October 2010

Michael Zhang

Twitter Photo Rights Controversy is Much Ado About Nothing

Last week Scott Bourne published an article on Photofocus titled, "Photos On Twitter – What You Should Know". In it, he claimed that Twitter's terms of service (TOS) forced photographers to give Twitter a license to do whatever they wanted with photos shared through the service. The argument centered around a couple paragraphs found in the document:

By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

This was used to argue that Twitter owns a license to photos shared through the service.

Michael Zhang

Beautiful Light Painting Calligraphy Art by Julien Breton

Light painting and calligraphy are both hard enough skills to master on their own, but what about combining the two and doing it well? That's what French artist Julien Breton specializes in. These photographs show Breton's calligraphy created with light with no trickery involved at all.

Michael Zhang

Upscale Shopping Area Cracks Down on Photography to Deter Ram Raiders

Terrorists aren't the only people photographers are being mistaken for in the UK -- upscale shopping area Multrees Walk in Edinburgh has begun targeting photographers after a string of thefts by ram raiders, or burglars who drive large vehicles through the front of stores and then loot them. The above video shows a confrontation with security that occurred after a guy and his friend snapped a photo of a shop window.

Michael Zhang

Turn Your Panasonic Micro Four Thirds Camera into a Digital Holga

If you have a Panasonic Micro Four Thirds camera and a love for retro photos, the Skink Pinhole Pancake Pro Kit can instantly turn your camera into a digital Holga pinhole camera. It's a modular system that provides three kinds of "holes":

Depending on the desired effect, you can use your camera as a pinhole-, zone plate- or zones sieve camera. To a high degree the installed aperture determines how your vision is creatively interpreted in rendering an image. The traditional pinhole creates relatively sharp images with exposure times ranging from one second to several minutes. With a zone plate or zone sieve however, photos can be taken without a tripod, if the lighting conditions permit higher speeds.

Michael Zhang

Russian Leica Clone Converted to Digital

There was quite an outcry back in September when we shared the iCannon 4 project, where some guy gutted his Canon film SLR to use it as a shell for an iPhone 4. The frankencamera shown above is a bit cooler - it was created using a Russian Leica imitation and a Sony DSC-WX1 digital compact. Both cameras were disassembled, with the rangefinder contributing the outer shell and then Sony cam offering the inner workings. What's amazing is that the resulting camera looks like a nicely designed retro digital compact - similar to the new FujiPix X100.

Michael Zhang

Lens Guard Provides Extra Protection for People with Butterfingers

Lens caps, filters, and hoods are great from protecting lenses from scratches and bumps, but they aren't the best for reducing the impact in the case that you accidentally drop your gear. The Lens Guard by DeluxGear is designed to absorb this kind of shock, protecting your lens from the impact of bumps and drops, and slips over lenses snugly with or without the filters or lens cap attached.

Michael Zhang

Photos of Things That Aren’t Supposed to be Photographed

If you're like a lot of people, you might have felt the urge to secretly shoot where there are signs posted prohibiting photography. Strictly No Photography is a website that aggregates these photographs, giving the public a glimpse into various things that are off limits to cameras. There's photographs from museums, theaters, and even a collection of "no photography allowed" signs.

Michael Zhang

Nikon D7000 Kits Being Sold by Best Buy Ahead of Launch

Itching to get your hands on the Nikon D7000? You might want to try Best Buy. Apparently some Best Buy stores are breaking the rules and selling Nikon D7000 kits before the camera is officially available on Sunday. Here are some unboxing videos created by the lucky few who were able to purchase the D7000 early.

Michael Zhang

Forced to Delete Photos? No Problem, Just Recover Them Later

Here's a useful idea related to the memory card recovery tutorial we shared yesterday: if you're ever confronted by someone who forces you to delete your photos (and our magical photographers' rights gray card doesn't work), go ahead and delete them! What most people don't know is that deleted photos can easily be recovered afterward. Even photos on a memory card that's formatted and completely wiped can usually be restored.

Michael Zhang

Happy Meal Photographed Weekly Shows No Change After Half Year

New York City photographer Sally Davies purchased a McDonalds Happy Meal on April 10th of this year and left it out uncovered on her coffee table to prove wrong a friend who said it would rot after only a few days. After about two weeks of photographing the food, Davies realized that absolutely nothing was happening, so she began taking pictures once a week. After 180 days Davies shot the 27th photograph, with the meal looking almost identical to when she first bought it. The 1st and 27th photograph taken half a year apart are shown above.

Michael Zhang

How to Recover Deleted Photos from a Memory Card with PhotoRec

Last night my pastor emailed me telling me that he had accidentally deleted an entire folder of photographs off his Sony compact camera, and that Sony's technical support informed him that it would cost $200-300 for them to recover the photos. After I got a hold of the memory card, I checked some of the recovery programs I've used in the past, but discovered that they now require paid licenses to actual do recovery (though analysis is free). I then stumbled across PhotoRec, a free and open source command-line application that's bundled with TestDisk, something I've successfully used to regain access to inaccessible external hard drives.

In this post I'm going to show you how you can use PhotoRec to recover your photos if you've accidentally deleted them or formatted your memory card.

Michael Zhang

Surreal Landscapes Created with Food

Foodscapes is a series by photographer Carl Warner in which he creates beautiful surreal landscapes using various foods. Warner starts by visualizing and sketching his ideas, which are then built on a large table in his studio with the help of his team. Large blocks of polystyrene are carved and covered with ingredients in order to make the hills seen in his photos, while shallow tanks are used to create lakes, rivers, and seas. Photographs for three different layers (foreground, middle ground, and background) are captured separately and then combined in post.

