Canon sent out this teaser yesterday stating that it's going to be making some kind of game-changing announcement on November 3rd. Since the location is Hollywood, it seems more likely that it'll be some kind of camera for filmmaking rather than a mirrorless camera. Filmmaker Philip Bloom thinks it'll be an EF and PL mount camcorder with a Super 35mm sensor (possibly offering 4K resolution).
YouTube user smithje77 and his dog recently embarked on a cross-country road trip from Seattle to Maine (3,000+ miles!), and he decided to document the journey by programming his Droid X to snap a photograph every 90 seconds (the script is available here). Afterward, he took all the stills captured and combined them into one epic time-lapse video that shows what it's like to drive from coast to coast.
On September 2nd, a woman in Northern California named Debbie Payne heard a loud crash and, upon investigating, found a smashed Canon 24-105mm lens on the ground and a gaping 9-inch hole in her roof. Now the police department in Petaluma is trying to figure out how the lens apparently fell from the sky.
Want to add some simple panning action to a time-lapse video? Trying using a cheap IKEA kitchen timer. GetawayMoments has a tutorial on how to convert a $2-$6 timer from IKEA into a simple device for your time-lapse projects.
Regardless of how bad photographers' rights seem to be in your country, here's a story that will definitely make you appreciate them at least a little bit more: a photojournalist named Sithu Zeya may spend 18 years of his life in prison after being arrested for photography. Zeya, who's only 21 years old, was arrested in Burma last year after getting caught photographing the aftermath of a grenade attack that killed 10 people in the country's largest city, Yangon. After being sentenced to 8 …
Tokyo-based editorial photographer Irwin Wong created this funny Justin Bieber parody song titled "Pay Me" as a shout out to all his "photographer homies who have had their copyright infringed".
Canon sends out an email containing a customer survey once or twice a year, and yesterday's survey included a few questions regarding mirrorless cameras. Looks like the company is looking into entering the mirrorless game. About time too -- mirrorless cameras are chipping away at Canon's market share, and Nikon is rumored to have a mirrorless camera announcement just around the corner on September 21st.
Melbourne-based design studio Betty Wants In is at it again. They've created this stunning slow-mo video of BASE jumpers doing their thing -- a perfect followup to the skydiving one they shared back in April. The footage was captured with GoPro cameras and then slowed down using Twixtor, just like the crazy wingsuit video we shared yesterday.
Today Canon unveiled its new high-end PowerShot S100 compact camera, successor to the popular S95. The S100 uses Canon's new DIGIC 5 image processor and packs a CMOS sensor (1/1.7") instead a CCD one. It shoots 12 megapixel images with a 24-120mm (35mm equivalent) f/2.0 lens, can capture RAW files, has a max ISO of 6400, includes GPS functionality, and has a 3-inch LCD screen. The camera is very similar to Canon's high-end G series (the sensor size is the same), except the S series has a …
If you ever find yourself needing some quick stabilization when recording video with your DSLR, but don't have a fancy rig with you (or you're in a place where you can't bring one), you can use an ordinary tripod as a makeshift shoulder rig for some extra stability.
Cell phone cameras have pretty poor image quality when compared with point-and-shoot cameras due to their small sensors, but one advantage they have over compact cameras is a naturally deep depth of field. That was particularly useful for this YouTube user in capturing some sharp video of his new motorcycle -- something that would have been much more difficult using a standard point-and-shoot.
Gomite's new Tiltpod is a simple "tripod" designed for people who do a lot of traveling with a compact camera. Stored on the end of your hand strap, it attaches quickly to your camera's tripod mount to help you frame and stabilize your shots when there's no one around to help you take it. The underside is made of a "grippy" magnetic material that helps it stay still on most surfaces, and the angle of the base can be adjusted after the camera is attached.
In this video, UK photography instructor Damien Lovegrove demonstrates how you can add some pseudo-sunlight to portraits by simply placing some weeds or part of a bush -- which he calls a "dingle" -- between an off-camera flash and your subject.
Baking blog Bakerella has a fun tutorial teaching how to make Instagram logo graham crackers, or "Instagrahams", a geeky treat for anyone addicted to the wildly popular photo sharing app.
According to a survey conducted for SanDisk, 64% of adults in the US wouldn't consider destroying their photo collections for $1 million. At the same time, the general public probably doesn't spend nearly enough time and money ensuring the safety of those same photos.
