Well, if you had any doubts that Sony is on the cusp of releasing a new DSLR-style E-Mount camera, they should be long gone by now. Yesterday we shared a leaked product photo of the Alpha 3000 (or ILC-3000), and today we have a couple of photos of one being used in the wild.
Freelance sports photographers who have been on contract with Reuters in North America have been receiving some unpleasant calls over the past couple of days. Apparently, due to a new deal between Thomson Reuters and USA Today Sports Images, they are being systematically informed that their photographic services are no longer needed.
Here's a quirky product in case you're spending your Saturday online shopping for things you don't exactly need but might not mind owning. It's called the MeCam, and it's a wearable clip camera that can shoot 720p video and take 5MP photos during the day and night.
It wasn't so long ago that Instagram was in the business of being bought, but now that the app has the power of Facebook behind it, as Bob Dylan would say: The Times They Are a-Changin'. In addition to the recent update to the company's brand guidelines that banned the use of "Insta" and "Gram" by connected apps (among other things), the company just made an acquisition of its own.
Technology often borrows ideas from nature, and camera technology is no exception. For example, you might remember the bug-inspired compound eye camera we shared just a few months back. Engineers at Swiss company iniLabs don't want to mimic bug eyes, however, they'd rather create something that mimics the human eye. And that's exactly what they did with the new Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) 128 camera.
It's become a pattern with musicians lately. In an attempt to force people to actually experience the concert they're attending, many musicians are banning photography at their shows outright. In the past, we shared messages put up by the bands She & Him, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Savages, all of whom are kindly asking concert goers to put away their darn cell phones.
"Impossible" stories don't seem to be all that impossible where cameras are concerned. For example, you might remember the Canon compact that found its way back to its owner after drifting 6,200 miles across the ocean to Taiwan.
Today's impossible story isn't quite so international, but no less amazing. After losing $1,300 worth of camera equipment to an alligator at the Everglades Alligator Farm eight months ago, another alligator was kind enough to return amateur wildlife photographer Mario Aldecoa's gear to him last week.
For travel shooters and those looking to keep their kit light, new Interchangeable Lens Compacts (ILC) have been a major boon. But the real beneficiaries of the rise of this new system -- still less than five years old -- are the companies that make them. However, in order to maximize those benefits, manufacturers of ILCs need to establish the format as viable and resilient. For some, that means working together rather than against one another.
Over the last couple of weeks we've mentioned more than once that Sony has a lot of releases coming up, and as those releases draw near, inevitable photo and spec leaks also spring up. Yesterday it was the upcoming NEX-5T and a few new E-Mount lenses, and today it's the first photo of the upcoming Alpha 3000 (sometimes referred to as the ILC-3000).
While working on a feature film called The Grind, filmmaker Vashi Nedomansky had to come up with a way to shoot a flashback scene, complete with Humvee, in the desert of Iraq. The only problem? He had neither Iraq, nor a Humvee to work with.
Fortunately, he did have the sand dunes outside of Los Angeles and a 1:18 scale model of a Humvee purchased at Walmart for $23. Combine those things with a bit of creativity and you get some low-budget, professional-looking visual effects.
Sony is primed to announce quite a few new products in the coming months. Some of the more exciting rumored products include the groundbreaking Lens Cameras and the NEX full frame mirrorless camera everyone has been salivating over.
The photos that leaked earlier today, however, don't show either of those. Instead we get a peek at three upcoming lenses and an updated NEX-5 series camera.
Hopefully, you know me for my level-headed and impartial analysis of the photography business. Forget that. Today I’m going to go off on someone who is not only doing a disservice to the industry that he purports to serve, he’s actively working to destroy it. In the words of The Dude (from The Big Lebowski): “This aggression will not stand!”
Here's a photo series whose subject we hope nobody ever runs across in real life. Called Point Blank, photographers Peter Andrew, Simon Duffy and Derek Blais have put together a set of photographs that give you a down-the-barrel view of several well-known guns.
Sports games and medals are often won and lost at the hands of the referees. Be it an offside call that might have turned into a goal or the line judge that just doesn't want to give those last 6-inches your team needs for the first down, there's good reason cameras are becoming standard backup for refs who might have missed something.
German shot putter David Storl has a particularly good reason to be thankful for cameras these days, since a photo that was almost deleted managed to overturn an erroneous foul call and win him the gold in the IAAF World Championship Men's Shot Put Finals last week.
When it comes to visible light photos of the night sky, Hubble has been king. That's because Earth-bound telescopes -- even those with much higher-quality optical systems than Hubble -- must deal with the blurring effects of our planet's atmosphere.
