Jessica Lum

We’ve seen some very heavy-duty gear lugged out to cover the Olympic games in London this year: some …

The Dirkon pinhole 35mm camera is made entirely from paper cut from a template by designers Martin Pilný, Mirek Kolář and Richard Vyškovský. The three published the template in a 1979 issue of Czechoslovakian magazine ABC mladých techniků a přírodovědců (translated as An ABC of Young Technicians and Natural Scientists). While original prints of the magazine are rare, the Dirkon gained cult popularity in Chzechoslovakia.

YouTube just announced a useful new feature: an easy face blur option. The announcement says the feature is aimed for news and human rights agencies to protect privacy and identities especially if posting images of activists who may need to remain anonymous or if minors are present in the videos and privacy is a concern.

Professor and self-proclaimed cyborg Steve Mann created an eye and memory-aid device he calls the EyeTap Digital Glass. The EyeTap, worn by Mann above on the left, is a wearable device that is similar to Google Eye, pictured right, but he's been making them at home since the 1980s. The goal of his project is to use images to aid memory, or even to augment the memories of people with Alzheimer's Disease or who simply want to preserve their memories more permanently. However, a recent misunderstanding over Mann's technology allegedly caused a confrontation between Mann and several employees at a Paris McDonald's restaurant.

PIX magazine is a newly launched digital magazine that has women photographers in mind.

But the writers at Jezebel -- and at least one female photojournalist who wrote in with a tip about the magazine -- are a bit miffed over the content, which they say is "full of lady stereotypes".

Okay -- maybe it's trying to reinvent the wheel, er, ring flash, but this could be an interesting gadget: Chinese company CononMark has unveiled a flash system that looks like a cross between a ring flash, speedlights, bracket flash and modeling lights.

This may be a rare case in which a $695 class might actually save your life: Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is offering a safety course for journalists who cover war, conflict and disaster zones.

Exactly two years ago today, Instagram testers uploaded the very first image to …

During the filming of ABC's television show "Lost," lead actor Matthew Fox, who played Jack Shephard on the show, decided to create a photo book with some behind-the-scenes images of the show's set in Oahu.

Fox's collection is a lo-fi mix of black and white photographs and color medium format photos taken with a Holga toy camera. He features lesser-seen images taken during the making of the pilot: actress Evangeline Lilly listening to music, Josh Holloway joking around with fellow cast members and J.J. Abrams rapt in concentration on set.

The Fuzzy Face Photo Frame is reminiscent of the classic children’s toy, Wooly …

Sebastian Guerrero, an independent researcher in Barcelona says he's discovered a way to force friendship with any Instagram user -- private or public -- by exploiting an Instagram server-side vulnerability. In one case, Guerrerro forced Mark Zuckerberg to follow his test account. Then Guerrerro sent him a message through a photo post, which would show up in Zuckerberg's photo feed of people he follows. Guerrero also used a test account to follow a private user without the required approval from the private user.

LZRTAG is a free Android app that lets you generate QR codes associated with uploaded images -- mostly animated .gif images. The codes can be printed out and placed on walls and other surfaces. When scanned with the Android app, the codes call up the associated image and display it in an augmented reality on your phone.

It's nearly impossible to find a photograph in China taken before 1970 -- most images were destroyed or removed to other countries during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.

A professor at Bristol University in the UK is running a project in search of these lost images, the BBC reports:

Such photographs are exceptionally rare in China. The turbulent history of the 20th Century meant that many archives were destroyed by war, invasion and revolution. Mao Zedong's government regarded the past as a "black" time, to be erased in favour of the New China. The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s finished the job.

"If you were at all savvy," says (Professor Robert) Bickers, "you realised early on that you had to destroy your own private family records, before the Red Guards came and found evidence of your bourgeois, counter-revolutionary past, when you might have drunk coffee in a café bar, à la mode."

Mexican photojournalist Julian Cardona has lived in Ciudad Juarez since 1960 and began documenting the city in the early 1990s as a photojournalist for the local newspaper, El Diario. He says he's seen Juarez shift from an idyllic postcard-worthy border town to the city known as the homicide capital of the world.

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."

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.

But for some prepared photographers, the display resulted in some singular photos of the large fireballs.

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.

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

In certain applications that show EXIF data, the camera name may show up as the EOS Kiss X6i -- the Japanese market name of the same camera model. Additionally the Camera Settings / Remote Shooting screens of EOS Utility (EU) also shows “EOS Kiss X6i," according to a Canon product advisory.

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.

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.

It's quite simple: cut and decorate 1.375″ x 11″ strip of paper, pop the top off the film cassette (you can use a bottle opener) and tape the inside end of the strip to the film spool. Wind the paper into the cassette and leave a tab for the recipient to unfurl the message.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The UK government issued an updated copyright policy statement today that's intended to modernize copyright law in a digital era. But here's where those traditionally protected under copyright -- authors, poets, artists, photographers and so forth -- begin to cringe: sweeping definitions of "orphan works" and Extended Collective Licensing could allow companies to buy chunks of content without compensating original authors.

