If I get a photography idea, I tend to just go with it and see if it works. I had driven out to my parent's place early in the day and the idea just came to me. I think at first I thought, "Man, I wish I had thought to shoot moon-lit snow the day before when you could make a snow man for the op."
What would Vincent van Gogh's work look like if he had been a photographer instead of a master painter? Would he have created his self-portraits using a camera instead of a brush?
Photographer Tadao Cern recently created an interesting image that explores this question. He took one of the artist's most famous self-portraits and using Photoshoppery to recreate it as a still photo.
The last few days have been rough on BuzzFeed, as a Reddit outcry has gained more and more traction regarding some light painting photos the website used to create ads without seeking permission or giving credit.
Even as we say goodbye to the Jessops chain of retail stores in the UK, it seems that more of the major manufacturers are moving towards establishing a brick and mortar branch. Polaroid will soon be opening 'Fotobars' and now, following in Polaroid and Leica's footsteps, Canon is getting ready to open its own 'Canon Experience Stores.'
The debate over whether or not the US Government should release photos of Osama Bin Laden's body has been going on ever since his death at the hands of Seal Team 6 in May of 2011. Last April, it seemed that the book had closed on the matter when a federal judge ruled not to release the photos for various reasons.
But certain parties -- the conservative legal group Judicial Watch in this case -- refuse to take no for an answer, leading the US Court of Appeals in Washington to take another look at the matter.
Here's a cool little Kickstarter we ran across today, and for once it's not already funded 5-times over in the first few days, so you'll have the chance to be a part of it. The product is a lens holster designed specifically for Nikon that lets you keep an extra lens right on your hip and ready for a quick, no-hassle swap.
We're used to Google frequently improving things on its end -- most recently adding pan and zoom to Google+ -- but a constantly improving Yahoo! is a fairly new thing.
After numerous improvements to Flickr and a new Flickr app, Yahoo! has turned its photographic eye on Yahoo! Image Search. From here on out, you'll be able to search all of Flickr's creative commons images straight from Yahoo!
A couple of days ago, UK camera retailer Jessops entered administration (essentially bankruptcy), appointing PricewaterhouseCoopers as their administrator and putting them in charge of the store's fate.
Admittedly, time-lapses are a bit played out; it seems like every other day another one makes its way across …
Walkthroughs of photographs that aren't easily reproducible (or are impossible to reproduce) might not be very useful to many, but it's still interesting to learn how rare shots come about. An example would be the photograph above, captured by photographer Bryan Hanna last week. Hanna was aiming to capture a long-exposure nighttime photograph of a landscape in the foreground and the night sky in the background, but he accidentally snagged something even better: a fireball zipping across the sky in just the right area in the frame!
One of Pentax's big announcements for this year's CES 2013 was the MX-1, a camera that is designed to compete against other retrotastic compact cameras that are currently generating a lot of buzz (namely the Fujifilm X-Series and the Olympus OM-D).
If how innovative a company is were determined solely by the number of patents received, then Canon is one of the most innovative companies in the world. For an eighth consecutive year, Canon ranked first among all Japanese companies in terms of patents issued by the United States government.
Canadian photographer Joel Robison regularly creates surreal self-portraits that show what his life might be like if he found himself on the receiving end of a shrink ray. The conceptual photo-manipulations show him interacting with objects that are suddenly the size of trucks. In one image he is seen sitting on a Christmas tree next to some body-sized ornaments. In another, he's exploring a globe while perched on top of a bottle of Coke.
We've written a couple of times in the past on how you can achieve drastically different portrait looks by choosing different lens focal lengths and subject distances. Basically, your choice of glass can make a huge impact on what your subject's face looks like... and how much they appear to weigh.
Reddit user Popocuffs wanted to demonstrate this, but instead of using a human subject, he used his cat.
The image you see above isn't a screenshot from some city-building video game like Sim City. It's a panoramic photograph of New York City captured by Sergey Semenov that recently won Epson's Pano Award for most outstanding panorama captured by an amateur. Check out a high-resolution version of the image here.
We showed you Nikon's video earlier today, now it's Sigma's turn to show what goes into making quality lenses at the company's factory in Aizu, Japan.
Filmed from the same artistic bent as the Nikon piece, this video show the meticulous process that goes into making quality Sigma glass. Unlike Nikon's version, this one doesn't stop until the lens is fully assembled and ready to latch on to the nearest camera.
Russian photographer Stanislav Aristov's matches series has been getting some well-deserved attention lately. To create these sculptures, he bends and molds the matches while they're burning. He then photographs them, as well as the flames and smoke, using a macro lens and studio flash.
Lifehacker featured a great tip today courtesy of Redditor lifedeathandtech that’ll help you …
Winning the 2012 National Geographic Photo Contest is a pretty incredible feeling. Being disqualified 72-hours later for a minor editing decision... that one doesn't feel quite as good. But that's what happened to photographer Harry Fisch who, for a few glorious days, was living every Travel Photographer's dream -- shortly followed by their worst nightmare.
