Etsy seller missquitecontrary sells her fine art photographs printed onto vintage dictionary pages. You can try your hand at doing this yourself — just be sure to use archival inks and find an old dictionary or encyclopedia with thick pages.

missquitecontrary’s Etsy Store [Etsy]

As newspapers and magazines struggle to keep eyeballs from turning to the free world of the Web, more and more blogs are rising up to fill the niches once dominated by print. Despite the changing landscape, magazines are still able to command high advertising rates that blogs can’t match (yet). Wanting to find out whether magazines or blogs provided the best bang of each advertising buck, photographer Trey Ratcliff recently spent $26,000 placing ads in three major photography magazines, comparing the results to his online affiliate ad returns. His conclusion?

If I was consulting for one of these product companies that puts significant funds into magazine advertising, I would challenge them to try something new for six months: Try taking 50% of that money and put it into several hundred blogs, podcasts and review sites and measure the results. Cut the worst performers and find new ones.

Only one of the three magazines actually made Ratcliff money (the other two lost over ten thousand dollars) — the one that included an online ad rotation as part of the package.

Stop Advertising in Photo Magazines – Head West to the Web [Trey Ratcliff]

Thanks for sending in the tip, Troy!

Want to made giant prints of your tiny phone photos? Instead of doing the enlargement purely with Photoshop, Photojojo suggests using a scanner for high-quality enlarging. Simply resample the small photo at 360dpi, print it out on high quality matte paper, and then re-digitize it using a scanner at 360dpi and the print size you want. It’d be interesting to see a side-by-side comparison of this technique versus simply resizing in Photoshop and printing that image directly.

DIY: Turn Phone Photos into Mural-Sized Prints! [Photojojo]

Behind the Gare St. Lazare is one of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson‘s best known photographs, and is frequently cited as an example of his “decisive moment” approach to photography. The photograph was made in 1932, but the oldest known print is dated 1946. That print will be sold at a Christie’s auction on November 11th along with 100 other signed prints, and is expected to fetch up to ~$250,000.

(via Christies via Foto Actualidad)

Earlier this month we shared a hugely popular post on transferring a photo onto a block of wood. Well, the same technique can also be used to create a canvas print. All you need, besides the stretched canvas, is some gel medium and a photo printed with toner (e.g. made with a laser printer or photocopier). The gel medium is used to “steal” the toner from the paper, and once the paper is rubbed away, the print remains. Check out the full tutorial over on A Beautiful Mess.

Make Your Own Canvas Portrait! [A Beautiful Mess]

P.S. Be sure to check out the wood transfer tutorial if you haven’t seen it already. It’d make for a neat gift for the holidays!

If printing your film photos with the usual chemicals isn’t old school enough for your taste, you should try your hand at making a salt print. Photographer Andrew B. Myers made the above print using the technique, and explains,

Salt printing is one of the oldest processes photography has employed, pioneered by Henry Fox Talbot back in 1839. The process hasn’t changed much since then. Basically, you start by coating paper in a solution of water and sodium chloride (I ended up using table salt) and letting it dry. Next, in a darkroom environment, a silver nitrate solution is applied to the salted paper, creating a light sensitive emulsion. Let it dry. At this point, a contact print can be made by sandwiching a film negative or some sort of transparency and letting the paper sit in the sun. In my case, I had access to a powerful UV light with a timer, which worked in a similar fashion, and allowed me to work at night in the winter. It’s quite neat seeing the image once it’s been exposed, and after washing and fixing, you’re done. [#]

You can find a more in-depth tutorial over at Dulce Photography, or browse some more sample salt prints in this Flickr group.

(via Photojojo)

Image credit: Photograph by Andrew B. Myers and used with permission

Want to adorn a wall with a giant print using your own photography? Here’s a great video in which photographer Lee Morris shares how he shot, printed, and framed a massive 5-foot-wide panoramic print for less than $150 — super cheap compared to the $1,000+ you might pay to have it professionally done. After shooting multiple photos on a bridge in Rome, he merged the images using Photoshop, had a metallic print made by Bay Photo Labs, and then framed it using a large mirror he found at Bed Bath and Beyond. The final result is quite impressive!

Disclosure: Bay Photo Labs is a sponsor of PetaPixel

PillowMob is a new service that transforms photos of heads into puffy pillow heads. In addition to human faces, you can also use the face of your beloved pet. They cost $25 each with free shipping — it’s currently available to US residents only, but the company may begin shipping internationally soon.

Thanks for the tip, Jeremy!

Apparently Nikon has decide to save some trees (and shipping weight) by no longer including user manuals in some of its digital cameras. Since most people likely never touch the manuals anyway, it’s not really a problem, but the company’s draconian stance towards downloadable instruction manuals has some customers grumbling.

Search for a particular camera’s user manual on Nikon’s site, and you’ll be greeted with the message,

To protect against Copyright Infringement, Nikon offers two versions of our current product manuals. A fully printable manual for existing owners (which requires a valid, North American, Nikon camera serial number and registration to download) and a non-printable version for others (no serial number required). [#]

So basically, the company will let you download a manual onto your computer without any hassle, but if you want to print it out, you’ll need to go through a registration process to access a printable version of the file.

Kyle Wagner over at Gizmodo writes,

Nikon does offer a fully printable version of its manuals if you just happen to have your camera’s serial number and registration information on hand, but seriously! How is that necessary? It’s not even the inconvenience of the thing (which does kind of stink). It’s the sheer absurdity of it. What does Nikon possibly stand to lose from users printing out a copy of their manual?

Is Canon’s policy any different? Upon first glance it might appear so, but it actually isn’t. You can download a user manual without any hassle or copyright warnings, but try to print it out and you’ll find that each page has a big fat [COPY] watermark. There also doesn’t appear to be any warning about the watermark, or a link to a non-watermarked version that requires registration. Thus, this isn’t really a Nikon issue, but an issue with the way camera companies deal with downloadable user manuals.

My guess is that the policy is meant to make it more difficult for counterfeit cameras to have legitimate-looking user manuals, but this just means a counterfeit maker can simply pay for a single camera (or borrow a serial number) in exchange for a downloadable manual. At the same time, legitimate camera customers are smacked with a great deal of inconvenience, especially if more and more manufactures decide to start saving trees.

(via @Beschizza via Gizmodo via Nikon Rumors)

Finish modder metalfusion has a sweet DIY way of showing off photographs. After converting .jpg, .gif, or .png photographs into halftone images using a free program, they use a CNC machine to carve the image into black-painted plywood by drilling into the wood at various depths. Up close the “print” looks like a piece of wood with a bunch of holes, but step back — or squint your eyes — and the photo can be seen!

DIY CNC (via Hacked Gadgets via Engadget)