Leica's new flagship digital rangefinder, the Leica M, was announced more than a month ago, but things have been very quiet in regards to sample photos demonstrating the camera's capabilities. If you've been dying see actual photos shot using the camera, today's your lucky day. Pandachief over at the forum HK LFC has published quite a few sample photographs shot in a low-light environment (it appears to be a dinner party).
Amazon has launched Cloud Drive Photos, an Android app that makes it easy to store and share photographs to and from the the cloud. It's a consumer-oriented app build on top of Amazon Cloud Drive, a cloud-storage service that competes with the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive.
Photographing people on park benches is nothing new in photography, but photographers usually capture different people sitting on different benches. Ukrainian photographer Eugene Kotenko did something different: he spent four years documenting the life of a single park bench outside his house.
If you just so happen to have both a C-mount CCTV lens and a M42-mount teleconverter lying around, try combining the two: you may find a makeshift macro combo on your hands.
Looking for a cheap fog machine or fog juice for your photography? Hurry out to your local pop-up Halloween store today: David Hobby of Strobist reminds us that these seasonal stores often offer deep-discounts of those things once All Hallows' Eve has come and gone.
In 2008, I had this kooky idea to take my then 4-year-old son out to an abandoned road and throw him into the air, since it seemed most fathers like to do this with their kids. There was this long, abandoned road near my house, so we set up there. After getting my Nikon D200, self-timer, and tripod ready, my son decided that he didn't want to be thrown into the air, so I just held him up instead. I then took another photo of myself looking up with my arms extended.
Want to see what New York City experienced over the past few days? Check out this time-lapse video by Silas Maniatis (SMvideoChan on YouTube). The photographs were captured by a camera mounted to the top of the building at 2 Northside Piers in Brooklyn and snapping away at 2 frames every minute, or 30 seconds between shots.
Photojournalist Kenneth Jarecke wrote up a thought-provoking piece yesterday titled, "Instagram, the Devil, and You." He offers his thoughts on the question, "Will 'Instagram photojournalism' stand the test of time?":
Just in case you’ve been wondering: yes, the latest versions of Adobe’s photo-editing programs are all compatible with the …
After Hurricane Sandy devastated New York City earlier this week, photographer Randy Scott Slavin ventured around various areas that had been plunged into darkness due to power outages. He shot eerie long-exposure photographs that make the city look like a ghost town. The series is titled "NYC Unplugged."
Ever since we launched our Leica Look-alike iPhone 4/4S skin back in 2010, it has been the top seller in our store (yup, we run a small online shop to support this blog). If you're the proud owner of a new iPhone 5, we've also got you covered. Today we're launching an iPhone 5 version of the popular skin, which makes your phone look just like a Leica rangefinder camera. You can pick one up for $6 (shipping is free in the US).
As a kid growing up in interior British Columbia, it is impossible not to fall in love with the great outdoors. Some of the best ski hills on the continent, endless hiking and biking opportunities, and lakes that stretch over the horizon. The endless opportunities outside my doorstep would often lead to long adventures in the mountains, and ultimately, a budding interest in photographing these places to share with others.
Using an old Pentax ME-50 Super, I captured images of mountains, glaciers, and sunsets on these outings. It was pretty hard to take a bad picture when the surroundings are so epic and naturally stunning, it was just a matter of visiting them.
It seems like Kodak is having a hard time figuring out how to getting its finances back in the black. Kodak has announced its 3rd quarter financial results, and the numbers aren't pretty -- they're downright ugly, actually. Despite raking in $1 billion over the three-month period ending in September (down 19% from the same period last year), the company still posted a net loss of $312 million (up from a loss of $222M during the same period last year).
It's mind-blowing what can be created these days using ordinary DSLRs, a small team of people, and a whole lotta skill with visual effects. The short film above, titled "Grounded", was emailed in to us by its creator Kevin Margo, who works as the visual effects supervisor at Blur Studios. He says that it was inspired by his father, who passed away from cancer. Here's the synopsis:
One astronaut's journey through space and life ends on a hostile exosolar planet. Grounded is a metaphorical account of the experience, inviting unique interpretation and reflection by the viewer. Themes of aging, inheritance, paternal approval, cyclic trajectories, and behaviors passed on through generations are explored against an ethereal backdrop.
It was shot using a Canon 5D Mark II for 24fps footage, a Canon 7D for 60fps footage, and the Canon 24mm, 50mm, and 135mm prime lenses. The software used in post include Vegas, PFtrack, Zbrush/Vray/Max, Fusion, and AE/MagicBullet.
When Google upgraded its Android OS to Jelly Bean 4.2 a couple of days ago, the company unveiled a new camera app called Photo Sphere that lets you shoot 360-degree panoramas by waving your camera around. If you've been dying to play with the app on your Android device running the older version of Jelly Bean, but can't bear to wait until 4.2 officially comes to you, this should be music to your ears: the new 4.2 camera/gallery upgrades and Photo Sphere have been successfully ported to Android 4.1.1.
