Culture

Google Glass is set to arrive in the hands of the general public later this year. There are already apps that can trigger the shutter by detecting winks, and some people are already thinking of how the wearable camera can be useful for various photographic applications.

Having always-ready glasses strapped to your face may be convenient, but how will photography look? The video above by Grovo offers a humorous look at what photographers would look like if Google Glass becomes widely used as a camera and camcorder.

Need a chuckle? Look no further than the latest bizarre photo fad to sweep across the Internet. Called "Cat Beard," the meme involves shooting a self-portrait with your face above a cat's head. If you can nail the right perspective, you get a humorous photograph that looks like you have a strange beard covering your face (and a frown as well).

...there's no such thing as Flickr Pro, because today, with cameras as pervasive as they are, there is no such thing really as professional photographers, when there's everything is professional photographers. Certainly there is varying levels of skills, but we didn't want to have a Flickr Pro anymore, we wanted everyone to have professional quality photos, space, and sharing." -- Marissa Mayer, Yahoo Event, May 2013

Woah, there, Yahoo cowgirl...let's hold on just a second!

Are you ready for the imagery war -- the war against personal photography and capturing of video? You'd better be.

The title of this piece actually isn't entirely accurate. In some ways, this war isn't just coming, it's already begun. Forces are lining up on both sides, under the radar for most of us so far, but preparing for action. And right now, if I had to place a bet (cash, not bitcoins, please), I'd reluctantly have to predict the anti-imagery folks have the better chance of winning.

Most people in today's society have a mobile phone. Most mobile phones have cameras. Anyone and everyone has become an on-the-scene photojournalist, reporting on everything from major news events to the odd and crazy.

Some of these picture-worthy events take place on everyday flights. Shutter-happy passengers, snapping or even video recording the woman on the next aisle over acting unusual or a fellow passenger being disruptive. It's undeniable that we are curious beings, and want to document and share events we witness. But not everyone is pleased citizen photojournalists.

Photographer Arne Svenson lives on the second floor of an apartment building in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City. For his project "The Neighbors," he pointed his camera at a luxury apartment building across the street and secretly photographed its inhabitants through open windows.

Those photographs are now being sold for thousands of dollars at a gallery in NYC, but it turns out the subjects aren't very happy with having their images stealthily snapped and sold.

Last year one of my friends got married and I was so thrilled to be her photographer that day. What was even more amazing was that she had an “Unplugged Wedding” after seeing pictures and hearing my rants over the years about well-meaning guests whom have inadvertently (or heck, even completely on purpose) ruined images.

If you make your money unscrupulously as an identity thief, you might want to refrain from sharing about your life through photographs online. Two identity thieves in South Florida found that out the hard way earlier this year after they were busted thanks to an Instagram photograph of food.

After Adobe’s Photoshop CC announcement earlier this week, Ryan Chartrand decided …

You might think that bearded, Carhartt-wearing, ironic dudes riding fixed geared bicycles in Brooklyn are obnoxious, but a different brand of 21st century hipster is helping make photography, er, awesomer. Let’s celebrate the nerdtastic dedication that possesses these photo hipsters.

When a huge meteor exploded over Russia back in February, the incident was captured by a large number of drivers who drive around with dashcams pointed out the front of their windshield. The story put a spotlight on the fact that dashcams are widely used in Russia due to the prevalence of insurance fraud.

Footage from Russian dashcams found online is often quite dark (figuratively, not literally), showing horrible accidents and tragedies. Not so with the video above -- it's a compilation of random acts of kindness captured by ordinary drivers.

Aerial cameras based around RC helicopters are becoming widely used these days for all kinds of photographic and video-related purposes, but here's one use that we've never seen before. An RC helicopter camera was recently used to both deliver an engagement ring and capture the proposal as it went down.

PTSD, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, is a serious problem that affect a huge percentage of war veterans. A condition once associated most strongly with Vietnam War veterans, the Afghanistan and Iraq war have brought the condition back into the public eye with a vengeance.

According to the National Institute of Health, the VA estimates that approximately 31% of Vietnam vets, 10% of Desert Storm vets, 11% of Afghanistan vets and 20% of Iraq war veterans are affected. And while photography has been used to great effect to document PTSD in the past, one nurse at the VA in Palo Alto, California is using it to help treat veterans with the condition.

If you ever try your hand at shooting photos or videos from the sky using a remote-controlled helicopter, do your best to avoid trees, tall buildings, and... statues. Ohio-based cameraman Terry Cline found out the dangers of statues the hard way this past weekend. While capturing aerial imagery, Cline got his flying camera stuck in the arms of a statue 100 feet above the ground.

Are you so crazy in love with photography that you would wear a lens-inspired wedding ring on your finger? If so, alternative ring company Titanium Buzz has a wedding band just for you.

The company has just launched a new product called the Camera Lens Ring. It's a simple ring that looks like something torn from the middle of a camera lens.

While we're on the subject of Google Glass, check out this interesting use case by hockey player Joseph Lallouz. He decided to wear his Glass during a hockey match in order to capture what the sport looks and feels like from a participant's point of view.

Actor Jeff Bridges has been nominated for six Academy Awards for his work on the silver screen. In 2010, he walked away from the award ceremony clutching a statuette after winning the Best Actor prize for his role in Crazy Heart.

When he's not playing various characters in front of a camera, Bridges is well known for his interest in being behind the camera. He often serves as an unofficial behind-the-scenes photographer on Hollywood movie sets, documenting what things look like from an actor's perspective.

Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada-based photographer Chris McVeigh is incredibly good at building camera replicas with LEGO pieces. Last month we featured his LEGO recreation of the Leico M9-P Hermes rangefinder camera.

Now McVeigh (who goes by the name "Powerpig" online), is back with a beautiful new camera creation. This time he has built a Polaroid OneStep SX-70 Rainbow instant camera.

The woman in this portrait doesn't actually exist. The face is actually the average of 57 different women -- 57 girlfriends that appeared in episodes of the popular TV sitcom Seinfeld.

We know that the Instagram community is alive, well, and more than 100 million strong, but until today, we had never heard of an Instagram meetup. Called Instameets, it seems that these meetups have been happening all over the country for a while now; and for a recent Instameet in Santa Monica, Instagrammer Ravi Vora decided to put together a mini-documentary to chronicle the experience.

"A new generation is using photography to celebrate, to question and represent a continent on the rise." That is the final sentence of the intro to Episode 1 of the six episode Al Jazeera miniseries 'The New African Photography.' It's a miniseries that, over the next several weeks, will look to the continent's photographers to paint a new, more accurate picture of Africa for the world.

Mike Rugnetta over on PBS's Idea Channel asked an interesting question in last Wednesday's episode: Is a tagged Instagram photo more than just a photo? Or, if you will, do hashtags add something (context, meaning, the ability to connect to a community) to photographs, thereby transforming the photo as we know it into a "different entity?"

If you've ever shot with a Leica M rangefinder camera, you probably know how effective the camera can be for stealthy shooting. After all, there's no mirror that needs to swing out of the way like there is in a DSLR, so the main sound you'll hear is the soft click of the shutter curtain flapping open to expose the film or sensor.

It's not just Leica aficionados that appreciate the silent shutter: did you know that the Leica M is held as the standard for silent photography in courtrooms across the United States?

The web is abuzz over newly released photographs of Miss Korea 2013 beauty pageant contestants, and not in a way the photographer or the pageant were expecting. The photographs have sparked heated discussion on the topics of plastic surgery and racism.

The video above is a commercial Canon is running over in Japan to promote its new Kiss X7/Rebel SL1, the world's smallest and lightest DSLR. It shows how the camera is perfect for soccer moms who would like to capture action shots of their "super soccer kids."

What will future generations think of the cameras we're using these days? What will the cameras look like to them? Japanese artist Maico Akiba has a project titled "100 Years Later" that imagines what various modern commonplace objects might look like if rediscovered by people a century later. Among the objects are a number of cameras.

An old class photo taken in 1941 at Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High School is about to be auctioned off, and it's set to fetch quite a price. Why, you ask? Well, because a girl by the name of Norma Jeane Baker -- who later became famous as Marilyn Monroe -- both signed and was in the picture.

I’d love to say I coined the term "Like farm", but it’s entirely possible I read it somewhere before, as a brief search on that term turned up other articles on the growing phenomenon of content farms on Facebook. For a while now, I’ve been watching my own news feed fill up with unattributed photos and artwork. And I think we've all seen the equally unattributed and ubiquitous quote art (either graphic design or simply pasted over photos). Although the amount of this content seems to rise and fall, it has seemed like it is growing of late. Or perhaps I've just become more sensitive to it?

