April 2014

I have a feeling this is something every photographer does or has done at some point in their life. Walking through a flea market or thrift shop, they look around and see an older camera. Not one they have any interest in purchasing, but one they do have interest in. Why? For what could be inside. They are in the search of film... film that isn’t theirs. They hope to find photographs from a time long gone and possibly forgotten.

I’ve done it myself and I’d put good money down that many of you have as well. Usually the cameras come up empty, and even if they don’t, oftentimes the photographs themselves are nothing special. But every so often someone hits the jackpot, and that was the case recently with Matt Ames.

We’ve shared his work before here on PetaPixel, but this time filmmaker Simon Smith has stepped up his game.

Whereas his previous collaboration compared 1920s footage of London to footage he captured present day side-by-side, his newest then-and-now piece overlays the two, creating a throwback to the London of 1924 by placing the scenes inside of modern-day London.

When it comes to product photography, the smallest changes in lighting and setup can completely alter the final image, for better or worse. This applies doubly to objects like perfume bottles where you have both transparent and reflective surfaces to deal with.

Here to help with a rather simple fix for making sure photographing these products stays as hassle-free and gorgeous as possible is photographer Andrew Boey, who gives us a rundown on how to make use of a simple piece of 'hybrid' gear to get "clinique" quality product shots.

Brandon Stanton, the photographer behind the now iconic Humans of New York photo blog and #1 NYT bestselling book Humans of New York recently sat down with some students and faculty at the University College of Dublin to receive the James Joyce Award.

But more important for us than the award is that he also sat down to talk about HONY how it has become what it currently is.

At first glance, this little black camera looks like a tiny, worn-out shooter from a hundred years ago. But …

It is hump day, and something tells us it's time for a relaxing/adorable first person video of a scuba diving photographer getting friendly with some harbor seals. It's that time right?

Outdoor-apparel company Filson has teamed up with two of the most notable Magnum photographers, Steve McCurry and David Alan Harvey, to create the ultimate set of camera bags. From simple totes to full-fledged backpacks, the line-up is impressive across the board.

The difference between the two Koreas is well-known. We understand that one country is almost entirely closed off from the rest of the world, while the other is modern and plugged in. We've even seen images from space that show how literally dark North Korea is.

And yet, it takes a compelling photo series/book like German architecture photographer Dieter Leistner's Korea--Korea to truly drive home the differences between these two pieces of the same peninsula.

"This crap is why I can't make a timelapse landscape of Chicago." That's the title of a video and Reddit post by Chicago-based photographer Benn Jordan that shows the scary situation he found himself in recently while trying to capture a time-lapse of South Chicago.

Fujifilm is making a name for itself as a company that truly supports the cameras it puts on the market. By delivering major firmware updates for existing models (even ones that have been discontinued and replaced) they make it less likely that people will upgrade, but simultaneously build fierce customer loyalty.

Today, Fuji continues down this road with firmware 2.0 for the X-E2: a major update that brings the X-T1's nearly no-lag EVF performance and more to the older shooter.

When it comes to days where there are long periods of shooting -- particularly video -- it’s always nice to know you have enough battery power to make it through the day. And while Canon’s LP-E6 and LP-E8s are great, they tend to only last about an hour a piece when shooting HD video.

To make sure you have enough battery life to shoot a fair amount and then some, Chris Winter shares a neat little semi-hack he’s come up with to make an external battery capable of lasting up to 9 times as long as a standard Canon battery.

Someone must’ve heard my birthday was just around the corner, because from now through most of the month of May, Canon, Nikon, and Sony all have incredible deals going on over at B&H. I’ll briefly go over some of the best deals below.

In an effort to bring 145 years worth of its historic photography collection to the computer age, the American Museum of Natural History has digitized over 7,000 of its archived images and made them publicly available online.

Very few people ever have the honor of flying along with the Thunderbirds. However, Blair Bunting, a fairly new Nikon Ambassador, managed to do just that at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona after shooting one of the Thunderbirds' newly-painted F-16 beauties.

In what is one of the coolest photography hacks I’ve seen in a while, Steve Ramsey from Woodworking for Mere Mortals shows you how to easily create a print-transfer to wood using nothing more than your standard inkjet printer.

Today the good folks at f-stop Gear have launched their new Loka UL backpack. This further extends their Mountain Series lineup of backpacks and is one more example of how f-stop Gear won't sleep on progress.

