Archives

It's true that many (if not most) people these days think that a smartphone plus a decent camera app equals enough equipment to create great photography. Sure, they'll hire a professional to do their wedding, but when it comes to less momentous occasions -- like that trip to the Caribbean -- they tend to take the photographic reins in their own hands. According to The Wall Street Journal, however, more and more people are deciding to hand the vacation reins over to a professional photog.

In this B&H Event Space seminar, David Brommer takes you "Beyond The Rule of Thirds" by discussing many different aspects of photographic composition. The entire seminar will take about two hours to watch from start to finish, but the information Brommer covers -- from positive and negative space, to theories of color and balance and other advanced composition -- is highly informative for amateurs, and may even benefit some pros.

In this tutorial I will share how I shoot "liquid flow" photos -- smoke-like abstracts done by dropping cream colored with food dye into a small tank of water, then rotated 180 degrees.

McLean Fahnestock of Long Beach, CA took high definition video of all 135 Space Shuttle launches and synchronized them into this mesmerizing video titled "Grand Finale". It's a beautiful project with a twinge of sadness.

A few months ago 14-year-old Julia Bluhm caused quite a stir when she managed to collect over 80,000 total signatures in an attempt to get Seventeen Magazine to put one completely un-Photoshopped spread in each issue. Her argument was that the magazine's readers have a sensitive body image, and constantly seeing unrealistically thin and perfect software-enhanced models wasn't helping the matter.

The Google Glass team is starting a new series of videos called "Glass Sessions" that feature ordinary people using Google's prototype camera glasses in their everyday lives. This first video shows new mom Laetitia Gayno -- the wife of a Googler -- using the glasses to capture precious moments with her baby and share them live online with her family members back in France.

AFP photographer Joe Klamar's portraits of US Olympic athletes have caused a firestorm of controversy in the past week, with people calling the images "insulting" due to their lighting, angles, and concepts. Klamar has responded to the controversy over on AFP. Rather than being intentionally "bad" for the purpose of making a point, they were simply the result of being unprepared: …

This image might look like some kind of screenshot from an old 16-bit video game, but it's actually the first photo ever made of an atom's shadow. Researchers at Griffith University in Australia suspended a ytterbium atom in midair, shot it with a laser beam, and then used a Fresnel lens on the other side to snap a photograph of the dark shadow left by the atom. Scientist Erik Streed has a writeup explaining how they accomplished it and the project's implications for other research.

This small mountain of gear leads to two very frightening thoughts. Firstly, there’s no ending in sight; one keeps accumulating more and more equipment in order to keep pushing the edge of what’s possible both from a compositional and artistic standpoint, as well as from an image quality standpoint. You’ve either got to have a great day job and very deep pockets, or some good recurring clients.

There's a lot of resources out there for people who want to get to know their SLR just that much better -- ranging from books to about a gazillion (that's a technical term) YouTube tutorials -- but not a lot of people seem to know about Nikon's own Digitutor website. The Nikon Digitutor offers helpful flash tutorials about all of the different aspects of your Nikon camera.

World travel bloggers Michael Powell and Jürgen Horn recently visited the The Trick Eye Museum in South Korea, where visitors can snap humorous and mind-bending pictures of themselves interacting with various painted rooms.

Filmmaker Ian Gamester created this video of moments collected over the course of several years, inspired by artist David Hockney's photocollages, his famous "joiners."

Most people already know that one of the ways Kodak tried to dig itself out of its sizable financial hole was to sell the Kodak Gallery to Shutterfly, and the service officially shut down just a few short days ago. Most Kodak Gallery users probably won't be too upset with the move, but unfortunately, it looks like even the 2-million active users (the Kodak Gallery had a total of about 75-million) will have to go a few weeks without access to their photos as their accounts are transferred over.

Mars rover Opportunity has spent more than 8 years on the Red Planet exploring, analyzing and, like any good tourist, snapping photos. And one of the most recent and stunning photos from the six-wheeled explorer is the panorama you see above.

18-year-old photography enthusiast Tomislav Safundžić of Croatia gathered some NASA imagery captured from the International Space Station and created this beautiful time-lapse view of Earth. It's titled "This is Our Planet".