Nikon recently put out this short 3-minute video that offers an interesting glimpse into one of the critical steps of lens making: the production of the optical glass. It steps through the various stages of manufacturing, from combining the raw elements through examining the chunks of glass before they're polished and perfected.
Google tends to play nice with photographers, and yesterday the search giant announced that photos were going to start getting some love on its social network -- love of the pan and zoom variety. With cell phones, point and shoots and SLRs alike all churning out 12MP+ photos (at the very least), Google thought it was time you were able to see all of that glorious detail.
When Fujifilm announced the X100s last week, it made the bold claim that the camera had the world's fastest autofocus system among cameras of the same class. Sluggish autofocus was one of the big complaints owners of the X100 had, so for this latest refresh the company focused its attention on making the camera faster.
Want to see how fast the new AF is? We captured the short video above during a brief hands-on time we had with the camera. It doesn't show an in-depth test or much variety in subject matter, but should offer a taste of what "world's fastest AF" looks like in the flesh.
To make the point that Garnier Fructis' hair products are great for both women and men, advertising agency Publicis teamed up with photographers Billy & Hells for a series of creative advertising photographs.
Upon first glance, each of the photographs appear to show a tough guy with a massively long beard. However, look a little closer and you'll realize that things are not what they appeared to be.
Czech Republic-based photographer Katka Pruskova recently completed her first time-lapse project, and it's quite an impressive effort. Pruskova photographed flowers in front of a black backdrop, using the magic of time-lapse photography to capture them blooming. She shot more than 7100 still photographs using her Canon 5D Mark II over the couse of more than 730 hours.
Canon's attention grabber at this year's CES 2013 is a new compact camera designed to fight against the encroachment of smartphones: the PowerShot N.
The little guy is unlike most point-and-shoots you'll find on the market. It's extremely small, square, and simple. The design may seem gimmicky at first, but pick it up in your hands and your opinion might change.
Samsung camera lovers received some good news via Dropbox today. According to Dropbox's head of mobile business development Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, future Samsung smart cameras are going to come packing Dropbox and 50GB of free storage for 2 years.
The news is nothing new for Samsung Galaxy Camera owners, who already had the service and 50GB built in. But the fact that they're putting Dropbox on all cameras means you won't have to pony up $500 to get the automated cloud storage benefits.
We had some hands-on time with the new Polaroid iM1836 just now. The company is only showing off two of the units at CES 2013. One of them doesn't turn on. The other one can't take any pictures.
Earlier today, an Australian court put an end to a year-old tussle between photographer George Ferris and newlyweds Jarrad and Sheree Mitchell over the quality of the wedding photos he took for them. Although neither side really won, the court did make an interesting statement that could serve as a precedent in the future.
One of the main pillars of the Mitchell's argument was that Ferris had missed several key moments, including their wedding kiss. Ferris, on the other hand, called it "just a peck" and maintained that not all moments could be captured. The court sided with Ferris.
One of Samsung's big reveals at CES 2013 is its new 2D/3D lens, which can be paired with the new NX300 to capture true 3D photographs and video using a single lens and a single sensor. When you're feeling like switching back to 2D, a convenient switch on the side of the lens turns it into an ordinary camera lens.
Getting the perfect shot, from the perfect angle, with the perfect perspective, is an obsession of great photographers and videographers. This is because, although there may not be any one perfect angle from which to capture a moment, a few of them are leaps and bounds more impressive than the others.
In this video from NatGeo's "The Man Who Can Fly" -- a short piece on daredevil adventurer Dean Potter -- filmmaker Bryan Smith and shooter Michael Schaefer found one of those angles, and it only took them a mile away from their subject.
Nikon has released some pretty interesting patents in the past. As recently as October of this last year we saw a patent for a camera attachment that blows air into the tripod mount to keep your sensor cool. Just days before that another patent showed that the company might be building features specific to "camera toss" photography into its compact and mirrorless cameras.
Nikon's most recent patent isn't quite as out there, but still unique as far as we can tell -- it's a dual lens hood.
Here's a creative project by visual artist Andrew Knapp and his puppy (all dogs are puppies... no matter how old) Momo. Remember those 'Where's Waldo' books that used to keep you unendingly entertained and frustrated in the waiting room of your local doctors office as a kid?
Getting noticed for quality landscape and wildlife photography is difficult enough, but try doing it on an iPhone. That's what photographer Kevin Russ has been doing, traveling the great American West and capturing stunning photos using nothing more than an iPhone 4S and 5.
Jessosps, one of the last of the UK's national photography retailers, may be entering into administration by the end of the day, according to recent reports. The major retailer managed to narrowly avoid administration in 2009 after an unpopular deal with HSBC, in which the bank "forgave" some 34M pounds of debt in exchange for a near %50 stake in the company.
In May of last year another ray of hope appeared in the form of a potential $16M investment by Canon, but no such deal ever came to official fruition, although some sources report that an investment was made. Now, Jessops seems to be out of options, and administration may be just around the corner, with rumors pointing towards PricewaterhouseCoopers as the potential administrator.
