August 2011

Michael Zhang

Field of Views of Different Focal Lengths

Here's a neat image showing the different field of views offered by focal lengths ranging from 16mm to 200mm. It's not simply lines overlaid on a single photo -- the different focal lengths were actually used to capture what the scenes looks like through the lenses.

Michael Zhang

Make a DIY Lens Cap Using a Soda Can

mr-korn over at Lomography recently snagged a cheap Olympus Zuiko 50mm lens on eBay, but the lens didn't come with a lens cap. Rather than try and find a replacement cap for that particular lens, he decided to craft his own DIY cap using a can of Coke.

Michael Zhang

Perseid Meteor Photographed from Space

One amazing perk that comes with being a NASA astronaut is that you can watch meteor showers up close and from above. Astronaut Ron Garan captured this awesome photograph from the International Space Station of a Perseid meteor burning up in our atmosphere.

Michael Zhang

M-Disc: A New Disc That Lasts “Forever”

There's a good chance the digital photos you've stored on hard drives and DVDs won't outlive you, but what if there was a disc that could last forever? M-Disc, short for Millenial Disc, is a new type of disc that doesn't suffer from natural decay and degradation like existing disc technologies, allowing you to store data safely for somewhere between "1000 years" and "forever".

Michael Zhang

The World Shot Through a Light Bulb

Flickr user Henrique Feliciano Silva made this neat photograph by hollowing out a light bulb, filling it with water, hanging it upside down on his balcony, and shooting his neighborhood through it with a shallow depth of field.

Michael Zhang

The Impermanence of Digital Photographs

It seems like everyone has access to some kind of camera these days, but will the digital images captured survive long enough to become part of the historical record of our time for future generations?

Michael Zhang

Incredible Photos that Capture Day Turning into Night

For his project "Day Into Night", photographer Stephen Wilkes set up a 4x5 camera with a 39-megapixel digital back 40-50 feet off the ground in a cherry picker, and photographed the scene throughout the course of one day. Keeping a constant aperture, he adjusted his shutter speed to compensate for the position of the sun. Afterward, the hundreds of images captured were edited to roughly 30-50 photos, and then seamlessly Photoshopped together to show a gradual transition from day to night.

Michael Zhang

Do People Always See the Same Things When They Look At Colors?

Update: It looks like the video was taken down by the uploader. Sorry guys.

Color is simply how our brains respond to different wavelengths of light, and wavelengths outside the spectrum of visible light are invisible and colorless to us simply because our eyes can't detect them. Since colors are created in our brains, what if we all see colors differently from one another? BBC created a fascinating program called "Do You See What I See?" that explores this question, and the findings are pretty startling.

Michael Zhang

“Horsemaning” is the Latest Photo Fad

Another week, another strange photo fad. The latest one is "horsemaning", and involves photographing two people to look like one decapitated person (like the headless horseman). Apparently it started in the early 1920s with the photo seen above, and is making a comeback as of late.

Michael Zhang

Concept Ilford Film Package Doubles as a Twin-Lens Reflex Pinhole Camera

Film usually comes in pretty boring boxes, but what if you could reuse those boxes as a pinhole camera? Designer Linna Xu won the Packaging category of the 2010 Adobe Design Achievement Awards with this concept, creating these awesome boxes for Ilford medium format film that double as pinhole cameras resembling old school twin-lens reflex cameras. Each box allows users to explore the world of medium format photography without even having a medium format camera!

Michael Zhang

Bored at Work, Engineer Builds a Camera Out of Trash

Mechanical engineer and Flickr user Some Guy (Art) was bored at his job where picture taking was explicitly disallowed, so he did what any rebellious photo-fanatic would do: build a makeshift camera out of trash! Bringing $5 worth of parts (e.g. dowels, bolts, super glue) from home, he successfully turned some machine core -- which he calls "cardboard toilet paper tube on steroids" -- into a 35mm pinhole camera.

Michael Zhang

Generate an Infographic Showing Your iPhone Photo Habits

Photo Stats is a new iPhone app that can help you visualize your iPhoneography habits by automatically generating interesting infographics showing things such as where you snapped photos and the time of day you shoot the most. You can buy it for $1 in the App Store.

Michael Zhang

Film Shot with Canon 7D Bought for $4 Million, Hits Theaters Later this Month

If you decide to watch the new indie film "Like Crazy" when it hits theaters on October 28th, keep this in mind: it was shot using a Canon 7D. The movie won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival this year, which led to Paramount snapping it up for a cool $4 million -- much better than $200,000 in profits using a Canon 5D, wouldn't you say?

Michael Zhang

Hackers Create a DIY Flare Gun Camera

The Israeli army has a tactical intelligence device called the "Firefly" -- a wireless camera that's launched out of a grenade launcher, capturing eight seconds worth of imagery as it floats on a parachute from 500 feet in the air.

Michael Zhang

Beautiful Long Exposure Shots from a Japanese Train

Flickr user Céline Ramoni has a beautiful set of photographs shot from the Yurikamome rail line connecting the cities of Shimbashi and Toyosu in Japan. The exposure times aren't too long (they're all less than a second), but the speed of the train creates plenty of motion blur -- even in daytime.

Michael Zhang

Example Showing the Benefit of RAW’s Higher Dynamic Range

One of huge benefits of shooting in RAW is that RAW files usually have considerably more dynamic range than a JPG. This means that details in the shadows and highlights of an image that would otherwise be lost if shooting JPG are stored in the RAW file, and able to be recovered if needed during post-processing.

Max Edin

How to Take Better Pictures with Your Point-and-Shoot Camera

There are several things you can and should do to get the most out of the images from your point-and-shoot camera. If you use it correctly, people won't know with what camera the shot was taken.Check out the photograph above and guess which camera it was taken with. I'll reveal the answer at the end of the post.