In the spirit of the iPhone 4 vs. Canon 7D side-by-side camera comparison video, filmmaker Brandon Bloch has made a wonderfully clever juxtaposition of the Canon 7D and Mattel's Barbie Video Girl. The Barbie Video Girl alone is a thing of wonder -- it's a really bizarre bionic-looking glitz and glam doll with a camera built into her chest.
You've heard the term "photographic memory" before, but have you ever heard of someone who actually has it? Meet Stephen Wiltshire, a UK-born autistic savant with an extraordinary memory that has given him the nickname, "The Living Camera". The above is a short video showing his abilities that will make your jaws drop.
Here's a super random gift idea for photographers that have everything: a camera that's hidden behind what appears to be a normal shirt button. The Thanko Button Camera is attached to button-up shirts using special buttons that have a hole for the lens. If you don't have a shirt with black buttons, you'll be happy to know that the buttons come in three different colors: black, white, and pearl.
NewsARSE has a pretty funny satirical piece poking fun at the photographers' rights situation in the UK: …
Amateur Photographer is reporting that stock photo agency Getty Images added the Leica X1 to its "Approved Cameras List" last month. A quick Google search turned up this submission requirements document with a now apparently outdated list: …
Newspapers are fading. News media is in a limbo of redefinition. Now we can add photojournalism to that list of defunct media, said Neil Burgess, head of London-based photo agency NB Pictures. Burgess is also the former head of Network Photographers and Magnum Photos, and twice Chairman of World Press Photo, and has spent much of his life working on social documentary photography and 25 years as a photojournalist.
Freddy Wong's YouTube channel is a must-subscribe if you're interested in video editing and home-brewed CGI. A couple months ago we featured an amazing video they made where an entire action scene was done using light-painting techniques. What's neat about their channel is that they also create behind-the-scenes clips explaining how each one was made.
Here's a funny example of a photo-based security feature gone wrong: starting in May, Facebook started doing user verification checks when logging in from an unfamiliar computer in order to make sure it's actually the account owner logging in. The verification checks are photo-based, and involve correctly naming people you have listed as friends. Unfortunately, the feature will sometimes ask users to correctly name unfamiliar things: people they don't know very well, dogs, cats, objects, gummy …
Contact sheets are ordinarily used to select photographs to print, but UK-based photographer Martin Wilson's contact sheets are masterpieces in themselves. His sheets are created by carefully capturing images on
If you're a digital photography buff, here's some required trivia knowledge: what you see above is a photograph of the first digital camera ever built. It was created in December 1975 by an engineer at Eastman Kodak named Steve Sasson, now regarded as the inventor of the digital camera.
UK-based filmmaker Philip Bloom created this beautiful video of Monument Valley, Utah. Blending regular video and timelapse footage, Bloom builds a serene and powerful portrait of the place. Bloom used a plethora of gear to capture the footage, including five cameras - one Canon 5D Mark II to capture video, another 5D Mark II, two Canon 7D, Canon 1D Mark IV, and a Nikon D3s for timelapse. Whew!
Adobe is running a unique contest right now in search of the "next Photoshop evangelist". Sadly, the winner isn't given a special "evangelist" position in Adobe's marketing department, but rather the prize package is pretty typical: a copy of CS5 Design Standard and a trip to Photoshop World in 2011 (which includes airfare, lodging, meals, and a chance to demo the winning tutorial).
The Flip Video camcorder has had a convenient built-in USB connector for quite some time, so why not compact cameras? Today Samsung announced the PL90, a 12.2 megapixel compact shooter that offers a convenient USB plug built into the body of the camera. Gone are the days of carrying around a separate cable or card reader, or having to have a computer with built-in card slots.
This crazy self-portrait was taken using the tiny reflection in the tip of a ballpoint pen. Russian photographer Alexey Arkhipov modified a Canon PowerShot S1 IS, adding a custom (and cheap) lens setup to achieve this super-macro shot. Head on over to his blog post if you'd like to learn how it was done and how to do this yourself (you might have to use Google Translate).