For those of you who can't stand what paparazzi photographers do with their cameras, know this: it's not just the professional celebrity photographers who do such things. When a celebrity is spotted in public, ordinary people all around pull out their cameras and do exactly the same thing.
The video above shows what happened recently when Tom Cruise and his daughter Suri tried to watch a show at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Florida.
The Library of Congress has an extensive collection of daguerreotype photographs captured over the past two centuries. In addition to browsing the technically perfect ones that document history and people, it's also interesting to look at metal plates that are flawed.
Here's a quick demonstration of what Fujifilm's new focus peaking looks like on the freshly-announced X100s and the X20. When manually focusing the lens, the feature uses white pixel highlights to indicate the high contrast areas of the scene. This is one of two new features -- the other being split image focusing -- designed to make manual focusing a much nicer experience on X-Series cameras.
There's a few ways to handle a problem, one of the more popular of which is to eliminate the source entirely. That's what Facebook has decided to do about the little AppData hiccup last week that cost the company nearly 2% in the stock market. They simply pulled user count data out of Instagram's Developer API entirely -- problem solved.
Toshiba is really getting invested in the world of cameras. First, they draw some attention by jumping into the CompactFlash game, claiming that theirs are the fastest CF Cards, and setting a goal to capture 1/3 of that market by 2015. Now, according to Chipworks, it looks like Toshiba has managed to get their APS-C sensor inside Nikon's D5200.
The war between brick and mortar stores and online retailers ended a long time ago -- online retailers won. "Showrooming" was born and the B&M store became no more than a place to try before you went home to buy online. Worst case scenario you needed something right away that you would then return once your online order arrived. It's not pretty, but that's the reality of it.
This last holiday season, in an attempt to win back some traction in the fight, Best Buy offered to match online pricing on any item. This offered a great "have your cake and eat it too" scenario for consumers; but now the holiday season is over and people are back to shopping online. Well, Target is looking to change that, and not just during the holidays.
Some people use dream journals to record and remember their imaginary nighttime escapades. Israel-based photographer Ronen Goldman uses photographs. Whenever he has a strange dream that he'd like to document, he goes out and recreates that dream as a surreal photograph. The project is titled "Surrealistic Pillow".
Back in July, Lexar vice president of products and technology Wes Brewer confirmed that the company was going to jump into the XQD game in Q3. This was good news for the technology, since only one camera was taking them and one company was making them at the time.
Well, the Nikon D4 is still the only DSLR capable of using the cards at the moment, but now Lexar (a couple of quarters late, but here nonetheless) has officially made the leap with its new 1100x pro series cards.
We've shared some awesome photographic finds before -- from the surprising to the downright amazing. On the surprising end you have things like the memory card with wedding photos still intact found a year and a half after an earthquake. On the amazing side you have the Kansas teen who bought a Polaroid camera at a garage sale and found a photo of his long-passed uncle inside.
This story falls somewhere in between. On the glass plates inside of a Jumelle Belllieni stereoscopic camera that photographer Anton Orlov bought at an antique store, he found some old negatives. And we mean old... like WWI France old.
For a fleeting, wonderful moment, it seemed that all of our Instagram popularity dreams were coming true. Released two days ago, the app Firegram used some automatic magic to get your photos way more attention than they would ever have gotten on their own. When Roi Carthy of TechCrunch tried it out on one of his photos he got a whopping 56 likes (%1500 increase) in no time.
Alas, if it seems too good to be true, that's because it wasn't meant to last. As of now the app has been "discovered" by Instagram and denied access to its API -- no likes for you.
After a substantial leak in mid-December, we expected that Polaroid would unveil its android-powered J2 (or is it J3 now?) look-alike at CES. And here it is, officially announced in all its pre-production glory alongside a few other, less-impressive products.
For his project "Trace Heavens," James Nizam found an abandoned property in Delta, Canada, and, with the government's permission, sliced gaps and holes into a couple of the rooms. He then allowed sunlight to stream into the space in the middle of the day, and then used small mirrors attached to ball joints in order to direct the light beam around the room in various patterns.
A couple of weeks ago we reported on rumors that Nikon was going to be announcing two new mirrorless cameras at CES -- the S1 and the J3. Now that CES has finally started it looks like the rumors were true, both cameras have indeed come to fruition with each sporting the specs we expected.
Fujifilm held its CES 2013 press conference yesterday, revealing some facts about the state of its camera business, sharing its vision moving forward, and offering a closer look at its two new fixed-lens cameras: the X100s and the X20.
If you have your 35mm film processed and printed at your local lab, have you ever wondered how it's done? In this post, I'll take you on a behind-the-scenes tour on the entire process.
When doing trainspotting photography, it pays to be extra alert and aware of your surroundings. The video above, captured at the Thurston, Suffolk train station, shows how one camera-wielding trainspotter almost learned (or didn't learn) that lesson the hard way.