Latest Posts
High Speed Photography With Your Flash
If you’re looking for a photographic challenge to spice up the new year, you might consider high speed photography. When you hear the words “high speed”, the first knob you might reach for is the shutter speed. Unfortunately, as you will soon find out, this knob is virtually useless. While a shutter speed of 1/8000 [...]
How to Use A Gray Card on Mars: The Curious Case of the New Mars Rover
Did you see the see the launch for that new camera. You know. The one with the 2 megapixel sensor … that runs on radioactive decay … and takes landscape photos … of Mars. This new camera was launched (literally) on November 26 and is currently nested in the nosecone of a rocket hurtling towards [...]
Five Reasons You May Soon Be Shooting at ISO 50,000
You’ve got your subject in the viewfinder and the frame is composed. As you press the shutter button, a suprisingly complex process ensues. First, light energy which spent its last eight minutes traveling from the Sun hits its Earthly target and reflects into your lens. Then photons channel their way through the glass and smack [...]
New Website Lets You Know the Best Time to Pull the Trigger on a Camera Purchase
For everyone who is busily scanning holiday sale promotions and wondering when is the best time to purchase a new camera, here is one more resource at your disposal. A new website called Decide.com will give recommendations on whether to buy or wait for a better price based on complex price prediction algorithms. The website [...]
Windows Workflow Tip: Working with Raw Files in Windows
If you’re like many photographers with new Windows PCs, the first time you download Raw photos onto your computer you will see a discouraging screen similar to the one below. When you attempt to view your Raw files in Windows Explorer, a bunch of sad little rectangles stare sappily back at you like lost puppy [...]
What is the Highest Frame Rate the Human Eye Can Perceive?
If you begin to dabble in DSLR videography, one of the first controversies you run into is the optimal frame rate for video capture and playback. Legend has it that you should capture the video using a shutter speed twice as fast as the frame rate you desire for the final playback (e.g. 1/50th for [...]
The Future of Photo Editing: Inserting 3D Objects Into A Scene
So you think you’re a photo editing master. You can optimize exposure without batting an eye. You can apply an unsharp mask with the best of them. You even brushed out that clueless tourist from your Washington Monument photo so that no one could notice. Well, here’s a skill that you may be adding to [...]
Breathtaking Time Lapse of Earth from Space Station
Maybe you’ve heard. There is a one-million pound tinker toy floating 200 miles above the surface of the Earth. The International Space Station zips around the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour and witnesses 17 sunrises and sunsets every day. What you may not know is that in addition to all their other duties, the [...]
Free Lecture from CMOS Sensor Inventor on Image Sensor Technology
In the early 1990′s, while you were busy watching a new show called Seinfeld, Eric Fossum was busy inventing something revolutionary. Fossum had recently joined the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was asked to come up with a new type of image sensor. Solid-state sensors up to that point had been CCD sensors which suffered [...]
Canon Introduces Cinema EOS Camera Series
In a Hollywood event that included Martin Scorcese and many other filmmakers, Canon unveiled its foray into digital film making – the C300 Cinema EOS camera. Film makers have been infatuated with Canon’s HD DSLR cameras ever since Canon introduced HD video capability in its 5D Mark II. But the 5D Mark II was [...]
Microsoft Creates Autonomous Party Photographer Robot
Say what you want about Internet Explorer 6 or Windows Vista, Microsoft still has the ability to innovate when they want to. Cameras have become so easy that all you have to in some cases is press a button. Now it seems that humans are not even required to do that. Microsoft combined one part [...]
How Good is the iPhone 4S Camera’s IR Filter?
One of the many enhancements in the iPhone 4S camera is reportedly an embedded infrared (IR) filter. Sounds good you say, but what good is an IR filter and how can we even tell if it’s really in there? One of the easiest IR filter testers may be located right beside you. If you have [...]
Throwable Ball Camera Captures 360 Degree Panoramas
For everyone who has stitched a few photos together in Photoshop and called it a panorama, here is how you take it to the next level. Jonas Pfeil, a student at of the Technical University of Berlin has taken one part camera array and one part Nerf toy and combined them into a throwable camera. [...]
DIY Movie Making With Your DSLR
If your still photography is in a creative rut, maybe you should consider flipping your DSLR camera over to video mode. While it may not be the reason you bought your camera, film makers the world over are embracing DSLR cameras for their video abilities. Entire TV episodes have been shot with the Canon 5D [...]
Lytro Introduces First “Living Picture” Camera
Forget about setting exposure. Check. Forget about memory cards. Check. Forget about focusing? Ch…..What? Today, amid a torrent of fanfare, Lytro introduced the first of its “light field” cameras. These cameras incorporate a remarkable shoot first, focus later concept which they hope will take the photography community by storm. Earlier this year, we previewed the [...]
