News entries for April, 2012

You want to archive your photo collection, right? You want an onsite copy and an offsite copy, right? You know, so one disaster doesn't lead to another.

But why should you buy a bunch of external hard drives that will just sit around on a shelf?

Why not save a few bucks and just buy the bare drives and one dock like the WiebeTech UltraDock that you can plug them into...

History is the tale told by the winners and nothing proves this better than, “Prague through the Lens of the Secret Police” a collection of “surveillance” photographs taken between 1970 and 1989. Published in 2009, these are pictures made by nearly 800 secret police whose job it was to roam the streets of Prague and photograph suspicious behavior.
 
And as such, they are...

If you've been around photography for any length of time, you'll doubtless have heard some variation on the truism that it's not the camera which makes the photo, it's the photographer. The theory is that a real pro can get a great photograph no matter what gear he or she is using. A new iOSapp from Belgian developer Michael Hardaker takes this theory and runs with it,...

There have been a lot of interesting crowd-funded Kickstarter projects so far along with some more laughable ones. Add the Brydge + iPad project to the interesting category. (Actually make that the very interesting category.)

Ever since we got our iPad, we've searched high and low for a good solution for adding a keyboard to Apple's tablet so we could type more quickly....

Leaping boldly into the 21st century, IR has rolled out a reader comment system for our news pages! Now, rather than simply staring dumbfounded in amazement, you can share your own thoughts on the news of the day, whether it be cool steampunk cameras, a true "box" camera from IKEA, a 6mm, 220 degree fisheye lens for $160,000, or whatever the latest is from your favorite...

There's a new kid on the block for photographic filters, with the announcement by a newly-formed Slovakian company that it will soon start selling filters in the standard Type P format.

Piešťany-based G&R spol. s.r.o. will sell its filters under the brand name '84.5mm camera filters', taking the name from the typical width of a Type P filter. Initially, G&R plans to offer...

Taller photographers and tripod manufacturers alike are faced with something of a dilemma: it's relatively easy to make a sturdy tripod that offers comfortable eye-level shooting, or one that offers great opportunities for shooting low to the ground, but making one that can perform equally well in both areas is a challenge, to say the least.

Typically, manufacturers take...

Sitting for your picture in a Daguerreotype photographer’s studio in the middle of the 19th century was a form of torture for both sitter and photographer. An agonizing experience, it required the subject to sit for several minutes, immobile while clamped into neck braces and head supports.

For the portrait photographer, it was a struggle too. There was no question of...

Scandinavian megaretailer Ikea has gained worldwide fame--perhaps verging on notoriety--for product designs that pare things down to their very basics, and use cheap, sustainable materials wherever possible. Now, they've turned their attention to the imaging world, with the help of product designer Jesper Kouthoofd of Teenage Engineering A.B. The result? What Teenage...

For the photographer who has everything, how about a snazzy bracelet made out of an actual recycled camera lens?

The creation of photographer Craig Arnold, the bracelets -- Arnold calls them "cuffs" -- are made from camera lenses he recycles in South Australia and sells under his re:vision brand.

Arnold also makes original sterling silver pieces modeled on real lenses...

Four weeks after it debuted the first release candidate of Photoshop Lightroom 4.1, Adobe has today released a second release candidate version of its popular photographer-centric imaging application. Lightroom 4.1 RC2 adds new defringing controls that help squash chromatic aberration, and adds support for twelve new camera models. It also aims to fix eleven bugs present in...

If you thought the megapixel wars were over, you've probably never heard of the 3.2 billion pixel Large Synoptic Survey Telescope camera.

Comprised of 189 sensors and over three tons of components, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), is designed to capture the entire visible sky every week. In doing so, it will create an unprecedented public archive of data: about...

Portland, Oregon photographer Martin Waugh is obsessed with water. Trained in physics, about 10 years ago he was fascinated by high-speed photography and the balloon popping, smashing light bulb, water splashing images of Harold Edgerton.

Seeing those images, he decided that it was the perfect way to blend his love of science and photography. He set up a rig for taking...

If you're shooting with the Nikon D800, D800E, or D7000 digital SLRs, or the Nikon 1 V1 compact system camera, you'll want to take a careful look at all of your EN-EL15 battery packs. These packs were included in the camera bundles, and =sold separately as Nikon model number 27011. In either instance, they're clearly identified as an EN-EL15 on the pack's label. Nikon has...

Ok, this is pretty clever. It's called The Descriptive Camera and it's the creation of Matt Richardson, an NYU student who says he was fascinated that digital cameras capture "gobs of parsable metadata about photos" including settings, GPS location data, date, time etc. but "they don't output any information about the content of the photo."

The Descriptive Camera, in...

Over the last few years, there's been something of a revolution in the interchangeable-lens camera world. Since the Nikon D90 introduced photographers to the concept of shooting video with a camera primarily designed for still imaging, almost the entire industry has taken the idea onboard, and it's now the rare interchangeable-lens camera indeed that doesn't offer some form...

During the 1920s, a photographer working for the Sydney Police Department in Australia took mug shots of all newly arrested suspects. This anonymous photographer created a series of images that are powerful portraits and also a remarkable historical record.
 
Comparing these vintage images to modern mug shots, the differences between the 1920s and the 2010s are striking....

Canon USA has now published its findings after an investigation into the reported light leak problems with the EOS 5D Mark III digital SLR. While it has confirmed the change of exposure value shown by the camera when the top panel LCD's backlight is activated, it says that its in-house testing has confirmed that this does not cause a noticeable impact on final images.

The...

Last January, Phase One combined its medium format camera brands Mamiya and Leaf, to create a new global entity: Mamiya Leaf. Both companies had already been cooperating for some time, and now the first product line of the combined Mamiya Leaf takes that cooperation a step further.

The Leaf Credo camera back series is designed for use with the Mamiya 645DF camera body....