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?
If you've ever watched the evening news on television, you've probably seen photos and video captured by the powerful cameras on the station's helicopter. Here's something interesting: on a clear night, the long reach of the helicopter's camera can actually snap a clear photograph of the planet Saturn!
The photograph above was captured by Chopper 6, the news helicopter operated by Philadelphia's 6ABC Action News.
Miller's Professional Imaging is the largest professional photo lab in the United States, with facilities in Pittsburg, Kansas and Columbia, Missouri that offer a slew of printing services for hobbyists, semi-pro and professional photographers alike. In the above video, Chris Marquardt of Photography Tips from the Top Floor treats us to a behind the scenes look at the company's 40,000 square-foot facility in Columbia, MO.
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.
One of the big trends in the camera industry these days is the stuffing of "big camera" sensors into "small camera" bodies. After all, if you can get the same image quality from a camera that's smaller in size, why wouldn't you want to? (That's the idea, at least).
The quality and portability of cameras these days would be quite astonishing to photographers from back in the earlier days of photography -- the days in which you needed both hands and a strong back to work as a photojournalist. In this post, we've compiled photos from those "good ol' days" to see how far photography has come.
F-Stop Gear has decided to put together a miniseries of inspirational shorts about the pro photographers they sponsor. These f-stop pros are some of the best outdoor photographers in the business, and the company would like to give its fans some insight into the men and women behind the epic shots.
Do you ever have those times when you look up or around you and you see something like the scene above?
In the past, we've shared some interesting experiments that photographers and artists have done, imagining what our photos would look like if something were to be drastically different about out planet or solar system. Today, we're adding another one to that list.
At the end of May, a signed copy of one of the most iconic photos ever taken, and the camera that took it, will both go on sale at the WestLicht Photographica Auction. The photo is a signed print of the iconic V-J Day "Kiss in Times Square" photograph taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt, and the camera is the Leica IIIa rangefinder that he used right up until the day he died.
Most time-lapses involve long pans over vast landscapes with gorgeous star-filled skies in the background. And while we love those -- if you haven't seen the New Zealand time-lapse we shared recently you're missing out -- we don't see equally stunning urban time-lapses nearly as often. This is one of the exceptions to that rule.
The story of photographer Jacques Lowe and his iconic work chronicling the Kennedys and the era in US history known as Camelot is a tragic one. As President John F. Kennedy's official photographer for three years -- 2 before and 1 after he became president -- Lowe captured over 40,000 photos of the Kennedy family at work and play.
Because of the immense worth these photos held to Lowe and the general public, he took great care in choosing where he would store his negatives; he chose a fire-proof bank vault in the World Trade Center. On September 11th, 2001, his entire archive was lost.
Photographer Ole C. Salomonsen loves shooting the northern lights or, as he calls them, the polar spirits. And for his most recent film he went all out by putting together time-lapse photography of the aurora above cities, in front of starry backgrounds and above gorgeous fjords with a couple of mind-blowing video captures thrown in for good measure.
It's obvious that building a subway station would consist of digging a very large artificial cavern under the earth, but actually seeing one in progress is pretty incredibly. And thanks to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Flickr stream, we can.
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.
Here's a little photographic history lesson to get your Thursday morning started off right. Did you know that the woman many sources believe was the first female photographer was an English botanist by the name of Anna Atkins?
Atkins repurposed the cyanotype process (discovered by Sir John Herschel in 1842) from a way of making photocopies of notes and diagrams (i.e. blueprints) to a way of making photograms of plants.
According to a recent analysis of its 2012 wedding insurance claims, Travelers Insurance cites the photographer as the most common cause of wedding day mishaps. In its breakdown of the numbers, 24 percent of all wedding issues (the largest chunk) were vendor-related, and 58 percent of all the claims filed under that category involved photos or video.
