After years of providing portrait services to local families and high school seniors, both the Sears and PictureMe portrait studios (the latter found in Walmart) have closed their doors for good. The news has been breaking slowly via local outlets as Sears and PictureMe employees nationwide found themselves without a job Thursday morning -- some having receiving the news as late as Wednesday night.
With a population of over 7 million people packed into an area of 426 square miles, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world. As with other places where development cannot expand horizontally, apartment buildings tend to get taller and taller in order to provide living space for all the inhabitants.
The folks at Hama just announced a new accessory that should make life as an iPad or iPhone toting photographer a bit easier. No, we're not talking about the guys who shoot with their iOS devices; we're talking about the people who use them for on-the-go storage, editing and sharing.
In PDN's March issue, the magazine highlighted Cade Martin’s impressive ad work that he had done recently for Tazo Tea and Starbucks. As the main feature, it's only natural that one of those images ended up on the cover of the issue (pictured above). Not everyone, however, was as thrilled by Martin's work as PDN.
Getting an authentic tintype of yourself or one of your photos isn't easy. Unless you live near Photobooth in San Francisco or know how to make one yourself, your options are extremely limited. There's a new option available, however, and this one will let you order a tintype from the comfort of your couch.
Montreal resident Jennifer Pawluck was arrested earlier this week after she posted the above photo of anti-police graffiti to her Instagram account. The photo shows a caricature of Montreal police Commander Ian Lafrenière with a bullet hole in his forehead, leading police to accuse Pawluck of criminal harassment against a high-ranking police officer.
Panasonic had quite a leaky day today. New details of its upcoming GF6 Micro Four Thirds mirrorless camera hit the Interwebs via separate sources, giving us a better idea of what should be expecting very shortly. The camera will reportedly be announced on April 9th, so we're less than a week away from hearing about this camera straight from the horses mouth.
Every year in Catalonia, Spain, there are festivals in which people come together to build colorful -- and ridiculously tall -- human towers that are supported by nothing but the participants' strength, balance, and courage. These towers are called castells, which means 'castles' in Catalan.
Taking a cue from the music industry and those incessant Now That's What I Call Music! albums, NASA has released its own "best-of" compilation of the most compelling imagery its satellites collected this past year. A mixture of true color, computer models, visualizations, and time-lapses from the ISS, the video gives us yet another stunning view of our little blue planet.
The folks at 522 Productions have been slowly putting out videos that capture the essence of what inspires each of them. The charge was led a few weeks ago by 522's art director Chris Jurchak, but it was editor Eli Sinkus' What Inspires You? video, uploaded on April 1st, that caught our eyes and ears.
Last week Anthony Jacobs of Perspective Aerials reached out to tell me that he had become the first person to fly a Canon 1D C with a drone rig. The 1D C is a camera I have a very mixed relationship with, but when you see the way someone like Anthony puts it to work you can only imagine what the 1D C's ability to capture 4K in such a small package could make possible.
We shared this time-lapse by photographer Bruce W. Berry yesterday in a post about NASA astronaut photography from the International Space Station, but we'd like to share about it a little more about it since it's something that definitely deserves its own post.
Samsung did a lot to advance the idea of a "smartcamera" late last year by announcing the Galaxy Camera -- an Android-powered compact camera that looks and feels more like a giant smartphone than an traditional point-and-shoot. However, some smiles turned to frowns when people learned that it would be sold through mobile carriers such as AT&T with 3G or 4G data plans.
Canadian photographer and DIY enthusiast Matt Bechberger wanted to improve the ergonomics of his Mamiya 645 medium format camera without shelling out money for an "expensive, hard to find, and ugly" grip, so he decided to make his own. He ended up creating a beautiful custom wooden grip that attaches to the bottom of the camera and features a shutter release at the top.
Photographer Jeffrey Milstein says he has always been fascinated by how the ground from a flying airplane, and one thing in particular has captured his attention: airports. From the air, massive terminals, long runways, and huge airplanes all look tiny and insignificant compared to how they feel on the ground. Milstein's photo series Flying shows what a number of airports look like from high in the air.
A couple of weeks ago, we shared a hack by photographer Trey Ratcliff that allowed you to upload your photos to Google+ at full resolution by using Google Drive. Android users could already upload full-sized photos from their phone, the hack simply allowed desktop users to do the same.
