Michael Zhang

Photos of Falling Chocolate Confections Created Without CGI

Japan-based art collective NAM shot this series of advertisements showing gravity-defying chocolate confections. What's interesting about the concept is that they decided to do everything without digital trickery, opting instead to hang the various foods from thin strings.

Michael Zhang

Wet Plate Photography with a Giant Van Camera

Los Angeles-based photographer Ian Ruhter creates amazing photographs using a van that he turned into a gigantic camera. He uses the collodion process (AKA wet plate photography) to turn large sheets of metal into photographs, and spends upwards of $500 making each giant one-of-a-kind print.

Michael Zhang

A Canon Rebel T2i Fit for a Stormtrooper

Leica charges thousands of dollars extra for its limited edition white cameras, but a Boston-based photo enthusiast named Andrew successfully customized his camera for only a few dollars by going the DIY route. After spending two hours strategically placing green painters tape onto his Canon Rebel T2i DSLR using a razor, he hung the camera by the strap mount and applied six coats of white spray paint and three coats of matte clear.

Michael Zhang

April Fools’ 2012 in the Photo World

April Fools' Day 2012 has come and gone. Even though we didn't publish any bogus stories this year, here's a quick roundup of other photo-related sites that did. The screenshot above shows Kodak's homepage yesterday, which advertised a new kitten printing machine. Interestingly enough, there was a serious news ticker just below it that discussed the company's bankruptcy status.

Roger Cicala

If Carpenters Talked Like Camera Geeks

With the recent camera releases (or maybe Spring fever) I’ve been rather amazed watching various photography forums have major melt downs during the last few weeks. I said something about cameras and lenses just being tools, not life and death, and got immediately annihilated. They aren’t just tools, I was told, they are the means to make a living for some people, and the passionate hobby of others. That got me thinking, though: I have friends who make their living as carpenters, and others for whom woodworking is a passionate hobby. I got to thinking how silly their forums would seem if they acted like we do.

Michael Zhang

How to Compose Shots When Shooting Skateboarders

Here's a tutorial by skateboarding photographer Michael Burnett in which he discusses various composition tips and techniques. His area of expertise is in shooting skateboarders, but the tips are very applicable for other types of photography as well.

Michael Zhang

Facial Recognition Software Guesses Age Based on a Photo

Facial recognition service Face.com has announced a new feature in its API: age detection. After analyzing a photograph of a person's face, the software returns three values: minimum age, maximum age, and estimated age, along with the confidence level of the guesses. Applications for the new technology include enhanced parental controls and targeted advertising.

Bryan Formhals

10 Photographers You Should Ignore

Editor's note: This is a piece by photographers Bryan Formhals and Blake Andrews on how famous photographers' styles are copied over and over again. Please do not read or comment if you take things too seriously.

The other day while reading the Internet I came across “The 10 Most Harmful Novels for Aspiring Writers.” I wondered whether there could be a list for photographers as well. I thought about it and then sent my list to Blake Andrews to see if he wanted to contribute and have some fun with it. Here's what we came up with.

Michael Zhang

Photographs of Airplanes Hovering Over the Heads of Sunbathers

Maho Beach outside of Princess Juliana International Airport in Sint Maarten is famous for the fact that landing airplanes fly overhead at minimal altitude. It's one of the only places in the world where airplanes can be viewed in their flightpath just outside the end of the runway, and therefore is very popular with tourists and plane spotters. Austrian photographer Josef Hoflehner has a project titled "Jet Airliner" that consists of photos of massive jet airliners hovering over the heads of sunbathers on the beach.

Michael Zhang

Apollon: Concept Cameras that Connect Together for Social Photography

Apollon is a concept camera designed by product designer Gordon Tiemstra for his industrial design university project. The big concept is that the camera can be physically combined with your friends' cameras, allowing them to snap photographs together to create things like panoramas and 3D photographs. The images captured by any camera in the cluster is wirelessly transferred to all of the others, giving everyone the complete set of images that were snapped.

Michael Zhang

Collapsible Hanging Bookshelf Made with Reused 35mm Film Strips

VU35 is a new brand by Lucas Desimone and Matias Resich that offers products created from wood and reused 35mm film -- a plastic material that's difficult to dispose of. Their first product is a minimalistic collapsible bookshelf called Filmantes, which uses strips of film to connect three wooden shelves.

