This post could also be titled "How Not to Photograph Endangered Male Animals." The video above was uploaded to the Web by the BBC back in 2009 and shows photographer and zoologist Mark Carwardine finding and photographing a rare parrot in a New Zealand forest. Unfortunately for Carwardine -- and hilariously for the rest of us -- he gets closer to the bird than he was planning to.
One of the most entertaining events that photographers get to enjoy each year is the annual Gulf Photo Plus shootout, in which 3 photographers each get 20 minutes to take a photo from concept to completion. In 2012, the shootout pinned David Hobby, Martin Prihoda, and Greg Heisler against each other. This year, John Keatley, Lindsay Adler and Zack Arias are the victims participants, and one of last year's contestants is actually the subject.
Here's a pro tip: if you ever find yourself with a strong desire to photograph crocodiles in their natural habitat, don't do it like the photographer in the video above (warning: it contains a bit of strong language).
Here's something that might give you a chuckle: it's the invisible friend prank. The video above shows magician Rahat Hussein and prankster Jack Vale teaming up to pull this prank on unsuspecting passersby in Hollywood.
French photographer Philippe Echaroux is known, among other things, as a great portrait photographer. You might remember his work taking studio quality "celebrity" portraits of random strangers on the street.
For his most recent portraiture project, however, he eschewed even the limited studio gear he brought out on the street with him, and issued himself a challenge: take a high-quality, professional portrait, using nothing more than an iPhone and a €10 lighting budget.
The latest panorama sent down by NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover is unique in more ways than one. Not only is it a panorama taken on another planet (still blows our minds), it's also been subjected to some post production. The photo -- a piece of which is seen above -- has actually had its white balance modified by NASA to make it look more like it was taken on Earth.
Here's a lighthearted dose of humor to get you through the workday: Thumbs & Ammo is a humorous new photo blog with a tagline that says, "Real tough guys don't need guns, they just need a positive, can-do attitude." Each image in the ongoing blog is a movie still or poster from a famous flick, with the action heroes' guns replaced with thumbs-ups.
The rise of a plethora of fashion blogs has led, almost inevitably, to the rise of a style of fashion photography known as "street style." The all-access blogging medium gave photography enthusiasts who admired what legends like Bill Cunningham do a way to break into the industry and share both their opinions and pictures.
Over the past several years, however, the practice has exploded -- much to the chagrin of big fashion editors and journalists who now have to deal with massive crowds of photogs outside of major fashion shows. GARAGE Magazine's Take My Picture is a short documentary that explores this explosion, and tries to offer both sides of the story.
Combining the capabilities of a high-speed camera with the basic idea that "there are enough [magical moments] happening every moment of any given day," New York artist James Nares is currently captivating audiences at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his mesmerizing video "Street."
While messing around with the features of his Nikon V1, EOSHD forum user Javier Sobremazas discovered something pretty awesome about the $220 camera: it can shoot 4k RAW ... sort of. The sort of plays in for two reasons. Firstly, it can only shoot 4K for one second at a time; and secondly, it's actually an extension of the camera's burst mode.
Here’s a fun contraption that could make breakfast that much more photographic each morning.
"There's the kind of lighting you do because you want it to look like ambient light. And there's the kind of lighting you do just because you think it looks cool. This was [the latter]." That's how Greg Heisler describes this photograph he took of now-retired NBA star Alonzo Mourning for ESPN magazine.
Fine art and portrait photographer Edouard Janssens -- the man behind the 1 to 100 years project we featured some time ago -- recently decided that he wanted to begin using large-format instant film to shoot an art series of "eerie" portraits. In order to do this, he had to painstakingly acquired several pieces of expensive gear, and during this search he stumbled on one very special find: a box of 8x10 Polaroid instant film that had expired in October of 1978.
Yesterday, we shared an interview with a young Annie Leibovitz, in which she discussed some of her most iconic photos. For today's blast from the past, we have this short interview with Greg Heisler, in which a very young version of the Heisler we know and love tells the story behind his photographs of the American Ballet Theatre.
In game theory, a zero-sum game is one in which one side's gain is exactly balanced out by the other side's loss. Regarding photography, the term works well to describe one problem with the ever-more-popular art of motion image photography, or pulling stills from very high-definition video. And in the video above, The Slanted Lens makes this point very well by testing the concept in a photo shoot using Canon's 1D C.
