Did you know that in vintage tintype photographs of infants mothers were often present in the photo but hidden by a veil? Subjects needed to remain still due to the longer exposure times required back then, so mothers were often asked to hold their children tightly while the portraits were being exposed. It was common practice back then, but the resulting photos are pretty eerie when you look at them now.
This might look like some kind of microscopic organism, but it's actually a high-speed photograph of a nuclear explosion. It was captured less than 1 millisecond after the detonation using a rapatronic camera, which is capable of exposure times as brief as 10 nanoseconds (one nanosecond is one billionth of a second). The photograph was shot from roughly 7 miles away during the Tumbler-Snapper tests in Nevada (1952). The fireball is roughly 20 meters in diameter, and three times hotter than the …
Here's a video in which business-savvy photographer Sal Cincotta shares some tips on how to turn your photography service into an experience that your clients will remember and be excited to recommend to others.
Think your lens is good in low-light conditions? Check out this Nikon D700 with a Nightstalker II night-vision system attached -- standard issue for the Navy's Combat Camera unit. PopPhoto has published an interesting article that offers a glimpse into what life is like as a US military photographer. You an also see an example photo shot with the above lens here.
Here's an informative lesson on shutter sync by photographer Matthew Gore, who writes, …
"The Catch" is one of the most famous plays in American football history, and Walter Iooss Jr.'s photograph of Dwight Clark leaping into the air is one of the game's iconic images. Paul Lukas of Uni Watch has published an interesting analysis of the photograph and why it "works": …
Ever wonder what National Geographic photographers go through to get the beautiful shots that appear in the yellow-bordered magazine? The Photo Society -- an interesting new website created by the magazine's Photographer’s Advisory Board -- recently surveyed 45 Nat Geo photographers about hazards they've encountered while on assignment. All the incidences were then counted up and turned into a fascinating table showing how "glamorous" the photographers' lives are. You can also read short …
Wondering whether or not the shutter speeds on your camera are accurate? Instead of taking it to a shop or buying expensive testing equipment, you can use an old television or CRT monitor as a simple shutter speed tester! Camera enthusiast Rick Oleson has an easy to understand diagram showing what you can expect to see from the screen at different shutter speeds. For a more technical explanation and tutorial, check out this article that appeared in a 1967 issue of Popular Science.
The first known light painting photographs were made way back in 1914, when Frank and Lillian Moller Gilbreth used small lights and long exposure photos to capture the motion of workers. Subjects ranged from handkerchief folders to bricklayers. The photos weren't meant as art, but were instead made to help develop ways to increase employee output and simplify job tasks.
With the introduction of iOS 5, Apple finally turned the iPhone's volume up button into a shutter button and its headphones into remote shutter releases. However, did you know that many Bluetooth headsets can now be used as wireless shutter releases? As long as your device can wirelessly increase the iPhone's volume (and not just its own) it should work. This means that even Bluetooth keyboards can be used as wireless remotes! …
Here's an hour-long program from 1981 that featured Joel Meyerowitz and his street photography in New York City.
Here's an amazing time-lapse created using NASA's Earth Observatory photographs of our planet. It spans an entire year, and shows how lands change with the passing of seasons. You can download a higher-res version here.
The George Eastman House in Rochester, NY is the world's oldest museum dedicated to photography. A couple years ago, curator Todd Gustavson wrote a book on the history of photography featuring the museum's gigantic collection of historical cameras. This behind-the-scenes video with Gustavson gives a glimpse into the drool-worthy warehouse and a brief tour of some legendary cameras.
If you had the task of choosing some photos that represented Earth and mankind to extraterrestrial life forms, which photos would you select? NASA had to do this back in 1977 when it launched the Voyager space probes, which are now the farthest human-made objects from Earth. A committee led by Carl Sagan eventually settled on 116 images: …
Want to learn the basics of studio lighting? Here's a two-hour-long lecture with photographer Joey Quintero in which he gives an overview of the basic principles, techniques, and tools.
Did you know that in addition to making his famous landscape images, Ansel Adams made ends meet by shooting commercial work? Although he made photos for clients as large as IBM, AT&T, and LIFE, Adams didn't like his job. In a 1938 letter to a friend, he wrote, …
Check out Google's homepage: the doodle today celebrates the 224th birthday of Louis Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype and one of the fathers of photography (the others are Nicéphore Niépce, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Thomas Wedgwood). Daguerre was born on November 18, 1787, and unveiled his daguerreotype process at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1839, when he was 51 years old.
