Mobile photo sharing star Instagram just announced its 5 millionth member and will soon pass 100 million photos, but their domination of the market may not last much longer. According to TechCrunch, Facebook — a service that receives 6 billion photos a month and stores 100 billion photos total — is currently working on a feature-packed iPhone app that may soon be ubiquitous on iPhones.
The information comes from 50MB of images and documents leaked to the blog, and TechCrunch says that the app can be described as Path meets Instagram meets Color meets With. Unlike the legions of photo sharing apps struggling to capture users, Facebook can simply tap its 600+ million users to instantly dominate the market — much like it did with photo sharing on the web.
Meet Ianto, a light painting Miniature Pinscher. Her owner Michael Zoellner created a special vest with 5 LED lights that functions as a Persistence of Vision display, spelling out the words of the novel “Makers” by Cory Doctorow in the air as Ianto sprints across the park. If you don’t have the technical know-how to pull this off, you can always try strapping an iPad to your dog!
German wedding photographer Rocco built this ingenious do-it-yourself photo booth using a Nikon, an iPad, and a remote shutter release. Guests can step on a pedal to trigger the shutter, which snaps a well-lit photograph (there’s a Speedlight on each side) and beams the image to the iPad via an Eye-Fi card and the app ShutterSnitch. While this photo booth doesn’t print out photo strips, it could be a great and fun way to give an event’s attendees some extra high-res photos without any extra work — well, besides building the thing.
Move aside Panasonic GF3, this is the world’s smallest Micro Four Thirds camera. Olympus took its Despicable Me-style shrink ray and reduced the Olympus E-PL1, E-P2, and E-PL2 to the size of an SD card for a promotion over in Hong Kong. They’re meant to be used as cute little cell phone charms, but they work nicely as tiny prop cameras for your action figures as well! Read the rest of this entry »
One of the exciting features of iOS 5 announced by Apple last week is the ability to use the iPhone’s “volume up” button as a shutter button when taking pictures. What’s also neat is that this design choice also means that the “volume up” button on Apple’s headphone remotes can also trigger the shutter, allowing them to be used as remote shutter releases. Say hello to stealthy and/or non-blurry iPhone photographs!
Bad news for TinEye but good news for photographers: Google is adding reverse image search to their ever-growing list of products, allowing photographers to search using their photos to see the different places they’re being used online. You can search for images by entering a URL, uploading from your computer, dragging and dropping onto the search page, or via Chrome and Firefox extensions. The feature will be rolling out to Google’s users over the next few days — once you see the camera icon in your search bar you’ll know you have it!
Just because you use the built-in flash on your compact camera doesn’t mean you need to live with harsh, direct lighting. Here’s a quick video tutorial teaching how to use any small white card (e.g. a piece of scrap paper or a business card) to easily bounce your flash and soften the lightning.
Medical experiments can be quite bizarre — I once heard about one that involved injecting subjects with various kinds of animal feces. After a year of participating in various clinical trials for cash, photographer and recent art-school graduate Josh Dickinson decided to start a project called Studied to document what it’s like to be a human guinea pig. His experiences range from being pricked with needles and subjected to pain to being suffocated… Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a helpful tutorial that teaches how to shoot in harsh, midday sunlight using a single reflector to soften the shadows on your subject. If you’ve never used a reflector outdoors before, it’s a great primer for getting started. Aside from buying a nice reflector for about $30, you can also find cheap ones for under $10 on eBay, use a car sun shade, or make one yourself with cardboard and foil.
