Prior to the fancy graphics video game players enjoy today, classic games were based on simple geometric forms. German photographer Patrick Runte decided to do a quirky photo project exploring what these games might look like if translated to the real world. His series, titled Jump ‘N’ Run, shows people dressed in simple costumes of “characters” from games like Pac-Man, Pong, and Tetris.
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Photographer Christian DeBaun of Charlottesville, Virginia captured this photograph that shows six living generations of daughters. The oldest is 111-year-old Mollie Wood, who was born in 1901. The youngest is 7-week-old Braylin Higgins. You can find more images from this photo shoot here.

(via Laughing Squid)

In sharp contrast to the Leica way of doing things by hand, Canon has just announced that it is planning on completely eliminating the need for a human production line as early as 2015. So while your future Leica M10 will still be completely hand-made (with a price tag to match), your future 5D Mark IV (or maybe Mark VI by then) will be entirely robot-made.

Fortunately, Canon spokesperson Jan Misumi assured the press that the move won’t lead to job losses, as employees will be moved into other parts of the company. But it does seem to take a little bit of the humanity you see in the Leica making of video out of camera manufacturing.

(via Engadget)

PetaPixel is now a three-year-old blog. Our readership has continued to grow at a healthy rate over the past year, and recently we even added our first full time writer, DL Cade (if you follow this blog regularly then you’ve already seen plenty of his work). We’ve had a blast bringing you all the most interesting tidbits from the world of photography on a daily basis.

We’ve been thinking of having a meetup in real life for anyone and everyone interested in cameras and photography. Possible locations include NorCal, SoCal, and NYC. If you’re located in any of these places — or elsewhere — and would be interested in attending such a thing, please let us know in the comments! We’d like to gauge our readers’ interest in this kind of thing.

To all you awesome readers out there: thanks a bazillion for visiting this site, for commenting, and for sharing it with your friends!

Metamorphose is a project by photographer Frederic Fontenoy that consists of slit-scan self portraits created in outdoor locations. The technique produces an effect that makes his body look like it’s metamorphosing into some other life form.
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Slow-motion video is usually the territory of expensive equipment like the Miro M120. Alternatively, if you’re not looking to shoot professionally, you can always take the video you capture on your phone or regular camera and slow it down, but the results are usually choppy and (sadly) nothing you’d want to broadcast on YouTube. Fortunately, there is another way; iPhone videographers who own the 4S now have a free, fun alternative in a new app called SloPro.
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Want to see how the world’s most expensive camera was auctioned this past Saturday? The video above shows the 1923 Leica O-Series going up at the WestLicht Photographica Auction and being sold at the record-breaking price of $2.79 million after auction fees and tax. WestLicht points out that these cameras have been appreciating like crazy in recent years: the first sold in 2007 for $440K and a second sold in 2011 for $1.9M before this most recent auction. Each of the auctions set a new world record for “most expensive camera”.

Yes, that camera you see sitting on the table is the actual camera being auction. The model at the end is holding a very expensive piece of metal and glass in her hands.

Many words and/or phrases come to mind when you think of Kodak: photography, disposable camera, kodak moment, and more recently bankruptcy. But we never thought we would be able to associate the phrases “nuclear reactor” and “enriched uranium” with the once-great photography giant — until recently that is. That’s because a few months ago a former Kodak employee let slip to the Democrat and Chronicle the existance of a little known, and never publicized, nuclear reactor hidden in the bowels of Kodak city for the last 30 years.
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Here’s a humorous short film titled “Smile” by director Dean Fleischer-Camp, who regularly asks people to pose for a photograph but then secretly records video instead. It shows how poses that look so natural in still photographs can look so completely awkward in videos.

Update: Long Awkward Pose is a website dedicated to this very thing. (thx flamedot!)

David Shankbone (real name David Miller) has been called “arguably the most influential new media photojournalist in the world.” And if you’ve never heard of him you may wonder: How did he achieve such a status? How did he get his work published by The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Forbest all while his actual day job isn’t even as a photographer? He did it all by giving away his photography for free. Read more…