If you're ever sitting down in a public place with your camera bag, having it close by isn't enough to protect it from theft -- you need to make sure it can't be easily snatched. Tom Bird of the UK learned this the hard way: he was at a pub recently when his camera bag suddenly disappeared. It's contents? Just thousands of dollars worth of gear including a Canon 5D Mark II, a 24-70mm f/2.8, a 50mm f/1.2, a 16-35mm f/2.8 and a laptop.
You probably know that stopping down (i.e. increasing your f-stop number) can increase the sharpness of your subject, but how much should you stop down to boost resolution without losing that nice, creamy bokeh? Roger Cicala did some research on this question and writes: …
If you're a vegan film photographer, you might want to think about switching to digital. Why? Because virtually all photographic films and papers are made with animal parts. Most of the thickness in film comes from gelatin, which is used to hold the silver halide crystals in an emulsion. Gelatin is made from animal hides and bones -- mainly cows and pigs. People have tried to come up with substitutes, but they haven't been able to find anything suitable that's as stable or cheap as gelatin.
The Fader has published an interview with Instagram founder Kevin Systrom that reveals how Systrom first got into photography, and how the service's now-ubiquitous filters came about: …
Kaufmann’s Posographe is an intricate pocket-sized mechanical calculator invented back in the 1920s. Measuring 13x8cm and filled with tiny scribblings, the device allowed photographers to approximate the exposure values they needed by simply sliding around six small pointers.
German photographer Andreas Gursky is one of the most successful artists of our time, and yesterday a print of his titled "Rhein II" became the world's most expensive photograph, selling for $4.3 million. Back in the early 2000s, director Ben Lewis made this interesting 23-minute feature that gives an inside look into "Gursky World."
Maurice Ribble of Tech Photo Blog recently found the ingredients list for flash powder, which was used for state-of-the-art photographic lighting 150 years ago. After making some of the powder, he began to test it to see how it compares to modern day flashes (more specifically, a Canon 580EX II).
You've probably heard before that focal lengths between 85mm and 135mm produce the best head shots because they provide a desirable perspective in head shots, but how much of a different does the focal length actually make? Photographer Stephen Eastwood decided to find out, shooting 10 portraits of the same subject with focal lengths ranging from 19mm to 350mm.
Eric Fossum, the man who invented the CMOS image sensor, recently gave an hour-long lecture at Yale that provides an educational overview of the technology. He covers a wide range of topics, ranging from digital imaging history to the latest state-of-the-art technologies in the sensor field. If you're at all interested in learning how your camera works, this'll be an interesting lecture to take in.
Here's a helpful video that attempts to demystify the concept of DSLR sensor sizes. If you've never been able to understand how sensor size (and its crop factor) affects resulting photographs, this video will help.
Kodak's fall from grace is an interesting case study that modern day companies can learn from. Even though the world's first digital camera was invented by one of its engineers, the company was unwilling to cannibalize its film business that, at the time, was making money hand over fist. By the time digital cameras started catching on, Kodak had missed the boat.
Ever wonder why most DSLR cameras capture images with a 3:2 aspect ratio, while most other cameras use 4:3? It's because they were designed to match different things: …
'Life In A Day' is a historic crowdsourced documentary film that shows what the world was like on a single day: July 24, 2010. People in 140 countries around the world captured snippets from their lives on that day and submitted 80,000 video clips to YouTube. Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald and executive producer Ridley Scott then edited those 4,500 hours of footage into a 95 minute long feature film. After debuting at Sundance and being streamed on YouTube earlier this year, the film is …
Philip Bloom recently shot this interesting mini-documentary on Anthony Vizzari using a Sony NEX-5N. Vizzari is a guy who collects photographs and cameras, owns a photo shop, and runs a photobooth business. Here's an artist, architect, antiquarian, photographer, and storyteller, and calls himself an "archotographist".
This video offers a glimpse into how Schneider-Kreuznach LS lenses are manufactured for the Phase One 645DF camera body. In the past we've also featured videos showing Canon, Leica, and Voigtlander lenses being made.
This amazing image might look like a computer generated graphic, but it's actually a composite photograph by NASA showing India's population growth over the years. The white areas show the illumination visible in the country prior to 1992, while the blue, green, and red lights indicate new lights that became visible in 1992, 1998, and 2003, respectively. The four photos were tinted and then combined into an image that reveals where new populations are appearing. NASA definitely needs to do one …
Everybody Street is an upcoming documentary film about New York City street photographers (e.g. Bruce Gilden and Joel Meyerowitz) who have taken some of the most iconic images of the past century. Created by photographer Cheryl Dunn, the film was originally a 36-minute short film, but is being expanded into a feature length movie.