Invented in the early 1970's by cameraman Garrett Brown, the Steadicam has become a staple in the world of motion pictures. But given how frequently it's used, most of us have lost appreciation for the true impact the camera stabilizer has made.
Knowing this (and wishing to change it) the people over at Refocused Media have put together the above compilation using famous clips from almost 50 different films -- clips that may have never been attempted if it wasn't for the Steadicam.
Annie Leibovitz is one of the most iconic portrait photographers of our time, …
Typically, the folks over at DigitalRev are the ones doling out the challenges. Be it a Buzz Lightyear camera or a sub-par tilt-shift replacement, they like to put the pros through their paces.
Since we've been talking about taking pictures of outer space, it only seems right that we share an incredible picture taken from outer space. This photo, taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station, shows the incredible vantage point they were privy to in 2009 when they witnessed an eruption of the highly active Sarychev Volcano.
In an effort to educate the general public on the age-old art of the camera obscura, New York artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder have set up a 10-foot by 10-foot walk-in version in the city's Madison Square Park.
Surrounded by the Flatiron District, the installation offers an inverted look at the neighborhood, as well as the opportunity to learn a little bit about photography's roots.
In their most recent "Pro Photographer, Cheap Camera" challenge, DigitalRev managed to get world-renowned, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Vincent Laforet to participate. Known best, perhaps, for his tilt-shift work, Laforet was asked to trade in his 1D X and 45mm tilt-shift lens for a Canon A2e and Lensbaby composer.
The Harlem Shake meme has taken over the Internet over the past few weeks, and even the world of photography has been invaded. Here's a small roundup of Harlem Shake videos put out by photography and camera enthusiasts.
"How's the image quality on the TriPod 5?" That's a question you would perhaps be hearing these days if certain decisions had been made differently years ago over in Apple HQ. When the Cupertino-based company was brainstorming names for the smartphone that would eventually be called the "iPhone," one of the names that was being considered was "TriPod."
Artist, swimmer and former Olympian Casey Legler is in the process of adding another line to her resume: male model. As a model for Ford Models, Legler is making headlines over the fact that she models only men's clothing for the agency. In fact, to her knowledge, she is the first woman to ever sign an exclusively-male modeling contract.
There are a few reason why some of us fight over who gets the window seat on airplanes, and the view that Tim Sessler captured in his mesmerizing short film "Drift" tops that list. While on a flight from San Francisco to Philadelphia (with a layover in Salt Lake City) Sessler pulled out his 5D MarK III and shot some of the stunning vistas outside his airplane window.
Here’s a wonderfully soothing look at how the ink that brings many of our photos from digital to physical …
While in an antique shop looking for old Nikon lenses, the folks over at …
Did you know that the White House was completely gutted and rebuilt on the inside between 1949 and 1952? After decades of poor maintenance, the building was in danger of collapsing in 1948, which forced President Harry Truman to move out and commission a complete gutting and rebuilding of the building's insides.
The U.S. National Archives has been publishing photographs showing the gutted White House to its Flickr photostream.
Memphis, Tennessee-based photographer and X-ray technician Blake Billings has a set of images showing what various cameras look like when photographed with an X-ray machine. What you see above is a Nikon D60 DSLR.
Last week we featured some Sears catalog ads for camera kits from back in 1900, and shared …
When the Mars Rover Opportunity was nearing its 9th year in the Martian sun, we shared a beautiful panoramic landscape shot of the red planet taken by the aging rover. It makes sense then that Curiosity would eventually send down a panorama of its own. But just like you would expect from a younger generation of rover, it couldn't help but make the pano a selfie.
Here's a short but fascinating glimpse into the world of CGI, and how photography was used to help digitally build New York from the ground up for The Avengers movie. As it turns out, creating a digital world into which you can insert these actors takes, not only an insane amount of CGI and attention to detail, but a whole lot of photos to lay the groundwork.
The Lancaster Watch Camera and its little sister, the ladies version, offer some of the earliest proof that spys are, indeed, among us. Ok, maybe not that, but they are a pretty neat piece of 1890's camera engineering.
Smiling naturally in photos is a challenge for many people. Even if you avoid the all-too-common “say cheese” mistake, …
If you often find yourself dreaming of photography while eating pastries, or (more likely) visa versa, then this is the camera for you. In all seriousness though, here's a fun little novelty product that made its way across our desk, which combines a 3MP camera and a fattening favorite, the doughnut.