A newly developed camera called VisAO, however, has done away with that problem, and in the process enabled astronomers to take the highest-resolution visible light photos ever captured of the night sky.
While living in their studio -- which also happened to be located in an old bank with joint bathrooms at the time -- photographers Gerban Grotenhuis and Marc Marselje had an interesting idea. Just how many creative and funny scenes could they create using those joint toilets?
The result is a humorous and creative photo series called Toilet Diaries that transformed joint toilet rooms into everything from a WWII battleground to the inside of a claw crane machine.
Here's a video that should help you transition out of work mode and into TGIF mode with more than a few chuckles along the way. It was put together by Minnesota-based photojournalist Ben Garvin using a stop-motion iPhone app, and has been making the rounds on the Internet as beard and stop-motion lovers unite to praise his efforts.
The Tadaa app for iOS is a neat camera and effects app that has managed to win itself some 3 million users since it first hit digital shelves. It's done this by offering interesting effects and features that competitors like Instagram don't -- such as a Twitter-like re-share feature and the recently added ability to blur the background.
The newest feature out of the Tadaa camp, however, comes as its own stand-alone app rather than an in-app ability. Dubbed Tadaa 3D, it'll allow you to "create breathtaking 3D illusions" using standard photos.
It seems the retro design movement has finally begun to infiltrate something other than the mirrorless market. In a move that makes its Instax line of instant cameras look a lot more like the X-Series line, Fujifilm has just announced the retro-styled Instax Mini 90 seen above.
Earlier this year, Swiss photographer Philipp Schmidli attracted a good deal of attention for a series of photos showing the silhouette of a biker in front of a gigantic moonrise.
The photographer received many comments about how the photos resembled the cover of the movie ET. Although that was never Schmidli's intention, he decided to follow up the original series with an actual ET-inspired shoot!
Google has made sure that the couch potato in all of us has ample opportunity to see the world by adding everything from the world's tallest peaks to an extensive tour of the Grand Canyon to its Street View repertoire. But of course, that's not to say the search giant is anywhere near done.
The company's most recent update, which went live yesterday, added a long list of world-renowned zoos to the list, allowing users to skip the lines and see some lions, giraffes and pandas in their not-so-natural habitats.
If you're going to do self-portraits, it might not be a bad idea to take a leaf out of photographer Alex Wein's book and get creative. Started during a cross-country roadtrip back in 2011, Wein's series Headstands puts a quirky twist on your standard "here's me at the *insert famous landmark here*" photo by quite literally turning it on its head.
Researchers at Cornell University recently developed a new piece of software in conjunction with Adobe that could some day help amateurs and professionals alike exert more control over how exactly certain static scenes are lit.
KFC Restaurants recently opened a new concept store in Louisville, Kentucky called KFC eleven. (The "eleven" being a tribute to the 11 herbs and spices in KFC's original recipe chicken). The new store has a distinctly modern look, and is far from the red and white color palette made popular by Colonel Sanders.
The new concept required a new direction for the photography as well. KFC eleven's creative agency, (Creative Alliance) asked us to help them create the visual feel for this new brand.
In all art forms; music, writing, architecture, photography, whatever; originality and innovation are the things that produce the best works from the best artists. A lot of advice on how to improve your art focusses on technical and technological aspects; often with a cursory “develop your own style” thrown in somewhere. It’s a difficult thing to explain or teach: how do you develop your vision or style? And how do you know if you’ve found it?
Last night was packed full of announcements from Canon, as the Japanese company saw fit to announce four new point-and-shoots (including a new flagship), update the PowerShot N and release a new lens in one fell swoop.
Two new photo booth systems have appeared in a rather unlikely location: the New York Public Library. The library system (which, by the way, is the second largest public library in the US) recently installed the booths to allow visitors to capture moments from their library visits and share them with friends and family.
Earlier this month, Photoshelter did a live webinar with Carolyn E. Wright, AKA The Photo Attorney. Carolyn is a full-time attorney whose practice is aimed squarely at the legal needs of photographers. During the webinar talked extensively about copyright infringement, and what photographers need to know when they think their copyright has been infringed (you can watch a video recording here).
Earlier today, we showed you some of the impressive work the Photoshoppers of Reddit's r/ColorizedHistory community have been putting together. In case you read that post and though "I'd like to try that!" the short tutorial above by 19-year-old r/ColorizedHistory contributor Mads Madsen is a great place to start.
Andrew Nelles is a 26-year-old freelance photojournalist based in Chicago, Ill. A graduate of Columbia College Chicago, he began freelancing in Chicago in 2009. Andrew was one of the 28 photojournalists laid off from the Chicago Sun-Times in May 2013 after spending 9 months at the paper.