News

The golden ratio is used by nature, photographers, and now... Twitter! Did you notice it in the new Twitter design?

Photokina 2010 came and went without any bombshell EVIL announcements by Canon or Nikon, but murmurs about impending cameras …

Charges have been dropped against Anthony Graber, a motorcyclist who filmed a plainclothes Maryland State Trooper during a traffic stop and uploaded the video to YouTube. According to the Baltimore Sun,

Viral marketing agency The Viral Factory is helping Samsung with an experiment in which they're planning to drop 100 SD cards attached to paper airplanes from 21 miles above the Earth in the stratosphere. Instructions will be printed on the paper airplane informing anyone who finds one of the experiment and what they can do to participate. Finders are encouraged to shoot with the cards and then upload anything taken to the Project Space Planes website.

The claim that the planes will "carry the messages across the world" is a bit farfetched, but supposedly the planes could potentially travel hundreds of miles depending on the wind conditions. The experiment is planned for mid-October.

Here's a glimpse into what viewing photographs might be like for future generations: Brother Industries is working on a special pair of glasses called the AirScouter that can project images directly into your retina, making you see a 16-inch display that doesn't actually exist floating 3 feet in front of your face.

Meet the 20x24 Polaroid Land Camera, a mythical beast in the world of large format photography. Polaroid's founder Edwin Land created only seven of these 235-pound cameras over thirty years ago, and only six exist today. Two of them are on display at Harvard and MIT, and only four are in use commercially. According to Forbes, buying prints created with this beast cost $3,500 a piece, while renting the thing for a day costs $1,750 and $200 for each shot. Back in June, an Andy Warhol photo shot with the camera sold for a quarter of a million bucks.

"Teenage Paparazzo” is a documentary film that will debut on HBO on September 27. It's about the life of Austin Visschedyk, a 14-year-old paparazzi photographer who chases celebrities for 17 hours a day, earning $500 to $1000 for each photograph sold. Hopefully Visschedyk isn't like the paparazzi in the Kate Mos LAX video we posted a while ago (though he probably is).

Lensbaby unveiled a new accessory at Photokina called the Tilt Transformer, which allows you to use Nikon mount lenses on EVIL camera bodies as an instant tilt-shift lens with twice the tilt of normal TS lenses. It's currently available for Micro Four Thirds bodies, but will be available for Sony NEX cameras as well starting on October 28, 2010. The Tilt Transformer comes with the Lensbaby Composer in a $350 package, or separately for $250.

When American photographer Alex Soth arrived in the UK earlier this year to work on a commission for the city of Brighton's photo biennial, he was told by the customs officer at the airport that he couldn't do his photography work without a work visa, and that getting caught might result in two years of jail time.

Instead of going ahead with the project anyway or calling it off, Soth decided to hand his camera over to his 7-year-old daughter Carmen. The duo strolled around Brighton for a few hours each day, with Alex directing many of Carmen's photographs while Carmen looked to check off entries on the shooting list she made (shown above).

In the future, focusing on the wrong subject when taking a picture might be a thing of the past. At Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference this year Adobe gave a demonstration of how plenoptic lenses can be used to allow focus to be arbitrarily chosen after the image is captured during post-processing. These are microlens arrays containing hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands (Stanford researchers used a camera with 90,000 lenses) of tiny lenses that record much more information about a scene than traditional single lenses.

Barcodes can be found everywhere, but using existing barcode systems with ordinary cameras require that the barodes be printed large or that the camera be placed close to the code. MIT's Bokode project is a new system that magically stuffs barcodes into bokeh, allowing ordinary cameras to be used as barcode readers from a distance. The codes are contained in little points of light that only turn into codes when viewed through an out-of-focus camera lens. You've probably seen how little bright points of light grow into larger and fainter points of light when you defocus.

Leica may have teamed up with the Audi design team for the limited edition Titanium M9 they …

Earlier this year when Hasselblad announced the H4D-40, we found it interesting that Hasselblad claimed to be …

Leica's announcements at Photokina have been pretty dull so far compared to some of the other cameras that have been unveiled. Aside from announcing a Panasonic LX5 rebranded as a Leica D-LUX 5 and a Panasonic FZ100 rebranded as a Leica V-Lux 2, they've also announcement a "Titanium" version of the M9 digital rangefinder of which only 500 pieces will be made.

