What was it like to browse Flickr back in 1989? We don’t know, because Flickr didn’t exist then. However, thanks to a clever setup from Flickr user Jeff Jackson, we get a little glimpse at what it would be like.
At the young age of six-months-old, Hessy Taft became the poster-child for the Nazis. Chosen as the image most resembling the ideal Aryan baby, the Nazis plastered it across propaganda. What the Nazis didn’t know is that this child was Jewish.
If you're worried that spending hours upon hours staring at a computer post-processing thousands of photos will damage your eyeballs, rest assured: it won't. And the video above by the folks at DNews explains why that is.
What happens when you pit Nikon's $3,000 D800E up against a $30,000 Hasselblad H5D? Well, photographer Benjamin Von Wong -- whose work we've featured quite a bit here on PetaPixel -- got to do just that in a friendly comparison.
Privacy is a big concern these days, what with the NSA looking over both your shoulders, reading your emails and chiming in on your cell phone conversations. And while you might not be able to "fight the man" as it were, you can protect your privacy a bit by learning how to remove sensitive location information from the photos you post online.
Anamorphosis is a technique you've probably seen used many times, even if you never knew what it was called. It's the projection technique that sidewalk artists use to make it seem like their drawings are three-dimensional when viewed from a specific angle.
Attention amateur concert photographers: are you really being as annoying and disruptive as you could be? Because an attendee at a Major League Baseball game may have just set a new high/low at a recent Tampa Bay Rays home game.
If you have some time today, check out this video series by digital filmmaker and photographer Rich Ferguson, created for the Edinburgh Libraries in the capital of Scotland. It's a brief tour through the collection of early Victorian photography held by the libraries.
Researchers at a California company specializing in high-speed imaging equipment have developed a camera add-on capable of freezing objects traveling at up to 7,500 miles per hour -- that's almost 10 times the speed of sound.
The photographer who captured images of the Chicago Bears doing the "Super Bowl Shuffle" is suing the Chicago Tribune and Fox Sports for allegedly misappropriating the images.
You may never take local birds and weeds for granted again after spending some time with Meet Your Neighbors, a photo project aimed at documenting the huge variety of the biosphere one species at a time.
PetaPixel turns four years old today. As the blog continues to grow at a healthy clip, we're slowly looking to expand our team of writers. Just last week we decided to open up applications to anyone interested in working for PetaPixel as a blogger. We received hundreds of applications that came in at a rate of about one per minute.
By now we should be used to photo apps coming from all corners of the industry -- even Snoop Lion has released a photo sharing app -- but it was still a bit of a surprise to hear that Manfrotto had released a photo taking, editing and sharing app of its own.
For the first time since PetaPixel launched back in 2009, we're hiring! Team PetaPixel is looking for rockstar bloggers who would like their writing to be read by nearly 3 million photography enthusiasts every month.
Statistics show that 70% of people who are abused as children will grow up into adults who will in turn abuse children. A recent awareness ad campaign by Mexican organization Save the Children shared this fact in single photographs that are both creative and difficult to stomach.
Typical photography exists around the visible spectrum (think of the rainbow), but cameras are also able to pick up other wavelengths of radiation. Ultraviolet radiation, as the name suggests, comes after the violet section of the visible spectrum so is not visible to our eyes. However, some animals (birds, for example) are able to see UV.
Apparently GoPro isn't very fond of its cameras being compared to rival action cameras. The action camera pioneer has sent DigitalRev a DMCA takedown notice after the latter published an article last month comparing GoPro Hero 3 with the Sony HDR-AS15.
We now take a break from our regularly scheduled programming to direct your attention to an interesting study that was published yesterday by Pingdom. The website tracking company decided to analyze the demographics of the world's top 100 blogs (according to Technorati), sorting them by reader age and gender. It's findings regarding PetaPixel caught our eye.
In 2002, photographer Greg Heisler was asked to photograph former PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. Now, eleven years later, we get to hear the story behind that photo.
Happy New Year to all our of our awesome readers! As we move into this new year of photo blogging, we'll take a moment to look back at how this blog has grown over the past year.
Wowzers. Time flies! As we come to the end of another year of blogging about the wonderful world of photography, here's a roundup of the top 10 most popular posts of the past 12 months. It's a list of advice, inspiration, creativity, and interesting news stories.
