For several years now, my occupation has been to basically read everything written about new equipment. In order to help everyone save time, and to save the Internet millions of electrons, I have developed a concise method to summarize all such discussions for all newly introduced imaging equipment.
Flickr photographer RawSniper1 has a clever way of holding onto his lens caps when they're not attached to the front of his lenses: he uses LEGO pieces. By attaching one thin 2x4 piece permanently to the top of his lens cap and one thin 2x8 piece to his camera strap, he created a simple DIY lens cap holder system.
Goodbye old young friend. Let me give you all a piece of wisdom that I recently learned the hard way. If you go on a fishing trip called 'Hit em' Hard' and the captain tells you that you should take your bag off and put it in the 'dry container', what he really means by 'dry container' is a place that will fill up with seawater after he accidently clogs the drainage pipe, soaking you and your friends cameras, bags, wallets and cellphones for over an hour in salty seawater.
Photographer Brandon Stanton has generated quite a bit of attention in the photo world through his project Humans of New York, which features thousands of portraits that form a visual census of the city. His goal is to capture 10,000 portraits of New Yorkers that are associated with points on a map.
This is a cautionary tale about a recent experience with Amazon. For Christmas I was the lucky recipient of a Pentax K-5 -- a gift from a family member who bought it from my Amazon wish list (Yeah me!). Unfortunately, unwrapping was the last happy moment in this tale.
It may not be the most popular series of compact cameras, but the Ricoh GR Digital line has attracted a sizable cult following of photographers around the world -- particularly street shooters. From the time the original GRD was announced at Photokina 2004 until the most recent GRD IV, the cameras have offered smaller 1/1.77-inch CCD sensors. That will soon change: a trusted source tells us that the Ricoh GR Digital V will feature a larger APS-C sensor.
Chilean visual artist Felipe Baeza is doing some pretty interesting work with Matrix-style camera rigs. Instead of bullet time videos, Baeza uses his rig to create 3D portraits of subjects that can then be displayed in augmented reality or through a 3D model viewer.
In most ways the smartphone is the height of convenience. Phone, check; computer, check; camera, check. But one market the smartphone seems well suited for, but hasn't yet broken into with any reasonable force, is the action cam market.
Upon first glance, artist Thomas Barbèy's surreal photomontages may seem rather amateur when compared with all the highly-polished photomanipulations that are floating around on the Internet. However, one simple fact will make you see the pieces in an entirely different light: Barbèy shoots film and uses in-camera and darkroom techniques to create the works! …
For his project Presidial.org, Chicago-based artist Jeremy Tubbs collected random news photographs of Barack Obama captured between January 1, 2008 and December 31, 2012, aligned them, and then turned them into the above time-lapse video. The 2,500+ photographs were scraped from various online sources and are arranged in chronological order.
Facebook has over 240 billion photos on its servers -- that's billion... with a "b" -- and every day about 350 million more are added. Naturally, Facebook needs to store all of those photos somewhere, and that somewhere needs to be accessible at all times because who knows when Jack will need to show Jill some pics of the hill from 3 years ago.
"The Ugly Truth" is a bizarre series of portraits by photographer Rut Mackel. Each photo features a not-very-pleasing photo of a face that looks flatted and disfigured. No, the subjects don't actually look like that, and no, Mackel didn't use any kind of digital manipulation for the photos. She simply asked her subjects to hold a pane of glass and then press their faces against it.
We've seen a lot of gimmicks when it comes to selling cameras. Especially where point-and-shoots are concerned, gimmicky features have become standard over the past few years as part of the war on smartphones. But this has to be one of most interesting: a special edition camera with the sole purpose of inserting Japanese anime characters into your pictures.
It's been a while since we've shared some DigitalRev tomfoolery, but the most recent question posed by Kai and his buddies is an interesting one: given how expensive "entry-level" full-frame DSLRs are, would a dirt cheap 35mm SLR be a realistic alternative?
When you think "Instagram competitor," the first app that comes to mind is Flickr's new offering. Having released just in time for Instagram to royally annoy its users with the proposed ToS changes, disgruntled Instagrammers flocked to Flickr in droves.
Getting your photography removed from an offending website or Facebook page can be a hassle, and if you've never done it before, learning the proper process for any given situation can be a downright pain. Fortunately, there are awesome people out there who don't mind helping out their fellow photogs.
