A couple of days ago the world was wowed by the up and coming BlackBerry 10's new camera app. The app, demoed by RIM at BlackBerry World 2012, allowed you to select someone's face and scroll through frames captured before and after you hit the shutter button. If you thought the app looked familiar, you were right: it's actually a rebranded version of Scalado Rewind.
We've seen many a photo collage in our day, but New York artist Michael Mapes' Specimen Boxes are an entirely different creature. To create these unique photo compartments, he dissects various photos of his subjects into many corresponding bits and then mounts those bits on or in different materials -- much like what you see in insect collection boxes. Sometimes it's vials, sometimes it's push pins, and sometimes it's gel caps, but it always turns out looking really interesting.
Last week we reported on how photographers and a magazine are being sued for $300,000 for allegedly breaking a 2,630-year-old statue while photographing it for an assignment. While many people, including us, pointed to it as an example of why carrying liability insurance is a good idea for photographers, a more appropriate question is: does a typical insurance plan even cover something like that? David Walker over at PDN writes that it doesn't: …
Photographer Lauren Marsolier’s Transition series consists of minimalist landscape photographs of desolate locations. The various places don't actually exist -- Marsolier creates them by combining photographs captured in different places at different times.
Columbus, Ohio-based photographer Nick Fancher works as the lifestyle photographer of Men's online shopping club JackThreads, a job that has him shooting lifestyle photos for 8-12 brands every single day. The behind-the-scenes video above shows what a typical day for Fancher looks like as he hurries around to different locations in the city to photograph his models wearing different clothing items from different brands. It not only shows the process of shooting the images, but also lighting …
Michele over at The Scrap Shoppe offers this handy trick for hanging picture frames: hammer a nail through a clothespin and use it to determine nail placement. Simply hang the picture on the clothespin nail, figure out where you want to place the frame, and then push the clothespin into the wall to make a small indent. Voila! Target acquired.
Aerial photographer Stephan Zirwes shoots amazing images of patterns and repetition seen in landscapes while looking straight down from a helicopter. From his perspective, things like cars, shipping containers, and people blend together into abstract designs.
Flash diffusers come in all shapes and sizes, from DIY Home Depot versions to more expensive professional grade equipment. None of these solutions seemed adequate for 30 year photography veteran Les Tirmenstein, however, and that's why he designed the FlashPipe.
People ask me, “Jun Shen, how do you shoot so fast on the streets?!?” I’m like a ninja, whipping out my camera, shooting it, and putting it away so quickly that my subjects don’t know what hit them. They walk away whispering to themselves, “What was that? Did he take our photo? …
It might not be very applicable to the vast majority of photographers, but NASA astronaut Captain Alan Pointdexter has written up a fascinating article over on Luminous Landscape in which he shares advice about doing photography in space. Taking photos on the ground is one thing, but imagine using not just the sun, but the earth itself as a source of light.
To show off its collection of eyewear for kids, Very French Gangsters shot cute mugshot-style portraits of gangster children who were obviously booked for being too hip for their own good.
RGBDToolkit is a project that layers HD video recording with a DSLR over Microsoft Kinect's depth maps, creating trippy 3D footage that may be an indication of what we'll be documenting life with in the future.
Back in November of last year Kodak sold off its sensor business -- Kodak Image Sensor Solutions -- to a California based firm in an attempt to avoid bankruptcy. We know now that the sale was in vain, and now other camera companies are paying a price for Kodak's decision.
Last October, Portland-based 17-year-old photographer Brendon Burton began an ambitious project in which he committed to creating one self-portrait every day for a year. Now, half a year later, Burton is still going strong and his Flickr photostream is full of beautiful and creative images that document his development as a photographer.
Users of both Flickr and Pinterest will be happy to know that the two companies have decided to collaborate. Because of the high volume of Flickr photos that end up pinned (often without any credit), the companies have decided that it would be in the best interest of photographers and users alike to add a "Pin It" button on the Flickr site. In this way photographers who allow their photos to be pinned are properly attributed, while Pinterest users can now share photos with a few easy clicks
Canon has received some pretty bad publicity over the past month due to the 5D Mark III's "light leak" issue -- a relatively minor flaw in which light from (or through) the LCD panel can affect the camera's exposure readings in extremely dark environments. Last week Canon finished investigating the issue, and reported that it only affects a certain range of serial numbers, suggesting that the company has implemented a fix for newer bodies. It also announced that service centers would be …
If you have a Canon compact camera running the Canon Hack Development Kit (CHDK) firmware, you can create a simple shutter release cable using some cheap components. The firmware causes the camera to snap a photograph anytime 5V is sent down a USB cable connected to the camera. You can do this using a USB cable (e.g. the one that comes with your camera), 5V battery, simple push button, and some kind of housing (a metal candy tin, for example). Oh, and you'll need to be comfortable cutting up …
Time-lapse in motion can be a bit of a nightmare. Not only do you need to have your intervalometer set properly to control when and how your camera takes pictures, you also have to have the camera on a dedicated track, hopefully moving at a consistent speed, and preferably without you being the one moving it.
