Ever wonder how photographs magically appear on Polaroid pictures? Photojojo offers a simple explanation of how the process works:
[...] your instant camera ejects the picture in between two metal rollers. The rollers pinch the chemical packets on the bottom of your film, break them open, and spread the developer chemicals all over the surface of your image. [#]
They also have some other interesting “photo science” explanations here. For a more in-depth look, check out this HowStuffWorks article on instant cameras.
Photographer Darren Samuelson spent seven months building a massive homemade large-format camera that’s about six-feet-long when fully extended. He shoots with 14×36-inch x-ray film that’s about 1/12th the cost of ordinary photographic film but much harder to develop. Read the rest of this entry »
This epic advertisement for The Camera Store imagines what would be like if wars were fought with cameras instead of guns. In this alternate reality, massive telephoto lenses and flash(bang)s sure come in handy!
Samsung just published a followup to the NX lens engineer interview video that we shared a couple weeks ago featuring Q&As with the planners, marketers, and designers behind the lenses. Included on the page was this interesting photograph that appears to show a bunch of prototype cameras developed in the company. Check out the cube-shaped camera and another one with three retro dials at the top!
Here’s a short and sweet video in which famed wedding photographer Joe Buissink shares some advice regarding the “psychology” of wedding photography, or how to capture genuine emotions and expressions on camera. The tips he shares are useful for other kinds of photography as well, not just wedding or engagement photography.
Color photography was born on this day 150 years ago in 1861 when Scottish physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell and photographer Thomas Sutton — inventor of the SLR camera — shot the above photograph of a colored ribbon.
[...] Maxwell proposed that if three black-and-white photographs of a scene were taken through red, green and violet filters, and transparent prints of the images were projected onto a screen using three projectors equipped with similar filters, when superimposed on the screen the result would be perceived by the human eye as a complete reproduction of all the colours in the scene.
During an 1861 Royal Institution lecture on colour theory, Maxwell presented the world’s first demonstration of colour photography by this principle of three-colour analysis and synthesis, the basis of nearly all subsequent photochemical and electronic methods of colour photography. Thomas Sutton, inventor of the single-lens reflex camera, did the actual picture-taking. He photographed a tartan ribbon three times, through red, green and blue filters. [...] Because Sutton’s photographic plates were in fact insensitive to red and barely sensitive to green, the results of this pioneering experiment were far from perfect. [#]
Thus began modern color theory and the fundamentals behind how your DSLR captures color.
Last week The Daily Mail published some photographs of British singer Seal passing through LAX airport with his family. While at first glance it might look like the camera hanging around his neck is a Leica MP film rangefinder, look a little closer and you’ll see that it’s not — it doesn’t have a battery compartment, a film reverse lever, or a film advance lever… Read the rest of this entry »
Who says you need a heavy and expensive lens to capture a beautiful shuttle launch photograph from far away? After the Space Shuttle Endeavour blasted off yesterday on its final mission, one of the photographs that went viral was shot from an airplane using an iPhone. Another was this stunning photo made by Trey Ratcliff using a Nikon 50mm prime lens while thousands of photographers around him were holding massive lenses.
Even though I had my Nikon D3X set up on a tripod with my 28-300 lens, I actually shot this picture with my 50mm prime lens on my Nikon D3S! Everything did go according to plan, and I had run through the routine a few times before the launch. The plan was to fire away on my main body during the first 15 seconds or so. At that point, the D3X starts to have bufferring problems, so I switched to my Chewbacca-bandolier D3S. I pulled it up into a vertical orientation and rapid-fired just as the shuttle tore into the clouds. [#]
You can read more about the shot over on his website here.
Image credit: Photograph by Trey Ratcliff and used with permission
Jeffrey Martin, the guy behind the world’s largest indoor photo, has done it again — the founder of 360cities was hired by Wembley Stadium to shoot a massive 20 gigapixel 360-degree panorama of the 2011 FA Cup Final this past weekend. About 1000 photographs shot with a DSLR and robotic tripod head were needed to capture the 90,000 fans in attendance, and the final image was processed with a workstation that had 192 gigabytes of RAM and 24 CPU cores!
Check out the final photo here or read about how it was made. You can also tag people you know in the image — tens of thousands have been identified and tagged already.