Here's an interesting factoid: to make the Star Wars scenes containing AT-AT walkers and tauntauns more realistic, a new stop motion technique called "go motion" was created: …
Photographer Lisa Bettany has an interesting post over at Camera+ comparing the iPhone 4S camera to the cameras on each of the previous versions (and a couple other cameras as well). It's an interesting look at how much cell phone cameras have improved since the original iPhone was announced at the beginning of 2007.
The 100 year anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic will come in April of next year, and auction houses are already seeing a spike in the number of artifacts from the disaster being put up for sale. Among them are a set of previously unseen photographs made the morning after the sinking, which show the rescue ships, lifeboats, and an icy Atlantic ocean.
Canon's new 1D X DSLR shoots at a whopping 14 frames per second, but did you know that it's not the first Canon SLR capable of that frame rate? Nearly 30 years ago, back in 1984, Canon unveiled the "F-1 High Speed Motor Drive Camera": a camera powered by huge battery packs that could chew through a roll of film in 2.57 seconds.
"Exposing to the right" is a well-known rule of thumb for maximizing image quality by pushing exposure to avoid noise, but the equation is changing as the quality of image sensors continues to improve. Ctein over at The Online Photographer writes, …
Two years ago, Flickr partnered up with Getty to allow Flickr users to sell photographs, and today Getty announced that its "Flickr Collection" has grown to over 250,000 images. Getty also revealed that the above image titled "Rock Concert" by Flickr user Michael Bodge is their best seller. No word on how many copies it has sold, though.
Here's a slow motion video showing a closeup look at the human eye, our amazing biological lens (and sensor). You might be surprised at how mechanical its movements are and how fluid the iris is. Another crazy fact is that we're continually relying on "image stabilization" to see things clearly: …
Here's a strange (and extremely rare) piece of camera gear: the Leica Telephoto Assembly Rifle. Also known as "the Leica Gun", it was made for photographers at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany, and became popular among wildlife and sports photographers during the interwar years. One of them will be auctioned off at the Tamarkin Rare Camera Auction on October 30th, and is expected to fetch up to $100,000.
Here's a test comparing the 1080p HD video recording capabilities of the iPhone 4S and the Canon 5D Mark II. Vimeo user Robino Films shot the same scenes at the same time with both cameras using a special rig, and then synched the footage together. They also tried to match the exposure, shutter speed, frame rate, and picture style as much as possible.
Have an idea for a photo product and an entrepreneurial itch? PDN published an article this past week with three stories of people who successfully turned their ideas into products (and businesses). One of them is the story of Gary Fong and his Lightsphere: …
Google+ is becoming pretty popular among photographers as a way to share work and connect with others. If you've been thinking about jumping in but don't know where to begin, Scott Kelby and Co. made this helpful (and free) hour-long primer with tips on how to use the service effectively.
Photographer Zack Arias has written up a lengthy and insightful post detailing how he goes about updating and editing his portfolio: …
If you think about it, there are many parallels between Apple and Polaroid: both companies introduced innovative products that redefined markets in their time, both were founded by college dropouts, and both emphasized design and usability in their products. What you might not know is that it's not a coincidence. Christopher Bonanos wrote a fascinating article for the New York Times on how Steve Jobs idolized Polaroid founder Edwin Land and modeled his career after Land's: …
Here's a helpful 22-page guide by National Geographic that explains many of the basic concepts of photography, from lens types to composition. It's a free excerpt taken from the 400-page book "National Geographic Ultimate Field Guide to Photography", and is a great read for anyone just starting out.
Seeing a double rainbow is a relatively rare treat, but how about three or four rainbows? Scientists have only reported seeing triple rainbows five times over the past 250 years, but German photographer Michael Theusner was recently able to capture this first ever photograph of a fourth-order rainbow. Ordinary rainbows (first and second order) appear in the area of the sky opposite the sun (and aren't seen in his shot), but when higher order rainbows appear, they show up on the sunward side.
Phonar, the free and open undergraduate photo class we wrote about a couple months ago, is now underway. While the physical class can only be attended by students at Coventry University, the general public can take part through the assignments and recorded materials shared through the website. Here's the first assignment that's due on October 13th: …
