If you're ever in England and come across an old camper van with the words "Camper Obscura" splashed across the side, knock on the door and say hi to photographers Jonathan Blyth and Matthew Pontin. Since the summer of 2010, Blyth and Pontin have traveled widely around the South West of England, teaching people about photography from the rear cabin of the vehicle.
Having your laptop and photographs stolen usually isn't a good thing, but for photographer Melanie Willhide, it actually helped her career move forward.
From most angles, it looks like a bunch of lights flickering at random. But stand in just the right spot, and you’ll perceive moving bodies. Jim Campbell’s installation for Light Show – a new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London – is a powerful antidote to the high-tech obsession with performance, the endless competition to pack more megapixels into a smaller screen or sensor. It also provides fresh insight into human vision.
One of the big trends in the camera industry these days is the stuffing of "big camera" sensors into "small camera" bodies. After all, if you can get the same image quality from a camera that's smaller in size, why wouldn't you want to? (That's the idea, at least).
F-Stop Gear has decided to put together a miniseries of inspirational shorts about the pro photographers they sponsor. These f-stop pros are some of the best outdoor photographers in the business, and the company would like to give its fans some insight into the men and women behind the epic shots.
In an attempt to speed up its sizable network and lower costs, Facebook recently decided to begin using Google's WebP image format. The format was designed by Google as a space-saving alternative for PNGs and JPEGs. WebP provides lossless and lossy compression, support for an alpha channel, support for animation and more -- all at much smaller sizes and almost identical image quality.
Last week was full of horror, disbelief and touching compassion. It was also a week driven by photographs and discussion about photography. From the iconic photo by Boston Globe’s John Tlumacki on the cover of Sports Illustrated, to the hundreds of citizen photos turned in to the FBI, the story and the events that followed were driven by photography.
Do you ever have those times when you look up or around you and you see something like the scene above?
Duesseldorf, Germany-based photographer Jakob Wagner wants to show you how diverse photographs of the Atlantic Ocean can be. The images in his series "Madeiran Weather" are all of the same patch of coastal area, yet they are drastically different from one another due to the weather.
How do you solve the problem of professional concert photographers snapping unflattering photos of you during your live shows? One way is to ban them completely, and that's exactly what Beyonce is doing with her latest concert tour. Policies like hers may be growing in popularity among artists who want to control their image, but the policy is still causing quite a hoopla.
If you thought ordinary iPad photographers looked silly, wait till you spot someone in public with a telephoto lens strapped to the front (er... or back?) of their tablet. The iPad Telephoto Lens is a new external lens attachment for iPad users who would like to squeeze a little extra reach from their tablet camera.
Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how you can make a pretty nice flash diffuser for your macro setup for just a little time and a little money.
This will probably be of limited interest to most of you, but we like to know how things work, not just how well they work. We thought we’d take a couple of pictures when we disassembled a ballhead in case any of you were interested. Our demonstration partner today was a Benro B1 ballhead that had a stripped tension adjustment knob, but all ballheads work basically the same way.
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has been serving as one of the International Space Station's resident photographers. Every day he posts beautiful photographs showing what our planet looks like from orbit to his Twitter account, @cmdr_hadfield.
One of the big gripes people have with the idea of taking pictures with Google Glass camera glasses is that the device requires you to say "ok, glass, take a picture" in order to snap a shot. While this is great for situations when you need hands-free photography and don't mind saying a voice command, it would be highly inconvenient in situations in which you would rather not (or can't) talk.
Photographer and software developer Kostas Rutkauskas has launched a new mobile app called Helmut. Designed for Android, it's a film scanning app that lets you digitize your old film strips quickly and on the cheap.
Earlier this month, we featured a neat light painting experiment by photographer Matt Holland that involved long exposure photos of rock climbers wearing colorful lights. The climbs resulted in colorful light trails that tracked the course each climber took.
This is the story of how I fell in love with photography and how I acquired and defeated gear-acquisition-syndrome.