Based on some patents filed by Nikon, the company is expected to announce an updated 800mm lens, which will be the largest lens in the current lineup, according to Nikon Rumors. As of now, the 600mm f/4G ED VR is the longest lens Nikon is offering, though Sigma and Canon both have 800mm f/5.6 lenses in their lineups.

The 4th of July fireworks show in San Diego malfunctioned yesterday, resulting in an entire show's 20-minutes worth of fireworks released in 15 seconds that the Port of San Diego attributed to a corrupted computer file.

Photo agency Getty Images is on the auction block, in a second round of bids that are climbing towards $4 billion for a potential sale. Investment firm KKR & Co. and private equity investment firm TPG are on the list of at least five interested bidders, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Update: Klamar has responded to the criticism. The photographs aren't 'anti-establishment'. They were simply the result of being unprepared.

If you've noticed an unexpected "Kiss" in your Canon Rebel T4i EXIF data, there's no need to panic (or blush!).

20 years ago, actor and filmmaker Jeremiah McDonald used a video camera to send a message to his future self. This year McDonald -- now 32-years-old -- took that message and created this awesome video of himself as an adult talking himself as a child.

On the heels of my guest blog post over at Tiffinbox, I wanted to showcase a little camera comparison I used to illustrate my points on gear acquisition. We are all at fault for lusting after the latest and greatest gear available to us on the market. I know I have, but that lust comes with a price tag and a trade-off.

Hong Kong model Angelababy lost her contract with Panasonic after leaking a photo of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF5 on Instagram in March of this year. And now: a legal mess that could cost millions.

Check out this unique picture frame by Urban Outfitters. The Sunglasses Photo Frame is a "kooky oversized sunglasses picture frame" that shows your 3.5x2.75 photos through the two lenses. The temple arms work as a stand for the frame.

Smartphone cameras have gotten to the point of being able to stack up well against digital cameras -- at least when viewing the photos at smaller sizes. Zoom in, and there's still a pretty big gap in quality due to the smartphone's smaller lens and sensor. BuzzFeed's John Herrman writes that the emergence of ultra-high res displays displays is converting people back to digital cameras: …

If you've got spent, empty film cassettes lying around collecting dust, Photojojo has a crafty idea for the mindful re-user: make them into rolled invitation or stationery holders.

Sports photographers use a variety of techniques and gear to shoot from different angles that are less accessible to the photographers during action: wirelessly triggered cameras mounted behind backboards, perched on overhead catwalks, clamped on the ground. Reuters photographers Fabrizio Bensch and Pawel Kopczynski decided to take the technology of remote photography to another level for the upcoming 2012 Summer Olympics with robotic cameras.

"Two of Us" is a project started in 2009 by Chinese photographer Fan Shi Shan. It involves cloned photographs of people who grew up as only children due to China's one-child policy. Fan writes, …

Here's a tutorial by Elizabeth Giorgi of Being Geek Chic on how you can turn your Instagram photos into beautiful canvas-style prints for about a buck a pop. You can find a text version of the tutorial here.

Here's a short video by PBS about Duluth, Minnesota-based street photographer Kip Praslowicz. Praslowicz talks about his work and his approach to shooting in his community.

Needing a way to test the speed of memory cards, Jaroslav of Crazy Lab realized that camera shutter sounds can do the trick. By recording the sound of his Canon 600D snapping away in continuous burst mode and then viewing them audio file, he was able to visualize the card's speed and compare them against each other. He also learned some things about burst speed and ISO/format: …

We've featured slit-scan photographs and slit-scan still camera apps before, but have you ever seen what a slit-scan video looks like? This trippy video was created using a $2 Mac app called Slit-Scan Movie Maker. Is this real life? …

If you want to snap a photograph of the sun (perhaps during an eclipse) without burning your camera sensor, one quick way is to make a dark filter using an unwanted floppy disk (remember those?). You'll need to carefully harvest the black magnetic film inside the disk and slice out a piece to cover your lens with. Two words of warning: don't crease the film, lest you make it unusable, and don't use the filter with your human eyes.

The business world let out a collective gasp when it was announced back in April that Facebook had agreed to acquire Instagram for a whopping $1 billion. Eric Savitz of Forbes points out that photo publishing company Shutterfly -- which has the same market valuation as Instagram -- may actually be a smarter buy: …

Video effects team Corridor Digital created this clever short film titled "Photoreal" featuring a magical Canon DSLR that creates floating planes of frozen reality.