Teaming up with noted NYC wedding photographer Ryan Brenizer, B&H has released the …

What happens when you use a generous dose of juxtaposition in combination with some digital retouching skills? You end up with a rather humorous series of images that show the softer side of some of the most infamous men to ever walk this Earth.

When it comes to wanting to sell physical prints of your photographs online, there are but a few platforms. And of the platforms that do exist, many of them seem to fall short when it comes to offering everything you need in one, simple workflow.

Seeing this as a ripe opportunity, an incredibly talented team consisting of the co-founders of DNA 11, CanvasPop and dozens others have created an online marketplace that offers an end-to-end platform for artists to leverage. It’s called Crated, and it has the potential to be a game-changer for photographers who want to sell their work online.

Last week, Terry Richardson found himself at the center of yet another controversy when model Emma Appleton tweeted a screenshot that showed a crude message allegedly from Richardson himself. Whoever sent that message offered to exchange a Vogue shoot for sex, but it turns out that person wasn't Terry Richardson.

The Galaxy S4 Zoom camera/smartphone officially has a newer, sleeker younger sibling. Announced late last night, Samsung has taken a bit of the focus off of the Galaxy S5's camera issues with the release of the new, 10x optical, 20.7-megapixel Galaxy K Zoom -- a smartphone that truly earns the right to be called a 'camera phone.'

This article was republished with kind permission from …

Cleveland-based photographer Seph Lawless's first job was in a bustling Ohio mall. Today, that same mall appears in his photo series and book Black Friday: The Collapse of the American Shopping Mall -- a haunting series that pays homage to these victims of the recession and the online shopping revolution.

His photos really need no further introduction, and so instead of spending time describing what you could simply scroll down and see, we sat down with Lawless (digitally) to talk about the hows and whys behind this eerie photo book.

Last week we shared a video that got both incredibly popular and controversial. It was put together by Photigy's Alex Koloskov, and showed how he created nearly-identical product shots of a glass of whisky using an iPhone and a Hasselblad.

Now he's back to answer some of the concerns that readers brought up after watching that video, specifically regarding how much post-processing went into the image and if it would be printable on the large scale.

Looking to lighten up his current load while out photographing time-lapses, photographer Doug Urquhart 3D printed and pieced (read: hacked) together a brilliant 3-axis modular time-lapse motion control rig that is 50% lighter than his previous setup.

Street artists can be some of the cheekiest people around. Their approach to satire, be it politically motivated or otherwise, is often worth a laugh or two... if not a round of applause. The latest project in London by Guus Ter Beek and Tayfun Sarier is no exception. They've taken Photoshop's erase tool quite literally into the real world to great effect.

Get out your Easy Bake Ovens and your polydimethylsiloxane, it’s time to make some lenses. Okay, okay... so it’s not that easy. But researchers at an Australian University have developed a new way to make extremely inexpensive, high-quality lenses by using nothing more than droplets of a transparent silicon and an oven to cure said droplets in.

Samsung is proud of the camera in the Galaxy S5 smartphone. So proud, in fact, that the company released an ad that called the iPhone out by name. But the company may have jumped the gun now that it has been confirmed that an unspecified number of Galaxy S5s have shipped with cameras that don't work at all.

We recently took a look at some of the best camera hacks that will save you tons of money. Today we’ve decided to turn things up a notch and progress to the next level! If you’re the kind of person who loves to take things apart to find out how they work, you’ll love the ingenious camera hacks below.

We take all unconfirmed news (aka. rumors) with a grain of salt because you just never know, but according to Fuji Rumors this particular tidbit is as good as confirmed. The mysterious "High Speed Wide Angle Lens" on Fuji's lens roadmap is apparently going to be a 16mm f/1.4 -- no ifs, ands or buts about it.

It's incredible what you can capture with a point-and-shoot camera, years of experience with face/body painting and a huge helping of both creativity and patience. Those were the ingredients that went into creating the video above, called Painted, by professional makeup artist Elvis Schmoulianoff.

In this little video put together by the Marc Silber Show, nature/wildlife photographer Florian Schulz joins Silber to talk about his photography, workflow and overall approach to capturing his museum-adorning images.

Forget MIT and their fancy schmancy algorithms that were developed using the scientific method and 2.5 million photos as a sample... this handy little infographic, created in the style of a board game, can probably do a similarly accurate job of predicting how many likes a photo will get.

