If you thought ordinary iPad photographers looked silly, wait till you spot someone in public with a telephoto lens strapped to the front (er... or back?) of their tablet. The iPad Telephoto Lens is a new external lens attachment for iPad users who would like to squeeze a little extra reach from their tablet camera.
This will probably be of limited interest to most of you, but we like to know how things work, not just how well they work. We thought we’d take a couple of pictures when we disassembled a ballhead in case any of you were interested. Our demonstration partner today was a Benro B1 ballhead that had a stripped tension adjustment knob, but all ballheads work basically the same way.
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has been serving as one of the International Space Station's resident photographers. Every day he posts beautiful photographs showing what our planet looks like from orbit to his Twitter account, @cmdr_hadfield.
Today the Canadian Space Agency released the video above, in which Hadfield takes the time to explain how to best photograph Earth's landscape from 400km (~250 miles) above the surface.
One of the big gripes people have with the idea of taking pictures with Google Glass camera glasses is that the device requires you to say "ok, glass, take a picture" in order to snap a shot. While this is great for situations when you need hands-free photography and don't mind saying a voice command, it would be highly inconvenient in situations in which you would rather not (or can't) talk.
It looks like Google has been one step ahead of us the whole time: it appears that the company has built "wink to snap" functionality into Google Glass' camera.
Photographer and software developer Kostas Rutkauskas has launched a new mobile app called Helmut. Designed for Android, it's a film scanning app that lets you digitize your old film strips quickly and on the cheap.
Earlier this month, we featured a neat light painting experiment by photographer Matt Holland that involved long exposure photos of rock climbers wearing colorful lights. The climbs resulted in colorful light trails that tracked the course each climber took.
Over the past four years, photographer Neal Grundy has also been working at combining long exposures, light painting, and rock climbing. Unlike Holland, however, his work is more focused on illuminating the faces of large cliffs rather than creating squiggly trails of light.
FocusTwist is a new app for iOS devices that lets you shoot Lytro-style refocusable photographs using your phone or tablet. Photographs shot using the app are interactive and dynamic in their focusing: click (or press) any area of the scene to see that area of the photograph come into sharp focus.
What would it look like if the retro filters found in smartphone camera apps were turned into a real filter you could slap onto the front of your lens? A couple of Stanford product design students think they have an answer.
Olivia Vagelos and Martin Bush have started a new camera filter brand called Mount July, which features the world's first multi-color, radially graduated filters.
Need a pick-me-up? Check out the project "Your Pet and You" by photographer Tobias Lang of Hamburg, Germany. The series is composed of beautiful portraits of all kinds of pets and their loving owners.
Lytro introduced refocus-able photos to the public when it unveiled the world's first consumer light field camera back in October 2011. Since then, a number of people and companies have been brainstorming refocus-able photo technology of their own.
One developer created a tool that can turn video footage into refocus-able stills. Toshiba and a company called DigitalOptics are both working to build Lytro-style smartphone camera modules. Next week, there's going to be a new contender: an app called FocusTwist.
Hungarian photographer and retoucher Flóra Borsi created a popular series of photos last year titled "Photoshop in Real Life." The images imagined what various Photoshop Tools might be used for if they had physical powers in our world, and were quickly shared across the web.
Now Borsi is back with a new set of images that show off her Photoshopping prowess. Titled "Time Travel," the photos show Borsi inserted into various historical photographs of famous individuals.
Fine art photographer Aaron Ansarov's project Zooids contains beautiful, colorful, and abstract images that might look to you like something biological seen through a microscope. They're actually macro portraits of the Portuguese Man O' War, a jellyfish-like creature that is responsible for 10,000 documented painful stings worldwide.
When photographer Callum Cooper moved from Melbourne, Australia to London, England, one of the things that caught his eye was the uniformity (or "conformity") seen in the city's residential areas. Along a street, multiple buildings would have exactly the same architecture, and if it weren't for the minor differences in the facades, some of them can hardly be distinguished from one another.
Cooper then came up with the idea of exploring this phenomenon using photographs -- photos that would become a "structuralist film."
Over 100 million people around the world snap photos with Instagram on their phones now. If you like the look of Instagram filters but would rather not broadcast the photographs to the world every time you snap a picture, there's actually a (semi-old) trick you can use to save the pics without sharing them (for iPhone users, at least): all you have to do is turn on "Airplane Mode."
Between 2009 and 2012, Finnish photographer Petri Artturi Asikainen roamed the streets of Tokyo in search of subjects for his project 100 Years in Tokyo. His goal was to collect portraits of people for all the ages between 0 through 100. The result of the effort is a book that contains 202 beautiful portraits -- the faces of a man and a woman for each age in that range.
Yesterday we reported that the online communities of Reddit and 4chan were attempting to identify the attacks behind the Boston Marathon bombings by crowdsourcing publicly available photographs from the scene. We blurred the faces in the photos we shared, since it was likely the people in them are completely innocent.