Earlier this year, daredevil BASE jumper Jeb Corliss leaped off a cliff in Switzerland in a wingsuit and wearing 5 separate GoPro cameras. One of the things Corliss did afterward was create this ethereal slow-motion video with the footage using Twixtor, the artificial slowmo program that has become quite popular as of late.
ifttt (If This Then That) is a new service that lets you automate tasks across different social media services you're signed up for, including Dropbox, Flickr, Instagram, and Facebook. All you have to do is choose what "this" and "that" are, and the service will take care of handling the task. For example, you can use ifttt to automatically send every photo uploaded to Facebook that's tagged with your name to your Dropbox account, or have it send all of your new Instagram photos to a particular …
Last September, Sony issued a notice informing customers that its pellicle mirror cameras would overheat during extended periods of video recording. Rather than maximum clip lengths, the company's cameras are apparently limited by how long the sensor can endure high temperatures. In the video above, someone tests Sony's new NEX-5N mirrorless camera for this overheating issue, and finds that you can record about 23m22s of video from a "cold start" before the camera issues a warning and shuts off …
Last week Toshiba announced "FlashAir" SD card with built-in LAN functionality, and today SanDisk is launching a counterattack. Rather than develop its own wireless cards, the company is partnering with Eye-Fi to sell co-branded wireless SD cards to European customers. The cards, which allow photos to be transfered to a computer over Wi-Fi, will be available in 4GB and 8GB sizes, and are basically Eye-Fi cards with a SanDisk logo slapped onto them. No word on price or release date as of yet.
Everpix is a new company that wants to make your entire photo collection -- both online and offline -- accessible from anywhere through the cloud. Introduced yesterday at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 conference, the service will come as a desktop client that monitors folders on your computer and photo sharing accounts on the Internet. Whenever you add new photographs, they're automatically beamed to the cloud (i.e. Everpix servers), allowing images created using many different devices and stored …
Johan Rijpma spent six months creating this two and a half minute time-lapse video showing rolls of transparent adhesive tape slowly unwinding. For one of the shots, he spent hours standing in the wind and rain, turning a plate 0.4 degrees every 30 seconds and then snapping a photo. Some of the sequences took as long as 12 hours to develop.
We all knew it wasn't a question of if, but of when: a major camera review site (Imaging Resource) has published a review of a cell phone (Apple's iPhone 4) as a digital camera. The review's conclusion is positive news for camera-makers though: …
Next time you're on vacation and find yourself without a camera, try checking the mini-bar in your hotel room. Ace Hotel has announced that the mini-bar in each of their guest rooms will be stock with a refurbished Polaroid camera and limited edition packs of Ace Hotel branded Impossible Project B&W instant film. If you don't plan on staying at any of their hotels, you can also purchase the branded kits through their website for $150 each.
In 1986, Texaco's gas stations ran a promotion where you received free Fujifilm film every time you filled up with at least 25 liters of gas. That's neat and all, but my question is: where can you buy that awesome photo-snappin' car?
It looks like all the negative news stories about photographers' rights in the UK is finally causing some positive change -- private security guards across the nation are being instructed (for the first time) to exercise some common sense when stopping and questioning picture-takers: …
Photographer Michael Freeman says that although things are getting tougher for professional photographers, the "consumption of imagery in all areas is actually increasing". Professionals therefore need to think more about marketing themselves and specializing in a particular niche.
Shutterbugs is a new comedy web series geared towards photo geeks: …
To promote its new Xperia phones, Sony hosted a three-day hackathon on a boat to see what creative innovations people could come up with. One of the hackers decided to make a flamethrower-style flash (seen at 2:26), triggering a gas flame to flare whenever a photograph is taken with the phone. Maybe this'll start a fire-lighting trend in professional photo studios...
German satire program Extra 3 conducted a humorous -- albeit disconcerting -- experiment testing photographers' (and videographers) rights in Germany. They had an actor use a camera at different "sensitive" government locations, doing the exact same things (e.g. film the locations of security cameras) but dressed in two different outfits -- first as a European tourist and then as a Middle Eastern man. The result shows that how law enforcement deals with cameras is largely determined by common …
The rise of microstock and the fact that anyone with a camera can sell cheap photos has done a lot to devalue stock photography, but is the same thing happening to the photojournalism industry? Paul Melcher says that the industry is headed in that direction: …
Here's a long exposure light painting tutorial by a couple MIT Media Lab students. In addition to teaching the basics of the technique, they also show off a robot arm that they programmed to do extremely precise light painting photos and animations.
As a tribute to 9/11, Jason Powell revisited locations where photos of the attacks were captured on that fateful day and rephotographed them with the photos overlaid on the background.
