Claire O’Neill and Mito Habe-Evans over at NPR’s The Picture Show blog have just posted a fun experimental project you can try out this halloween: making a pinhole camera out of a pumpkin. What you’ll need is a pumpkin, aluminum foil, a knife, tape, photo paper, dark spray paint, and access to a dark room. Along with the disturbing skull camera we shared earlier today, this would be a fun way to capture photos of trick-or-treaters this halloween.
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This is Flickr user MrDAT‘s homemade halloween costume. He used a Nikon SB-600 flash mounted on helmet and an Ezybox softbox. With a little more work and some cardboard, this costume could be turned into a giant, working human flash unit!

Image credit: 2010 Halloween – Strobist by MrDAT and used with permission

There probably isn’t a more suitable camera for halloween picture taking than “Third Eye“, a macabre pinhole camera created with a 150-year-old human skull by Wayne Martin Belger. Light enters the camera through the “third eye” on the forehead, exposing the film that’s placed in the middle of the skull.
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Halloween is coming up — are you geeky enough to make your pumpkin photography-themed? This one has a Graflex camera carved into it.

Image credit: Photograph by Ann Treadwell and used with permission

Light Studio is a new iPhone app designed to teach you the basics of studio lighting for portraiture. In addition to sections with examples of setups and tutorials, there’s a 3D modeling feature that allows you to position up to three hard light sources and watch how the lights affect the 3D face model. The app is available for $1.99 in the App Store.

(via DIYPhotography)

After a long night of working in CMYK, you’re ready for a change, so what do you do? Bust out some food coloring and convert some brownscale pancakes to RGB RYB, of course!

These colorful pancakes were created by The Pancake Project. Despite looking like foam rubber, the pancakes weren’t affected taste-wise by the heavy doses of food coloring.

(via Laughing Squid)

Image credit: Photograph by The Pancake Project

When Apple unveiled the iPhone 4, they also showed off a white version that would be available alongside the black one. Since then, however, the company repeatedly pushed back the launch date for the white version, claiming that the white one was, “more challenging to manufacture than we originally expected”. Now, Cult of Mac is reporting that the problem has to do with the camera design, with the white semi-translucent glass causing light leaks and washing out photographs taken with the phone.

The white iPhone 4 can’t take accurate photographs. The handset’s semi-translucent glass case leaks light in, ruining pictures taken with the internal camera, especially when the built-in flash is used.

“You don’t get accurate pictures on the white iPhone because of the color of the glass back. It washes out the pictures,” said a source with connections to Apple who asked to remain anonymous.

Too bad — they should have released the “broken” ones as a special edition for photo enthusiasts who like low-fi photography.

Thanks for the tip Udi!

Image credit: light leak by brainware3000

My buddy Kyle and I were traversing a mountain road near my home town of Tillamook, Oregon. I am intending to create a tour company that will comprise of local tours in and around the Tillamook County area. We have many beaches, mountains, rivers and bays here and I intend to show people. Without getting too off-track, we were heading up into the mountains on a gravel logging road to calculate mileage and timing for a tour. A road I’d been on regularly as I had worked for the state department of forestry for a number of years. Eventually we came to a freshly repaired washout, where a landslide had completely deleted the road in that particular drainage. The washout had created the most amazing view of the Tillamook valley, a reservoir lake and some mountains with intense directional light catching every crag. I was compelled to take a photo so I might use it on a future brochure.
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This is a Kodak advertisement that ran in the The Saturday Evening Post 100 years ago, on April 30th, 1910, and shows how people back then gave their children a taste of photography.

(via The Online Photographer)

A couple days ago we covered the winning image of the British Journal of Photography’s international photo contest and how many readers disagreed with the photo’s merits. The prize for that contest was a one week exhibition and a Sigma digital compact camera. Now compare that to the above photograph, which won AU $80,000 in the 2010 Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize, one of the richest prizes in the world. Like the BJP photo, this photograph became the subject of debate.
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