Lens-shaped coffee mugs and vacuum flasks (the proper name for the Thermos) have become a hot novelty item in the world of photography over the past couple of years, and Leica wants a piece of the action. Two weeks ago, a Leica-branded coffee mug was spotted on eBay, and now it appears that the strange product will be hitting store shelves at brick-and-mortar Leica retail locations.
Back in July, we shared a series of creative animated GIFs and a music video that show space-lapses over great distances in San Francisco. The creators Kevin Parry and Andrea Nesbitt have just published the video above that teaches how you can do the same thing with your camera.
Hong Kong-based photographer Alexander Safonov shoots incredible underwater photographs showing scenes teeming with marine life.
Here's a strange leak that has people scratching their heads: photos and specs have emerged that show a soon-to-be-announced interchangeable-lens mirrorless camera by Polaroid. Called the IM1836, the camera will be a Polaroid-branded camera manufactured by Sakar International and will be powered by Android OS.
For a recent assignment for Men’s Health magazine, photographer Adam Voorhes was tasked with creating photos of chili peppers exploding.
Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) charts are a very commonly used tool in the photo industry for measuring and describing how sharp a particular lens is. However, it's a system that is largely enigmatic to those outside the realm of optic experts and camera gearheads.
Whoa... Big news on the camera patent scouting front today: Nikon appears to be tinkering with the idea with creating a special 35mm SLR replacement back that would turn a film camera into a digital camera!
Earlier this month, Facebook stated that it's working on strategies for monetizing Instagram. Now we're starting to see the gears in the money-making machine warming up.
Earlier this year, we wrote about a dangerous new Russian photo fad called "skywalking," in which thrill-seeking climber-photographers seek out the highest man-made structures they can find, climb to the apexes without proper safety equipment, and then shoot photographs of themselves and the view once they're there.
For their project 24x360, Patrick Rochon, Timecode Lab, and Eric Paré combined a 360-degree "bullet time" rig with light painting and produced some pretty sweet results. The short teaser above shows some of the pieces they created.
Now that filtered smartphone photos have taken over the photo sharing world, many people -- especially investors -- are wondering: what's next? One possible answer may be temporary photo sharing.
Russian wildlife photographer Igor Shpilenok captured this perfect Kodak moment of another shooter at a reserve in Kabardino-Balkaria. It humorously illustrates the dangers of chimping too much -- stare too much at the back of your camera and you might miss a great photo opportunity! …
Perth-based photographer James Fabri sees things a little differently when he looks through the viewfinder of a DSLR. While most photographers can only use half of their regular vision to frame shots, Fabri has the advantage of seeing things the way he normally experiences the world. You see, he only has one eye.
Last week we shared a project by photographer Tyler Casson that featured four photos of an island across four seasons of a year. Photographer Kevin Day has been doing a similar project -- one that he has been working on for over five years now. The Berkshire, UK-based photographer has been visiting and documenting one particular tree in a field, snapping photos showing different seasons and different lighting conditions.
We've shared some interesting digital to analog conversions here in the past (e.g. printing iPhone photos using an enlarger), and here's another one: create a digital wet plate by shooting a photo displayed on your computer monitor.
Here's a slightly-oldie but a very-goodie: New York University photography professor Fred Ritchin gave this keynote address last year at the "What's Next?" event put on by Foam. He shares his thoughts on the past, present, and future of digital photography and how it impacts the world around us.
San Francisco resident Ryan Tatar is passionate about two things when he's not sitting at his desk at a Silicon Valley tech company: surfing and photography... and usually a combination of the two. He has attracted a good deal of attention in both worlds with his lo-fi photographs of surfers, captured with old analog cameras and expired and/or cross-processed films.
Fujifilm made quite a splash in the camera industry when it announced the sleek X100 back in September 2010, but since then the camera's spotlight has been stolen by newer interchangeable-lens followups, namely the X-Pro1 and the X-E1.
