Sony has been gaining ground on Canon and Nikon lately by focusing on innovation, creating new technologies and entering the mirrorless market early while the two mega-corps have mostly been content with playing it safe with their popular products. Sony recently filed an interesting patent in Japan that shows some of this creative thinking at work. It’s a design for a compact camera in which the panel that hides the lens on the front of the camera turns into a camera grip when the lens is exposed! Read the rest of this entry »
DOF Calculator is an app for Android phones that helps you easily calculate depth of field and hyperfocal distances. Simply tell it your camera, lens, and aperture setting, and it’ll spit out the numbers you need for optimally sharp landscape photographs. You can download it for free by searching for “DOF Calculator” in the Android Market.
For a quick video tutorial on how hyperfocal distance works, check out this post.
Erik Pettersson was looking for a nice digital frame, but found that all the commercially available ones were too small, ugly, and cheap looking. He had an old Thinkpad T42 laptop lying around, so he decided to make his own custom frame. After installing Linux and writing some custom scripts for operating the frame, he disassembled it and joined it with a nice-looking IKEA frame. Best of all, he documented his entire process and published it online as a tutorial for those who want to make their own.
Think your camera gear is safe in your zippered bag just because you have have sliders locked up? Think again. This video shows how easy it is to break into a zippered bag without leaving a trace.
Yet another reason you should try and keep your gear in sight at all times.
Digital hyper-realist artist Bert Monroy spent four years creating an incredibly detailed Times Square scene. The 5×25 foot image weighed in at 6.52 gigabytes as a flattened file, and involved more than 750,000 separate Photoshop layers and over 3,000 separate Photoshop and Illustrator files. The image is actually a “who’s who” for the world of digital imaging, and features individuals who have made an impact on the history of the field, including Photoshop’s founders, imaging experts, and notable photographers (see if you can pick any out!).
Design firm XNcreative shot some photographs with a Canon Rebel 550D (T2i) while flying over various locations in the western US, but didn’t feel the still photos captured the original grandeur of the locations, so they decided to turn the stills into a motion-faked video. It was all done using Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Apple Motion. You can find a walkthrough for how it was created here if you want to try your hand at this 3D effect.
Chris Kotsiopoulos of GreekSky created this mind-boggling panoramic photo of the sky that shows the passing of a day. He writes,
You can read about his process and some challenges he faced here. Kotsiopoulos is also the photographer behind the beautiful stacked lightning photograph we featured a while back.
Image credit: Photograph by Chris Kotsiopoulos and used with permission
What does it take to shoot portraits of random strangers on a sidewalk? Photographer Clay Enos, known for his portraits for the movie Watchmen, walks us through his process for capturing impromptu portraits of passers-by on a white backdrop.
One takeaway is that it pays to be outgoing and social, since your conversation skills can do a lot towards making subjects feel at ease.
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner (February 14th, to be exact), and if the special person in your life is a photography-lover, you might want to think about ditching the cards, flowers, and chocolates, and going with something a little more… lomo. Lomography has released two special edition Diana cameras for this special occasion. The “Love is in the Air” Diana Mini costs $119 and the “Take My Heart” Diana F+ costs $99.
