Michael Zhang

Founder, Editor

Michael is a photography enthusiast, entrepreneur, and programmer based in Northern California near San Francisco. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with two degrees in computer science.

Articles by Michael Zhang

Michael Zhang

Old Gadgets Taken Apart, Photographed, and Reassembled Digitally

The photographs in artist Max de Esteban's Proposition One project might look like X-Ray images, but they were actually captured with an ordinary camera. They were created by carefully deconstructing old gadgets, photographing them in "layers", then "reassembling" the gadgets digitally. You can see them on display through December 9th at Klompching Gallery in NYC

Michael Zhang

Insane Discounts on SanDisk Compact Flash Cards at B&H

In the market for memory cards? B&H is currently offering SanDisk Compact Flash cards at crazy prices. They're listing Extreme Pro cards at less than 50% of the price offered at other retailers. For example, a 16GB Extreme Pro card currently costs $60 (with free shipping in the US) from B&H but $130+ at most other places.

Michael Zhang

Composite Self-Portrait Made Using 500 Photographs of One Face

Inspired by Noah Kalina's viral everyday video a girl who goes by clickflashwhirr has been doing a similar self-portrait-a-day project. Designer Tiemen Rapati decided to make a composite image showing what the average of the self-portraits looks like. Taking 500 images from clickflashwhirr's Flickr set, Rapati wrote a script that counts the individual RGB values for each pixel, averaging them across the 500 portraits.

Michael Zhang

Trippy Multidirectional Face Illusions

Venezuelan artist Jesús González Rodríguez has a project called 1/2 that features strange Photoshopped portrait illusions. They each show half a face, but is that face looking to the left or towards the camera?

Michael Zhang

The Eatery: A Photo App That Aims to Change the Way You Eat

The Eatery is a new "photo sharing" app that's focused more on health than photography. Instead of being judged on aesthetics photographs are rated based on whether people think the food is healthy or not. Your "photo habits" are also crunched and turned into useful infographics and statistics about how and when you eat, giving you helpful information that you can use to change your eating habits.

Michael Zhang

Beautifully Detailed Photos of Splashes

German photographer Heinz Maier only started doing photography last year, but his stunning photographs of water drop splashes are already taking the Internet by storm. By using a macro lens and colored filters, Maier makes tiny splashes of liquid look like intricate glass sculptures.

Michael Zhang

Leaked Photos of the Panasonic Lumix GX1 Micro Four Thirds Camera

Photographs of Panasonic's upcoming Lumix GX1 Micro Four Thirds camera leaked onto Chinese camera forum Mobile01 over the weekend. The camera will reportedly be similar to the GF1, except with a grip, and offer 12MP resolution, a max ISO of 12800, speedy 0.09 autofocus, a large pop-up flash, a touchscreen interface, and two color options (black and silver).

Panasonic appears to be targeting serious shooters with this new GX line while targeting consumers with its GF cameras. We'll likely hear about this camera officially sometime in early November.

Michael Zhang

How to Photograph Your Fist Smashing Through a Wall of Water

This beautiful (and disorienting) photograph was made by Evan Sharboneau of Photo Extremist. If you can't make sense of it, try tilting your head 90-degrees to the left. The technique isn't too difficult -- it's taken the same way as photos of things dropped into water.

Michael Zhang

Letters Formed Out of Ordinary Scenes

Austrian photographer Bela Borsodi's creative alphabet photographs are similar to the word photos by Stephen Doyle installations that we shared back in September, except Borsodi doesn't use tape to create his letters. Instead, he arranges the things found in each scene so that the objects and the negative space work together to form characters.

Michael Zhang

How to Capture a Face Smash Photo without Putting Teeth at Risk

Photographer Blair Bunting made this photograph for a Discovery Channel ad promoting the show Deadliest Catch. Can you figure out how Bunting shot it without putting the model's body at risk? The trick is to use a few high powered leaf blowers and some liquid that looks like blood.

Michael Zhang

35mm Altoids Mint Tin Pinhole Camera

Photographer Chris Keeny came up with a nifty design for a pinhole camera made using an Altoids mint tin. It's pretty fancy too, utilizing a re-loadable film take-up spool that uses a metallic turn key to advance the film.

Michael Zhang

Camera Costume Ideas for Halloween

Want to create a photography-related costume this halloween? Here are some fun costume ideas to give you some ideas. The above is a standard Canon point-and-shoot that has a tiny camera in the lens.

Michael Zhang

12-Year-Old Becomes Youngest to Earn Royal Photographic Society Distinction

12-year-old Sam Kaye of Radlett, Hertfordshire, UK has become the youngest person ever to earn a distinguished membership to the Royal Photographic Society, the world's oldest photographic society. Kaye became a Licentiate of the RPS by submitting ten of his photographs anonymously to a panel of judges, who were shocked to learn of his age after awarding him with the distinction.

Michael Zhang

Nighttime Locations Illuminated Through Light Painting on an Epic Scale

German photographer Berthold Steinhilber has an awesome technique for lighting expansive locations at night: he tediously paints in the light manually with a powerful 1.8-pound headlamp powered by a 12-volt car battery. Depending on the scale of the location, his large format film exposures last anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours, with the aperture set between f/8 and f/16. The above photo took 1.5 hours at f/16.

Michael Zhang

Google+ Now Has Retro Filters

The success of Instagram has shown that photo filters are very much in demand with the general population. Facebook is rumored to be working on its own retro filters, but Google has beaten it to the punch: today the company introduced a wide range of creative filters to Google+'s Creative Kit. The filters (called "Effects") include looks that mimic daguerreotypes, Reala 400 film, Polaroid pictures, Lomo, Holga, and even cross processed film.

Michael Zhang

Amazing Mini Landscapes Photographed Inside a 200-Gallon Tank

Photographer Kim Keever creates large scale landscape photographs using miniature dioramas. He first creates the topographies inside a 200-gallon tank, and then fills it with water. He then uses various lights, pigments, and backdrops to bring the scenes to life for his large-format camera to capture.