Archives

Want to know how long it'll take you to save up for that camera or lens you've been dreaming of buying? grndctrl, an uber-simple personal finance web app, can tell you. It doesn't take any personal details, but simply asks for your income, expenses, and savings amounts. You can then provide it with a list of "rewards" that you'd like to save up for, and it will give you estimates of how long you'll need to wait.

German photographer Berthold Steinhilber has an awesome technique for lighting expansive locations at night: he tediously paints in the light manually with a powerful 1.8-pound headlamp powered by a 12-volt car battery. Depending on the scale of the location, his large format film exposures last anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours, with the aperture set between f/8 and f/16. The above photo took 1.5 hours at f/16.

The ACLU of Southern California has filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and several of its deputies, claiming that they unlawfully harassed, detained, and searched photographers simply because they were taking pictures. The suit asks the court to instruct the Sheriff's Department to stop detaining citizens on the basis of photography, and also seeks damages. ACLU attorney Peter Bibring tells the LA Times, …

On a rainy day recently, light painting photographer Jeremy Jackson was playing around with a green laser pointer when he discovered something interesting: all the out of focus raindrops in the photograph had a lined pattern in them -- and each one was unique! These "water drop snowflakes" were found in all of the photos he took that day.

Behind the Gare St. Lazare is one of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson's best known photographs, and is frequently cited as an example of his "decisive moment" approach to photography. The photograph was made in 1932, but the oldest known print is dated 1946. That print will be sold at a Christie's auction on November 11th along with 100 other signed prints, and is expected to fetch up to ~$250,000.

The success of Instagram has shown that photo filters are very much in demand with the general population. Facebook is rumored to be working on its own retro filters, but Google has beaten it to the punch: today the company introduced a wide range of creative filters to Google+'s Creative Kit. The filters (called "Effects") include looks that mimic daguerreotypes, Reala 400 film, Polaroid pictures, Lomo, Holga, and even cross processed film.

Zoom creep is what happens when gravity causes your lens to zoom in or out due to it being pointed up or down. While it's not really an issue when you're shooting hand-held, it can cause problems if you're trying to keep the zoom fixed while the camera's on a tripod. A trick to combat this is to use rubber bands to keep the zoom ring still, but now there's a fancier solution to this problem: the Lens Band. It's a gel bracelet-style band that's wrapped around the zoom ring when not needed. When …

Photographer Kim Keever creates large scale landscape photographs using miniature dioramas. He first creates the topographies inside a 200-gallon tank, and then fills it with water. He then uses various lights, pigments, and backdrops to bring the scenes to life for his large-format camera to capture.

Phaidon Press has released another one minute tip by photojournalist Steve McCurry, who suggests picking "an unusual vantage point". If you stay at street level it's sometimes difficult to capture a shot that hasn't been captured countless times before (especially in a popular tourist destination). Getting to a location that's not easy to gain access to can help you capture a more unique perspective.

This amazing image might look like a computer generated graphic, but it's actually a composite photograph by NASA showing India's population growth over the years. The white areas show the illumination visible in the country prior to 1992, while the blue, green, and red lights indicate new lights that became visible in 1992, 1998, and 2003, respectively. The four photos were tinted and then combined into an image that reveals where new populations are appearing. NASA definitely needs to do one …

Nikon says the megapixel race ended years ago, but its upcoming camera is rumored to be a 36MP beast. Canon, on the other hand, actually took a step backward in terms of megapixels, dropping from 21 in the 1Ds Mark III to 18 in the new 1D X. However, the company states that camera's resolution is by no means worse than the 1Ds Mark III, despite what marketers want you to believe. A representative recently spoke to Amateur Photographer, saying: …

Cinematographer Chris Bryan used a Phantom HD Gold camera in a custom underwater housing to capture super slow-motion footage of waves in Sydney, Australia. Water looks amazing at thousands of frames per second. Be sure to watch it full screen and in high-def.

Fox News is reporting that HP is in talks with potential buyers of its webOS mobile operating system, which it obtained back in April 2010 after acquiring Palm for $1.2 billion. One of the potential buyers is surprising though: …

Want a pair of mittens that don't interfere with your love for photography? If you know how to knit, you can make your own! Norwegian knitter Bea created a nifty pair of mittens that have a hole your index finger can poke through when your camera shutter summons it. You can find the free pattern on her site if you'd like to make your own.

The RoundFlash is a new ring flash adapter that's lightweight and collapsible. Setting it up from its collapsed state is similar to setting up a tent: simply take the rods and stick them into the holes to expand the adapter.