Here's a fun little 30-second stop motion video showing a roll of 35mm film loading itself into a camera. It was created as a project for a photography class.

At first glance, the images in Fabian Oefner's Nebulae might look like images of distant galaxies captured with a space telescope. They were actually shot in a studio using a number of fiber glass lamps. Oefner used exposures of different lengths to capture the ends of the lit fiber glass as points and streaks of light. He then combined multiple images into single photos to achieve the "star density" seen in the final images.

Here's a beautiful short film by Arden Oksanen titled "Pictures of a Cowboy". It's about the life and work of Carl Oksanen, a cowboy-turned-photographer who documented the beauty of Wyoming through stunning landscape photographs. Prepare to be inspired.

As more and more consumers are opting to use their smartphones as their primary camera, manufacturers are moving away from cheapo point-and-shoots and towards beefier compact cameras that offer quality that phones can't match (yet). Samsung's new EX2F definitely falls into that category. It's a high-end compact camera that packs a 12.4MP 1/1.7-inch sensor (the size used by many high-end P&S cameras, but smaller than Sony's new RX100), a 24-79mm (3.3x) f/1.4 lens, a 3-inch swiveling LCD, ISO of …

In No Great Hurry - 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter is an upcoming documentary film about influential American photographer Saul Leiter, who was a pioneer in the use of color photography in the 1940s and 1950s. Despite his accomplishments, Leiter -- who is 89 this year -- has never been driven by "success", preferring instead to live and photograph his own quiet way. One of his notable quotes is, …

Watermarks are a popular way of "signing" photographs and deterring theft, but having a giant logo overlaid on your images can ruin the viewing experience. Photographer Klaus Herrmann has one solution: integrated watermarks. He writes, …

Lytro has been pushing to make their living pictures -- interactive, clickable photos that have a variable focus point -- easier to share. Lytro is a camera that has a very specific, proprietary way of saving and viewing photographs, so sharing these photos can be tricky. Nevertheless, Lytro has been able to quickly expand living photos across the web through social media, most recently to Google+ and Pinterest through Google Chrome extensions.

@NeedADebitCard is a new Twitter account that finds and retweets photographs of credit/debit cards that are publicly shared through the service. Apparently many people don't know that it's not a good idea to publish photos that allow anyone to see your credit card information. The account's byline is: "Please quit posting pictures of your debit cards, people."

Canon recently announced that some owners of the Canon PowerShot S100 compact camera could be eligible for a free repair. The S100 lens is prone to getting stuck when extended -- an error that Canon says is due to a part getting disconnected within the lens. Humidity and heat can exacerbate the problem.

YouTuber Jeremiah Warren recently decided to try and capture video of fireworks exploding from above (just in time for July 4th). He took three 3-foot balloons, attached a GoPro camera to them, and had the rig float around high in the air while he shot fireworks up at the camera. He has a making-of post over on his blog if you're interested in learning the specifics of how this was done.

New York-based artist and storyteller Ourit Ben-Haim's Underground New York Public Library project first began as sketches of rough photographs of people reading on trains. The photos are unrefined and voyeuristic, like reading over a stranger's shoulder.

Last year I received an email from a photographer acquaintance about some images I had recently shot. I had met this photographer a couple times at a few photography functions and was Facebook friends with him, but I didn’t really know this person well... who really knows all their Facebook friends these days?

Polaroid pictures might have an iconic look, but finding an elegant frame for them requires more than a trip to your nearest department store. Swiss design group Refurnished has a beautiful "Polaroid SX70 frame" that protects your white-bordered pictures inside a handmade wooden case.

Beginners: Ever wonder why your photos don’t look ‘professional?’ Amateurs: ever wonder why you lack consistency? Pros: Ever wonder why you lose your edge or drive? Wonder no longer. This article deals with some of the most common oversights by photographers of all kinds, and how to avoid them.

The Onion's Tech Trends has a hilarious satirical video warning of the "insidious" Internet scams through Kickstarter: bad projects that guilt people into donating in order to fulfill a life-long dream.