The above video is photographer Jonathan DeNicholas' impressive entry for the 30 Day Filming Project contest put together by Sue Bryce and announced at creativeLIVE. The contest asked entrants to submit a 2 minute video in which you captured something that made you smile every day for a month, and DeNicholas entry was one of the 6 winners (of over 100 submitted) that were then showcased on You Can't Be Serious.
Creativity and humor score big points with consumers. That's why photographers, camera companies and camera stores alike often employ one or both to get their customers' attention. Some of what we've seen in the past includes James Hodgins' Crappy Vs Snappy, Olympus' ziplock bags of walnuts, and Schick's razor photo fad.
Many photographers want to give large format a shot, but carrying a massive 4x5 camera around with you isn't always practical or realistic. Fortunately for those people, the folks of Wanderlust Cameras have hit Kickstarter with a new invention: the Travelwide 4x5. It's an affordable, ultralight large-format camera that you can take with you anywhere.
The Birth of a Pond video above was shot by photographer James Breen over a three week period as he watched a construction crew create a pond from scratch in the Fall of 2009. To be fair, he didn't catch the entire "birthing" process, the final scene was captured a year after the pond was completed (allowing it enough time to fill naturally) but the video is still quite mesmerizing to watch.
London-based photographer Kelly Angood has had quite a tumultuous year so far in 2013. Last month she announced that she would be turning her popular cardboard medium format camera design into a proper do-it-yourself kit. After launching a Kickstarter campaign to take preorders, she quickly raised over £23,000 (~$34,000) from over 600 supporters.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but laziness is definitely its father. Case in point, here's an interesting tidbit of imaging history: the first webcam ever was actually invented by lazy students at Cambridge University who didn't want to waste a trip to the nearby coffee pot if it was going to be empty when they got there.
When photojournalists capture images of human suffering around the world, they're often accused of being coldhearted and of exploiting those in need. The media organizations and charities that send them out draw similar criticism, but they argue that these negative stories help bring attention to issues that would otherwise be ignored and that they help encourage charitable giving.
Remember that tiny Lomo-inspired fisheye camera we featured back in February? It turns out there's actually a market for that camera, and the gadget's creator is now reaping the rewards as orders for the gadget have been pouring in.
Cosina-Voigtländer’s Bessaflex TM is one of my favorite cameras. It’s an incredibly beautiful and refined camera that was discontinued (2007) as suddenly as it was put on the market (2003). There are but a handful of in-depth articles on it online, and I felt compelled to publish my thoughts on it.
Amateurs just getting into post-processing sometimes opt to purchase the much cheaper Photoshop Elements over spending the hundreds more it would cost to get the industry standard pro version. Unfortunately, the gap in features between Elements and the upgrade leaves a lot to be desired, which is why the ElementsXXL plug-in came to be.
Check out this quirky photo project by photographer Fabien Nissels titled Blocks. Nissels first photographed his friend Johan in a studio from four different directions for each part of his body (i.e. head, arms, torso, waist, legs). They then printed out the photographs and fixed them onto styrofoam blocks, placed the blocks in various locations and in different arrangements, and re-photographed Johan as a block dude.
While on assignment in the Middle East, war photographer Tracey Shelton had her gear stolen during an attempted kidnapping back in August 2011. As a freelance photojournalist, she didn't have a newspaper's funding to lean back on, and found herself out of several thousand dollars worth of camera gear.
Since NASA's first mission to the International Space Station back in 2000, astronauts on board the artificial satellite have snapped over 1.1 million photographs. What's neat is that every one of those photographs is available to the general public through a giant online database.
The 2013 Major League Baseball season kicked off this past weekend to the delight of fans of the sport across the US and across the world. Photographer Don Hamerman hasn't attended a ball game in over a decade, but he has a photo project that baseball enthusiasts may find quite interesting. It's a series titled Baseballs that shows off the beauty and diversity of found baseballs that were discarded after their usefulness was gone.
In November of 2010, The New York Times made headlines of their own when they chose four Hipstamatic photos to grace their front page. And now, Instagram is getting in on the action as well. For Sunday's paper, the NYT decided to use a photo of Alex Rodriguez taken by photographer Nick Laham in a locker room bathroom using an iPhone and edited in Instagram.
JTT has released what looks to be the smallest consumer night vision camera in existence. About the size of your typical CF card, the CHOBi CAM 3 can snap 11MP photos and take 1080p video for up to 120 minutes on a charge -- and it does it all in the dark.