Michael Zhang

Nikon D800 Resolution Compared to the Canon 5D Mark III

Last week camera testing service DxOMark announced that the Nikon D800 had earned the highest sensor quality score ever awarded. Roger Cicala of LensRentals wanted to see for himself how much of an advantage the D800's 36.3MP sensor had over its competition, so he did some sensor resolution tests on the camera, comparing it to the Canon 5D Mark III, 5D Mark II, and Nikon D700. His conclusion?

[...] there’s no question the D800 can actually get those pixels to show up in the final product (assuming your final product is a big print – they’re going to be wasted posting on your Facebook page). But you’d better have some really good glass in front of it. I don’t think the 28-300 superzooms are going to cut it with this camera.

In the real world, highest possible resolution is nice to know about and talk about, but usually not of critical importance compared to other factors. You’ll be able to make superb images with any decent lens for an 8 X 10 or even 11 X 16 print. But if you’re getting the camera because of the resolution, it makes sense to know which lenses will allow all of that resolution to be utilized. Just in case you get that job that needs billboard sized prints.

Michael Zhang

Aerial Interior Photo of a Building Created by Stitching Hundreds of Photos

Architectural photographer Brett Beyer was recently commissioned by Cornell University to make a photograph of the interior of its recently completed Milstein Hall. The request wasn't for a standard interior photo, but for an aerial shot of the 25,000-square-foot studio space that looked as if you were looking down at it with the roof removed (think Google Earth but for the interior of a building). Beyer accomplished this by pointing his Canon 5D Mark II and 17-40mm lens down from the ceiling on a 12-foot boom and then capturing 250 separate photographs of every square inch of the space over three days. He then spent 10 days stitching the images together by hand in Photoshop to create the amazing photo seen above.

Michael Zhang

Post-Apocalyptic Photographs of Major Cities Around the World

Silent World is a project by Paris-based artists Lucie & Simon that shows post-apocalyptic views of famous locations around the world. All but one or two of the people in each location are removed from the scene. Rather than use multiple exposures and compositing the images to remove moving objects (e.g. people and cars), they chose to use a neutral density filter -- one that's normally used by NASA for analyzing stars -- in order to achieve extremely long exposure times during the day.

Michael Zhang

Documenting the Human Condition: A Documentary on Street Photography

Here's an oldie but goodie: back in September 2009, photographer Chris Weeks released this documentary about street photography titled Documenting the Human Condition. It's occasionally preachy and at times feels like a stealthy Leica advertisement, but should be interesting to you if you're at all interested in the practice of street photography.

Michael Zhang

TrekPak Camera Bag Insert Adjusts with Pins Rather Than Velcro

TrekPak is a new padded camera bag insert that does away with the annoyances of velcro by introducing a new pin system for adjusting dividers:

What makes TrekPak really unique, is that you won’t find any Velcro. When you try to adjust a normal gear bag while out in the field, you know how frustrating it can be. The Velcro sticks where you don’t want it to, is hard to pull apart, and just looks messy and cluttered. Our patent pending system uses anodized aluminum pins and durable padded dividers to offer limitless organizational options. The TrekPak pin system is much easier to adjust, very secure, and straight up, it’s slick.

They're starting with inserts for Pelican camera bags, but are planning to release generic inserts and inserts designed for other bags as well.

Michael Zhang

Photographs of Decaying Food Highlight the Global Problem of Waste

According to the UN, one third of the world's food goes to waste -- mostly in industrialized nations -- while 925 million people around the world are threatened by starvation. To draw attention to this startling fact, Vienna-based photographer Klaus Pichler has been working for the past nine months on a project titled One Third, which consists of photos of rotting food. The food ranges from simple vegetables to cultural dishes from around the world, and everything is allowed to rot naturally by being stored in large plastic containers in Pichler's bathroom.

Michael Zhang

Giant Mirrors Placed in Landscapes

For her project titled Mirrors, Swedish photographer Ilar Gunilla Persson photographed various landscapes with giant mirrors placed in them. The mirrors give the scenes an surreal and artificial look, but all the shots were captured on film.

Michael Zhang

55-Hour Exposure of a Tiny Patch of Sky Reveals 200,000 Galaxies

This photo is what you get when you point a massive 4.1 meter telescope (VISTA in Chile) at an unremarkable patch of night sky and capture six thousand separate exposures that provide an effective "shutter speed" of 55 hours. It's an image that contains more than 200,000 individual galaxies, each containing countless stars and planets (to put the image into perspective, the famous Hubble Ultra-Deep Field contains "only" around 10,000 galaxies). And get this: this view only shows a tiny 0.004% of the entire sky!