At least one (much larger) news source didn't. The New York Post actually took one of the photographs being circulated by vigilant photo detectives and ran it on the front page of its newspaper. The headline: "Bag Men: Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon."
Warfare is often reduced to headlines in the news and numbers on a page, but it's important to remember that there's a human side to it. The soldiers fighting are fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters of people back at home. This is the truth photographer Melissa Cacciola wants to remind the world though her project "War and Peace."
The series consists of 48 tintype photographs of 24 active duty military personnel and veterans. Each subject is photographed both in uniform and in civilian attire.
People often give iPad photographers a hard time for trying to use an unwieldy tablet as a casual snapshot camera. Tom, the iPad photog seen in the video above, is one person who is glad he was using his iPad as a camera. You see, his iPad-ography saved him from a good deal of pain.
Remember that giant wooden Nikon 14-24mm hanging lamp we featured back in February? The designer, Spanish studio Monoculo Design, is back with another interesting piece of photography-inspired home decor -- this time for Canon shooters.
The latest creation is a stool that's designed to look just like a Canon 8-15mm fisheye zoom lens.
Two years ago, photographer Chris A. Hughes purchased a 1914 French Richard Verascope camera (shown above) from an elderly man who was clearing out his camera collection in preparation for retirement. When he got into his car after the purchase, Hughes was surprised to find two packages of slides in the camera's leather case.
Upon closer examination, he discovered that the photographs on the slides were captured by a French soldier during World War I.
Back in 2010, we featured the beautiful macro bug photographs of a Belgian photographer named Frans, who uses a custom laser camera rig to capture insects mid-flight. Inspired by fotoopa's work, biochemist and photography enthusiast Linden Gledhill decided to pursue the same photographic subject.
We reported yesterday that the FBI has issued an open call for photographs and videos that may help provide clues in the Boston Marathon bombing case. Since that time, investigators have begun circulating photos of two "possible suspects" spotted in images of the scene, suggesting that analyzing crowdsourced images has indeed been useful in this case.
It's not just government law enforcement that is attempting to use public photographs to identify the attacker, though: the large online communities Reddit and 4chan have also begun carrying out their own crowdsourced photo analysis.
Wow. The rumor of a new Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8 lens we shared earlier today has just been confirmed by Sigma. The company has just officially announced the lens, which is the world's first lens that offers a fixed f/1.8 aperture throughout its zoom range. That's a pretty big deal.
Update: Sigma has officially announced the lens!
Could an f/1.8 fixed aperture appear inside an 18-35mm zoom lens? That's what photographers on the web are now debating after the emergence of a pair of photos that appear to show a not-yet-announced Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8 lens.
Apple's next iPhone release may come with enticing upgrades to the phone's camera, including a 12-megapixel sensor, improved low-light capabilities, and HDR photography.
Photographer Jeff Cremer has figured out a winning formula for masking a splash on the Internet: travel to exotic jungles and take pictures of things that are rare, interesting, and bizarre.
In the aftermath of the tragic Boston Marathon bombing on Monday, investigators are turning to crowdsourced photographs and videos in order to hunt down the perpetrator(s). Authorities are calling for anyone at the marathon that day to send in photographs or videos captured in the area.
Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner was randomly selected and announced at the end of this post.
Listen up! We have a fantastic giveaway this week that you're going to love. We're giving away an Apple iPad (third generation) preloaded Adobe's Photoshop Touch app.
Andy Day is a London-based photographer who specializes in shooting parkour and freerunning. In case you've never heard of it before, parkour is an activity in which participants (called "traceurs") move fluidly through urban landscapes by running, climbing, and jumping across/through/on obstacles, getting from one place to another through the most efficient route possible using only their bodies.
The Internet let out a collective gasp back in October 2011 when Adobe gave an advanced preview of a crazy new image deblurring feature it has been working on. The feature can take a photo that's blurry due to camera shake, calculate the movements that caused the blur, and "reverse it" to create a sharper photo.
It looks like the feature isn't too far off now. Today Adobe released the above video that offers a sneak peek at what the tool actually looks like inside an upcoming version of Photoshop. Just as with the demo from two years ago, this video will drop many jaws.
Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg are scientists by trade and artists at heart. They work as the leads of a Google research group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and are constantly on the lookout for interesting (and artistic) ways to visualize data.
Back in 2011, they came up with an interesting project titled "The Art Of Reproduction," which shows how digital reproductions of photographs (and paintings) found on the Internet are far from "truthful."
One of the big trends in the digital camera industry right now is the stuffing of large sensors into tiny cameras. Today Ricoh became the latest camera company to join in on the action. It has officially announced the Ricoh GR, a compact camera that features a beastly APS-C-sized sensor at its core.
The Android operating system has been expanding beyond the world of smartphones and into the realm of "smartcameras" as of late, but did you know that by doing so it has simply gone full circle? That's right: Android was originally intended for digital cameras rather than for phones.
Want to explore famous New York City locations without leaving the comfort of your chair? Check out photographer Nuno Madeira's New York City 360 project. It's like browsing Google Street View panorama photographs on steroids.