An interesting video has been going viral within the photographic community today (with a little help from Reddit). The video shows photographer Andre Bailey of Envy Me Images ranting about the state of the consumer DSLR market -- specifically lamenting over and over that "there's [sic] too many cameras on the market."
Animal welfare proponents and wildlife photographers alike are calling Nikon out for what they see as the height of hypocrisy. According to The Independent, the fact that a company "synonymous with wildlife photography" simultaneously manufactures and markets rifle scopes to hunters -- and in particular big game hunters -- has the animal welfare community up in arms.
When it comes to protecting our gear, we tend to go for the expensive because, as they say, "you get what you pay for." But once in a while, a simple idea that helps you save a few bucks may not be such a bad thing.
Last week we reported that Fujifilm is planning to increase its film prices by 25% starting this month due to decreased consumer demand. Turns out that was specifically for the Japanese market, and that the hit won't be as serious in the United States.
In the two photographs above, the bottom image is a photo-manipulation created using the top image. Are they completely separate works of art? What if we told you the second photo was created without the original photographer's permission and submitted to a contest as an original artwork? What if we told you it actually won? …
Photographer Paul Octavious has collected a number of vintage cameras over the years, with some of them handed down to him by his grandfather. One day a house in his neighborhood had an estate sale for an old man that had recently passed away. When Octavious paid the big house a visit, he found that the man was a taxidermist with a large collection of stuffed birds and bird wings.
Back in April of last year, we featured an interesting project by photographer Tanja Hollander. Dubbed The Facebook Portrait Project, Hollander has spent the last year travelling around the world and taking portraits of all her Facebook friends. The project's motivation was half photographical and half philosophical, an exploration of the definition of "true" friendship that Hollander is still in the midst of today.
Sigma's DP1, DP2, and DP3 cameras are known for the fact that they're compact cameras with beastly APS-C Foveon sensors inside. With such novel sensor technology at their core, comparatively less is said about the f/2.8 lenses on the front of each camera.
According to the Professional Aerial Photographers Association, the father of aerial photography was French balloonist Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who photographed Paris from a hot air balloon way back in 1858. Unfortunately, none of his work remains today, and so the title of oldest surviving aerial photograph goes to the picture you see above.
When it comes to Instagram, there's been some serious controversy over ownership rights and Terms of Service. You can take the photos with the app, edit them in the app, host them on the app's servers, and ultimately sign over certain rights to the app. Not everybody likes this arrangement.
In 2010, photographer Seth Taras created a series of photographs for a worldwide marketing campaign for the History Channel with the message "Know Where You Stand." The photographer shot photos at locations around the world where major historical events happened, and then blended old photos showing those events from the same perspective. It's the same "then and now" concept that has become quite popular over the past few years.
When Nikon launched the D600, the DSLR was advertised as being on par with the Nikon D800 in the realm of video recording. There was soon grumbling, however, when owners noticed that HDMI output from the camera was crippled: there were black bars around the frame that weren't present in D800 footage. People immediately began pointing fingers at Nikon, accusing the company of intentionally hamstringing the D600 in various ways so that it wouldn't cannibalize sales of the D800 too badly.
As a followup to our post earlier today about former White House photographer Eric Draper's work, here's an interesting and relevant 17-minute-long story that aired on NPR in January of this year. It's an interview with former presidential photographers Eric Draper and Robert McNeely, who photographed the presidencies of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton (respectively).
Do a search for "Henri Cartier-Bresson" using Google's image search engine, and the photograph above is one of the results that pops up. Dig a little deeper into the results, and you'll learn that it's a photo by Cartier-Bresson showing French actress Isabelle Huppert.
Directors Ian & Cooper created this clever music video for the song "Back to Me" by Joel Compass using cinemagraph-style shots. Each scene is a strange fusion of motion picture and still photography, as some areas look like a photograph, while other portions look like video footage. If you're not familiar with the term "cinemagraph," check out other examples of the technique we've featured in the past.
Have you heard of Chief Official White House photographer Pete Souza's predecessor? His name is Eric Draper, and he's a photographer who spent eight years serving as George W. Bush's White House Photo Director and personal photographer.
April Fools' Day: the beautiful (or painful) day of the year on which the Internet is teeming with fabricated stories designed to fool and humor. We used to participate in the jokes and cover the silliness, but last year we started doing a single roundup post instead to keep you up to speed on April Fools' Day humor in the world of photography.
Nachtfluge is a series of photograph by US landscape photographer Kevin Cooley showing long exposure photos of airplane light trails streaking across the sky.