Tired of your boring Nikon point and shoot? Does the sleek modern silver clash with your vintage threads? Breathe easy: German company PimpmyDigicam offers these sticker "leather kits" for Nikon J1 cameras for a retro look that will pair impeccably with your vintage Oxfords.

For Windows users who frequently need access to Creative Commons photography, Abelssoft’s free desktop app …

Photographer Benjamin "Von Wong" has pulled of a flashy feat with fire: a multiple exposure shoot of a pyrotechnician at work -- all photographed and produced in his Nikon D800. That's right -- all in-camera, no stacking in Photoshop.

A UK couple is very displeased after their wedding photographer lost all the images from their wedding during a scuffle in a pub.

Jackie and Anam Sanderson enlisted a friend, Ben Fagan, to take wedding photographs -- mostly to his benefit, they said, to boost his portfolio. But after the wedding, Fagan placed the card in his wallet and lost it a week later -- though he doesn't have a clear memory of when or where. Unfortunately for the couple, who had a small wedding service with just 60 guests, Fagan was the only one taking pictures, save a few blurry photos taken by guests.

Instagram's latest 2.5 update has swapped out their "popular" tab for a new "explore" feature which allows users to browse photos based on users and hashtags -- it's a more functional search system. Now, instead of seeing photos that have the most likes, users can search for hashtags based on events and topics, which also makes it possible for users to have wider circulation of their images.

Editor's note: This post contains graphic photos that some readers may find disturbing.

Javier Manzano is a freelance photographer currently based in Afghanistan -- no stranger to documenting conflict. He received a 2011 World Press Photo award for an image from his 2010 work in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The border city has been embroiled in a drug war since 2008 when the Sinaloa cartel moved to take over Juárez -- located just over three miles from El Paso, Texas. Violence broke out between warring cartels, gangs and police. In 2010, Juarez recorded over 3000 homicides.

PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Javier Manzano: I was born and raised in Mexico and moved to the United States at the age of eighteen. Soon after graduating from college I landed a job at an advertising agency where I worked in for several years. The events that unraveled early on the morning of September 11, 2001 would change our lives forever. For me, it meant quitting my job and returning to school for what I believed was my calling in life – journalism. After completing several newspaper photography internships y became employed at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, CO. The paper folded in 2009 and over 200 people were laid off. Since then, I've worked as a freelance photographer producing a wide range of material, from editorial and commercial photography, to news and documentary films.

The last time C. Corey Fisk walked was in 1992. She has multiple sclerosis, an incurable disease that affects the central nervous system and gradually took her ability to walk and leave her bed.

But early February, she went on a photo walk with photographer John Butterill in the woods behind his house in Ontario, Canada -- all from her own home in northern California.

A Polish collector claims he's found an extremely rare daguerrotype of composer and pianist Frédéric Chopin, taken in his final repose in 1849.

If the image is authentic, it would be one of only three photographs of the composer, including the image of him alive in 1846, above. And it would be the only known original daguerrotype in existence -- all other images are duplicates.

What was supposed to be a routine press preview of the Turner Prize exhibition in London turned a two-hour standoff between photographers and Tate Britain gallery contract-wavers.

Press photographers refused to sign a problematic form at the door that required them to guarantee their images would not "result in any adverse publicity" for the host gallery and reportedly signed away permission sans-royalties for gallery publicity.

Instead of securing a monopoly over the favorable images produced at the event, the gallery succeeded in the opposite, mucking up press relations in a very public way.

Future generations of photographers may one day look back and wonder why we often blinded each other with painfully bright flashes of light for the sake of proper exposure.

NYU researchers Dilip Krishnan and Rob Fergus are working on a dark flash that eliminates the "dazzle" effect of regular flashes in a low-light room. They've created this camera rig that combines common infrared photography techniques with an ultraviolet flash that produces a dim purple glow instead.

The team placed an infrared filter on the lens of the Fujifilm S5 Pro, which is has a modified CCD sensor that specializes in IR and UV photography. To supplement existing UV light, the team created a modified filter on an external flash to emit only UV and IR wavelengths.

Some of the most raw, intimate and iconic photographs of the Civil Rights Movement were taken by photojournalist Ernest C. Withers. He was present during the entire Emmett Till trial, when Martin Luther King, Jr. rode the first desegregated bus, and in the hotel room where Dr. King was assassinated. Many civil rights activists would cite Withers' images as key to informing America of their plight and fight for equality.

But recent reports by Memphis publication The Commercial Appeal indicate that Withers, who passed away in 2007, was also informing the FBI -- on their payroll.

The Commercial Appeal posted documents indicating that while Withers was photographing key members of the movement, he was also acting eyes and ears for a now inoperative wing of the FBI that heavily tracked civil rights activists.

Due to a clerical error revealing Withers' informant number, reporters at The Commercial Appeal were able to connect Withers' name to informant activities.

If you tried to visit the Nikon Rumors site this morning, you’ve probably gotten …

Some wedding photographers offer a package that includes an iPad pre-loaded with images from that special day.