FocusTwist is a new app for iOS devices that lets you shoot Lytro-style refocusable photographs using your phone or tablet. Photographs shot using the app are interactive and dynamic in their focusing: click (or press) any area of the scene to see that area of the photograph come into sharp focus.
In the past, we've shared some interesting experiments that photographers and artists have done, imagining what our photos would look like if something were to be drastically different about out planet or solar system. Today, we're adding another one to that list.
Update: It seems that this rumor was off base. The latest word is that there is indeed a 2/3 sensor coming, but it will appear in a new XS2 fixed lens camera. The upcoming entry-level X-Series camera will continue to feature a APS-C-sized sensor. That makes a lot more sense.
Andy Baio has some experience with copyright infringement, especially where iconic photographs are concerned. In case you didn't read our previous coverage on the matter, his story goes something like this: in 2009, he put together an 8-bit version of Miles Davis' album "Kind of Blue" called "Kind of Bloop," and for the cover art he had a friend create a pixel-art version of Jay Maisel's famous cover photo.
Sony clearly felt there was a gap in the action cam mount market that needed filling. And so, in addition to providing mounts for everything from surfers to scuba divers, Sony Japan had just debuted an action cam mount for man's best friend.
For his project "Happy End," German photographer Dietmar Eckell has travelled all over the world to find and photograph abandoned airplane wreckages with positive endings. That last part may seem like a paradox, but all of the 15 wreckages Eckell has shot actually do have happy endings: no one on board died, and they were all rescued from the remote locations where they crash landed.
After posting a before-and-after of a concert photo she had taken and edited in Lightroom, photographer Kohl Murdock received several requests to post a tutorial on how exactly she edited it.
What would it look like if the retro filters found in smartphone camera apps were turned into a real filter you could slap onto the front of your lens? A couple of Stanford product design students think they have an answer.
At the end of May, a signed copy of one of the most iconic photos ever taken, and the camera that took it, will both go on sale at the WestLicht Photographica Auction. The photo is a signed print of the iconic V-J Day "Kiss in Times Square" photograph taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt, and the camera is the Leica IIIa rangefinder that he used right up until the day he died.
Most time-lapses involve long pans over vast landscapes with gorgeous star-filled skies in the background. And while we love those -- if you haven't seen the New Zealand time-lapse we shared recently you're missing out -- we don't see equally stunning urban time-lapses nearly as often. This is one of the exceptions to that rule.
Over the course of your comings and goings on the internet, you've probably spotted at least a few of those mind-bending GIFs that loop perspectives rather than a snippet of time.
Film footage from the early 1900's, when hand-cranked cameras were all the technology available, aren't exactly high-quality. Choppy, jumpy, and sped-up, the people in these films look anything but natural.
Photographer Ray Demski recently teamed up with climber Alex Luger to shoot a project he's dubbed "Ice Nights." Shot entirely at night using several powerful flash units and a medium format camera, the shoot looked to take ice climbing photography to a whole new level.
If you've never heard a basic overview of the history of photography, then this cute little animated video from TED-Ed is here for you. It covers everything from the invention of the camera obscura, to the battle between the calotype and the daguerreotype, to the rise of portable cameras.
In 1991, photographer Brian Masck took one of the most iconic photographs in all of sports. Known forevermore as the "Trophy Pose," it captured then Michigan Wolverine Desmond Howard striking a Heisman pose IRL. Since it was taken, the photo has been used by everyone from EA to Nissan to Sports Illustrated, and several of them are now being sued by Masck for using the photo without his permission -- including Desmond Howard himself.
Need a pick-me-up? Check out the project "Your Pet and You" by photographer Tobias Lang of Hamburg, Germany. The series is composed of beautiful portraits of all kinds of pets and their loving owners.
You know those sometimes stylish, sometimes dramatic, and often funny pictures of the celebrity hosts that come up every time Saturday Night Live takes or comes back from a commercial break? Well, ever since 1999, it's photographer Mary Ellen Matthews who has been in charge of putting those together each week. And in this short video, Plum TV catches up with Matthews to ask her about her daily life at SNL.
