News / Other News

The UK Intellectual Property Office has issued a 'myth-busting' document about the effect on photographers of a newly-introduced law. The law includes new rules regulating the use of 'orphan works' - intellectual property whose copyright holder cannot be identified. This has led to concern that the changes will allow UK companies to use copyright material from anywhere in the world without the approval of the copyright holder.

DPReview reader Eric Lew is a keen wildlife photographer, and recently returned from a trip to Antarctica. He shared some recollections, advice and photographs in a post on our forums, but we thought what he wrote was so good it deserved a wider audience. Click through for Eric's 2-page article 'Flying Penguins: Photography in Antactica' and find out how you too can publish articles like this on dpreview.

Falling into the interesting photo experiments category, Patrick Letourneau adapted a Kodak Aero Ektar 178mm F2.5 lens, a surplus lens originally used during World War II in bomber-mounted cameras, to use with his Panasonic GH2. A Thorium-oxide coating was used on the Aero Ektar's rear element to improve its refraction index, a fact that adds a sense of intrigue to the unique project. Click through for more details, and pictures. 

South Africa-based filmmaker David East uses a GoPro camera for his video work, but has started to use it for stills as well. Although not as technically sound as images taken on a dedicated stills camera, there's an evocative quality to his work, taken using an 11MP GoPro HD HERO2, which we really like. Click through for more details, and a small selection of images. 

Engineers have developed a curved camera designed to mimic insects' compound eyes. The hemispherical design gives a wide field-of-view with no aberrations and effectively infinite depth-of-field, with the hope it could be used in applications such as endoscopy or as visual sensors on unmanned aircraft. The current design uses 180 light-sensitive elements, each behind its own lens, but researchers hope to build one with 20,000 elements, giving a similar resolution to that seen by dragonflies.

Mike Brodie spent five years riding freight trains across America, returning with an astonishing visual record of the teenage 'freighthoppers' that travel the USA illegally, by rail. Brodie had no formal training in photography, but began documenting his experiences after finding a discarded Polaroid camera behind a car seat. Brodie's images are collected in his new book 'A Period of Juvenile Prosperity'. Click through for more details and a selection of images.

Detailed images on a Chinese blog may reveal more about the next-generation Olympus PEN. Although no official announcement has been made, the extent of the leaks about the camera make its existence an open secret. Rumors suggest the camera will be called the E-P5, and suggest it will have Wi-Fi capabilities (both of which seem plausible, based on the company's naming scheme and recent industry trends).

The overwhelming majority of photographers, even those who derive income from their images, practice the craft alongside their primary gig. And celebrities are no different. While they certainly have fewer budget constraints than the rest of us and easy access to fellow A-listers, there are quite a few with real talent who take their photography seriously. Here's a look at a few of them. (via PhotographyTalk.com)

Kodak hopes to sell its consumer film and processing kiosk businesses to its UK pension scheme, to allow it to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The move pays off the company's biggest debt - an estimated $2.8bn it was expected to have to pay to the pension scheme over the coming years. The pension scheme is reported to be paying $650m for the Personalized Imaging and Document Imaging units the company announced it would sell last August.

Olympus has opened an exhibition that it's calling the "OM-D: Photography Playground" in Berlin, Germany. Situated in the Opernwerkstaetten gallery space, it's an installation of works by 12 artists and collectives that visitors are encouraged to explore, interact with, and photograph. It's open daily from 11am to 7pm until 24 May 2013, and entry is free. Visitors can also borrow an OM-D E-M5 during their visit, to try out the camera at no charge.

As part of its partnership with the World Photography Awards, Sony is hosting a series of workshops at London's Somerset House. The sessions take place from April 26th - 28th and cover a range of interests from beginner topics to those looking to make a career out of photography. Individual sessions are are priced at £5 each. The workshops promote the Winners Exhibition of the World Photography Awards 2013 that will be showcased from April 26th - May 12th at Somerset House. Click though for more details

British sports photographer Tom Jenkins has written a thought-provoking article for The Guardian about how quickly sports stories can turn into breaking news events. In the aftermath of the bomb attacks at the Boston Marathon, Jenkins draws parallels with past tragedies including the Hillsborough disaster, which occurred on the same day 24 years earlier. Jenkins also adds personal reminiscences about how he has made the transition from sports to 'news' photography in the past. Click through for excerpts and a link to the full article at The Guardian.