Stop motion animation was already being used in the late 1890's as a way to make objects in films move by "magic," but full stop-motion animated films like the ones of today didn't come to be until around 1910. When they did, one of the great pioneers of the technique was Russian photographer and entomologist Wladyslaw Starewicz.
In 1906, etiologist and photographer Edward S. Curtis set out across the United States to draw, photograph and otherwise document the lives of Native Americans that hadn't yet been contacted by Western society.
Funded by J.P. Morgan, he would return 20 years later with over 40,000 photographs, which he used to illustrate his famous 20 volume series "The North American Indian." Only 222 complete sets were ever published (one of which sold last year for $1.44M at auction) and even though it has been criticized by some as misrepresenting the Native American culture at the time, its value as a documentary publication is enormous.
We've seen some strange photo projects in the past, but they're typically making a statement or serving some purpose. Haley Morris-Cafiero's photos of herself getting strange looks turned the tables on judging onlookers. Theron Humphrey's photos of his dog Maddie balancing on things across America allowed him to document his trip in an interesting way.
But photographer Motomachi's daily photos of his local vending machine serve no real purpose -- in fact, he felt the need to apologize by titling the project/blog: "I take a picture of the vending machine every day (or so). I’m very sorry."
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.
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.
Project Gutenberg is a digital library volunteer effort that takes old public domain and converts them into freely available eBooks for the benefit of the general public. Founded back in 1971, the library now has over 42,000 items in its collection.
Among the books in its collection are a number of old books on the subject of photography. One such book is the 1881 title, The Art and Practice of Silver Printing by Capt. Abney and H. P. Robinson (shown above).
This time-lapse, shot by photographer Bevan Percival on New Zealand's North Island, has to be one of the most beautiful we've ever shared. Shot over the course of six months using a Canon 5D Mark II, various lenses, and a Dynamic Perception 6' Stage Zero motorized dolly, it will keep your eyes glued to the screen all five minutes and fifty-nine seconds.
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.
Action sports photographer Alexandre Socci along with kayakers Pedro Oliva, Ben Stookesberry and Chris Korbulic recently took a trip to Hawaii. But where most of us would spend our time on the beach or in a national park, they decided to brave the waters surrounding Kilauea, an active volcano on the southeast slope of Mauna Loa.
Edith Widder is one of the three scientists that managed to capture the first high-resolution video footage of an actual giant squid. And about a month ago, her TED talk describing how she and her team did it (embedded above) was finally posted online.
Almost 2 stories tall, you would think that something that massive would have already been photographed or video taped. But it was Widder's common-sense approach that would yield the groundbreaking footage. So, how did scientists manage to finally catch a giant squid on camera? One word: quietly.
In an article on TechHive about the new HTC One, HTC's director of special projects Symon Whitehorn uses an analogy that we've never heard before. In a bid to explain why the 4 million ultrapixels on the HTC One's sensor are better than 8 million regular pixels on the HTC One X's, he likened pixels to buckets, and photons to rain.
The term "alchemy" typically evokes images of the transformation of base metals to gold, but for their short film by the same name, Eviosa Studios was trying to capture the kinds of transformations that are happening around us each and every day. And what better way to capture transformation than by shooting a time lapse.
Those interested in starting or adding to an expensive collection of cameras may want to head over to eBay very soon. That's because movie star Sylvester Stallone, or more accurately his brother Frank Stallone, is in the process of selling the Leica M9 used in the movie The Expendables 2.
Industrial and interaction designer Ruben van der Vleuten always wondered what happens to a package when you sent it in the mail. From A to B is his way of answering that question; a short film shot with a home-made hidden camera that he attached to the inside of a box and then shipped.
One of the benefits of the digital age is widespread access to archives that might otherwise never be seen by more than a few people. A good example is The New York Department of Records' database of over 870,000 photos of NYC, and a new case in point is PhotosNormandie.
Have you ever wanted to get pics of cute sea lion or seal pups up close? Well, your best bet may be to grab your kayak or surf board and paddle out -- camera in hand. Scuba diver Rick Coleman discovered this on a recent dive trip off the coast of Southern California.
