When people living in the same city look up into the sky, they likely see the same clouds and colors, albeit from slightly different perspectives. Exactly how different are these perspectives? In a recent project called Same Sky NY, photographers living in New York City came together to find out.
After working with standard photography and digital cameras, Brooklyn-based artist Phillip Stearns decided to experiment with creating works of art using old photographic technologies. He ended up studying the effects of high voltages and household cleaning products on instant pull apart color film. The results are pretty wild.
Want to see what London looked like back in the year 1926? Check out this beautiful color footage shot in various London locations by Claude Friese-Greene, an early British pioneer of film. Frisse-Greene created a series of travelogues nearly 90 years ago using a color process developed by his father William Friese-Greene.
If you feel feelings of wanderlust and jealousy easily, you might want to stay away from the story of Alex Chacon. He's a guy who recently completed a 503-day solo journey on a motorcycle. He rode 82,459 miles across 22 countries in both North and South America. Chacon also captured photos and videos throughout the journey in order to document his experience.
Some photographers enjoy chasing storms; Miles Morgan enjoys "chasing" volcanos. The Hawaiian landscape photographer has spent years risking life and limb to capture beautiful photographs of molten lava.
After weeks of rumors and leaks, Olympus' new PEN E-P5 finally became official today. It's the company's new flagship Micro Four Thirds PEN mirrorless camera, and features both retro styling on the outside and powerful specs on the inside.
You've probably heard of cameras that can detect wavelengths of light that human eyes can't, and also cameras that can detect heat in a scene, but have you ever heard of one that can capture sound? That's right: scientists at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have created a portable sound camera that's sensitive to sound waves.
Want to see how old film single-lens reflex cameras were put together? Clare (Wyoh on Tumblr) recently found a number of camera schematics inside an old French magazine from decades ago. The schematics show exploded views of the Nikon F, Nikon F2, Nikon FM, and Nikon FA SLRs. Each camera is shown in its most basic parts, which are numbered and labeled (in French).
We’ve been managing our photos together for almost a decade now. Things were nice and simple at the start and we both knew what to expect from each other--I pulled my photos off my camera on the computer, imported them into iPhoto and arranged them. Life was good.
Think subject tracking in camera is impressive? Future Canon digital cameras may have image stabilization systems that can track stars. At least, that's what a recently published Canon patent seems to suggest. The company may also be working on technology that can produce higher resolution photographs by shifting the camera sensor.
Want to shoot insanely cool Matrix-style "bullet time" footage at home? You can do so with a single rig built out of relatively cheap components.
NASA spaceship engineer Mark Rober came up with a brilliant way to shoot eye-popping imagery using just a GoPro camera and a cheap ceiling fan.
After Adobe’s Photoshop CC announcement earlier this week, Ryan Chartrand decided …
For over a year now, photographer Shawn Stockman Malone of LakeSuperiorPhoto has been pointing her cameras at the sky over Michigan's Lake Superior and capturing dazzling displays of the Northern Lights.
Dublin, Ireland-based photographer Maciej Pietuszynski was doing a bit of spring cleaning recently when he decided to upgrade a plastic box he has been using to carry his camera and flash unit. His idea was to give the box an extra job as a makeshift softbox in addition to its storage/transportation/protection duties.
Retouching and manipulating photographs is done with fancy photo-editing programs these days, but back in 1946, making adjustments required a lot more than a computer, some software, and some pointing-and-clicking skills. Retouching required a whole box of tools, a very sharp eye, and an extremely steady hand.
Olympus has a major camera announcement day coming this Friday, but the cameras it's planning to unveil--the E-P5 and E-PL6--have been almost fully revealed now. New leaks have revealed the full specs for the E-P5, photos of a fancy "premium" version of the E-P5, and product photos of the E-PL6 (shown above).
Have you heard of Sid Kaplan? If you've studied the works of great American photographers, you've likely at least seen some of Kaplan's handiwork. Although he's a master photographer in his own right, Kaplan had made a name for himself as one of the industry's finest photo printers. Over the past four or five decades, Kaplan has made prints for some of the biggest names in photography.
For the first time since PetaPixel launched back in 2009, we're hiring! Team PetaPixel is looking for rockstar bloggers who would like their writing to be read by nearly 3 million photography enthusiasts every month.
Samsung found itself in an embarrassing copyright infringement controversy earlier today after the company published a street photographer's work without permission as an advertisement on its Facebook page. It wasn't just the unauthorized use of the image that was embarrassing; here's the kicker: the photograph was actually shot using a Nikon camera.
You know those iconic minimalist product photos for Apple gadgets? Have you ever wondered about how they're shot and who shoots them?