When travel photographer Craig Pulsifer accidentally smashed the front of his lens recently and found his lens filter fused firmly to the metal threads, he went to Canon for help. The removal process explained to him by a Canon Professional services technician is probably something most people wouldn't think to try: use a hammer and hacksaw to surgically remove the stuck filter. Pulsifer followed the advice, and found that it works quite well (though he does warn that it's "not recommended for …
Getting a good picture of a toddler, dog or other easily-distracted subject is no easy task. You snap, you whistle, you make funny faces, but in the end you're often left with nothing more than a blurry picture and a very real relief that nobody else was there to see what just happened.
Want to learn how to be more productive with your photography? Instead of simply "trying harder" and relying on your willpower, a better way may be to take simple steps that have been shown to be effective by science. The above 3-minute video, created by artists/educators Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown, offers some tips that science has taught us about being more efficient at working and spending less time getting our work accomplished.
For their project "Museum Anatomy," Chiang Mai, Thailand-based artists Chadwick Gray and Laura Spector recreated and photographed old paintings from around the world on a human body instead of a canvas.
We've shared a number of photography-inspired tattoos in the past, but here's a concept we've never seen before. Brunssum, Netherlands-based tattoo artist Helma van der Weide created this optical illusion tattoo for her daughter Lotte van den Acker's forearm. All Lotte needs to do to show off her passion for photography is cover up her eyes with her arm and voila! Instant photography!
First, there was a competition, which suggested that one second of video could capture a unique, meaningful moment. Then a young woman from LA used roughly one second of footage per day to document a year in her life. And then finally, Cesar Kuriyama's similar video documenting his frivolous year off work following his 30th birthday went viral.
Earlier today, unimaginable tragedy struck the town of Newtown, Connecticut as 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School were gunned down by a man we now know to be 20-year-old Adam Lanza.
Film photography has been taking a lot of hits in the business world, but while major manufacturers continue to discontinue film production, one small company is doing the exact opposite. Revolog -- a small online shop founded by photography school graduates Hanna Pribitzer and Michael Krebs in 2010 -- has been finding success by selling handmade specialty film.
It was about this time last year that the world was introduced to the Holga iPhone case: a strange-looking gizmo complete with a rotary wheel packing 9 separate lo-fi filters for the toy-camera, retro lover in you. Well, much like the Swivl we reported on yesterday, Holga has decided that bigger is better, and is attempting to break into the DSLR market with a new rotary wheel lens for DSLRs.
Less than a week removed from the train photographer tragedy in Sacramento, California, another sad story has made its way across our desks. A 23-year-old man named Nicholas Wieme died in the pursuit of a "rooftopping" photograph yesterday after he fell into a building's smokestack in Chicago.
If you've recently purchased a Nikon D600 at its standard body-only retail price of $2,000, you might want to stop reading this post lest you suddenly find yourself filled with manufacturer-induced buyers remorse. If you're a budget-conscious photographer in the market for a new full-frame DSLR, today might be your lucky day.
Lytro's groundbreaking consumer light-field camera made a splash in the camera industry this year by making it possible to refocus photographs after they're shot. However, the cheapest model for the boxy device has a price tag of $399, and the reviews have been mixed so far.
Most SLR cameras feature a mirror lock-up mode that allows photographers to eliminate the vibration (and blur) caused by the mirror flapping up and down whenever a shot is snapped. Sony's SLT cameras don't offer this when it comes to the pellicle mirror found inside -- not yet, at least.
When Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast back in October, the photograph above was widely circulated by people who believed that it showed the storm bearing down NYC. It doesn't. The image is actually a composite photograph that combines an ordinary photo of the Statue of Liberty with a well-known image by weather photographer Mike Hollingshead.
French photographer Fabrice Fouillet is interested in churches built after World War II. Specifically, he's fascinated with how many of the buildings created in the 50s, 60s, and 70s deviated from architectural traditions built up over the centuries, and instead took on fresh new looks and radically different styles. Fouillet has traveled across Europe and the world in search of these churches, which were looked down upon when they were built but praised for their looks now. His project is …
What's it like to shoot on the front lines of battle as a military photojournalist? This 15-minute documentary by filmmaker Hannah Hill will tell you. Here's the video's description: …
Earlier today, Adobe officially launched Lightroom 4.3 and Camera Raw 7.3, an update that brings support for Apple Retina Displays (and other HiDPI high-res screens) to Lightroom. The news comes just a couple of days after Photoshop received its own HiDPI compatibility update.
