Photographer Kenneth Jarecke has written up an interesting article on how Internet culture is hindering the development of people who want to get better at photography:

There’s nothing wrong with not being any good at photography. Everybody started out bad and none of us does all aspects of it well. But it’s a crying shame to want to be good at it, to spend time and money trying to be good at it, and not getting any better.

This isn’t like teaching a child to read. Positive reinforcement is your enemy. Your Facebook friends, your Twitter followers… hate you. Instead of taking ten seconds to say. “This doesn’t work. You need to do better”. They readily push that “like” button, because it’s easy and they hope to get the same from you, but also because they’re cowards.

His advice? “Seek out great photography. Devour it, and be suspicious of any undue praise.”

Chances Are, You Suck (via A Photo Editor)

Image credit: 310/365: Photo-tastic Sunday… by Derek E-Jay

Want to see how far DSLRs have come in the past decade? Lee Morris of Fstoppers published these two photos taken at Super Bowl halftime shows. The crop on the left was captured in 2001, possibly with the Nikon D1H at 2.7 megapixels and ISO 800 (state of the art specs at the time). The slice on the right was from this past weekend, and was shot with a Nikon D3s at 12MP and ISO 12,800.

Image credits: Photographs by Lonny Krasnow/AP and FilmMagic

Photographer Brock Davis likes playing with food. Among his food related experiments are recreations of famous explosions done with cauliflower. The image above shows the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

Here’s the original famous photo taken that day (the photo he referenced can be seen here):

The Hindenberg airship disaster in 1937:

The atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan in 1945:

Food Stuff (via kottke.org)

Image credits: Photographs by Brock Davis and used with permission

Here’s your interesting photo fact of the day: did you know that sepia toning (when B&W photos are given that distinctive warm tone) is named after the Common Cuttlefish? The scientific name of the species is Sepia officinalis, and the ink produced by the cuttlefish was used for sepia toning when the technique first emerged in the 1880s.

Sepia is a dark brown-grey color, named after the rich brown pigment derived from the ink sac of the common cuttlefish Sepia. The word sepia is the Latinized form of the Greek σηπία, sēpía, cuttlefish. [#]

Nowadays, sepia ink is generally replaced with other dyes or pigments that produce the same hue.

Photographic print toning (via Reddit)

German broadcaster Deutsche Welle produced this interesting segment on photographer Yuri Arcurs and how he turned his microstock photography into a million-dollar photography empire. Here’s a mind-boggling statistic: on average, Arcurs sells one of his images every 8 seconds.

(via ISO 1200)

Ever wonder why camera manufacturers these days are describing often sensor sizes with fractions instead of millimeters? Roger Cicala of LensRentals explains:

[...] then we get into all of these fractional-inch-type-measurements for the smaller sensors. That measurement system originated in ancient times (the 1950s to 1980s) when vacuum tubes were used instead of CCD or CMOS sensors in video and television cameras. The image sensor was, in those days, referred to in terms of the outside diameter of the vacuum tube that contained it.

Why do manufacturers keep using such an archaic measurement? Because it helps them lie to you, of course. If you do the math 1/2.7 equals 0.37 inches, which equals 9.39 mm. But if you look at the chart above you’ll see that a 1/2.7″ sensor actually has a diagonal of 6.7 mm. Why? Because, of course, a thick glass tube used to surround the sensors. So they calculate the sensor size as if the glass tube was still included. Makes perfect sense to a marketing person who wants to make their sensor seem larger than it is. What sounds better: 1/2.7″ or ‘less than 10% the size of a full frame sensor’?

If you have a few minutes, give his entire post on sensor sizes a read — it’s quite illuminating.

Sensor Size Matters [LensRentals Blog]

Image credits: Photograph by Sphl

In a paper published in Science this week, Japanese researchers reported on a discovery that jumping spiders use a method for gauging distance called “image defocus”, which no other living organism is known to use. Rather than use focusing and stereoscopic vision like humans or head-wobbling motion parallax like birds, the spiders have two green-detecting layers in their eyes — one in focus and one not. By comparing the two, the spiders can determine the distance from objects. Scientists discovered that bathing spiders in pure red light “breaks” their distance measuring ability.

Here’s a National Geographic video discussing the finding:

Regarding the finding’s potential impact on photography, PopPhoto writes,

This “image defocus” could provide an interesting alternative to the way that modern cameras focus and analyze distance. Take for instance the current crop of 3D cameras. Some use two lenses and some allow you to take a panorama of shots, and will pick two to stitch together two to make a 3D final — these methods are analagous to the stereoscopic and motion parallax versions found in biology mentioned above. If cameras were able to adopt the defocus method, it could potentially provide 3D information from a single lens. Alternately, it might be a different way of calculating focus, separate from the phase- and contrast-based versions that we see right now.

No word on when “spider eye rangefinders” will become a standard feature in cameras.

(via Science via PopPhoto)

Image credit: Anterior Median and Lateral Eyes of a Female Jumping Spider – (Maevia inclemens) by Thomas Shahan

Here’s fantastic documentary film about Ansel Adams that PBS made for the history series American Experience.

[...] an elegant, moving, and lyrical portrait of this quintessentially American photographer. The documentary weaves together archival footage, photographic images, dramatic readings of the artist’s own writing, and interviews with leading photographers, historians, curators, naturalists, as well as Adams’s family, friends, and colleagues, to tell the story of a man who was at once a visionary photographer, a pioneer in photographic technique, and an ardent crusader for the cause of environmentalism.

It’s about 80 minutes long. You can find out more about the film here.

Ansel Adams: A Documentary Film [PBS]

Design director Wayne Ford has written up a great piece on the career of American photographer Arnold Newman, who was in the vanguard of the “environmental portrait” movement that emerged in the early 1940s.

By this point, [Alexey] Brodovitch — the indirect teacher — was very aware of the young photographers work and his growing reputation, and began assigning him regular portrait commissions for Harper’s Bazaar. One of these assignments was to photograph the Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, which resulted in one of Newman’s most iconic images, although at the time it was rejected for publication. ‘Sometimes, as with his famous image of Stravinsky, he would have to recreate a natural habitat artificially,’ remarks Huxley-Parlour, ‘so he expressed his essence by placing him at a grand piano in an editor’s apartment,’ creating a strong, hard, linear composition, ‘very much like Stravinsky’s music.’

Arnold Newman and the development of the ‘environmental portrait’ (via A Photo Editor)

Image credit: Photograph by Arnold Newman

Destin of Smarter Every Day wanted to show how a DSLR shutter works, so he pointed a Phantom high speed camera at a Canon 60D and made this slow motion video showing the magic that happens every time you press the shutter.