Hey Canon: get ready to have your toes stepped on. Nokia is reportedly prepping two new flagship smartphones for launch, and the two devices are rumored to have 'EOS' branding and a huge focus on high-quality photography.
Dmitriy Yoav Reinshtein is a 26-year-old photographer based in Tel Aviv, Israel. He works as an advertising photographer and creative retoucher, but one of his personal passions is shooting highly detailed macro photographs of tiny insects. While all of his macro photographs are amazing to look all, there's a particular subset that caught our eye: Reinshtein managed to capture a number of insects with water drops sitting on their top of their heads.
Want to see how much of an effect the direction and color of your lighting has on your portrait subject's face? Check out this trippy video by Nacho Guzman, who used a moving light and changing colors to cause a woman's face to look like it's constantly morphing.
If you're a frugal photographer who's constantly searching for ways to save some dough when buying gear, you might want to look into the new Los Angeles-based startup company Greentoe. It's a shopping site that's trying to turn the e-commerce world on its head by taking pricing power from merchants and putting it into the hands of consumers.
Basically, it's a site that lets you buy camera gear at prices you want to pay.
Google has officially announced the specs for its Glass wearable computer/camera. Of interest to readers of this blog is the fact that the camera will be able to capture decent photographs -- at least resolution-wise. It'll be a 5-megapixel camera that has WiFi capabilities. The camera will also be able to capture 720p video and audio.
When Israeli photographer Natan Dvir visited New York City in 2008, he was taken aback by the massive advertising billboards dominating commercial hubs and the fact that giant models on them loomed over the pedestrians walking by. Dvir began documenting these billboards and the juxtaposition of huge fake humans and tiny real humans through his project titled "Coming Soon."
Slovenia photographer Matej Peljhan has a touching series of photographs titled The Little Prince, which stars a 12-year-old boy named Luka. The images show the boy exploring an imaginary world created by laying colored sheets and household objects on the ground. Peljhan created the images to give Luka the feeling of being able to do things he can't.
You see, Luka suffers from muscular dystrophy, a disease that causes his body to become weaker and weaker over time.
Craig Royal is an award-winning fine art photographer based in Tampa, Florida. Visit his website here.
PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Craig Royal: I'm a visually impaired fine art photographer. I'm legally blind due to a congenital form of optic nerve atrophy. I have been legally blind since birth. My vision had been 20/200 corrected up until 1992, when a white blind spot began to develop in the center of my visual field in both eyes.
Back in January, we reported that Ricoh's upcoming GR Digital V camera will be the first in the series to feature a large APS-C sensor. Now, a video has leaked that not only confirms that sensor size, but reveals much more about the camera as well.
What does severe depression look like in photographs? The work of photographer Christian Hopkins may offer a clue. The 20-year-old photographer has been battling Major Depression (AKA clinical depression) for the past four years, and many of his photographs are a reflection of the dark thoughts and feelings swirling around in his mind.
One of the most prominent celebrity endorsement deals in the camera industry has been actor Ashton Kutcher serving as the face of Nikon. Since 2009, Kutcher -- a guy who boasts over 14 million Twitter followers -- has been appearing in commercials and print ads hawking Nikon digital cameras. In 2012, TIME voted the partnership as a top 10 celebrity tech endorsement.
There have been strange rumblings in the camera industry over this past weekend regarding the relationship between Kutcher and Nikon, with a rumor suggesting that the relationship has gone sour and is over.
When the presidential election was looming on the horizon last year, photographer Ashley Pizzuti decided to shoot a project that had been brewing in her mind for some time. Titled "Vote for Chase," the series imagines what political campaign photographs would look like if innocent young children ran for president rather than weathered adult politicians.
If you've always wanted to feast your eyes on the aurora borealis but haven't had the time or the money to travel to areas of the world where the light display occurs, photographer Göran Strand has a treat for you. He has created an immersive 360-degree panorama using time-lapse photographs shot during a particularly active aurora. The video lets you pan around in the scene, offering a small taste of what experiencing the northern lights feels like.
If you thought the LEGO Nikon F SLR we shared earlier this week was neat, check out this LEGO DSLR created by Taiwanese LEGO enthusiast RGB900. The realistic toy camera is created entirely out of various LEGO pieces, and features an external hotshoe-mounted flash unit and a flexible camera strap!
HoldFast Gear makes gear for photographers that you won't really find from other companies. Last year one of their big products was the MoneyMaker, a suspenders-style leather camera strap that looks like it popped out of an old detective film.
Today the company added a new eye-catching product to its lineup: the Bison Tote. It's a tote bag that's made out of bison hide.
When snapping pictures of wild animals in the great outdoors, there are some animals that photographers generally know to be careful around. These include creatures that are massive (e.g. moose, elephants), anything at the top of the food chain (e.g. lions, tigers, bears), and anything venomous (e.g. snakes). Well, you might also want to add the beaver to that mental list of yours.
It turns out beavers can be very dangerous, and even deadly. A man over in Belarus was killed recently after getting too close to a beaver he was trying to photograph.