One of the people behind the photos is San Francisco-based photographer Peter Belanger. The video above is a behind-the-scenes look into how Belanger photographed the iPhone 3GS for a 2009 issue of Macworld magazine.
Adobe caused quite an outcry from the photography community yesterday after announcing that its future software offerings will only be available through subscription plans to its Creative Cloud service. The main gripe was that the $50/month cost for all the programs in the CC suite--or $20/month for just Photoshop--didn't make financial sense for independent photographers and smaller photo studios.
Well, the sound of grumbling has reached decision makers over in the San Jose-based company. In a post published on the Photoshop.com blog yesterday, the company revealed that it's thinking about introducing special Creative Cloud packages geared specifically at photographers.
If you've ever been in a bad car accident, the images Danish photographer Nicolai Howalt's Car Crash Studies may bring back bad memories. The project is a photographic study of cars that have been involved in severe (and possibly fatal) accidents.
Just as RAW photo files contain all the information you need to put together a photograph, DNA contains all the information needed for a human being. Information artist and PhD student Heather Dewey-Hagborg has a fascinating portrait project that explores this idea.
National Geographic photographers snapped over 1 million images over the course of 2009. Only about 1000 of those photos were selected and published by the famous yellow-bordered journal.
Of these 1000 published photos, National Geographic selected the 10 best images and created a 50-minute film that offers a behind-the-scenes look at how they were made.
At its Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles today, Adobe announced Photoshop CC, the next version of its flagship photo editing software. Unlike version that came before it, Photoshop CC will only be offered through Adobe's Creative Cloud subscription plan.
Lisle, Illinois-based photographer Peter Hoffman's "Fox River Derivatives" project is a series of abstract photos that question mankind's relationship with natural resources. The photographs have a strange purple bubbles and colorations across the surface that are the result of an interesting technique: these images are what you get when you burn your negatives.
The video above is a creative stop-motion video that uses water drops as the "lens" through which the animation is seen. It was created without any computer-generated trickery: 2,000 individual photographs of different water drops were shot and combined to create the video.
Located in the city of Toronto, ALPHA Alternative School is one of Canada's oldest free schools. For the school's 40th anniversary last year, photographer Michael Barker worked on a project titled Alpha Alternative School 1972/2012. It's a series of diptychs with portraits of students shot back in the 1970s/1980s placed next to new portraits of the students captured around four decades later.
New York-based photographer Richard Silver is a passionate traveler, and his primary goal as an artist is to share his life experiences by creating beautiful photographs during his travels. Rather than shoot traditional photos, he uses techniques such as tilt shift, HDR, panorama, and time-slice in order to capture the world in eye-catching ways. Last year we shared his time-slice photos of NYC, which showed day turning into night in single photos.
Another major project he has been working on is called "Tilt Shift." He has been photographing some of the world's most famous locations and turning them into miniature scenes.
When musicians sign contracts to perform in major concerts, their documents often contain riders (more commonly known as addendums). These are a series of special requests made by the band or musician, and outlines specifics of what they're expecting when they arrive.
Photographer Henry Hargreaves noticed that riders often contain strange requests for the foods and drinks requested, so he decided to turn the requests into a photo project that offer a glimpse into the lives of famous musicians.
When a huge meteor exploded over Russia back in February, the incident was captured by a large number of drivers who drive around with dashcams pointed out the front of their windshield. The story put a spotlight on the fact that dashcams are widely used in Russia due to the prevalence of insurance fraud.
Footage from Russian dashcams found online is often quite dark (figuratively, not literally), showing horrible accidents and tragedies. Not so with the video above -- it's a compilation of random acts of kindness captured by ordinary drivers.
Aerial cameras based around RC helicopters are becoming widely used these days for all kinds of photographic and video-related purposes, but here's one use that we've never seen before. An RC helicopter camera was recently used to both deliver an engagement ring and capture the proposal as it went down.
The rumor mill is churning regarding Canon's tilt-shift lens lineup. The company will reportedly be announcing replacements to its two oldest TS-E lenses by the end of this year, and the lenses are likely already floating around in the wild for real world field tests.
Want to plan out and test your studio lighting setups before setting up equipment and bringing subjects into the picture? German software development company Elixxier has been developing a software program designed to help you do just that. It's called set.a.light 3D STUDIO, and is, according to Elixxier, the world's first software dedicated to photo studio simulation.
The 2,700+ year old city of Palermo, Italy is well known for its gastronomy (the art of food eating) and its four main street markets. One of the busier ones is Il Capo, or "The Cape," a market with Arabic origins that mainly contains various foods and fish stalls.