Jake Adelstein at the Japanese Subculture Research Center has written up an interesting article regarding the ongoing Olympus scandal, focusing on the organized crime allegations that have been brought against the company: …

Japan's Ministry of Defense has unveiled an amazing "Spherical Flying Machine": a 42-inch remote controlled ball that can zip around in any direction at ~37mph. Built using off-the-shelf parts for about $1,400, in Internet is abuzz over the potential applications, which include military reconnaissance and search-and-rescue operations. What we're most interested in, however, is the device's potential as an aerial camera for things like sports photography and combat photojournalism.

Update: Apparently this isn't something ordinary photographers need to worry about. See below.

Renowned photojournalist Steve McCurry, the man behind "Afghan Girl", offers this piece of advice regarding photographing people in public: "don't forget to say hello". It's part of one-minute masterclass series by Phaidon Press.

Everybody Street is an upcoming documentary film about New York City street photographers (e.g. Bruce Gilden and Joel Meyerowitz) who have taken some of the most iconic images of the past century. Created by photographer Cheryl Dunn, the film was originally a 36-minute short film, but is being expanded into a feature length movie.

A major craze in camera-related novelty items started early last year when Canon lens mugs took the Internet by storm. Last December we showed you a speaker designed to look like a Canon DSLR and lens. Now Nikonian music-lovers can join in on the fun: there's a new Nikon 55-200mm lens speaker for sale on eBay that costs between $20 and $40.

Artist Alexandre Farto has an interesting method of 'printing' large scale portrait photographs onto walls. Instead of using paint, he scratches paint away. Starting with a guide painted onto the wall using a stencil, Farto carefully scratches and chips paint and plaster away from walls using a jackhammer, pick, hammer, and his hands. His giant photos can be seen on abandoned buildings in cities around the world, including Moscow, London, and NYC.

Olympus Chairman and President Tsuyoshi Kikukawa resigned today under pressure from the company's ongoing financial scandal. The 70-year-old was a 45-year veteran of the company and was the president in the late 2000s when the dubious payments took place. Former president Michael Woodford -- the man whose accusations put Olympus in the spotlight -- has stated in interviews that the entire board of directors at the company is "toxic", "contaminated", and needs to resign. However, a member of …

Earlier this month we shared a hugely popular post on transferring a photo onto a block of wood. Well, the same technique can also be used to create a canvas print. All you need, besides the stretched canvas, is some gel medium and a photo printed with toner (e.g. made with a laser printer or photocopier). The gel medium is used to "steal" the toner from the paper, and once the paper is rubbed away, the print remains. Check out the full tutorial over on A Beautiful Mess.

Brazilian gadget site ZTOP recently attended a press event during which Fujifilm showed another roadmap for its X Series lineup. We've already reported that the company is planning to announce an interchangeable lens camera (hopefully with the X100's retro style) in early 2012, but this new roadmap narrows down the launch date to February 2012. We'll likely see the camera announced before then and showed off at CES 2012 in January.

'Moneyface' is a photo fad involving folded money and hybrid faces. Simply fold a banknote containing a portrait in half and combine it with a human subject.

Photographer Samuel Cockedey spent a year photographing the Shinjuku area of Tokyo, Japan using his Canon 5D Mark II, and then created a time-lapse video set to music from the sci-fi film Blade Runner. Titled "Android Dreams", the time-lapse is both a fitting tribute to Blade Runner and a beautiful portrait of Tokyo at night.

Here's a photograph by the The Bangkok Post showing Sony's sensor manufacturing plant in Thailand submerged under flood waters roughly 3 meters (~10ft) high. The shutdown of the 502,000 square foot, 3,300 employee plant doesn't just affect Sony, as other companies -- including Nikon and Apple (in the iPhone 4S) -- rely on Sony image sensors as well.

Here's an interesting factoid: to make the Star Wars scenes containing AT-AT walkers and tauntauns more realistic, a new stop motion technique called "go motion" was created: …

Engadget has published a lengthy review on the Pentax Q that confirms what many people have assumed since the camera was announced: that using a tiny sensor just to make an interchangeable camera system small isn't a good idea: …

One of the big things GoPro has going for it is viral marketing: people -- including the world's best daredevils -- are constantly producing never-before-seen footage using the company's tiny HD cameras, and it seems every week a new GoPro video goes viral on the web. The company isn't bad at creating their own videos either -- the above is an amazing promo video showing off the capabilities of the new Hero2 camera announced yesterday. 100% of the footage was captured using the camera, which …

Update: We've removed this image to avoid fringing on the copyright held by Magnum Photos. Click the image below to see the original side-by-side comparison.

For Halloween this year, photographer Tyler Card decided to made a giant Nikon DSLR costume. Not just any DSLR costume, mind you, but a fully functional one. The camera actually takes pictures when the shutter release button is pressed, and the photograph is displayed on the giant LCD screen on the back. The built-in flash also works, and the camera is even capable of triggering Alienbees strobes.