Earlier today, Instagram founder and CEO Kevin Systrom took to the stage at the Le Web conference in Paris to talk about where his service is headed. He revealed that Instagram is planning to stay independent of Facebook for the foreseeable future and that the service is slowly cutting ties with its rival, Twitter.
With Christmas and the holiday season just around the corner, here's our annual roundup of the latest, greatest, and phototastic-ist gift ideas. The items are listed by price, so there should be something to fit every budget.
Back in May, a 1923 Leica O-Series camera became the most expensive camera on the planet after being sold for roughly $2.79 million at a WestLicht auction. That camera was a prototype camera, and just one of 25 made (only 12 of them exist today). If you're wondering what the most expensive non-prototype camera is, look no further than the latest WestLicht auction that was held earlier today. The Leica M3D seen above fetched a staggering €1.68 million, or roughly $2.18 million, becoming "the …
You've probably seen macro photographs of everything from bugs to blooms, but have you seen any of ocean waves? That's the niche that Australian photographer Deb Morris has carved out for herself, and it's working out quite nicely.
If you're wondering why PetaPixel's coverage of Photokina 2012 -- the largest photo trade show in the world -- has been so slow, here's the explanation: it isn't intentional. Getting access to the Internet over here hasn't been as easy as I would have hoped -- the Wi-Fi at the hotel I'm at has been down for two days (I hear the same is true for other hotels as well), and there isn't free public Wi-Fi at Photokina.
I'm going to be in Cologne, Germany next week, covering the latest and greatest photo announcements at Photokina 2012. In addition to posts -- and possibly live blogs -- on this website, I'll also be sharing photographs of the products, parties, and press events through our relatively new Instagram account: @petapixel. The photo steam may also be added to the sidebar of this blog. Follow along for the inside scoop!
Earlier this month we wrote about a new Keanu Reeves-produced movie titled Side by Side, a documentary about the major shift going on in Hollywood away from film and toward digital. In addition to the interesting subject matter and star studded list of interviewees, here's another thing that makes the movie awesome: PetaPixel makes a cameo.
NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Mars this morning with much fanfare here on Earth. The photo above is one of the first photographs snapped by the rover and beamed back to Earth. Captured through a fisheye wide-angle lens, the landscape photo hows a gravel field in the foreground and the rim of the Gale Crater (the rover's new home) in the distance.
When people think of models they typically think of people like Natasha Poly. Even with her "missing arm" on this month's Vogue Russia, she still fits the stereotype: stunning, skinny and tall. But those aren't the kinds of models UGLY MODELS Modeling Agency is interested in. No, according to the agency's website, UGLY MODELS prefers "a look with true character."
There's a crazy storm hovering over New York City, and a few hours ago ex-NFL player Dhani Jones shot this epic Instagram photograph of it from 10,000 on a Delta airlines flight. It's crazy how the downpour is so concentrated that it looks like a giant tornado tearing through the city.
Back in 2010, we shared a video showing Canon's 1200mm lens -- a giant piece of glass that has been called "The Mother of All Telephotos". If you thought that focal length was long, check out Nikon's 1200-1700mm f/5.6-8P lens. Nikon launched a prototype of the lens in 1990 for newspaper photographers covering baseball in Japan. The sample photos above show the lens' ridiculous reach. A standard 50mm FoV can be seen on the left, while the right photo shows what the same scene looks like at …
In this tutorial I will share how I shoot "liquid flow" photos -- smoke-like abstracts done by dropping cream colored with food dye into a small tank of water, then rotated 180 degrees.
The business world let out a collective gasp when it was announced back in April that Facebook had agreed to acquire Instagram for a whopping $1 billion. Eric Savitz of Forbes points out that photo publishing company Shutterfly -- which has the same market valuation as Instagram -- may actually be a smarter buy: …
Falling somewhere in the "really cool idea" category, this fully-automatic, working photo booth is made entirely out of cardboard. Everything from the outside to the gears, cogs and belts that make up the innards is all cardboard and 100% automatic. To use the machine all you have to do is insert your cardboard token and then sit perfectly still while the box exposes, develops and fixes a silver-gelatin photograph of you and yours.