In the latest installment of InsuranceQuotes’ “Hidden Costs Video Series,” the insurance info …
Taking a cue from the music industry and those incessant Now That's What I Call Music! albums, NASA has released its own "best-of" compilation of the most compelling imagery its satellites collected this past year. A mixture of true color, computer models, visualizations, and time-lapses from the ISS, the video gives us yet another stunning view of our little blue planet.
The folks at 522 Productions have been slowly putting out videos that capture the essence of what inspires each of them. The charge was led a few weeks ago by 522's art director Chris Jurchak, but it was editor Eli Sinkus' What Inspires You? video, uploaded on April 1st, that caught our eyes and ears.
His video tells the tale of his love affair with photography and Henri Cartier-Bresson's famous "Decisive Moment" through the magic of (mostly) black and white film. A fictional tale of a boy discovering the world through photography, the entire video is then "narrated" by an interview Cartier-Bresson gave Cornell Capa in 1973.
The above video is photographer Jonathan DeNicholas' impressive entry for the 30 Day Filming Project contest put together by Sue Bryce and announced at creativeLIVE. The contest asked entrants to submit a 2 minute video in which you captured something that made you smile every day for a month, and DeNicholas entry was one of the 6 winners (of over 100 submitted) that were then showcased on You Can't Be Serious.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but laziness is definitely its father. Case in point, here's an interesting tidbit of imaging history: the first webcam ever was actually invented by lazy students at Cambridge University who didn't want to waste a trip to the nearby coffee pot if it was going to be empty when they got there.
An interesting video has been going viral within the photographic community today (with a little help from Reddit). The video shows photographer Andre Bailey of Envy Me Images ranting about the state of the consumer DSLR market -- specifically lamenting over and over that "there's [sic] too many cameras on the market."
April Fools' Day: the beautiful (or painful) day of the year on which the Internet is teeming with fabricated stories designed to fool and humor. We used to participate in the jokes and cover the silliness, but last year we started doing a single roundup post instead to keep you up to speed on April Fools' Day humor in the world of photography.
Here's a bit of silly humor as we're winding down the workweek: if you're a photography enthusiast who has fond memories of playing Pokemon Snap during the days of the Nintendo 64, then you might enjoy this humorous fake trailer by Gritty Reboots, which takes popular movies, TV shows, video games and turns them into cinematic trailers.
This one imagines what a live-action Pokemon Snap movie would be like.
To promote the Brooklyn Brewery Mash, filmmakers Landon Van Soest and Paul Trillo put together the impressive stop motion creation you see above. The video, which was created by putting together 3,000 separate stills, takes viewers on a tour of Brooklyn by bike messenger (among other things) showing off some of the borough's highlights.
For a while now we've been sharing photos beamed home by NASA's rovers on Mars. From panoramas by the old timer Opportunity to selfies by the new kid Curiosity, we're starting to see more and more of the Red Planet many millions of miles away. Andrew Bodrov, however, has taken it to the next level.
In October of 1967, at the age of 24, Charlie Haughey received a draft notice from the US Army notifying him that he would be spending a tour of duty in Vietnam as a rifleman. A couple of months after he arrived, his commanding officer put a camera in his hands and asked him to start taking pictures for Army and US newspapers. His only instructions: "You are not a combat photographer. This is a morale operation ... "
Haughey brought back nearly 2,000 negatives from Vietnam, shot between March 1968 and May 1969, none of which ever saw the light of day until very recently.
100 million users are uploading 40 million photographs on a daily basis to Instagram. Of these images, 43% of them dont have any retro filters applied to them. That leaves 22.8 million filtered photos hitting the social network every 24 hours.
Marketing firm Marketo recently poked around with some of Instagram's statistics, and then decided to assign personality profiles to some of the service's most popular filters. It's like Instagram meets Chinese Zodiac.