"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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? …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It seems we're entering into the final chapter of the Kodak Bankruptcy epic. After filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy in January of 2012, the ex-camera company's final plan to exit bankruptcy received court approval on Monday. What emerges from the ashes, however, will be a company that does zero business with consumers directly.
There's an awesome little subreddit that has been getting a lot of press coverage as of late. It's called ColorizedHistory, and is a 20,000+ person strong community of "Amateur Historians" who are interested in the idea of creating high quality colorized versions of historical black-and-white photographs.
After almost ten and a half years of faithful service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) GOES-12 satellite was decommissioned last week. And in order to honor the weather satellite for over a decade of providing quality imagery, the NOAA decided to put together a time-lapse showing just how much data the satellite captured in the 3,788 days it was functional.
One of the downsides to living in an uber-connected digital world is the ease with which intellectual property can be stolen. Whichever bogus excuse they choose to use, many people seem less than concerned when it comes to stealing someone's photography and claiming it as their own these days.
Jürgen Heckel is a photographer and sound artist who's currently living in Munich, Germany after living in Paris, France for 14 years. He spends a great amount of time in the great outdoors, and many of his photo projects are studies of trees and forests.
There's a new compact camera on the block, only this one isn't made by Sony or Samsung or Nikon or any of the other brands you might expect to see scrawled across the front of the device. No, this one is made by a little-known Swedish lifestyle company called theQ, and its all-new theQ Camera comes touting the self-assigned title of "world's first social camera."
Instagram can be a force for good. For example, the hashtag and Instagram account #litterati has encouraged thousands to pick up trash they find on the street. But as with most tools, it can also do harm, and a couple of day care workers in Virginia recently used the service to those ends, losing their jobs in the process.
A month ago, we heard some rumors that Fujifilm was working on an entry-level X-Series camera for those of us who didn't want to spend on the X-M1 but wanted something better than the X100. Details were (and to some degree still are) a bit thin, but now we have what seems to be the first leaked photo of the upcoming mirrorless camera.
Back when Instagram first came on the scene -- you know, before Facebook paid 735 Million dollars to snatch the company up before Twitter could get its hands on it -- the photo sharing app actually encouraged connected apps to use the terms "insta" and "gram" in their names. Thus were born services like Statigram, Webstagram, Luxogram and more.
Prince George Alexander Louis of Cambridge, often referred to these days as Royal Baby George, had his first photo shoot recently. But if you expected the future British king to get his pick of professional photographers when it comes to his first official family portraits, you'd be wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
