January 2010

Michael Zhang

Do People Recognize Great Photography?

In 2007, Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten conducted a social experiment in which he recruited one of the world's great violinists, Joshua Bell, to play in a Washington D.C. subway station. Just two days prior to the experiment, Bell had played in a sold-out Boston theater in which ordinary tickets sold for $100 apiece.

Michael Zhang

Freeze Your Camera for Less Noise

Last Friday an anonymous poster on the photography board of 4chan sparked a discussion that rippled into the blogosphere after freezing their camera to see whether ISO performance improves at lower temperatures.

Michael Zhang

Chicken Video Wins Nikon Festival Prize

Nikon just announced the winners of the Nikon Festival short film (140 seconds or less) contest a few hours ago, with the grand prize winner going to Marko Slavnic for his Chicken VS Penguin film embedded above. The win comes with a cool $100,000 and a Nikon D5000 DSLR kit.

Michael Zhang

Tamron Launches YouTube Series for Newbies

This past Monday, Japanese lens corp Tamron launched a new 12 week video series on their YouTube channel geared towards helping beginners understand their equipment. Each video is 1 minute long, and will cover topics such as white balance, RAW vs. JPEG, and more. Once this introductory series is complete, they plan on posting intermediate and advanced videos as well.

Jessica Lum

Multimedia Poetry

Here's a novel idea: using an audiovisual slideshow as a medium for poetry. Journalists at the Knight Digital Media Center created a project for the Oakland School for the Arts, featuring a student's poem, The Eternal Sea. Check it out here.

Michael Zhang

Monstrous 570 Megapixel Digital Camera

Remember the days when a 5 megapixel digital camera was considered top-of-the-line? I do. Remember the days when 570 megapixel digital cameras were the size of cars? That's a question people might ask years from now, when the most basic pocket cameras boast hundreds of megapixels, and when we have petabyte external hard drives.

Michael Zhang

Protect Your Gear by Flying with a Gun

A few days ago we came across this brilliant trick for protecting your valuable camera gear while flying. Most airlines don't allow you to fly with your luggage locked, but there's a clever way around the rule -- bring a gun.

Michael Zhang

The Million Dollar Homepage of Photography

Back in 2005, a student in England named Alex Tew launched The Million Dollar Homepage, through which he sold the pixels of a 1000x1000 grid for $1 each. Although it was an extremely simple idea, the unique project attracted enormous amounts of press coverage, and eventually earned $1,037,100 in a matter of months. It also spawned countless copycat websites that virtually all failed, since the idea was no longer novel.

Michael Zhang

Light Painting Animation by Freezelight

Freezelight is a Russian group that creates light painting photographs and animations. They have a pretty interesting blog showcasing their work, and opened up a Vimeo account a few days ago to showcase their films.

Michael Zhang

2 Years of Hard Work for a 60 Second Shot

Photographers often go through hours, days, or weeks of work to achieve certain photographs, and the dedication is usually reflected in the end result. That might seem like a lot of work to you if you typically only spend a few seconds framing and snapping a photograph, but what if I told you that a crew from BBC spent two years working on a 60 second clip?

Michael Zhang

Study Finds Photography Undesirable as a Job

Job portal careercast recently released a ranking of 200 jobs from best to worst for 2010. The Wall Street Journal republished the data in a nice, sortable chart as its Best and Worst Jobs 2010 list. Since you're reading this, you probably want to know how jobs involving photography rank on the list. The answer: pretty low.

Michael Zhang

Neat Hand and Paper Parkour Animation

Here's a dose of creative inspiration: a hand animated video of parkour. Created by Serene Teh and Noel Lee, parkour motion reel is a pretty unique take on the flip book style of animation.

Michael Zhang

Photography School Launches Camera Phone Course

Camera phone photography has been exploding in popularity in recent times -- pretty much every new phone is equipped with a camera nowadays, the iPhone is the most popular "camera" on Flickr, photographer Chase Jarvis has launched a mini-empire around the slogan "The Best Camera Is The One That's With You", the sensors for mobile phones are approaching absurd numbers of megapixels, etc... -- so it's not surprising that a UK-based photography school has launched a course dedicated to cell phone photography.

Michael Zhang

Neat Photomosaic iPhone App by LEGO

LEGO recently released a free iPhone app that turns your photographs into photomosaics made with 1x1 LEGO pieces. The app obviously isn't limited to faces, but can turn anything into a LEGO mosaic.

Michael Zhang

Obama Photo Used Illegally on Billboard

We're on a roll with controversial advertisements today. New York garment company Weatherproof has gotten the attention of the White House after illegally using a photograph of President Obama's visit to the Great Wall of China on a billboard in New York City (41st St. and 7th Ave.)

Jessica Lum

CES 2010: Day 1 Photo News – New Polaroid Instant Cameras and More

Polaroid has been getting some viral attention today, partially from its addition of Lady Gaga to its staff, but also because it's new nostalgic line of instant cameras. That's right, folks, Polaroid's back in the instant business -- it couldn't let such a good cash cow run away, after all. Several models of the PIC-1000 were displayed today at CES in Las Vegas, including this nifty wooden body camera: