Long before there was any way to capture colors on film, filmmakers were hand painting their short movies frame by frame to breathe life into black-and-white productions. The desire to capture color, it seems, far precedes our ability to do so.
One of the two Canon Speedlite flashes above is fake. Can you tell which one? …
Photographer Timothy H. O'Sullivan is perhaps best known for his photos of the Civil War, which include his famous "Harvest of Death" photo. But after covering the war, O'Sullivan decided to strike out West, and when he came back, he brought with him some of the earliest photos of the (quite literally) "wild" American West.
Back in April, we shared the first of cinematographer Mark Vargo's informative series of videos on different photographic concepts. The videos are meant to educate photographers and videographers alike on these concepts so that they might "unleash their creative potential." …
You might not know this, but there was metadata before there was, well, metadata. Way back in 1914, Kodak introduced the Autographic system, a combination of autographic cameras and film that allowed you to permanently sign, date and title your negatives as you shot them.
Data is embedded in our environment, in our behavior, and in our genes. Over the past two years, the world has generated 90% of all the data we have today. The information has always been there, but now we can extract and collect massive amounts of it.
Earlier this month, Photoshelter did a live webinar with Carolyn E. Wright, AKA The Photo Attorney. Carolyn is a full-time attorney whose practice is aimed squarely at the legal needs of photographers. During the webinar talked extensively about copyright infringement, and what photographers need to know when they think their copyright has been infringed (you can watch a video recording here).
Back in 1948, The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers defined high-speed photography as any 3 frames or more captured at a rate at or above 128 frames per second, but even back then high-speed cameras performed well past that mark.
Photographs like the one above by photographer Shikhei Goh go viral on a fairly regular basis. If the stories are to be believed, given enough patience and a little (or a lot) bit of luck, animals can be captured doing all sorts of amazing things.
In July of last year, we introduced you to the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP), an effort by the NASA Ames Research Center to digitize some 48,000 pounds of 70mm tape shot by the five lunar orbiters that were sent up to photograph the surface of the moon in preparation for the Apollo missions.
There will soon be one more road in the United States named after a famous photographer. The city council in Tulsa, Oklahoma has voted to change the namesake of its "Brady street" from Wyatt Tate Brady to Mathew B. Brady.
NYC Grid is a website run by Paul Sahner that explores and documents New York neighborhoods, "street by street and block by block." One of the awesome reoccurring features on the blog is the before-and-after section, which features pairs of photos showing identical locations but shot decades -- or sometimes over a century -- apart.
They're some of the most dramatic photographic documents of air combat in World War I, showing planes diving at each other, crashing in flames and pilots ejecting. And they're all completely bogus.
As a photographer, you will sooner or later bump into the phrase "the decisive moment". The decisive moment is a concept made popular by the street photographer, photojournalist, and Magnum co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson. The decisive moment refers to capturing an event that is ephemeral and spontaneous, where the image represents the essence of the event itself.
Have an afternoon to kill at a public library and want to go directly to the photography section? Just remember the magical number 770.
In 1938, after many prototypes, the first 8x11mm subminiature camera was brought to market by German inventor Walter Zapp. It was called the Minox Riga, and the tiny camera actually saw espionage action in both WWII and the Cold War.
Want to see how our planet "breathes"? Data visualization guru and cartographer John Nelson recently downloaded twelve cloud-free satellite photograph mosaics of Earth showing what our planet looks like in each month of the year. He then combined them into animated GIFs that show the steady pulse of seasons.
Those of you who have been waiting for a scientific reason to tell some of your friends to stop cluttering your Facebook News Feed with a new photo every 5 minutes need wait no more. A new study out of the UK examining the effects of sharing photos on social networks recently found that uploading too many photos (as well as the wrong type) can actually make people like you less.
Capturing our likeness has been a pursuit of the human race for thousands of years. From paintings of gods in Egypt and Greece, to portrait paintings of royalty, to the unabashedly narcissistic selfie of today.
I have been shooting a lot of film lately and enjoy it tremendously, so I thought I'd share some of the experiences I've had in the last year or so, mainly so you can learn from the mistakes I made, avoid them and then make your own.
If you thought the Zeiss f/0.7 lenses we shared yesterday were impressive, check out this crazy piece of glass: it's the Carl Zeiss Super-Q-Gigantar 40mm f/0.33. It's what some people call the fastest camera lens ever made.
We've featured build-it-yourself cameras before, but those DIY products aren't often suitable for children. One in particular was made entirely from 3D-printed parts, a DIY SLR for crafty adults that would be both fun and educational to make.
Ever since photography was invented in the 1800s, there have been people willing to risk life and limb to bring images to the public eye. Among the craziest examples are prisoners of war during World War II -- people who built makeshift cameras out of smuggled parts in order to capture what life was like inside their prison camps.
Camera makers narrowed the point-and-shoot market down to a couple of basic designs some years ago, and ever since it's been one variation after another on slim-and-silver or megazoom brawn. But oh, back in the day...
People will do just about anything to alleviate their anxiety. During the last year of writing my doctoral thesis, the worry about being able to finish grew increasingly heavy. The relentless grind of research, constantly being told that your work is inadequate, and believing that 80-hour workweeks are average has its tolls on all students. Once you reach the edge of this process and are pulverized into oblivion, you get a nice, shiny PhD.