If you have some translucent film canisters lying around, you can turn them into DIY glow sticks for light painting photography. Fuse three of them together into one translucent tube, stick a small flashlight into it, wrap it with a colored translucent sheet, and voilà, you have yourself a cheap and simple glow stick. It's a way to add some thickness to your light painting "brush".

Here's the current state of imagery: still cameras can shoot HD video, video cameras can capture high quality stills, and data storage costs continue to fall. In the future, it might become commonplace for people to make photos by shooting uber-high quality video and then selecting the best still. However, as any photographer knows, selecting the best photograph from a series of photos captured in burst mode is already a challenge, so selecting a still from 30fps footage would be quite a …

Photography enthusiast and retired physicist Milo Shott of Oxford, England has found a way use his love for cameras to raise boatloads of money for the poverty-fighting charity Oxfam: camera repair. 11 years ago, Shott noticed some workers at an Oxfam store throwing out an old piece of camera equipment. After saving it from the trash, he fixed it up and helped the store sell it for £270.

Step into the Foto Henny Hoogeveen Leica store in Lisse, the Netherlands, and you'll be greeted by a giant stainless steel Leica camera that weighs a whopping 350kg (~772lb). The sculpture was crafted by Chinese artist Liao Yibai, and there are only three of them in existence. Besides the one found in the shop, the other two are owned by Leica itself and a distributor. The camera isn't based on any one model, but is instead a hodgepodge of features found on the M6, M7, and M9.

Canon's new 1D X is an impressive fusion of the old 1D and 1Ds lines, boasting state of the art sensor quality combined with impressive speed, but there's one downside that may be a big disappointment to some photographers: the camera loses autofocus when used with lenses with a max aperture of f/8.

A 'vortograph' is a photo taken using a triangular arrangement of three mirrors. The process was invented back in 1917 by an American photographer named Alvin Langdon Coburn. Photographer Simon Gardiner decided to try his hand at vortography, and created this beautiful Inception-esque photograph of the Champs-Élysées in Paris [using Photoshop].

GoPro has unveiled the HD Hero2, the followup to the highly popular HD Hero from 2009 that has been adopted by daredevils around the world. The new camera is similar in design but offers major upgrades: more angles of view (90°, 127°, and 170°), 11-megapixel still photos (up from 5MP) at 10fps, a helpful LCD display instead of a single character code system, a mini-HDMI port, and a faster sensor that allows for faster frame rates (e.g. 960p at 48fps, up from 30).

Here's CNET's introduction to the new Lytro camera. The square LCD screen on the back of the camera might be small, but it's a touchscreen display that lets you play around with the focus directly in-camera rather than having to connect the device to a computer.

Photographer Dennis Calvert creates amazing light painting portraits that look more like video game illustrations than photographs.

Photographer Lisa Bettany has an interesting post over at Camera+ comparing the iPhone 4S camera to the cameras on each of the previous versions (and a couple other cameras as well). It's an interesting look at how much cell phone cameras have improved since the original iPhone was announced at the beginning of 2007.

Photographs of happy babies are cute, but not-so-happy babies can also make for great photo subjects. Photographer Evan Kafka has a knack for capturing wonderful expressions of both varieties.

More news from the ongoing Olympus scandal: despite an official explanation issued by Olympus last week, the company's stock has continued to plummet. It closed today at ¥1,099, down from around ¥2,500 before the crisis began. Investors are apparently spooked after a major Japanese newspaper suggested that the payments at the center of the controversy could have links to the criminal underworld (something the company has denied). The New York Times is reporting that the FBI is now involved in …

Here's a super-awesome way of using stop-motion photography to announce the birth of a new baby.

Night photographer Ben Canales made this image by stacking together roughly 50 different exposures in order to show all of the star trails across the sky. Regarding the color seen in the stars, Canales writes, …

Remember the light brown leather X100 special edition announced by Fujifilm a couple of days ago? While those might come with a unique limited edition serial number, the look apparently isn't as unique. As a commenter pointed out, it appears to be a covering offered by a shop named Aki-Asahi Custom Camera Coverings. There are quite a few styles in addition to that look (which is named "Lizard Ochre"), including a couple of beautiful wood coverings crafted from walnut and cherry wood.

In this video, commercial photographer Jay P. Morgan walks through how he went about shooting a composite sports photograph of Mexican soccer player Rafael Márquez.

Japanese camera site digicame-info is reporting that an upcoming announcement of a D700 successor (possibly the D800) has been cancelled due to the ongoing flooding in Thailand, and that Nikon's product supply has nearly come to a standstill -- affecting existing products in addition to upcoming ones. Even if the D800 is being manufactured in Japan like the D700 is, some components may be produced in Nikon's flood-damaged factory.