Michael Zhang

Canon Cross Media Station Delivers Wireless Transfer and Charging

If you shoot often, then you probably go through the hassles of sticking your memory card in a card reader and battery in a battery charger often as well. While these tasks don't take much time in themselves, doing them day after day can cause them to become quite tedious. Canon's Cross Media Station is designed to make these things a breeze, allowing you to do both by simply placing your camera (or two, or three) on the device, which looks like a slick scanner.

Jon Martin

10 Tips for Buying Camera Gear on eBay

If you’ve never been on a budget and blow money like a vuvuzela at a football game, don’t bother reading any further. If you like saving money and are on a budget, then please continue reading.

I buy used equipment constantly. It’s more a way of life than a just a financial decision. While I like being able to get things cheaper and refuse to pay full price for almost anything, I wouldn’t call myself cheap. Overly frugal maybe, but not cheap (but don’t ask my wife). All that said, getting a good deal on used equipment isn’t rocket science.

Michael Zhang

Beautiful Human Sculpture Experiment Blends Video with Stills

"Seaweed" is the sixth lo-fi video experiment by London-based filmmakers Luke White and Remi Weekes, who go by Tell No One. It's a beautiful video in which a "still" frame is captured and frozen every few seconds, resulting in a seaweed sculpture created with human arms.

Michael Zhang

Use Cardboard Cutouts to Spell Out Upside-Down Shadow Words

Here's a creative idea that we love - cut out giant letters, gather up some friends, and spell out words with shadows! Justin Swindle, a student at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, created the above image by cutting the sides off the biggest cardboard moving box he could get his hands on. He then traded the letters freehand and cut them out using a razor.

Michael Zhang

Kite Photos Used to Replace Shoddy Satellite Imagery on Google Maps

Frank Taylor, the guy behind the unofficial Google Earth Blog, is currently on a 5 years sailing trip around the world called The Tahina Expedition. Google is actually a partner in the expedition, and is acquiring content generated by the trip for use in their products. One thing Taylor has been doing is taking aerial photographs of locations using a kite, resulting in imagery that's much clearer than the photos Google gets from their satellites up in space. Google has already begun incorporating some of these images into their products, as you can see from this Google Maps satellite view of Manihi in French Polynesia.

Check out this Picasa album to see behind-the-scenes photos of Frank setting up his kite and shooting photos.

Michael Zhang

Olympus Ditching DSLRs in Favor of EVIL Cameras

Olympus is ditching the entry-level DSLR in favor of its Micro Four Thirds mount PEN line of EVIL cameras. In an interview with Fotopolis, Toshiyuki Terada -- the Product Manager of Olympus' SLR Planning Department -- is quoted as saying,

We do not have concrete plans to replace the E-620 and other recent SLRs. The entry level SLR class can be completely replaced by the Pen system in terms of performance.

Later in the interview, Terada seems to say that leaving the DSLR market entirely is one of the company's goals.

Michael Zhang

Beautiful Tilt-Shift Video of Coachella

Sam O’Hare is developing quite a reputation for his tilt-shift, miniature faking videos. O'Hare is the same guy that created The Sandpit, a beautiful tilt-shift video of New York City that has been watched nearly 2 million times. He was recently commissioned by the Coachella Music Festival to create a similar video for Coachella 2010, and the resulting video (shown above) is just as stunning.

Michael Zhang

TDK Unveils 1TB Optical Disc, Photogs in the Distant Future Rejoice

TDK has unveiled a monstrous 1 terabyte (1000 gigabyte) optical disc at CEATEC 2010 (the Japanese equivalent of CES), which wrapped up a couple days ago. The disc has 16 layers on both sides that each store 32GB of data, and is the equivalent to about 213 of the recordable DVD discs that you might be using to back up your image files.

Michael Zhang

Facebook Has a Zombie Photo Problem

Ars Technica published an interesting story today about how photos uploaded to Facebook remain on their servers months -- or even years -- after they're "deleted" from the service. We decided to test this out ourselves, uploading the above photo to Facebook, copying the direct URL to the image file, and then deleting both the photo and the album. As you can see from the hotlinked photo above, the image continues to live on as a zombie photo on Facebook's CDN servers.

Michael Zhang

James Nachtwey on the Importance of Photography in War

If James Nachtwey were a street photographer, he wouldn't be the type to stand on the opposite sidewalk and stealthily capture unsuspecting strangers using a telephoto lens. As you can see from the photograph above, Nachtwey has a fearless attitude when shooting in dangerous situations, getting up close and personal with the subjects.

Michael Zhang

35mm SLR Camera Created from Scratch

You've probably seen do-it-yourself pinhole cameras or even large format cameras created with foam core, but what about a solid metal do-it-yourself 35mm camera? That's exactly what Denis Mo decided to create, posting his step-by-step documentation to French camera forum collection-appareils.fr.

Denis had wanted to do such a project for 25 years, but it wasn't until he was almost 42 that he had the technical know-how to actually do it. Except for the shutter curtain fabric, ball bearings, and screws, all of the individual pieces that were used to create the camera were custom made.

Michael Zhang

Time-Lapse Video Spanning 3 Years and 45,000 Photographs

You've probably seen time-lapse videos spanning hours, days, weeks, or months, but how about years? Ramon, a videographer based in Paris, spent three years shooting the same location in Paris, documenting the teardown of an old skyscraper and the construction of a new one. The photographs were shot between January 2007 and September 2010 using a Pentax K110D DSLR, and a whopping 45,000 photographs were captured.