Anyone who says they aren’t frightened during war is either lying or a fool. It’s about finding a way of dealing with the fear – you have to be very calm. You’re not there to get your rocks off; you’re there because you feel your pictures can make a difference.
– Tom Stoddart
It’s amazing the kinds of dangerous situations photographers place themselves into to serve as the world’s eyes during wars and conflicts.
One of our keen-eyed readers named Daniel recently opened up his July issue of Wired magazine and saw this advertisement for the popular Fujifilm FinePix X100. What caught his eye was the following line:
The FinePix X100 provides smooth tonal rendering, an exceptionally low S/N ratio and outstanding image clarity.
S/N stands for “signal to noise” and an “exceptionally low S/N ratio” would mean the camera shoots extremely low-quality, noisy photographs — hardly the thing you’d want to boast about in an advertisement!
Update: Title and tweet fail: we originally wrote “Kodak” instead of “Fujifilm” in the title of this post. Sorry Kodak!
Here’s a neat little behind-the-scenes video in which Michael Ivins, the official photographer of the Boston Red Sox, talks about his experiences with shooting baseball. He offers some good tips that apply to other sports as well (e.g. try and anticipate).
A company called Lytro has just launched with $50 million in funding and, unlike Color, the technology is pretty mind-blowing. It’s designing a camera that may be the next giant leap in the evolution of photography — a consumer camera that shoots photos that can be refocused at any time. Instead of capturing a single plane of light like traditional cameras do, Lytro’s light-field camera will use a special sensor to capture the color, intensity, and vector direction of the rays of light (data that’s lost with traditional cameras).
[...] the camera captures all the information it possibly can about the field of light in front of it. You then get a digital photo that is adjustable in an almost infinite number of ways. You can focus anywhere in the picture, change the light levels — and presuming you’re using a device with a 3-D ready screen — even create a picture you can tilt and shift in three dimensions. [#]
Try clicking the sample photograph above. You’ll find that you can choose exactly where the focus point in the photo is as you’re viewing it! The company plans to unveil their camera sometime this year, with the goal of having the camera’s price be somewhere between $1 and $10,000… Check out more sample photos here
The power of the Internet is amazing. Just yesterday we reported on how a man found a battered memory card that apparently spent four years in the ocean and recovered 104 photos from it. After the story went viral and was widely reported, the owner of the camera has now been found. The girl nearest the camera in the photo above was visiting relatives four years ago when she accidentally dropped the camera into the Pacific Ocean from a wharf Santa Cruz. Read the rest of this entry »
Turns out that mysterious Leica camera spotted on British singer Seal was in fact a Leica that didn’t officially exist yet, but now it does: Leica has just announced the M9-P digital rangefinder. The new camera is basically the M9 with a few cosmetic changes — all the guts are identical. Like on the non-digital Leica MP, the traditional red dot is missing from the M9-P, which meant to give the camera an “understated appearance”. Read the rest of this entry »
A while back we suggested that for a photo project (perhaps on a rainy day) you can collect things of a certain color in your house, arrange them neatly, and then take a picture. An even easier place to do this might be your local supermarket. Designer Marco Ugolini and photographer Pedro Motta teamed up for a project titled Per Color that features baskets of color shot in a Brazilian supermarket. Read the rest of this entry »
Argentinian photographer Irina Werning’s “Back to the Future” series of photographs features people reenacting photographs of themselves taken decades ago, and has made Werning a well-known photographer after going viral on the Internet over the past year.
I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else’s house, I start sniffing for them. Most of us are fascinated by their retro look but to me, it’s imagining how people would feel and look like if they were to reenact them today… A few months ago, I decided to actually do this. So, with my camera, I started inviting people to go back to their future. [#]
NPR created the behind-the-scenes video above in which Werning talks about her interesting project.
In March 2011 we reported that an iPhone photo sharing app called Color had raised a whopping $41 million in funding before it had even launched. Sequoia Capital, one of the most prominent VC firms in Silicon Valley, invested more money in Color than they had originally invested in Google. Now, just three short months later, Color is still struggling to find users while its less-funded competitors are leaving it in the dust. Read the rest of this entry »
If you use Photoshop, you’re probably experienced with the uber-useful — and oft-abused — Clone Stamp tool, but what about the Clone Source panel that’s been around since CS 4? This brief but informative tutorial by Photoshop guru Brian Wood is a great primer for that panel, and also includes some general Photoshop tips and tricks that you might not have known.