22-year-old Italian photographer Manfredi Caracausi recently completed a project that focuses on telling the story of Il Capo. He shot portraits of the merchants manning the stalls and pictures of the goods they sell. The photographs are then displayed as a series of diptychs.
Here’s a wedding photographer who probably wishes now that he had set up a second camera with a lightning …
Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner was randomly selected and announced at the end of this post.
With the iPad from our previous giveaway safely in the hands of its new owner, we're back again with a fun new giveaway. This week our giveaway is of particular interest to Instagram users: one lucky winner will receive 20 sheets of custom printed Instagram magnets by StickyGram! Each sheet of 9 magnets ordinarily costs $15, so the combined value of this prize is $300.
If you ever try your hand at shooting photos or videos from the sky using a remote-controlled helicopter, do your best to avoid trees, tall buildings, and... statues. Ohio-based cameraman Terry Cline found out the dangers of statues the hard way this past weekend. While capturing aerial imagery, Cline got his flying camera stuck in the arms of a statue 100 feet above the ground.
Wireless connectivity is one of the hot features in the camera world these days, and many (if not most) new cameras either have built-in wireless connectivity or an optional wireless adapter that provides the feature. Unfortunately, the wireless adapters are often quite pricey, especially for higher-end cameras.
Here's something neat that you might be interested in knowing if you shoot with a Canon 1D X: you can connect a cheap WiFi adapter designed for homes and offices to give your camera wireless tethering!
Yesterday, we wrote about how Academy Award-winning actor Jeff Bridges brings his love of photography onto movie sets, snapping photos of the casts and crews. Last night Bridges was honored by the International Center of Photography in New York with a prestigious Infinity Award.
Seven other photographers were also presented with awards, and prior to each one receiving their prize, a short video feature was played to introduce people to the photographers and their work. We've collected the videos here for your enjoyment.
Are you so crazy in love with photography that you would wear a lens-inspired wedding ring on your finger? If so, alternative ring company Titanium Buzz has a wedding band just for you.
The company has just launched a new product called the Camera Lens Ring. It's a simple ring that looks like something torn from the middle of a camera lens.
One of the key features afforded by the fusion of photo sharing and social networking is people tagging. On services such as Facebook and Flickr, adding information to identify the people in photos is as easy as clicking/tapping a face and telling the service who that subject is.
Instagram this morning announced that it's joining in on the people-tagging fun. The company has released a new "Photos of You" feature that makes tagging a person as easy as adding a hashtag.
Some photographers make a name for themselves by creating portraits of children, while others create similar images of wild animals. Photographer Robin Schwartz does both -- at the same time.
Since 2002, Schwartz has been photographing her daughter Amelia while the young girl interacts with all kinds of creatures in the animal kingdom. Subjects have included everything from dogs and cats to monkeys, kangaroos, and elephants.
While we're on the subject of Google Glass, check out this interesting use case by hockey player Joseph Lallouz. He decided to wear his Glass during a hockey match in order to capture what the sport looks and feels like from a participant's point of view.
A couple of weeks ago, it was discovered that Google Glass has wink detection features baked into the device that could allow users to stealthily snap photographs of anything just by winking at it. Today, the first wink-to-shoot app was launched.
Tablet computers may soon rival desktop computers in RAW editing potential. Adobe has revealed that it's working on bringing Lightroom-style photo editing to tablet devices, and the software would include powerful RAW photo editing features that are currently found only in the desktop versions of Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw.
What you see here is artwork showing the rain of Hawaii and Northern California. It's from photographer Klea McKenna's project, "Rain Studies," and shows what rain looks like when you capture it with photo paper and light, rather than a traditional camera.
If you're into photography, whether as a serious hobby or as a profession, you probably find yourself doing repetitive tasks on a routine basis. You've probably also heard various tips, tricks, and strategies on how you can do these tasks faster and more efficiently. Heed them.
While saving a few seconds here or a few minutes there might not seem like much, optimizing your efficiency is definitely something worth doing, especially for tasks you're doing all the time. The reason is simple: small efficiency gains might seem inconsequential, but they build up and can save you quite a bit of time over time.
Whoa. If you enjoy watching mind-bending concepts that confuse you and make your brain hurt, check out this experimental short by Willie Witte, titled "Screengrab."
Nothing in the video is computer generated trickery: it simply uses clever camera tricks and a whole lotta printed photographs to create the seamless transitions. "All the trickery took place literally in front of the camera," Witte says. See if you can understand what's going on through the entire 1 minute and 30 seconds.
Samsung today announced its new NX2000 mirrorless camera, a system camera that features a large sensor, a touchscreen, and wireless connectivity. This is the camera that was leaked by an FCC filing a couple of weeks ago, and which people thought might be Android-powered (it's not).