Dubbed The Last People of the Pit, this documentary photography series by photographer Sorin Vidis attempts to preserve in images what remains of a community that has made its home in an urban oasis on the outskirts of Bucharest.

If you thought Photoshop 1.0 was primitive, take a look at the video above. What you’re watching is a short section of film shot at the Amiga launch conference that took place in 1985.

Specifically, you're watching world-renown artist Andy Warhol using his first ever computer to digitally edit a photograph of Debbie Harry by “painting” over it using the Amiga’s graphic program.

In 1939, British Pathé -- whose fascinating photography-related old videos we've shared before -- covered something truly amazing: 100 years of photography. It had been 100 years since the camera was invented and so, they took a look back at how those years had changed and refined the art of capturing images using a light-tight box and whatever light-sensitive material you happen to have at hand.

Here's an interesting idea. Designer Celine Semaan Vernon enjoys looking at the freely available images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Terra Satellite as much as anybody else, but she's taken it a step further. She decided to use those images to create beautiful silk scarves through her company Slow Factory.

We’ve shared just how dangerous it can be to get in the way of a drive down the fairway of a professional golfer before, be it on accident or by request. But today we’re sharing something that’s potentially even more impressive, albeit quite a bit more costly than previous events.

Yesterday, a page out of an official Sony camera manual leaked revealing that the company is indeed working on an RX100 Mark III (previously referred to as the RX200), and now sonyalpharumors has gotten their hands on some further details thanks to a 'trusted source.'

In some gut-wrenching news shared by Leica Rumors this morning, a sponsor of theirs, Red Dot Cameras, has had approximately $62,000 in gear stolen from their shop overnight.

In what is one of the more unique and well-executed uses of perspective photography I’ve ever seen, Instagrammer Varun Thota has combined his love for flight with his daily photo habits to create a unique series of images, aptly called #mytoyplane.

Here’s what I know. You grew up, like most, where you got trophies for participation, medals for winning bullshit things …

We’ve interviewed him before and his images have been seen around the globe, but today we have a …

So, you think carrying around your pro-series body and 300mm f/2.8 all day at a sporting event sucks? Well, don’t go complaining to the sports photographers of yesteryear or they might pull out a photo of them using the beast known as 'Big Bertha.'

When it comes to choosing wireless flash trigger systems, there’s no shortage of options. From PocketWizards to cheap, $20 systems on Amazon and Ebay, there seems to be one for each and every situation and price point. However, despite all of the options, there is one thing that every single one of them has in common: they're all pretty big.

Of course, when shooting in a studio with a DSLR a PocketWizard doesn't seem that beastly. But when you’re wanting to trigger a flash with a small mirrorless camera or compact camera, none of the options out there right now will allow you to do so without making your camera look like the attachment rather than the trigger. That’s where FlashQ comes in.

The aerial photography work of Edward Burtynsky is spectacular. So much so that Canadian filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nick de Pencier -- the creators of the Burtynsky documentary Manufactured Landscapes -- are featuring him in yet another visual stunner called Watermark.

A photographer's primary concern when taking a photo might not be "I wonder how many likes this will get," but being able to gauge popularity could still come in handy when you're trying to decide which photos to upload to your favorite sharing site.

Enter MIT PhD candidate Aditya Khosla and his new algorithm that does just that: tells you how popular your photos will be before you even upload them.

Update on 12/16/21: This video has been removed by its creator.

Note to any camera thief who attempts to get rid of the camera at a pawn shop: it might be beneficial to at least know how to turn the thing on. Not only that, but when questioned about where you “found” the camera and when asked to file a missing item report, don’t run off -- I’ve heard it doesn’t help with the whole suspicion factor.

What do you do when your photography professor at college goes on daily rants and rages, critiquing work with an iron fist while doling out priceless lessons? Well, thankfully, some student thought to start writing said rants and rages down.

But not only did he write them down, he shared them via a Tumblog so that the rest of the world could see, read and laugh hysterically at the brilliance and brutality of this awesome photo prof.

The day after the last lunar eclipse we shared a time-lapse with you to help ease the pain if you hadn't had a chance to capture the first of this tetrad of eclipses yourself. The time-lapse was put together by NASA and, while it was better than nothing, it left something to be desired.

Fortunately, photographer Andrew Walker of 599 Productions is here to show NASA how it's done so they can maybe put something better together next time.