Dutch designer Ruben van der Vleuten was curious to know how many people and steps were involved between mailing and receiving a parcel, so he decided to find out. He installed a tiny 3MP camera in a parcel, built a timer circuit using Arduino (a simple single-board microcontroller designed to control devices) and shipped it to himself. The timer of the circuit was set to make a 3 second video every minute and make longer videos while the box was moving. Click through to watch the results.

Sensor maker Aptina has announced a 14MP 1"-type sensor for use in mirrorless and video cameras. The AR1411HS enters the range alongside the existing 10MP model and offers even faster shooting capabilities. The 14MP chip can shoot full-resolution images at up to 80 fps and can shoot either 4K or Quad HD (allowing high quality 4:2:2 color) at up to 60 fps. The company suggests the 1" format (actually 13.2 x 8.8mm) offers an effective balance of image quality, price and capabilities to make a sensible middle ground between the tiny 1/2.3" sensors in most compacts and the APS-C sensors used in many mirrorless models and DSLRs. 

Andy Rubin, co-founder of Android, claims that the popular mobile operating system was originally designed for digital cameras, not phones. In an interview published by PC World, Rubin said that the original concept, as pitched to investors back in 2004, was for 'a camera platform with a cloud portion for storing images online'. By the time Google acquired Android in 2005, however, the plan had changed and Android was developed for mobile handsets. Click through for more details and a link to the full story at PCWorld.com.

Columbia University has announced the 2013 Pulitzer Prize winners for photography. The prize for Breaking News Photography was awarded to jointly to Rodrigo Abd, Manu Brabo, Narciso Contreras, Khalil Hamra and Muhammed Muheisen of the Associated Press, for their coverage of the conflict in Syria. The winner in the Feature Photography category is Javier Manzano, a freelance photograher, for his 'extraordinary picture' of two Syrian rebel soldiers illuminated by beams of light streaming through bullet holes. The annual awards include a cash prize of US$10,000. Click through for more information. 

Street photography isn't everyone's cup of tea, and for every Cartier Bresson, watching from a distance, there's a Weegee, pushing a camera into the faces of their bemused subjects without asking permission. Los Angeles-based photographer Johnny Tergo has taken this approach to a new level, rigging up his truck with a camera and bright studio strobes in order to 'bring the studio lighting aspect to everyday real life on the streets'. Click through for the full story, and images (via wired.com)

Citizen Finetech Miyota has developed an LCD panel for electronic viewfinders of digital cameras its claiming is the highest resolution available. It offers a 1280x960 pixel display (equivalent to 3.69 million dots). This exceeds the 2.36m dot (1024 x 768 pixel) resolution of the current Sony OLED and Epson LCD units. It uses a field-sequential design, showing red, green and blue information in sequence rather than being able to show them all at the same time, but the panels 120Hz design should avoid color breakup (tearing) the company says. The panel will enter mass produced in summer 2013.

Online user experience company Teehan + Lax has created a free tool for creating 'hyperlapse' videos using Google Street View. The term 'hyperlapse' describes timelapse videos which incorporate camera movement - something that is typically extremely difficult and time-consuming to perfect. The team at Teehan + Lax began experimenting with Google Street View as a guide for choosing locations, but realised that it could be used as source material. Click through for more details. 

Imaging Resource has published an interesting article by Steve Meltzer, which examines the mystery of the so-called 'Mexican suitcase' - a long-lost collection of images taken by the late Robert Capa. Before escaping Europe ahead of the Nazi invasion of France, Capa entrusted a large number of negatives to a friend for safekeeping. The collection went missing, and was presumed lost for decades until being identified in Mexico in 1995. Robert Capa's brother, Cornell Capa, finally got to see the long-lost negatives in 1997 - forty three years after his brother's death. Click through for a link to the full story.