Lytro introduced refocus-able photos to the public when it unveiled the world's first consumer light field camera back in October 2011. Since then, a number of people and companies have been brainstorming refocus-able photo technology of their own.
Putting together presentations often involves breaking out either PowerPoint or Keynote. But while both programs are great, they're designed to work just as well for the high school student, business professional, and creative professional. Fortunately, there's finally a program that focuses on the last of these.
About a week ago, Red Bull Illume and Snap! Orlando revealed a collaboration they were working on called "Motion to Light," in which they paired the fluid motion of certain sports with light painting. Part one used photographer Patrick Rochon and a team of wakeboarders to capture some stunning pics. Now a week later, we have part two. And the sport of choice? Paramotoring.
As a photographer, it would be nice if you could always have your portfolio in your pocket so that you can show prospective customers your work right away. And even though there are portfolio websites that will allow you to display your work on your phone, you're not always around a solid data connection; and keeping your work on your phone isn't a good idea either, since high-res photos fill up a 16GB iPhone hard drive before you know it.
The story of photographer Jacques Lowe and his iconic work chronicling the Kennedys and the era in US history known as Camelot is a tragic one. As President John F. Kennedy's official photographer for three years -- 2 before and 1 after he became president -- Lowe captured over 40,000 photos of the Kennedy family at work and play.
Photographer Ole C. Salomonsen loves shooting the northern lights or, as he calls them, the polar spirits. And for his most recent film he went all out by putting together time-lapse photography of the aurora above cities, in front of starry backgrounds and above gorgeous fjords with a couple of mind-blowing video captures thrown in for good measure.
Aberrations, distortions, corrupt images; all of these are things we typically try to avoid in the world of digital photography. But the Glitché app does the exact opposite. Instead of trying to remove digital imperfections from your photos, the app piles specific distortions on, and in the process turns your pristine pics into "works of digital art" ... at least that's what they're calling them.
Hungarian photographer and retoucher Flóra Borsi created a popular series of photos last year titled "Photoshop in Real Life." The images imagined what various Photoshop Tools might be used for if they had physical powers in our world, and were quickly shared across the web.
Typical photography exists around the visible spectrum (think of the rainbow), but cameras are also able to pick up other wavelengths of radiation. Ultraviolet radiation, as the name suggests, comes after the violet section of the visible spectrum so is not visible to our eyes. However, some animals (birds, for example) are able to see UV.
Fine art photographer Aaron Ansarov's project Zooids contains beautiful, colorful, and abstract images that might look to you like something biological seen through a microscope. They're actually macro portraits of the Portuguese Man O' War, a jellyfish-like creature that is responsible for 10,000 documented painful stings worldwide.
When photographer Callum Cooper moved from Melbourne, Australia to London, England, one of the things that caught his eye was the uniformity (or "conformity") seen in the city's residential areas. Along a street, multiple buildings would have exactly the same architecture, and if it weren't for the minor differences in the facades, some of them can hardly be distinguished from one another.
Over 100 million people around the world snap photos with Instagram on their phones now. If you like the look of Instagram filters but would rather not broadcast the photographs to the world every time you snap a picture, there's actually a (semi-old) trick you can use to save the pics without sharing them (for iPhone users, at least): all you have to do is turn on "Airplane Mode."
Between 2009 and 2012, Finnish photographer Petri Artturi Asikainen roamed the streets of Tokyo in search of subjects for his project 100 Years in Tokyo. His goal was to collect portraits of people for all the ages between 0 through 100. The result of the effort is a book that contains 202 beautiful portraits -- the faces of a man and a woman for each age in that range.
Yesterday we reported that the online communities of Reddit and 4chan were attempting to identify the attacks behind the Boston Marathon bombings by crowdsourcing publicly available photographs from the scene. We blurred the faces in the photos we shared, since it was likely the people in them are completely innocent.
Yesterday at noon, after 20 months of planning and work, the Digital Public Library of America finally made its debut. An initiative of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, the DPLA aims to provide anyone with Internet, access to a massive online archive of content including ebooks, manuscripts, works of art and, of course, photographs.