We don't feature a lot of tripods on PetaPixel because, frankly, once you've seen one you've just about seen them all. That's not to say that tripods don't vary hugely in both build quality and functionality, just that it doesn't really make headlines when Manfrotto comes out with their newest model.
One of the most vehemently argued conspiracy theories of all time is that, in 1969, NASA did not actually land on the moon. Many different breakdowns of the photo and video footage have been used to make this point (think: flag waving, missing stars, etc), leading most conspiracy theorists to argue that the great Stanley Kubrick actually filmed the moon landing in a television studio.
Less than two months after attending the 2011 Academy Awards with his friend and colleague Sebastian Junger, acclaimed photojournalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington (seen above) died tragically in Misrata, Libya, only minutes away from the hospital.
Natural disasters are tragic for many reasons. Assuming, most importantly, that you and your loved ones come through one such disaster healthy, you immediately begin the process of putting your life back together. And even though top priorities are probably your home, cars, critical documents, and so on, those things are replaceable; the photos that may have also been damaged or destroyed are not.
Copy protection and data encryption are standard in most storage media, but you don't often hear of copy protection as it pertains to memory cards. Although all SD cards come with a form of DRM copy protection (CPRM), it's rarely used; and something as common as re-formatting the memory card can erase protected sections that are required to make use of the copy protection in the first place.
A time-lapse of the aurora borealis captured from several different locations throughout Iceland would be a good enough way to start off your Saturday, but MIT neuroscientist Alex Rivest's time-lapse from a few months ago takes it one step further.
Is your Adobe Lightroom running slowly on your computer? Adobe regularly receives questions through social media regarding sluggish photo editing, and recently decided to start compiling the non-traditional solutions that work onto a single helpful page. In the Lightroom Help section of the Adobe website, there's now a page titled "Performance hints".
A good number of websites are talking about the new official portrait of President Obama. It was shot in the Oval Office back on December 6th, 2012 by official White House photographer Pete Souza, whom we've written about quite a few times in the past.
Want to focus your camera simply by looking at a particular area of the viewfinder? If you're a Sony shooter, you might be enjoying that feature as early as next year. The company is reportedly working on building Eye Tracking autofocus into its cameras, with the initial version arriving in a flagship camera sometime in 2014.
Since June 19th of last year, political activist and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been living inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Although Ecuador has granted him political asylum, if he steps foot outside the embassy, he could be arrested, extradited to the United States, and tried for his role in leaking sensitive US diplomatic cables.
A couple of days ago, there were murmurings on the web that Instagram experienced a sharp drop in usage numbers following its ill-handled Terms of Service change. The story was based on findings by analytics firm AppStats, which claimed that Instagram's Daily Active User count had fallen from over 15 million to around 5 million in the span of about one month.
In addition to being passionate about image making, photographer Svjetlana Tepavcevic is also an avid collector of seeds. After finding and collecting a new specimen, Tepavcevic creates a highly-detailed high-resolution photo of the seed using an ordinary flatbed scanner. The resulting images form a project titled Means of Reproduction.
Unlike many camera lens lines, Leica's lenses are group into categories under well known trademarked names. Mention the word Noctilux, and a Leica shooter will immediately know that you're referring to a f/1 lens that's geared towards shooting in low-light environments.
Artist Daniel Arsham has an exhibition at Philadelphia's Fabric Workshop Museum called Reach Ruin, which includes hundreds of cameras sculptures created out of plaster, glass, stone, and sand.
What are the most popular photo subjects in each location of your city? Is there any easy way of finding out? Those are questions UC Berkeley researcher Alexander Dunkel is trying to answer, and he has his sights set on Flickr as a possible solution. By combining the location geotags and context tags attached to many (or most) of the service's photos, Dunkel is able to create tag cloud-style maps of any location that reveals the tags that dominate each location.
Kodak had quite the surprise for the camera world today: the company announced that it will be soon joining the Micro Four Thirds standard with a new mirrorless camera called the S1. We had reported earlier this week that the company would soon launch a mirrorless camera (just like Polaroid did recently), but it seems most people didn't expect that the news would have anything to do with the Micro Four Thirds standard.