Miklós Falvay used 3D camera mapping techniques on some historical photographs, turning them into tiny windows into the past that viewers can step into.
John Sypal is the photographer behind Tokyo Camera Style, the "Sartorialist of the camera world".
Canada's TSN created this "Top 10" compilation of clips showing sports photographers and cameramen getting way too close to balls, pucks, feet, and fists.
If a stranger suddenly grabs your camera and takes a photograph, who owns the copyright to that photograph? Photographer Mirjam Letsch writes, …
We've shared a couple stories in the past month on how human eyes are very subjective and horrible as light meters, and here's yet another mind-boggling example of how easily our eyes can be fooled by context. In the image above, the "blue" and the "green" stripes are exactly the same color.
San Diego-based graphic artist Darren Pearson takes light-painting to a whole new level with his Light Fossil series -- long-exposure photos with detailed dinosaur fossils carefully drawn into the frame.
Could allowing the use of your photos for free actually be a way to increase income? Portrait photographer Jonathan Worth -- the man behind Coventry University's free photo courses -- used to send take-down notices to any website that shared his work without permission. Then he met author Cory Doctorow, a proponent of Creative Commons licensing, who suggested that he try giving away his work for free. Worth then made a high-res photo freely available online and quickly sold 111 signed prints, …
Japanese business newspaper Nikkei reported yesterday that Nikon is on the cusp of announcing its entry into the mirrorless camera market. What's more, the paper stated that the camera would cost between ¥70,000-¥100,000 ($900-$1,300), a pretty common price point for this type of camera (though it may be somewhat high if the camera only packs a 2.7x sensor). In response, Nikon put out a strange press release titled "Comments on Media Reports about Nikon's imaging product": …
The debate over David LaChapelle copyright infringement lawsuit against Rhianna rages on -- lawyer John William Nelson has written an article on why copyright should extend only to the literal copying of a photograph and not the elements within the photo.
Here's a weekend project idea: personalize your camera's wrist strap by making it look like a friendship bracelet! All you need is some embroidery thread and some time. Simply repeat a simple knot over and over and your strap will magically be covered with a neat repeating pattern. Head on over to KEH for the step-by-step tutorial.
DSLRs are finding their way into more and more consumers' hands, and apparently many of those consumers are tired of the standard black look. Just months after Canon announced the Rebel T3 in red, Nikon is following suit with its entry level D3100 -- the first Nikon DSLR to be available in a color other than black or silver. Aside from the new paint job, the camera's specs are identical to the black version.
Things aren't look very bright in the world of film. Citing plummeting consumer demand for silver halide films, Fujifilm has announced that they're cutting a number of films in the lineup in order to ensure that production of films -- presumably the more popular ones -- will continue. They've already stopped producing the discontinued films, so you might want to grab some rolls and freeze them before they become extinct...
Shutterlog is an interesting YouTube channel started earlier this year by Mijonju and Cameron Lew that collects user-submitted videos of people taking a picture with their favorite camera. After receiving and sharing over 100 videos, they decided to take some of the shutter click clips and remix them into a beat. It's like a simpler version of Lv Sisi's Digital Analogue.
Here's a video in which renowned street photographer Joel Meyerowitz shows us his method of doing street photography. His quiet, friendly, and "invisible" style is quite different from Bruce Gilden's in-your-face technique. The New Yorker also has a great video on Meyerowitz's photography.
In response to the "widespread, continuing pattern of law enforcement officers ordering people to stop taking photographs or video in public places", the American Civil Liberties Union has published a helpful article that clearly details what your rights are as a photographer in the United States.
Between 1903 and 1917, photographer Alfred Stieglitz published a quarterly photographic journal called Camera Work featuring the work of important photographers around the world and promoting photography as an art form. Called "the most beautiful of all photographic magazines", 50 issues containing 473 photographs were published before Stieglitz could no longer afford to continue the publication. Individual issues now sell for thousands of dollars each, but you can view the entire collection of …
Here's a creative way to offer a behind-the-scenes look at how a stop-motion video is created: while animator Barry Purves was slowly moving a puppet and snapping frames, a separate camera was used to photograph Barry doing the animating, creating a time-lapse video that shows how the doll was brought to life.
With the success of the Fujifilm X100, camera companies are starting to realize that consumers love both the design of old school cameras and the ease of shooting digital. Samsung may be looking to join the retro party -- the latest rumor to hit the Internet is that Samsung is planning a X100-style camera called the R1... with interchangeable lenses!
