Photographer Jesse David McGrady has a super simple trick for adding a hazy, ethereal effect to your photographs: wrap a plastic sandwich bag around your lens. It sounds ridiculous and silly, but the results you get are actually quite nice!
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).
More and more camera companies are giving their products vintage camera-inspired designs these days, and Pentax wants to join in on the fun. The company announced its own retro-styled camera earlier today called the MX-1.
It's a fixed lens compact camera that features a sleek metal body, a fast lens, and a 12-megapixel sensor.
Photographer and photography student Eric Omori has an interesting project that combines the modern with the historical. He has been capturing paintball wars using wet plate photography. The project is titled Weekend Warriors.
It was about this time last year that the world was introduced to the Holga iPhone case: a strange-looking gizmo complete with a rotary wheel packing 9 separate lo-fi filters for the toy-camera, retro lover in you. Well, much like the Swivl we reported on yesterday, Holga has decided that bigger is better, and is attempting to break into the DSLR market with a new rotary wheel lens for DSLRs.
Well that was fast... Just hours after Instagram launched a major update to its popular photo sharing app, Twitter dropped a bomb on the industry by finally unveiling its own long-awaited and recently-leaked retro filters. The move brings it into direct competition with what Instagram offers -- the two services virtually offer the same product now, except Instagram is solely focused on images while Twitter lets you Tweet text as well.
Instagram officially ended Twitter's ability to display embedded Instagram photos this past weekend. Twitter users aren't pleased, but Instagram is now trying to divert their attention away from what they no longer have to what they do. The company announced a major update to the iOS version of the app today, which includes a sleeker look, faster speed, and a brand new filter for Instagrammers to play with.
The mobile photo sharing wars are heating up, and two of the big players, Instagram and Twitter, are in the process of trading blows. Back in November, it came to light that Twitter is currently working to build Instagram-style retro filters into its smartphone apps. Instagram retaliated this week by announcing that its photos will soon no longer be embeddable on Twitter. The latest news now is that Twitter is trying to spoil Instagram's holidays by pushing out its new filters by year's end.
Back in 1998, PC World magazine published a review of the Sony Mavica …
Facebook wasn't content with beating out Twitter in the pursuit of Instagram: the company has now beaten Twitter in launching photo filters in its primary mobile app as well. Just days after The New York Times reported that Twitter will be adding retro filters to its mobile apps in order to compete against Instagram, Facebook has gone ahead and added Instagram-style filters to its official Facebook iOS app.
Photography purists, you might want to look away. For the rest of you: remember that Craiglist listing we shared a couple of months ago posted by a couple looking for Hipstamatic wedding photographers? Among the hoards of enthusiastic Hipstamatic shooters who responded were Keith and Marc, hosts of the iPhoneography podcast TinyShutter. After being chosen for the gig, they drove down to Connecticut from Massachusetts and New Hampshire to capture the wedding with their iPhones.
Watts Martin of Coyote Tracks has an interesting piece titled “Iconic” that discusses …
Fujifilm is a camera company that's going all-in on the idea of "retro design". We're not complaining. Its new XF1 compact camera brings the sleek design of X-Series' cameras to the world of "point-and-shoots", featuring a minimalist aluminum body that's covered with faux-leather. The camera feels very nice and solid in the hand. It's not as compact as other point-and-shoots (the Canon S110 is around 30% smaller and 20% lighter), so I'd say it's purse-sized rather than pocket-sized. What it lacks in portability, however, it makes up for in beauty and brawn.
We had a chance to play around with the new Fujifilm X-E1 at Photokina 2012, at a meeting attended by people who were the brains and hands behind the camera. Announced back on September 6, the X-E1 is the more affordable counterpart to the well-regarded X-Pro1. It's an interchangeable lens mirrorless camera with the same beastly APS-C sensor, shedding 30% in size, 21% in weight, the fancy hybrid viewfinder in favor of an all-electronic one, and 41% in price (from $1,700 to $1,000).
If you want a 50mm f/1.4 lens for your DSLR, you'll need to shell out at least a couple hundred bucks, even if you buy one made by a third-party manufacturer. For those of you who don't mind losing autofocus, you can get the same focal lengths and apertures for much cheaper by buying some old glass and an adapter. By much cheaper, we mean as low as $10-$20! India-based photographer Brock Whittaker recently did this after seeing an auction on eBay for an old Mamiya camera kit.
DOGHOUSEDIARIES created this humorous glimpse into what the Fortune 500 company list will look like 18 years from now, in the year 2030. We see that "Undo Instagram Filters Inc." leads the pack with $2.88 trillion in annual revenue.
It's obviously satirical, but it does cause you to think... What is the world going to do with the unfathomably large pile of filtered photos if/when the fake retro look goes out of style?
Fujifilm has uploaded a video to its Japanese YouTube account showing its not-yet-announced XF1 (or XP1) retro-styled compact camera. The video shows that there's a twisting feature that's used to turn the camera on and off. Turning on the camera involves twisting the lens to unlock it, pulling it out of the camera until it clicks, and then rotating it some more to open up the lens cover. Turning it off involves doing the same things in reverse.
Fuji already introduced retro, Leica-style design to the world of mirrorless cameras with its gorgeous X series line, and now it appears that the company wants to do the same thing for the world of point-and-shoots. New leaked photos, first published on Digicam-info, show an unknown compact camera by Fujifilm that features a slick leather wrap and an elegantly minimal UI -- a camera that definitely wouldn't embarrass fashion-forward folk.
Want to mimic the look of Instagram's filters using Photoshop? We're happy to announce that we have a set of Photoshop files that allow you to do just that.
Designed exclusively for PetaPixel by Eric Öhman of Skellefteå, Sweden, the pack comes with 20 filters that imitate the look of the popular mobile photo sharing app.
Tired of your boring Nikon point and shoot? Does the sleek modern silver clash with your vintage threads? Breathe easy: German company PimpmyDigicam offers these sticker "leather kits" for Nikon J1 cameras for a retro look that will pair impeccably with your vintage Oxfords.
Berene Campbell of Happy Sew Lucky has a nifty cut-and-sew fabric design that …
Ever wonder how photographs were made back in the days of the Civil War? This video by the George …
New photos have emerged showing the retro OM-styled EM-5 Micro Four Thirds camera that Olympus is planning to unleash on the photo world. It's the first camera in a new OM-D line, and offers a beautiful old school SLR aesthetic. The image above, which looks like some kind of ad, reads,
A new digital SLR era is about to begin. Digital SLRs, which simply replaced film with an imaging device did not change significantly in terms of size, weight and user interface. The revolutionary, new mirrorless camera, the OM-D, has an exceptionally light and compact body. Its Electronic View Finder enables photographers to check the Art Filter effect, color temperature, and exposure levels in real-time. When shooting, you can instantly "create" a truly unique world and preserve it in exceptional quality. The "world" will be transformed from something you see to something you "take part" in.
The OM-D is a groundbreaking, new digital interchangeable lens camera perfect for people who want to "take part," "create," and "share."
You can see a higher-res version of the ad here.
Fujifilm and Olympus have been hard at work lately bringing the beauty of film cameras …
Some spec rumors for the Olympus OM-D camera that we wrote about yesterday are starting to emerge.
There might be a giant corporate scandal hovering over its head, but that’s not stopping Olympus from …
Did you know that you can use Photoshop’s Match Color feature to turn old paintings into “filters” for your …
Holga is selling an iPhone Lens Filter Kit that packs 9 separate “retro” …
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.
iPhone photography app Hipstamatic was the king of retro filters before …