Want to take better photographs using your mobile phone camera? It helps to know what you are working with. I'll assume you already know the basics for all kinds of photography (composition, exposure, focus and DOF, shutter speed, aperture, et cetera).
Annoyed at people who have a habit of snapping a quick food photo before every meal? There might be a scientific explanation for why some of them do so: scientists have found that that rituals such as snapping a quick food pic may actually help make eating more pleasurable for the eater.
How do us elders separate ourselves from those who only know what it means to upload? Here are 17 tools and toys you’ll immediately recognize if you still remember the heyday of Kodak. Bring on the nostalgia.
You know those shooting gallery games you find at carnivals? The kind in which you try to win prizes by hitting targets with a rifle? Sometimes the gun and target systems use light rather than air or pellets -- if the target detects a specific flash of light emitted by the gun, it will count as a "hit." …
Photo manipulation is nearly as old, if not as old, as photography itself. It has been used in state propaganda, to unify nations, for aesthetic and creative expression, to generate fear, and the list goes on and on.
In 2003, my first "Mastering Digital Printing" book came out. My goal was to create an in-depth reference to the new world of digital printing for photography and fine art. I had a sense that there was a need, especially by photographers, for good information about "this new way to print" images (digitally). I guess I was right because the book was an instant success; it was actually in the Top 5 on Amazon Books jockeying with John Grisham and Michael Crichton in sales ranks for a short while.
Film has seen better days. With legends like Kodak's Kodachrome gone, and staples like Fujifilm's Neopan 400 very recently following suit, most news about film is met with dismay and long drawn out "No's" (if you doubt it, check out the comment section on the Neopan 400 and Provia 400X discontinuation announcement linked above).
The mandate for Documerica was intriguingly broad -- "photographically document subjects of environmental concern" -- and photographers responded with striking images covering everything from pot-smoking form to toxic smog.
About a week ago, the stock photography website Dreamstime got in touch with us to offer us some exclusive information. Having recently added a "search-by-camera" feature, they had compiled a huge amount of statistical data on the most popular cameras being used by their 150,000+ contributing photographers.
There has been a good deal written about the similarities of the camera to the eye as well as the computer to human memory. What I would like to do is clarify the uniqueness of the human brain from camera technology and at the same time show the similarities between brain function, photography and cognition.
Scott Schuman (aka. The Sartorialist) hit it big in fashion street photography. But not all fashion photographers work in a studio or on the street. Many have made many-year-long careers photographing from what is referred to as "the pit" at fashion shows.
Every so often I get an email asking me to jump in on some forum argument or other. I rarely do that because of the language barrier.
Can you trust camera reviews submitted by customers of online retailers? Not entirely, suggests a new academic study, and not for the reasons you might think.
If you ever get a chance to visit the National Media Museum in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, be sure to check out the Kodak history area, which contains various Kodak cameras that appeared in the history of photography. One of the exhibits is the "Queen Mary's Doll's House Camera," an amazing 1/8th-scale replica of an old Kodak 2C Brownie. As if the detail of the camera weren't enough, here's the kicker: the model is actually a fully functional camera!
Film photography is similar in many ways to digital photography, and most of your standard digital photography techniques apply to film too. You just have to understand the peculiarities of film and its limitations and you’re good to go.
There are as many career paths in photography as there are food pictures on Instagram. The difference is that on Instagram, the pictures are posted for fun. When it comes to a career though, pictures are produced for profit. At least that's how it's supposed to be.
Wildlife researchers now have a much clearer idea of how bats fly, thanks to the wicked-looking X-Ray video above that shows the animal's skeleton at work.
Photographers commonly place UV filters on the front of their camera lenses in order to protect the glass front element. Aside from preventing dust buildup, the filter also takes the brunt of any impact seen by the front of the lens. If you have to have some glass shatter, you'd rather it be a relatively cheap filter compared to an entire lens, right? …
Our sun can look very different in photographs depending on the wavelength of light you're trying to capture. Some photographs show the sun as a glowing white ball, while others capture hotter areas in a cold blue color. NASA recently took a collection of sun photos shot at different wavelengths and combined them into the beautiful photo collage seen above (here's a higher-res version).
Want to see how much reflected light your polarizing filter eliminates from any scene? You can easily visualize this light using an image editing program like Photoshop.
Freelance photographer Robert Caplin filed a copyright infringement and DMCA violation complaint on June 26, 2013 against Mario Armando Lavandeira, Jr., aka Perez Hilton. Hilton is best described as an Internet gossip blogger, who has been known to appropriate copyrighted images and then “transform” them by drawing captions, tears, or other scribbles, and thereby claiming “fair use.” …
There's nothing like high-speed footage to put your reaction time in perspective. Knowing this, David Prager and Mauricio Balvanera of Distort put a high-speed camera to use capturing people doing the 'ruler test,' where a ruler suspended just above your fingers drops at a random moment, and you have to try and catch it as soon as possible.
Designing a camera from start to finish takes a lot of work by a lot of talented people. What begins as brainstorming and sticky notes must be turned into sketches, 3D renderings, and physical products. Even the UI has to be meticulously planned so that it is intuitive, speedy and responsive.
These days, it's easy to take for granted what the magic of the Internet, wireless technology, and fiber optic cables have made possible, but there was a time when sending a photograph a long distance in a short time wasn't quite that easy.
Want to watch a non-fiction film about photography? Here's a list of documentaries (and some other stuff) concerning photography that I've collected over the years.