The above is a promotional video for the Summadayze 2011 music festival done in stop-motion. It was created by Tom Blachford, a 22-year-old self-taught photographer based in Melbourne, Australia.
Yesterday Citigroup released a research report on Hoya for investors. What was interesting about the report (from a photographer's standpoint) was a section on page 2 regarding the company's digital camera business.
"Devil in the Detail" is a neat stop-motion music video directed by Souljacker for the band The Ambience Affair. Rather than use video cameras, a Canon 400D was used to shoot over 15,000 still photographs, which were later combined using Final Cut Pro.
Haje Jan Kamps is the blogger behind Photocritic.org …
Another Nikon patent discovered recently provides yet another sneak peek at their yet-to-be-announced mirrorless, interchangeable lens camera.
Here's a fun video that compiles quite a few clips from movies where "experts" look for clues to mysteries in videos and photographs, often "enhancing" them in ridiculous ways before suddenly discovering something earth-shattering.
The above photograph was recently posted to Korean forum Samsung SLR Club, and was supposedly captured during a commercial shoot for the Samsung NX100.
If you're a fan of the Polaroid SX-70, this promotional video from the 1970s should stir up warm fuzzy feelings. If you've never used one, watching this might give you a better idea of why so many are obsessed with it.
At SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles last month, Microsoft researchers showed off some new technology that improves existing digital blur reduction techniques by outfitting a camera with motion detecting sensors.
Many of Sony's new digicams have a nifty "Sweep Panorama" feature that allows you to create panoramas of up to 224 degrees by sweeping your camera across a scene. The camera then takes the numerous frames it captured during the sweep and combines them together into a panorama for you.
British musician Robbie Williams was recently featured in Nikon's "I AM NIKON" advertising campaign, with a commercial showing a fun experiment he did at a concert in 2003. He asked his audience to pull out their cameras and, on his cue, fire off the flash. The resulting scene was pretty awesome to behold. The full clip of the experiment is above.
In 2009, Kingston University students Samantha Harvey and Anna Brooks were trying to photograph children at a school when they were told by the headteacher that they could only photograph single child and only show the back of their head.
We've shared a good number of time-lapse videos here on PetaPixel before, but this one is pretty unique in the way it was created: François Vautier put an ant colony inside his scanner, and scanned the colony once a week over the course of five years. He then compiled the resulting images into a time-lapse video. It's a little hard to make out what's going on, and the zooming and panning can be a little distracting, but the idea is pretty interesting nonetheless.
Just a couple months after we reported that a 45-gigapixel photo of Dubai had become the world's largest, a new panorama has arrived to steal the crown. 70 Billion Pixels Budapest is a 70-gigapixel panorama of Budapest created using a setup of two 25-megapixel Sony A900 cameras fitted with 400mm Minolta lenses and 1.4X teleconverters. Four days of shooting resulted in 20,000 images, and an additional two days of post-processing produced a single 200 GB file. If printed, the size of the photo …
Everyone is expecting news of a new Canon 60D soon, and a leak yesterday by DxO seems to indicate that it will be in our hands by November of this year, meaning that Canon is probably planning to announce the new camera in late September at Photokina 2010.
This amazing video shows what lightning looks like when slowed down to 9,000 frames per second. Even if you've seen lightning in slow motion before, this video might surprise you. Even at extremely slow speeds, many of the bursts and flashes that go on during a lightning strike happen in what appears to be real time, while the main bolts last for quite some time. It's definitely an... illuminating video. Har har.
The mystery of the Ansel Adams garage sale negatives keeps taking on new twists, but the latest twist might have solved it once and for all.
Canon recently indicated that due to consumer demand for smaller cameras, they're working on shrinking their traditional SLR system to make it more portable while retaining the mirrored design. It's still possible, however, that they're simultaneously working on developing their own EVIL camera to battle existing offerings and the camera Nikon is likely working on.
Lets say you had an uber-expensive Phantom slow motion camera, a flamethrower, and a fire extinguisher at your disposal. What would you do?
If you've been impatiently twiddling your fingers, waiting for Nikon to bust out new DSLR cameras and lenses, your wait is almost over. Nikon is planning is planning to announce the successor of the D3000 -- the D3100 -- on August 19th, 2010, along with four new lenses.