The majority of in-camera editing and enhancing, especially on the mobile front, is done via software. Software that, according to MIT's Rahul Rithe, "consume[s] substantial power, take[s] a considerable amount of time to run, and require[s] a fair amount of knowledge on the part of the user."
In order to bypass this problem, Rithe and his team of researchers at MIT have developed a new imaging chip that can act as a photographic "jack of all trades" when it comes to taking your smartphone photos to the next level.
The BT Tower panorama, created by stitching together 48,640 images taken with 7 Canon EOS 7Ds, has officially broken the record for the world's largest panoramic photo. It was taken from atop the BT Tower in London, and you can see a tiny version of it at the top, but the real thing offers a massive, browsable 360-degree view of London in extreme detail.
You may or may not know this, but Google Maps offers a Business Photos feature through which the search giant allows "Google trusted photographers" to provide street view tours of business establishments. That way, you can browse the local camera shop's selection before you ever actually go in.
But a small ski shop in France made headlines a couple of weeks ago by putting the feature to hilariously creative use. The store is Krakatoa in southern France, and when you tour their establishment, you'll find some very interesting things are going on in that store.
Here's a cool time-lapse (or rather, "hyperlapse) that involved quite a bit in way of post-production to get it to work with the background music as well as it does. It was shot over 14-days within a 3-month period, and offers an awesome time-lapse look at the amazing city of Vienna.
From hitchhiking across Africa with a borrowed camera, to photographing some of the world's hardest to reach places from the air for National Geographic, expedition photographer George Steinmetz has quite a story to tell. And in this video, he's kind enough to share the details.
When people test cameras and lenses for resolution, they commonly use special resolution test charts that are filled with black bars of varying lengths and thicknesses. They're kind of like eye charts, except for cameras instead of eyeballs, and with lines instead of letters.
Well, did you know that in dozens of locations around the United States, there are gigantic resolution test charts on the ground?
Los Angeles-based musician Paz Dylan recently pulled a pretty funny prank on the Grammy Museum in LA. He made a series of informational wall display pieces featuring strange descriptions and photographs of himself eating tacos, and then hung them up on the walls of the museum next to the real pieces. That's pretty clever, but get this: no one noticed, and the pieces stayed up for a month.
The photograph above is a piece he made for the "Wall of Fame."
If you've been closely following the story of Instagram and its role in the world of casual photography, you might enjoy this humorous short film by photographer Grant McGuire. It's titled "Filter My Life."
Here's another curious photography-related novelty item for those of you looking to fill your house with them (i.e. those of you who purchased the lens shaped vacuum cleaner and lens-shaped humidifier that we featured recently): it's a lens shaped pepper mill.
We've seen photography of the Moon, and photography taken on the Moon; people have even left photography gear up there. But this is the first we've heard of a photo from Earth, not only making it to the Moon, but staying there.
Fortunately, it was left there on purpose (Can you imagine? "Uhhh ... John ... we need to turn around, I forgot something..."), and the story behind the picture goes something like this.
Photographers are usually trying to get closer to their subjects, be that in the wild or on the street. The photographers of MUMUȘ Photo Hub in Bucharest, Romania, however, decided to take a step back ... actually quite a few steps back.
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is a bit of a space celebrity. Some of his hobbies include tweeting back and forth with William Shatner, posting recordings from space on SoundCloud, and even beaming down the occasional video of himself playing the guitar.
It's safe to say that paparazzi aren't exactly adored in most photography circles. Given the comments we typically get on most paparazzi stories, you could say they're loathed. But that doesn't mean they don't fascinate us all the same.
So if you've ever wondered what's inside a paparazzo's photography bag (or bags), today's your lucky day. In this video, paparazzo Henry Flores took the time to show Photoinduced what you'll find in his.
Here's an interesting bit of photography/movie trivia that surfaced recently. Remember the infamous HAL 9000? HAL 9000 was the AI villain from Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey series, and the main bad guy in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
When tasked with making the music video for the song HAVOC by While You Slept, Frokost films decided to get a little creative. In addition to shooting the whole thing in slow motion, they managed to shoot the entire music video using just one 18-second continuous shot.