German photographer Christian Stoll's "Epic" series features epic wide angle photographs of futuristic locations. The spaces are immense and the scale dizzying.
In case you missed our earlier post, let's get you up to speed: in the internet age, the argument is that you don't own anything anymore. This is relevant because yet another copyright infringement lawsuit has made its way across our computer screens, this time between a student photographer and the Colorado University newspaper The CU Independent that printed and distributed his now famous falling bear image.
The latest rumor circulating around the "entry-level full-frame" topic is that Nikon may shying away from Sony when it comes to getting a full-frame sensor for the rumored D600. The rumor came as a result of an article on the Italian website MarsicaLive, which stated that Aptina Imaging is designing a new full-frame CMOS sensor for DSLRs; they also write that -- according to unconfirmed rumors -- the sensor is being designed specifically for Nikon. Although this is the first full-frame sensor …
The world of photography is full of "nuts," but these are the first we've seen that you could actually crack open with a nutcracker. For its latest photography marketing stunt, Olympus has been sending out a box complete with two walnuts and a note that simply says "coming soon." TechRadar received one, and PhotographyBlog received another.
Back in August we featured a service called JPEGmini, which gives anybody the ability to shrink their photos up to 5-times in size without any visible quality difference -- a substantial claim, but one that the service seemed to live up to quite well (we use it regularly).
Yesterday One World Trade Center officially became the tallest building in New York City. Since 2004, the EarthCam network has had cameras pointed at the construction site, documenting its progress. Taking images captured over the past eight years, the website created the mesmerizing time-lapse video above that shows eight years of construction in just two minutes.
Words certainly won't do Kevin Michael Connolly justice. Born without legs, this part-photographer, part-professional skier, part-writer is, ironically enough, an inspiration to us all (we say ironically because in the Today Show interview above they talk about how much he hates to be called an inspiration).
The new BlackBerry 10 operating system was unveiled BlackBerry World 2012 today, and one of the amazing new features that wowed the crowd was the camera app. It features a seemingly-magical "timeline" lens that lets you rewind sections of photographs in order to recover moments that your fingers weren't fast enough to capture. Did your subject blink in the photo? No worries... simply rewind their face and you're good to go! Basically, the camera is constantly capturing frames as soon as the app …
Concept products aren't a rarity. In the world of cars and computers concepts usually make us ooh and ahh at their beautiful styling and implied functionality, but in the world of cameras things can get a bit, strange. Such is the case with a new SLR concept by industrial designer Arti Patel called the All.Round SLR.
Ever since she entered the world 30 some-odd years ago, Alison has had her father Jack Radcliffe's camera pointed at her. Radcliffe, a Baltimore, MD-based photographer, started out by documenting her life casually as new parents commonly do, but slowly became more interested in the relationships involved in growing up.
The United States is a diverse country, but there are few places in the US as diverse as New York City: "the greatest city on earth." In many ways The City's diversity makes it a street photographer's gold-mine, and it's this mine that photographer Brandon Stanton has been meticulously digging through over the last couple of years.
Here's a tongue-in-cheek "leaked advertisement" for Instagram's new camera: the Instagram Snap. The camera is sure to become a hit among hipsters.
MIT researchers are at it again: the university's latest research project to receive attention from tech blogs the world over is their new self-cleaning, anti-glare, fog-resistant glass. They're calling it "multifunctional" glass, and by using a nano-textured surface it eliminates glare and fogging entirely, essentially making it invisible.
The Olympus OM-D EM-5 generated quite a bit of buzz when it was first announced due to its retro OM-inspired styling, but now reviews of the camera are suggesting that its potential as a camera are on par with its sleek form. DPReview has published a comprehensive review of the camera, giving it glowing marks and calling it the best Micro Four Thirds camera yet: …
We'll go ahead and start by saying that we're using the term "photographer" lightly; in reality we should probably say "users." But there's a certain irony to calling celebrity Instagramers "photographers" that we quite enjoy. Unlike Flickr where many of the best loved users are well known photogs showcasing their most recent work, Instagram's top users are made up entirely of celebrities.