While we're on the subject of interesting photography-related wood products, take a look at Woodsnap. It's a company that prints photographs on sheets of high-grade wood, a canvas material that's sure to attract a lot of attention.
Feast your eyes on this gorgeous twin-lens reflex camera that was designed and built from scratch by photographer Kevin Kadooka, a mechanical engineering student at the University of Portland. It uses a Mamiya-Sekor 105mm f/3.5 Chrome lens and has a Polaroid back for shooting 4.25x3.5-inch instant film, and is crafted out of laser-cut birch plywood.
Happy Halloween y'all! If you're planning on carving up a pumpkin for your doorstep this year and are looking for a challenging design, check out this amazingly detailed pumpkin sent in by reader Dan Savoie.
Portrait is a new 20-minute documentary film by Columbus, Ohio-based filmmaker Andy Newman that explores the question, "In the age of Instagram, what sets a professional photographer apart?" Newman compares the lives and work of two people who are both crazy about photography, but who have chosen very different careers and mediums.
Mirrorless cameras feature sensors larger than compact cameras and bodies smaller than DSLRs, but how do their sensor sizes compare with one another? To give you a better idea of how formats such as Nikon CX and Olympus/Panasonic Four Thirds stack up against each other, Digital Camera Database created this helpful graphic showing the relative sizes of each format.
Check out this album cover portrait photo of the Belgian indie pop band SX, shot by photographer Benjamin Von Wong. While it looks appears to show the band standing in the ocean with the sun rising (or setting) in the background, it was actually shot in a much more controlled environment: a swimming pool.
An update to the image-stabilized Canon 24-70mm lens rumor that we shared yesterday: Canon Rumors is reporting with certainty that the lens is in fact on the way. However, the lens won't be an IS version of the f/2.8, as previously reported, but an entirely new Canon 24-70mm f/4L IS. In other words, the lens will give up a stop in max aperture in exchange for IS.
You know those digital photos you've archived by burning onto DVDs and sticking under your bed? You'll be lucky if the files are still readable by the end of your life. Photographer Trevor Paglen wants to archive photos for a much longer time... and by "much longer", we mean billions of years. He's not just doing this for himself, either, but for all of humanity.
I am not a reviewer. I don’t even play one on TV. There are already some in-depth reviews out on the new Canon EOS-M, and more coming daily. But I handle a lot of equipment and test a lot of equipment. When something new comes in I spend a day handling it and testing it. Hopefully this will give you a quick overview of the camera, and perhaps fill in some things that actual reviewers don’t get to tell you about. We recently got a bunch of EOS M cameras, a bunch of the 22mm lenses, a couple of 18-55 kit lenses, and a single EOS M EF adapter.
For those who don’t want to read this but do want to tell everyone what I said later, here’s the summary: it is the best of mirrorless, it is the worst of mirrorless, it is the camera of wise choices, it is the camera of foolishness, it is the epoch of accurate autofocus, and it is the epoch of slow autofocus. In other words, I’ve got mixed emotions.
Sometimes the best thing you can do to improve your photography is leave your camera at home.
Yes, practice is imperative if you want to improve. You do need to learn to work your camera instinctively and make a mastery of the technical aspects needed to create beautiful images.
The debate rages on: should appropriated Google Street View photographs be considered art? There are quite a few artists and photographers out there who think it should be. Photographer Michael Wolf was awarded Honorable Mention for his curated screenshots at the World Press Photo 2011. Photographer Aaron Hobson takes screenshots and turns them into gorgeous panoramic photos. Jon Rafman's screenshots were picked for an exhibition at London's Saatchi Gallery.
Now here's another case that might cause a lot more head-scratching: photographer Doug Rickard's Street View screenshots have been selected for the permanent collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Here's the latest installment of Ross Ching's "Empty America" project, which features time-lapse videos of major cities in the United States with all the people magically removed. Over the past couple of weeks, we've visited the beautiful cities of San Francisco and Seattle; this week, the destination is New York City.
Japanese electronic industry analysis company BCN has published a new report (in Japanese) on the current landscape of the mirrorless camera industry. Using data gleaned from retailers and manufacturers over in Japan, it reports that three companies -- Olympus, Sony, and Panasonic -- account for nearly 70% of mirrorless camera sales in Japan. Nikon and Canon, both relatively late to the mirrorless game, are fourth and fifth (respectively), with a combined share of 22%.
The role Twitter played during Arab Spring in early 2011 gave the microblogging service a huge boost in legitimacy and pushed it into the mainstream. Instagram may be having a similar "coming of age" experience through its role in the ongoing coverage of Hurricane Sandy.
Nikon has done quite a refresh of its DSLR lineup so far in 2012. It released the D4 as a flagship camera and the D800/D800E as a high-megapixel camera for pros, the D3200 as an entry-level camera for consumers, and the D600 as a more-affordable full-frame DSLR. The company isn't done yet: Nikon Rumors reports that within the next few weeks, Nikon will be announcing a fifth DSLR: the D5200.