Back in November, Brazilian model Nana Gouvea felt the Internet's wrath after she used the Hurricane Sandy aftermath as a backdrop to further her career. Needless to say, those photos did garner attention, just not the kind she wanted.
Over the last year, WordPress owner Automattic has launched pages specifically targeting bands, brides, restaurants and even cities. Today, we can finally add photographers to that list.
We've featured Instagram-inspired presets for Lightroom in the past, and today a new challenger has emerged. The folks over at Really Nice Images has released a couple of preset packs that are designed to faithfully imitate the look of Instagram's popular filters. What's unique about this new offering is that the presets aren't limited to the latest version of the mobile app's filters -- there's also a pack containing the classic filters that were replaced after Instagram Version 2 came out.
Have you ever considered adding a prism to your camera bag? Washington DC-based wedding photographer Sam Hurd has done quite a bit of experimentation using an equilateral prism -- the kind used in schools to teach properties of light -- to add special effects to his photographs. The results are pretty interesting.
Want to see how the highly-acclaimed Sony RX1 is assembled? At CES 2013 in Las Vegas last week, Sony showed the above video at its special press event, using it as a creative countdown clock for indicating when the show would begin. The split-screen video shows three of Sony's newer products -- the Cybershot RX1 camera, the Xperia Z smartphone, and an HD camcorder -- being assembled from their basic parts.
Solar chargers have been around for a while, but not a lot of them can handle the power needs of an SLR battery, and none that we know of can charge virtually any camera battery -- until now that is. The Freeloader Pro and included CamCaddy can do both.
Art.com is "the world's largest online specialty retailer of high-end wall art." Zenfolio offers "online photography presentation and sales solutions for professional photographers and enthusiasts." Knowing that, Zenfolio's acquisition by Art.com announced earlier seems like a match made in sales heaven.
Every photographer has one, or maybe a few, favorite photos. Those images that tend to grace the front page of your website. The ones that turned out just right, capturing the exact feeling or message you set out to capture. For wedding photographer Jerry Ghionis, that photo was taken in December 2011, and the video above takes you behind the scenes at the shoot.
You know that feeling of extreme excitement when an Internet package arrives in the mail? That's what a guy named Jalal felt recently after ordering a Canon 5D Mark III and 24-105mm f/4L kit from Dell.com. Unfortunately for him, what he received wasn't quite what he had expected.
Back in early December, Google announced that the company would be adding 5,000 new stock images of "nature, weather, animals, sports, food, education, technology, music and 8 other categories" for free use in Docs, Sheets and Slides.
Flickr celebrated the 5th year anniversary of the launch of The Commons today. The massive collection of public domain photos now includes more than 250,000 images from 56 different libraries, archives, and museums.
About three quarters of the EF-mount lenses out there are not weather sealed. Because of this, using those lenses often leads to more frequent sensor cleaning, dust and even water accumulation inside your camera body.
The short 1-minute video above is a beautiful time-lapse showing a train ride in Norway that spans not just distance, but seasons. It was created by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, which recorded the exact same scenic 453-mile journey from Trondheim to Bodø in each of the seasons. The footage was then synchronized to show the same location at each time, and then made to transition from one to another in a seamless fashion.
Canon recently launched a new safety initiative aimed at keeping dangerous knock-off gear out of your camera. The tag line for the initiative is "Play it Safe, Power your Canon with Canon Power," and the company is hoping that a mix of warnings and education will do the trick and keep you from buying counterfeit "Canon" batteries and chargers.
After recently purchasing a Nikon 1 V1, Swedish photographer Sven Hedin decided to work on making the camera work with an external flash. Not just any external flash, mind you, but a vintage flash unit -- the kind that uses disposable bulbs.
Being out on the roads is dangerous, be you a donkey in Botswana, a deer in New York, or a Google Street View driver. Things don't get newsworthy, however, until one of the first two meets up with the third.
3D technology is consistently improving. And even though Samsung may have pioneered single lens 3D technology, Panasonic have put together an impressive rig that can shoot 3D panoramas.
A couple of days ago, we featured a BTS video showing how portrait photographer Greg Heisler got a great Time magazine cover shot of Michael Phelps before the 2004 Olympics using some creative techniques and a lot of preparation.