If you haven't heard of the photo sharing app Snapchat yet then you probably will soon. The app -- which blew up earlier this year and is about to secure a boatload of venture capital -- is built around an incredibly simple concept: you don't always want to share photos on a permanent basis.
Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how to create a photograph of you holding yourself up. I hope it will give you a good idea of how I create this type of image so that you can create a similar image yourself! Obviously, this is not the only way to create this type of image, but it is the way I have found most believable, as the connection between the two subjects actually occurs in real life. Enjoy!
Ever since Facebook acquired Instagram for a ridiculous sum of money earlier this year, people have been expecting the social media goliath to ruin it in one way or another. That's because while the small team behind Instagram may have been happy with just the fame part of fame and fortune, a company like Facebook is used to getting both.
When the engineering students and staff of King's College in London gathered together to take a faculty portrait, the photographer used an old camera that panned from left to right in order to capture an extremely long panorama of the entire group in one frame. It worked a bit like the panorama features on modern smartphones: start the exposure on one side of the frame, and then gradually sweep the camera across the scene while everyone in the frame stays as still as possible.
Astrophotography enthusiast Don Marcotte wanted to find out whether the Canon 6D or Canon 5D Mark III was more suitable for his area of photography, so he pitted the two cameras against one another in a few noise tests at his local camera store. He simply shot long exposures without any light (the cap was on) in order to see how much noise would show up in the frame.
In yet another business move no doubt influenced by the rise of the all-mighty smartphone camera, a "source familiar with the plan" has told Reuters that Panasonic aims to sell camera and battery manufacturer Sanyo to a Japanese equity fund by the end of March.
German photographer Jakob Wagner is a master of nighttime cityscape photography. For his series titled Nightscapes, traveled to various countries all over the world, shooting gorgeous images of urban environments that are teeming with points of light from buildings and cars.
The New York Post sparked a firestorm of controversy last week after publishing a photo of a man about to be struck by a subway train. People around the world were outraged that a photographer decided to photograph what had occurred, that he had sold (or, in the photographer's words, licensed) the photo to a newspaper, and that the paper decided to publish it with a sensationalist front page story.
About this time last year, a startup named Satarii released the original Swivl: a nifty little motion tracking dock for your smartphone. Meant for shooting video and video conferencing, the dock would follow your every move by keeping a remote tracking marker in frame.
Canon broke new ground in its lens-making this year by bringing image stabilization to non-L wide-angle prime lenses (the widest IS prime was previously the 100mm f/2.8 IS L). There are now three: lenses at the stabilized-wide-angle party: a 24mm and 28mm, announced in February, and a 35mm that was announced just last month.
If the book Frankenstein were written about the subject of photography, then French photographer Grégoire Cheneau would be Victor Frankenstein and his Altered States portraits would be Frankenstein's monster(s). Upon first glance, many of the portraits seem to be harshly-lit shots of ordinary -- albeit strange looking -- people. Upon closer inspection, however, you start noticing that there's something off about them.
The megapixel war is heating up again in the high-end DSLR market, with the 36MP Nikon D800 leading the charge and rumored high-MP Canon and Sony competitors on the way. If you've been drooling over massive megapixels, be warned: with great megapixels comes great responsibility storage costs. Photoshop guru Scott Kelby writes: …
This isn't a biggie as far as camera issues go, but there are a few photographers reporting some strange discoloration on sections of their Canon 5D Mark III that makes the camera look like it's a lot older and more beat up than it actually is.
Check out this unique necklace created by artist Ashley Gilreath last year. Called "I Am Who They Were," the piece is designed to represent Gilreath's memories of climbing up the stairway in her grandparents' house -- a stairway lined with family photographs.
We've written about photographer James Balog's documentary film Chasing Ice a couple of times in the past. His team spent years shooting time-lapse photographs of glaciers around the world using solar-powered Nikon DSLRs, which allows changes over a long period of time to be seen in just seconds or minutes.
