News / Other News

The first consumer point-and-shoots didn't have art effect modes or face detection smile-shutters. They looked like the Kodak 1, a leather-encased box with a key to wind the film, a shutter release and not much else. Introduced to the public in 1888, each Kodak 1 contained a roll of film with 100 exposures. The UK's National Media Museum owns a collection of prints from these first consumer 'compacts.' Click through to take a look at a set of these early snapshots.

We've been fans of Aaron Johnson's comic strip 'What the Duck' for years. 'WTD' is one of the best satirical comic strips in the world, and it's published here every week, as well as being included in our weekly newsletter. Barbed, topical and always amusing, we hope you enjoy WTD as much as we do. 

Our friends and collaborators over at DxOMark have recently been looking into how lenses score on specific cameras, and the latest model they've examined is Nikon's 24 MP APS-C flagship, the D7100. The article looks at no fewer than 126 lenses, and gauges the advantage of the D7100's higher pixel count and lack of a low-pass filter compared to the 16MP D7000. As a bonus, there's also an assessment of how the imaging performance of Nikon SLRs has improved over the last decade. Click through for the link.   

PDN PhotoPlus Expo celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. The annual conference and tradeshow, held at the Javits Center in New York, will feature a lineup of more than 130 presenters taking part in keynotes, seminars and panel discussions with topics ranging from creative techniques to making a living as a photographer. The show takes place October 24-26th, and registration is open to the public. Click through to read more.

We all know that smartphones are being equipped with better and better cameras, but few of us would ever consider using one for 'serious' photography except in an emergency. Nokia's 'conversations' blog is featuring an interesting project by its own 'camera expert', Ari Partinen and colleague Marko Saari, who wanted to see whether the new Nokia Lumia 1020, which features a 41 megapixel 'PureView' sensor, could hold its own in a studio fashion shoot. The results might surprise you. 

Modern lenses tend to be large and expensive, with multiple glass elements combining to minimise optical aberrations. But what if we could just use a cheap single-element lens, and remove those aberrations computationally instead? This is the question scientists at the University of British Columbia are asking, and they've come up with a way of improving images from a simple single element lens that gives pretty impressive results. Click through to read more.  

As part of the continuing celebration of its 125th anniversary, National Geographic once again features Steve McCurry's famous 'Afghan Girl' photograph on the cover of October's 'The Photography Issue'. Along with the new issue, National Geographic has launched some supporting content, as well as a new blog called Proof, offering 'new avenues for our audience to get a behind-the-scenes look at the National Geographic storytelling process.' 

Heard the one about the sculptor awarded over half a million dollars because a stamp was made including a war memorial he'd designed? At first that may sound surprising, but reading the court's judgement (and the rejections of the various defenses put forward by the US Postal Service), is an informative lesson about copyright and fair use. Click here to read more.

We've been fans of Aaron Johnson's comic strip 'What the Duck' for years. 'WTD' is one of the best satirical comic strips in the world, and it's published here every week, as well as being included in our weekly newsletter. Barbed, topical and always amusing, we hope you enjoy WTD as much as we do. 

Researchers at University of California, San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering are working on a miniature wide angle lens, taking advantage of the benefits of spherical lenses. At just a tenth of the size of a traditional wide angle lens, a spherical lens can create wide angle images without chromatic aberration or loss of resolution at corners. The challenge is capturing the lens' spherical projection on a flat sensor. The team have overcome this by using optical fibers fused to the rear of the lens to relay light to electronic sensors. Click through to read more.

The New York Times' Lens Blog asked teenagers across the U.S. to submit photos of their hometowns for a project simply called 'My Hometown.' Thousands of teens responded to the call, with submissions coming from 45 states. The resulting collection is a yearbook of sorts, documenting the friends, family and places closest to a small sampling of the country's young people. Lens Blog has published a selection of 145 Editor's Choice photos, and the whole collection is available online - searchable by student or state. Take a look at a few standouts.

Jean Albus mixes dresses into her Montana landscapes by letting them decay, sometimes for years, before photographing them. She hopes their weathered forms invoke emotions about aging, memory, transformation and more. Her final images sometimes feature a dress as she's found it, sunken into the elements. She also often superimposes the worn dress over another image of the landscape, floating the decaying dress within "Big Sky Country." A new video explains her process. Click through to see more.

Some people are happy to shoot with lenses and think only of the results, but it can also be fascinating to think about how such complex, precision pieces of engineering are made. Some insight is provided by Dave Etchells over at Imaging Resource, who has just posted a story about his visit to Sigma's factory in Aizu, Japan. However, no matter how hard you try, you can't make every lens perfect - as Lensrentals Roger Cicala explains in his recent blog post. Click through for more.

DxOMark has tested the Canon EOS 70D's live view autofocus system in comparison to the Sony SLT-A77, looking at focus speeds and accuracy in both movie and stills modes. The two cameras offer an intriguing contrast in technologies; the 70D uses Canon's latest 'Dual Pixel AF' on-sensor phase detection, while the A77 employs a separate phase detection AF sensor which receives light via a semi-transparent mirror. Click through to see how the two cameras fare in DxOMark's head-to-head testing.    

The folks behind CreativeLive, an online resource for photographers co-founded by Chase Jarvis, have kicked off Photo Week: six days of educational workshops streamed live online for free. Workshops will be broadcast over three channels with topics including wedding, family and portrait photography. It begins today - click through for more details.

Photography, as an art form, can be quite elastic. It can be used to capture the 'decisive moment' or a once-in-a-lifetime split-second shot. Or, the form expands into more studied, careful, fine art approaches. These photos fall into the second category. Their use of color and lines, artificial lighting and repetition give them a lot in common with paintings - so much so that they might just trick you at first glance. 

We've been fans of Aaron Johnson's comic strip 'What the Duck' for years. 'WTD' is one of the best satirical comic strips in the world, and it's published here every week, as well as being included in our weekly newsletter. Barbed, topical and always amusing, we hope you enjoy WTD as much as we do. 

Canon has released a short video produced with a unique full frame CMOS sensor. Announced in March, it's a sensor dedicated to extreme low light video recording with unusually large pixels. The test subject? A group of Yaeyama-hime fireflies on Japan's Ishigaki Island. Click through to read more.

Jeff Rich's photo project started at the French Broad river outside of Asheville, North Carolina. Since then, 'Watershed Project' has taken him to the Tennessee River and now the Mississippi in an effort to document and raise awareness of the safekeeping of these rivers. To create some boundaries for the project, he's limited the scope to capturing the stewardship, pollution and control of the rivers. Click through and check out some of his images.

For some of us, photography is a hobby. For others, it's a way to make a living. For Forrest Sargent, a 22-year-old with autism who is unable to speak, it's a veritable lifeline. His communication is limited to spelling out words using a letter board, a method which allowed him a much-needed way to express himself. Beyond that, he communicates with a gift from his parents bought for his 19th birthday: a camera. Click through to see some of his work.