Of all the camera lenses offered on Amazon, the $26,000 35-pound giant green Sigma 200-500mm f/2.8 probably has the funniest customer reviews and images.
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Today Instagram released version 2.0 of its wildly popular iPhone app, which will soon see its 10 millionth user. The base technology has been completely overhauled to bring speed to the app — filters now apply 200x faster, tilt-shift applies 100x faster, and both can be viewed live while shooting. Four new filters have been introduced (seen above), and borders on filters are now optional. Finally, the resolution of photos saved to the iPhone 4 has been increased from 612×612 to 1936×1936 (the size of photos uploaded to Instagram remains unchanged).
Noticeably absent from today’s announcement was an Android version of the app, though with this major release you can bet that they’re working harder than ever on getting it released.
Instagram Version 2.0 (via Instagram via TechCrunch)
Flickr user Alex12Ga turned his Canon 5D Mark II into a DIY digital view camera by mounting a Novar-Anastigmat 75mm f/3.5 lens from 1949 with its original bellows. He mounted the bellows to his camera using an aluminum plate and an EOS mount ring that he salvaged from a broken Sigma lens.
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Canon has long offered its telephoto L lenses in white in order to keep the lens cooler under sunlight, but did you know that certain Nikon lenses can be found in “white” as well? The lenses were officially called “light gray”, and can be purchased for pretty reasonable prices on eBay — the AF-S ED 70-200 f/2.8G VR seen above was sold a couple days ago by eBay seller shrewd25 for $1,999.
(via Nikon Rumors)
Real estate agents make it a point to have homes look attractive in photographs, knowing that good photography can make a huge difference, but the people at animal rescue shelters often settle for second-rate photographs of the dogs they’re trying to find homes for. Professional pet photographer Teresa Berg of Dallas, Texas realized that countless dogs are likely euthanized each year simply due to bad photography, and decided to make a difference. Several years ago she started doing shoots for a pet shelter free of charge, and helped increase the adoption rates there by 100%
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Why sell an old photo as something historical when you can market it as something mythical? A few days ago someone listed an old civil war photograph on eBay with the description:
Original c.1870 carte de visite showing a man who looks exactly like Nick Cage. Personally, I believe it’s him and that he is some sort of walking undead / vampire, et cetera, who quickens / reinvents himself once every 75 years or so. 150 years from now, he might be a politician, the leader of a cult, or a talk show host.
The subject’s resemblance to Nicolas Cage caused the listing to go viral, but before the seller could rake in the big bucks with the $1,000,000 Buy It Now price, eBay apparently pulled the listing. Too bad… it would have been one of the most creative ways to sell a print that we’ve ever come across.
(via The Online Photographer)
Last Friday, Olympus partnered with JetBlue for an Oprah-style giveaway: each of the 1000+ passengers traveling on Flight #001 from New York to Fort Lauderdale was given a newly-announced PEN E-PM1 Micro Four Thirds camera. The company documented the event using its own PEN cameras, and simply asked that everyone upload 20 of their favorite images captured to this website.
Perhaps if it was a flight full of photo-enthusiasts and the camera a top-of-the-line DSLR, the reaction would have been more enthusiastic.
Nikon has set up a teaser page titled “I AM COMING”, with a countdown that ends on Wednesday September 21. With all the rumors that have been floating around, it would be pretty shocking if this wasn’t the company’s mirrorless camera announcement. Looks like Nikon couldn’t snag the domain name “iamcoming.com”, though — the teaser is at iamcomings.com.
I AM COMING (via Nikon Rumors)
The giant “GRIT” seen in this photograph wasn’t added in post-processing. The secret? Blue painters tape.
Artist Stephen Doyle created the installation for a series of photographs that appeared in a recent New York Times Magazine article titled What if the Secret to Success is Failure?
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Teenage photographers Vanessa Hollander and Wilson Philippe embarked on a ten-day motorcycle trip across Mongolia this past summer on a mission to give instant photo portraits to Native Mongolians who had never seen a photo before. They also made the above video documenting the reactions of a few of their subjects:
each person photographed really prized and protected his or her polaroid (fearing that we wanted to keep it), and barely let us see it when it was developed! the children automatically stored it away once we showed them what was the very first picture of themselves. it was a really great and humbling experience and showed us how much just one photograph can mean to people who have never had one of themselves. although many people claim they want to escape this mess of technology in more delevoped countries, we often tend to take the beauty of some technology, such as photography, for granted. [#]
Unless you’re a photography-hating robot, the video should bring a smile to your face and a fuzzy feeling to your heart.
