There’s plenty of time lapse projects documenting the passage of time and the process of aging with human portraits, but how about with animals? This video going viral on the Interwebs right now was creating by making a photo a day of Dunder, a German Shepherd, and shows him growing from an 8 week old puppy to a 1 year old adult. If you have a pet, this concept could be a fun project for getting it involved in your photography!
Did you know that a third of the SanDisk memory cards being used on Earth are actually fake? A SanDisk engineer recently shared this startling fact with a reader over at The Online Photographer:
[...] at any given time, approximately a third of the SanDisk memory cards (made by Toshiba) being used out there in the world are counterfeit. As in, not SanDisk memory cards at all—some other kind of cards dressed up as lookalikes.
Thirty percent, was the number quoted. A third, more or less.
To make sure you’re getting the real thing, always purchase your memory cards from reputable dealers.
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Flickr user Betty Ann recycled a photography book by transforming pages into these nifty pillow boxes, with each one showing a different camera. Stick a gift certificate to your favorite local camera shop into one and it’ll make the perfect gift for a photography-lovin’ friend! You can find a step-by-step tutorial on how to make your own pillow box over on eHow.
(via Craft)
Image credit: Camera Pillow Boxes by b-a-boop and used with permission
Sigma announced today that its flagship SD1 DSLR will be available starting in June 2011 with a hefty price tag of $9,700. The unique thing about the camera compared to its competitors is the 15MP Foveon sensor that uses 3 stacked sensors, giving each photo 46 million pixels of color data — this supposedly helps provide sharper pictures, truer colors, and fewer artifacts compared to traditional sensors (but also means 45MB Raw files). The camera will shoot at 5fps, use 11 autofocus points, and have a 3-inch LCD screen.
Sigma is reportedly targeting existing medium format shooters with this camera, but the sensor had better be out of this world to justify shelling out nearly 10K on a 1.5x crop factor 15MP DSLR, since photographers can pick up the 40-megapixel medium-format Pentax 645D for the same price.
Update: Sigma has released a number of sample photos here. Be patient with the site though — it seems to be under a heavy load.
Jonathan Blaustein is the photographer behind the project “The Value of a Dollar“, which went viral on the Internet in 2010 and then was subsequently acquired by the State of New Mexico and the Library of Congress. Visit his website here.
PetaPixel: Could you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Jonathan Blaustein: I’m a photographer, writer, and professor based in Taos, New Mexico, originally from New Jersey (who isn’t?). In addition to my career as a photographer, I’m also a correspondent for the photo industry blog A Photo Editor. My family and I live in a little horse pasture at the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, far from everywhere. I’m pretty fortunate, as Northern New Mexico has a really vibrant photography scene, and of course our light is legendary. As far as my background goes, I first studied History and Economics at Duke University, but returned to school to study photography, and I have an MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. I’ve been a practicing artist for the last 15 years, and my work has been exhibited in galleries, alternative spaces and museums around the United States.
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As the low-light capabilities of high-end (and even low-end) cameras rapidly improve, it’s easy to marvel at technology and forget how amazing our own eyes are, but here are some mind-boggling facts to consider: did you know that the human eye can detect as few as two photons entering the retina, and that, under ideal conditions, a healthy young adult can see a candle flame from 30 miles away? To see how mind-boggling that is, try using Google Maps to find a location 30-miles away from where you live.
According to neuroscientist Bradley Voytek, the reason we don’t utilize our full sensory potential is because we’re not paying enough attention to them — kinda makes you want to put down your camera and focus on staring at things, huh?
We are all inattentive superheroes (via Boing Boing)
Image credit: Eye by Furryscaly
What you see above is the inside of the world’s largest pinhole camera measuring 45x160x80 feet. It’s an abandoned airplane hangar in Irvine, California that was converted over the course of two months into a gigantic pinhole camera. 24,000 square feet of plastic, 1,300 gallons of foam filler, 1.52 miles of tape, and 40 cans of spray paint went into darkening the hangar.
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Reuters photographer Beawiharta was on a short flight from Singapore to Jakarta with his wife and three kids, when one of the engines suddenly exploded into flames. As a sharp burning odor permeated the cabin, the plane began to vibrate harder and harder, and finally the electricity turned off. Accepting the fact that if they died their family would die together, Beawiharta grabbed his DSLR and started photographing:
After that, I became calm because I was not afraid to die because we would all die together. I started to adjust my camera, which was hanging around my neck. I set the ISO higher, set the white balance, checked the battery was full and saw I had around 300 clicks for the rest of the memory card. I started to take pictures, though it was dark. I forgot my Canon EOS5dmk2 has a full HD video, so I forgot to record the situation. After 20 years living as a photographer, I was thinking as a photographer. [#]
Check out some more photos and his story over on the Reuters blog.
Trading fear for photos on a stricken plane (via Gizmodo)
Image credit: Photograph by Beawiharta/Reuters and used with permission
If you’re a coffee lover (or addict), adbeus is a photoblog that you’ll want to feast your eyes on. They visit the best independent coffee shops in Montreal and photograph each cup of coffee in exactly the same way: the coffee on the right side of the frame, the table serving as the background, and the camera viewing from above. The result is a project that shows how beautiful and unique cups of coffee can be!
Spanish blog Duduá organized a fantasy cake contest in Barcelona at the end of April, and found amongst the many creative cakes was this sweet (pun intended) Polaroid Land Camera 1000 cake with an instant photo popping out the bottom.
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