It's a simple, yet brilliant way to get both bride and (especially) groom more excited about the album -- while assuring their photos won't lie forgotten in a dusty album years later.

The digital trend is catching on, said Pennsylvania-based photographer Daniel Lanton, who bundles the iPad with engagement photos. Lanton said in an interview with Tampa Bay Online that the iPad it adds a bit more immediacy to the images, as well as a sort of permanence in a new digital age:
"I just foresee a time when the wedding album becomes non-existent or continues falling away ... Now I'm selling more iPads with bound albums. I sold six in the first week."

This adorable Pico projector concept which comes hot on the heels of Nikon’s more standard-looking S1100pj projector camera.

A Venezuelan court ordered newspaper El Nacional not to print violent images after the paper published a controversial image of dead bodies piled up in a Caracas morgue.

The photo, taken by an El Nacional photographer in December, ran with a story last Friday about security problems in the country. On Monday, the image was picked up by another newspaper, Tal Cual.

The Venezuelan government deemed the decision to run the photo as a part of a campaign criticizing current president Hugo Chavez, in light of the upcoming September elections.

The court ordered El Nacional and Tal Cual to not publish violent photos, saying the ruling is to protect children:
"(The print media) should abstain from publishing violent, bloody or grotesque images, whether of crime or not, that in one way or another threaten the moral and psychological state of children."
El Nacional responded to the ruling on Wednesday by running a front-page story about what they call censorship, along with large blank spaces with "Censored" stamped across where photos usually run.

Yesterday, Canon announced a rather strange and unexciting Canon 7D "upgrade." It's not exactly an upgrade either -- all of the camera specs for the new Canon 7D Studio Version are unchanged. For $1829 for the body only ($130 more than the current 7D), photographers can have several "locked levels" of the camera. Pay even more and you get a barcode scanning kit and a wireless transfer unit, the WFT-E5A.

So essentially, an extra $900 on top of the regular 7D price lets you have the camera equivalent of parental controls, plus barcode scanning that embeds information into the EXIF data in photos.

Sure, there's a (somewhat niche) practical application for these features. The locked levels can allow for quick settings that can't be changed without a password -- perfect for head photographers to who send mindless drones out to shoot or have little faith in their assistants.

Typical sized white balance cards may be of (literally) little assistance in color calibrating global imaging satellites, …

It looks like tap tap tap's Camera+ added one too many features for Apple's liking. When the app developers tweeted a secret workaround that enabled the volume button to double up to control the shutter, Apple pulled Camera+ from the App Store.
Just this week, developer John Casasanta wrote in a blog post that an upgraded version of the app originally intended to launch the feature, VolumeSnap. VolumeSnap would have also allowed users to use the volume control on iPhone headphones as a remote shutter control. Pretty nifty.

But Apple rejected tap tap tap's new version, citing this as a reason:
Your application cannot be added to the App Store because it uses iPhone volume buttons in a non-standard way, potentially resulting in user confusion. Changing the behavior of iPhone external hardware buttons is a violation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement. Applications must adhere to the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines as outlined in the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement section 3.3.7
So tap tap tap left out the feature -- at first. The app retained the feature, which was now hidden, but could be enabled by pointing the phone's browser to a specific site provided by the developers.

There's a bit of bad blood going on between user-generated "street journalism" website Demotix and the UK Press Card Authority.

Over the past year, Demotix has issued press passes to select active citizen journalists. But now, the UK Press Card Authority, which issues press credentials for news organizations like BBC and SKY, warned that the press passes are not the same, nor should they be treated similarly to official credentials issued by the Authority. Furthermore, UK Press Card Authority chairman Mike Granatt said he would share his concerns with UK police and authorities, saying that the Demotix passes may appear similar to the official national press passes.

Granatt said:
Our concern is that the police and third parties might be misled by the Demotix card. Its intention is confirmed by Demotix's advice on their website, which suggests ' … walking up to the authorities with swagger, then shove the press pass in their face along with "that's right, I have access to this event" grin on your face'.

No professional journalist would behave like that. And no one should encourage anybody to try to bluster their way past a cordon or into an event with this hobbyists' 'press pass'.

A good majority of news and documentary photographers tend to shy away from capturing video footage on DSLRs, owing to the cameras limited HD clip length. However, here's a really fantastic example of a documentary-style story shot with a 1D Mark IV, directed by photographer Austin Walsh in Kansas City.

There's the old adage, it's not the camera that makes the photographer, but according to a by-the-numbers study by dating site OkCupid, the nicer camera might make you look more attractive.

Based on a random "snap decision" survey hosted by the site (two juxtaposed photos with the question, "Who would you rather date?"), people tended to favor photos of people taken with Panasonic Micro-4/3s, followed by Leica point-and-shoots. DSLRs ranked pretty highly as well, followed by big-brand compacts. Certain camera phones like the iPhone ranked as slightly less, though still producing attractive photographs. Minolta DSLRs and the Nikon Coolpix fell below the attractive standard, along with most other camera phones. Kodak really takes it hard, ranking third lowest with the EasyShare next to the Windows and Motorola phones.

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.

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.