Apparently Sigma worked so hard on ensuring image and build quality on its new flagship SD1 DSLR that they …

Panasonic announced the Lumix GH2 today at Photokina. Here's the low down: the GH2 is a 16.05 megapixel Micro Four Thirds EVIL camera with an ISO range of 160 to 12800, 23 autofocus points, face detection, a 3-inch swiveling LCD screen, and HD video recording at 1080p (60i/24p). You can also use the 3D lens Panasonic announced recently to capture 3D photos with this camera. This camera will ship by the end of this year at a price of $900 for the body only.

The retro FinePix X100 made a huge splash when it was announced a couple days ago, and …

Future generations of photographers may one day look back and wonder why we often blinded each other with painfully bright flashes of light for the sake of proper exposure.

NYU researchers Dilip Krishnan and Rob Fergus are working on a dark flash that eliminates the "dazzle" effect of regular flashes in a low-light room. They've created this camera rig that combines common infrared photography techniques with an ultraviolet flash that produces a dim purple glow instead.

The team placed an infrared filter on the lens of the Fujifilm S5 Pro, which is has a modified CCD sensor that specializes in IR and UV photography. To supplement existing UV light, the team created a modified filter on an external flash to emit only UV and IR wavelengths.

Just unveiled at Photokina, Casio’s new EXILIM EX-H20G point-and-shoot is a pretty ordinary 14.1 megapixel HD video-capable camera with …

Pentax has announced its new K-5 DSLR camera as Photokina is getting underway in Cologne, Germany. The new 16.2 megapixel CMOS sensor camera has nice but pretty standard specs and features: 11 autofocus points, an HDR mode, 7fps burst shooting, a 3-inch LCD screen, an ISO range of 100 to 12800 (expandable to 80 to 51200 via custom functions), 100% viewfinder coverage, 1080p video recording at 25fps, and a magnesium alloy body. The K-5 will be available starting in mid-October at around £1200 (~$1875) with a kit lens.

Wow... Fujifilm just unveiled a new EVIL compact camera it's going to be showing off at Photokina, and it look amazing. The camera is styled like a film rangefinder camera, with a leathery covering surrounding the body and a magnesium alloy top and base plate. Inside the camera is a 12.3 megapixel APS-C sensor that has an ISO range of 200 to 6400 and captures 720p video or stills at 5fps. There's a 2.8 inch LCD on the back, and a new and innovative hybrid viewfinder that can toggle between electronic and optical modes. The lens is a fixed prime 23mm f/2 Fujinon.

The above photo by Aaron Yeo, titled “ …

One of the big features touted by Samsung in the unveiling of the …

The top photo was published by Al-Ahram, Egypt’s second-oldest and most widely circulated …

The above photographs were anonymously emailed to Nikon Rumors recently, and appear to show Nikon presenting some sort of upcoming "Q" camera. The fact that Nikon has begun including the text "F Mount" on their rear lens caps seems to indicate that we might see a new mount introduced soon, possibly for a new EVIL system and in time for Photokina.

This Leica MP2 camera and matching Wetzlar electric motor are going up for auction at …

It looked like quite a deal -- a photographer with an impressive portfolio of photographs offering a $500 photo package for $65 on the social buying website Groupon. The offer was so enticing that all 1,175 packages quickly sold out, generating over $76,000 in revenue. That's when people started noticing something fishy about Dana Dawes and her photography.

Remember the awesome Leica M9 iPhone 4 skin that we featured back in August? If you desperately wanted one, today is your lucky day -- we've created our own and it's for sale in the PetaPixel Store for $13 with free shipping within the US!

The super detailed plastic skin is designed to protect your iPhone 4 while making it look just like a Leica rangefinder camera.

Nikon has officially announced the D7000, a camera that we've know about for quite some time now through various rumors. The camera replaces the Nikon D90, and has a number of interesting upgrades: 11 autofocus points has been increased to a whopping 39-point system, the megapixel count has been increased from 12.3 to 16.2, the 96% viewfinder coverage has been replaced with pro-level 100% coverage, parts are now beefed up with magnesium alloy, one SD card slot has been increased to two, 4.5 fps has been upped to 6fps, ISO can be boosted up to 25,600 (up from 6,400), and the camera now does 1080p video recording at 24fps.

What appear to be legitimate photos of the soon-to-be-announced Nikon D7000 DSLR were leaked onto the web today. The camera is expected to replace the D90, occupying a midrange DX sensor spot a step above the recently announced Nikon D3100. The official announcement for this camera, some new lenses, and a new Speedlight flash are expected to come at midnight tonight. Stay tuned.