Massive wildfires in the Rockies have destroyed hundreds of homes and scorched tens of thousands of acres over the past week. To get an idea of how massive these fires are, check out this photograph captured by a NASA satellite.
Watch out, Flickr -- Instagram is coming for you. The popular photo sharing app has quietly updated its website to include commenting and liking on individual photo pages. Previously the website was "read only", and any interaction with the social network was limited to its mobile interface. The new website, which also features larger images and a slick blue theme, suggests that the company may soon be breathing down Flickr's neck by expanding beyond mobile. However, it still noticeably lacks …
To celebrate Google+'s one year anniversary, photographer Alex Koloskov and retoucher Genia Larionova teamed up on a photo project to recreate the Google logo using photographs of paint. They tossed paint matching the colors of each letter into the air multiple times and picked out the best shapes, which were then combined in Photoshop.
It looks like Nokia wasted no time putting the folks at Scalado to work for them. As we reported a week ago, Nokia is acquiring Scalado's developers, technologies and IP portfolio, and we're already seeing Scalado's well-known "rewind" technology make its way into Nokia's new Camera Extras app.
We've featured more ambitious projects before -- you may remember Cesar Kuriyama's video which consisted of 1 second of footage per day for an entire year -- but YouTube user grapefrugten's take on documenting life in short snippets involves a slightly different approach. He releases a monthly video diary, entitled 48 frames, which consists of 2 seconds of video per day (24fps X 2sec = 48 frames).
Starting off Sunday on a slow motion note, this is just a downright cool 1000fps video of skateboarders doing some pretty crazy flat ground tricks (tricks so crazy many of them don't even have established names). The video was shot using a Redlake N3 high speed camera, and the footage... well that speaks for itself.
PetaPixel is now a three-year-old blog. Our readership has continued to grow at a healthy rate over the past year, and recently we even added our first full time writer, DL Cade (if you follow this blog regularly then you've already seen plenty of his work). We've had a blast bringing you all the most interesting tidbits from the world of photography on a daily basis.
The Nero Multi Trigger is a nifty camera triggering device that can make your DSLR and external flash unit respond automatically to sight, sound, and motion. It has built in optical, audio, and laser sensors, allowing you to shoot everything from lightning flashes to balloon pops. There's also an intervalometer for time-lapse photography. The device mounts to your DSLR's hotshoe and is powered by a pair of AAA batteries. They cost $200 each and are available for both Nikon and Canon DSLRs from …
Lytro's groundbreaking light field camera is finally landing in the hands of customers, and to give people a better idea of how the camera works, the New York Times has published an interesting diagram that shows what makes the camera tick. Here's what DPreview has to say about the camera: …
Here's a great diagram by Mobot that shows how the 41-megapixel sensor inside Nokia's new 808 PureView phone stacks up against other popular sensor sizes. It's pretty clear that they didn't just milk a small sensor for more megapixels as a simply marketing ploy, but instead came up with a sensor that's significantly larger than those found in other smartphones. Engadget also has a photo showing a comparison of sensor sizes, while Digital Trends has published an article on five reasons why the …
Hope you guys had a good holiday season. Welcome to 2012! As is our tradition, here's our annual "state of the blog" post, in which we'll briefly share on how this blog grew in the past year and where it is now.
As 2011 comes to an end, here’s a look back at 10 of our most popular articles from the past year: …
Before We Begin is a project by photographer Christopher Jonassen (whose frying pan photos we featured here) that consists of diptychs showing clouds and cloud watchers. The images capture peaceful "moments of reflection between thought and action."
After damaging the pellicle mirror in his Sony A55 with cleaning fluid, a guy named Dario decided to look for a makeshift replacement while waiting for a real replacement mirror to arrive. He then discovered that food wrap (AKA Saran wrap) works nearly as well as a real pellicle mirror. The only downsides are occasionally degraded autofocus and a soft-focus effect when facing bright lights.
Christmas is almost upon us, and for the second straight year PetaPixel's gift guide comes incredibly late. Think of it as a general guide to nifty photo-related gifts that have emerged over the past year rather than a Christmas gift guide -- after all, gifts are great to receive year-round, right?