If you're planning to attend the Kentucky Derby early next month, you might want to make sure you'll be content with capturing your memories with a smartphone or point-and-shoot. Churchill Downs, the racetrack that hosts the famous horse race, has unveiled new security measures that will prevent attendees from bringing certain items onto the grounds. Among them: all interchangeable lens cameras.

Marta Crass of Knoxville, Tennessee is quite handy with cardboard. She runs an Etsy shop called CisforCardboard that's dedicated to her custom cardboard art. She handcrafts signs, wall hangings, letters, and anything else you can dream up... including cameras.

What you see here is a replica of Crass' grandfather's 1960's era Nikon F SLR, created using ordinary pieces of cardboard.

Last week was full of horror, disbelief and touching compassion. It was also a week driven by photographs and discussion about photography. From the iconic photo by Boston Globe’s John Tlumacki on the cover of Sports Illustrated, to the hundreds of citizen photos turned in to the FBI, the story and the events that followed were driven by photography.

Do you ever have those times when you look up or around you and you see something like the scene above?

How do you solve the problem of professional concert photographers snapping unflattering photos of you during your live shows? One way is to ban them completely, and that's exactly what Beyonce is doing with her latest concert tour. Policies like hers may be growing in popularity among artists who want to control their image, but the policy is still causing quite a hoopla.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Before I begin with an observation of a photo that emerged from yesterday’s horrific bombings, I’d like to first take a moment to acknowledge the insignificance of my thoughts vis a vis the tragedy that has unfolded. There have been many great pieces that have already emerged in the first 24 hours like this one from Bruce Schneier of The Atlantic. That said, I blog about salient issues in photography, and there is no better time to discuss an issue than when it is in our collective consciousness.

It's hard to fathom the effect that Photoshop and digital retouching has had on our world. Limitations placed on artists and photographers in particular have systematically been stripped away as terms like "'shopped" made their way into our vernacular.

In this short video, PBS Arts examines that effect. From the artist, to the photographer, to the everyday citizen who has something to say, nobody has been left unaltered by Photoshop.

ABC's Nightline recently decided to take on one of the most popular photography trends of all time: the selfie. And to help them properly tackle the subject, they asked famed fashion photographer Nigel Barker to weigh in.

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!

One of the stereotypes that has become associated with Instagram users (and smartphone shooters in general) is that they're obsessed with snapping photos of their food. YouTube channel Hungry decided to see how people would react when this obsession is taken too far. They sent a Instagram photographer to random strangers and had him ask if he could photograph their food. Cameras were placed nearby to document their reactions to the strange request.

Officials over in St. Louis, Missouri are embarrassed and have a bit of explaining to do after it was discovered that a sign banning permit-less professional photography in county parks had been put up "by mistake."

Vine is exploding in popularity. The Twitter-owned service, which allows you to share 6-second video loops, is now the number one free app in the iTunes App Store less than three months after being introduced to the world.

People are also starting to take the app very seriously: some are putting a crazy amount of time and work into creating 6-second-long short films.

Albert Einstein once described quantum entanglement as "spooky action at distance." The basic idea behind it is that certain things (e.g. particles, molecules) can interact with each other instantly (or nearly instantly) regardless of how far apart they are. For example, pairs of photons can affect one another when separated by vast distances, with the effects occurring even faster than light could have traveled between the two points.

Check out this highly realistic life-sized SLR camera created entirely out of LEGOs. It was created by a LEGO enthusiast named Suzuki and is modeled after the Nikon F from the mid-1900s. We've featured a number of LEGO camera creations here in the past, and this one ranks at (or near) the top in terms of realism.

Remember how Usain Bolt grabbed a photographer's DSLR last year during the London Olympics and started snapping photos of his fellow athletes? A similar thing happened today in an NBA basketball game between the Chicago Bulls and Toronto Raptors.

A recent Washington Post article has drawn attention to a new trend that is arising among young girls on Instagram; a trend that has both parents and child safety advocates worried. The trend is Instagram beauty pageants, in which young girls submit pictures of themselves using hashtags like #beautycontest or #rateme, and subject themselves to the praise and/or ridicule of their many million Instagram peers.

Photographers often grumble about the rise of hobbyist photographers who charge little to no money across all kinds of photographic niches, robbing hard working professionals of clients and flooding the market with subpar results.

Instead of simply being discontent about how the industry has been changing, photographers Geoff Johnson and Kameron Bayne decided to do something about it. They've created Fotoseeds, a business that aims to make professional photography a sustainable profession by educating photographers, helping them grow their businesses, and doing away with insecurity and ignorance.