when you sell it, making it that much easier when it comes time to upgrade.
Earlier this month, Panasonic unveiled the new Lumix GX7: a rangefinder-style Micro Four Thirds camera that the company packed full of Panasonic firsts. Since Panasonic is hoping the camera appeals to professionals and consumers alike, the folks over in advertising decided to put together a series of videos dubbed "Shooting Impressions" in which they get professionals to use the GX7 on assignment and talk about the features they liked best.
The video above features photographer Bernie DeChant and his recent trip to Kyoto, Japan where he photographed the "erikae" ceremony through which a "meiko" (an apprentice geisha) becomes a full-fledged geisha.
One day, while looking at a glass of water, photographer, artist and architect Moses Hacmon realized that he could really see it. He wondered what water really looked like, and in particular what it looked like when it moved.
One nanoparticle photographic technique later, and he had his answers in the form of a breathtaking photo series dubbed Faces of Water.
When the words "Getty" and "Free" make their way into the same sentence -- as they have a few times before -- photographers tend to tense up before they read on. But when we say that the Getty Museum is sharing 4,600 images for free, there's no need to fret.
In this case, Getty doesn't refer to the stock photography company, but rather the J. Paul Getty Museum. And the museum's newly launched Open Content Program looks to be a positive addition for all.
Actresses Halle Berry and Jennifer Garner testified before the California Legislature on Tuesday in support of an anti-paparazzi bill that would ban taking pictures of children without their parents' written consent.
British filmmaker Philip Bloom was recently in Frankfurt working with digital agency Szyygy, and while he was there, he was selected as the subject of a filmmaking exercise he assigned the students of the 3-day private workshop he gave.
The assignment was to film a mini doc, and the four students picked Bloom as the subject, choosing to interview him about the street photography he shoots during his time off.
Researchers at a California company specializing in high-speed imaging equipment have developed a camera add-on capable of freezing objects traveling at up to 7,500 miles per hour -- that's almost 10 times the speed of sound.
Lest you think that smartphones have the mobile gaming market all but wrapped up, the folks at Magic Lantern have decided to shake things up a little bit. In the spirit of the old Kodak DSLR that came equipped with Pong, ML's pravdomil has added the ability to play a stripped down version of the old 1980s brick breaker-style game "Arkanoid" on the Canon 7D.
There's some debate over who the "father" of street photography was. Although Frenchman Eugene Atget is often granted this title, his work was mainly architectural, putting people second.
But there's another, lesser-known name that enters the picture (pardon the pun) as early as if not earlier than Atget: a Scotsman by the name of John Thomson.