John Herrman over at BuzzFeed has written up an interesting piece on how and why "grabby" terms of service have become ubiquitous in the online world of social media:
Korean photographer Lee Eunyeol creates beautiful nighttime scenes by installing lights in various landscapes. His artist statement reads, …
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Polaroid sponsored shows like "The Tonight Show" during which the hosts would take time to endorse the cameras during the show itself rather than cut to commercials. The montage above takes viewers back to a time when fancy new Polaroid cameras cost $69.95 -- or $1.19 a week.
When we told you about the StrikeFinder app earlier, we mentioned that what set it apart was that it used your actual iPhone's camera; it wasn't just acting as the trigger. Well, Trigertrap's new mobile app is just acting as the trigger, but it's acting as a very comprehensive trigger.
Matthew Gore of Light & Matter created this beginner-friendly video tutorial on the three basic elements of exposure: aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. It's explained with easy to understand illustrations and examples, and features graphics and sounds that are reminiscent of old 8-bit video games. You can also find a text-based version of the tutorial here.
One of the interesting features in Olympus' OM-D EM-5 retro-styled camera is the 5-axis image stabilization, which shifts the sensor in 5 different axis directions (existing systems generally use 2) to compensate for camera shake. It's a feature that caught the eye of Vimeo user Fiatopichan, who suffers from essential tremor (a neurological disorder that causes his hands to shake at about 5-10 Hz). He decided to buy the camera to test out the new system, and reported his findings in the video …
"Dancing with Invisible Light" is a project by San Francisco-based photographer Audrey Penven, who used an infrared camera to capture portraits illuminated by the invisible structured light emitted by a Microsoft Kinect.
There are plenty of light-sensitive triggers on the market, some triggers even use your smartphone, but Ubertronix's new StrikeFinder app is the first mobile app that lets you actually take the pictures with your phone. Instead of designing a trigger app that attaches to an external camera, the StrikeFinder app released earlier today lets everyday iPhone users simply point their phone camera in the direction of say, lightning or fireworks, and the phone does the rest for them.
Not so much a "leak" as the proverbial flood gates opening, earlier today the Indonesian website Yangcanggih released what amounts to a full gallery of both the new NEX-F3 and A37 cameras, giving Sony fanboys (and girls) plenty to get excited over. The pictures confirm many of the previous rumors: the NEX-F3 does have a pop-up flash, and the 180-degree tilting screen is also a feature; while the A37 is receiving an articulating screen as well.
Last November Google launched a Photography Prize for finding the "photography stars of the future". After receiving entries from 20,000 students in 146 countries, Google announced the winners last week. The grand prize winner was Viktor Johansson, a 24-year-old photography student from Sweden who photographed the loneliness of competitive diving: …
With Nikon rumored to be working on the D600 as an entry-level full-frame for later this year, it's only right that Canon jump into the fray as well, and jump they have (maybe). Rumors that Canon has had a new entry-level full-frame in the works began circulating at the end of March, and now we're hearing that an announcement may be planned for the 2012 Holiday Season.
Every photo has a story, and this particular photo has one of the most interesting stories of them all -- a story of anonymous fame, and famous anonymity. To this day the above photo, titled "Firing Squad in Iran," is the only anonymous photo to ever win a Pulitzer Prize. And although the photo was taken in 1979, the photographer behind the lens didn't receive credit until 2006.
Artist Maarten Baas has a project called "Real Time" in which he creates one-of-a-kind clocks using a video camera and boatloads of patience and dedication. He creates 12-hour-long loops of people manually setting the time on various clocks... in real time. The video above shows his grandfather clock exhibit in which the hour and minute hands of the clock are painstakingly drawn in every minute of every hour for twelve hours.
The Afghan box camera, or kamra-e-faoree as it's called in Afghanistan, is a humble creation that has served its purpose well for many years. We say humble because the "camera body" consists of a wooden box, the "focusing apparatus" is a metal shaft attached to a piece of wood, and the "shutter" is controlled by removing and reinserting the "lens cap" manually.
For those of you amateur photographers out there who like shooting film, sometimes old cameras don't have the right light meter for getting the correct exposure. Sometimes they are faulty, inaccurate or have no light meter at all! Photographic light meters can be pretty expensive but analog foot-candle meters are cheap because they don't really have any photography purpose, until now. This guide will show you how to put it to work for photography.
"All the Wild Horses" is a photo series by South African photographer Andrew McGibbon that consists of beautiful studio portraits of horses. McGibbon writes, …
A typical snoot is used to control the direction and radius of of the light you're casting onto your subject, and they're great for getting certain effects. But photographer Peter Miesch's take on the snoot is a bit different; used right, his will give your photos a film-noire effect like you see in the example above.