The Kata ABS-HD is a new kind of bag that starts out the size of a book, and can be inflated to become a carry-on bag for protecting full size camcorders. What's nifty about this idea is that when not in use, the bag is extremely compact and can be stowed away with your other luggage. The bag is designed specifically for stowing expensive equipment safely in the overhead bins on planes, so the bag doesn't come with a lot of bells and whistles.
We reported yesterday that a set of glass plate negatives purchased for $45 in 2000 were verified by a group of experts as being created by Ansel Adams and worth upwards of $200 million.
Mila's Daydreams is a creative photography project by Adele Enersen that's similar to Jan von Holleben's Dreams of Flying project that we featured a while back. Every day, when her baby daughter Mila takes a nap, Enersen imagines what her daughter might be dreaming about and stages a cute scene to capture it in a photograph.
We all know pointing your DSLR directly at the sun for extended periods of time isn't too healthy for your sensor, but what about laser lights like the ones used at concerts? Turns out those can be even more lethal for your camera, even with very brief exposures.
Panasonic just announced the HDC-SDT750, touting it as the "world's first 3D consumer camcorder". The exact claim is slightly dubious, since we featured a different one last month, but it's definitely the first 3D camcorder unveiled by any of the major camera corps.
Well... finally! A Nikon coffee mug has finally appeared on the Internets, months after the web went crazy over Canon look-alike mugs and cups. The black 24-70mm thermos coffee cup comes with a nifty gold box and drawstring bag to carry it around in, and sets you back $23 over at 100milligrams.
Udi Tirosh is the blogger behind DIYPhotography.net and the creator of the Bokeh Masters Kit.
Philip Heron and James Adair filmed this super slow motion video of things smashed, shot, chopped and dropped with a Photron SA1.1 high speed camera.
Rick Norsigian, a painter based in Fresno, California, was browsing through a garage sale in 2000 when he came across two small boxes with 65 glass plate negatives. He was able to purchase the photographs for $45 after bargaining them down from $70. Now it turns out he made one of the biggest finds in photographic history.
We've already got plenty of gadgets designed to facilitate photography: there's auto-focus, face detection, and some crazy features in Photoshop that can effortlessly add and remove entire elements (and people) in photographs. So now why not have a camera that tells you whether you're taking an aesthetically pleasing photograph?
This is probably not the most ergonomic camera body, but it puts fisheye into a whole different context.
The Royal Family is really getting into social media: in addition to their YouTube channel, Twitter, and series of iTunes podcasts, the Family now has a Flickr account which went live to the public this morning. Currently, the British Monarchy's photostream contains 683 uploads of both recent and older historical photographs. According to an announcement from the Royal Collection, photos will be continually added to the account. The Flickr account launch was scheduled to coincide with the …
This past week, BP has received a lot of attention for its release of "official" images that later turned out to be very poorly photoshopped. So far, three badly altered photos have been called out. Aside from the inevitable backlash and disappointment from the public, the photo has taken on a life of its own as an internet meme. People have been adapting their own versions of the helicopter scene, replete with geek jokes and bizarre photoshopping. Here's one amusing example:
Here's a really astonishing stop-motion video of a guy walking across America. Peter Cote, director Sam Griffith, and the Conscious Minds Productions crew approached Levis jeans for sponsorship and products to use during the shoot. The trip began June 17 in New York and ended July 1 in San Francisco. For the actual photography, the crew used a Canon 5D.
Photographer Cosmin Bumbut was given the opportunity lead a photo workshop in one of the least likely places -- in a women's penitentiary in Romania. Bumbat furnished 14 women with six Canon PowerShots plus cards and batteries, and taught them basic photography. The photo workshop began meeting weekly, and within two months, the class had produced some 14,000 images.
The model on the cover of indie band Vampire Weekend's album "Contra" is suing the band, its record label, and the photographer for more than $2 million. Ann Kirsten Kennis discovered that her image was on the cover of the top-selling album when her daughter purchased it and brought it home to show her.
