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Yale Organized 170,000 Depression Era Images And Organized Them Into An Awesome Interactive Photo Map

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When a team of professors, employees, student’s and alumni of Yale University decided to tackle the massive collection of depression era photographs created as a special project by the The Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) between the years of 1935-1946, they knew they were embarking on a massive undertaking. The collection, which have been meticulously curated and cared for by the Library of Congress and the FSA-OWI, contained a whopping 170,000 images, all of which would needed to be sorted and re-cataloged into Photogrammar, the new interactive map/website designed by Yale.

As a means of documenting the time during The United State’s Great Depression and to instill trust in the citizens of the governments new programs designed to provide aid and relief to the poorest 1/3 of American farmers, the FSA-OWI began working with photographers all over the country to grow a collection of images. The great Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein were among some of the photographers involved with the project. [Read More…]

Put Your Old Calculator To Work As An Intervalometer With This Super Easy DIY Hack

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The clever folks over at JCAP Media have found a way to turn your old TI-84 graphing calculator that’s been sitting in the bottom of your desk drawer since college into something you may actually use. Who knew the graphing calculator could double as an intervalometer just by inputting a few commands and attaching it to your DSLR? This little hack is super easy and could actually come in handy when you’re shooting your next timelapse. Check it out!

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Analyzing Light – How to Breakdown The Lighting Of A Photo

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Ever since I started photography I had a thing  for lighting. Nowadays, every time I see a picture, I can’t help it but to analyze and breakdown how it was lit. In this article I will share my analyzing process, step by step.


I believe understanding light can make a huge improvement to any photographer’s work, and practicing light-analysis is definitely one of the better ways to do it. When was just starting out, analyzing light on Flickr photos I love was a huge learning experience for me.

There are plenty of way (or tricks) to analyze light, this is how I do it, feel free to share yours too.

The first thing I do is break down the lighting into 4 hint-groups: Catchlights, Shadows, Highlights, and Background lights.

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Sony Aims To Turn Smartphones Into Full DSLRs with the QX1 and QX30

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Yesterday, Sony’s upcoming QX1 was leaked onto the internet, giving us our first look at the lens mount and exactly what it’s expected to bring to smartphone users. The device wasn’t just officially announced today; it’s coming with a partner, as well, called the QX30.

I’ll start off with a TL;DR. Basically, we got the QX1 down yesterday: a mount compatible with any E-mount lens Sony offers. The newly announced QX30, however, is a fixed lens mount with an appropriate-to-title 30X optical zoom.

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Sony Set to Introduce New Interchangeable Lens Mount for Smartphones

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According to SonyAlphaRumors, Sony is preparing to announce another addition to its line-up of professional lens mounts for smartphones. This time, however, the new mount allows you to switch out between the lenses offered on their E-Mount line.

“These are the first pictures of the ILCE-QX1 E-mount camera. The third QX camera after the QX10 and QX100 (here one Bay). But unlike the other two this hasn’t a fixed lens but is an E-mount module. It has an APS-C sensor (not sure yet but should have the same great A6000 24MP sensor with fast af), built-in flash, costs 300 Euro body only and 450 Euro with 16-50mm lens.”

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Trust Issues: The 4Chan Photo Leak, and What We Need to Learn From It

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Louis CK did a bit on Jimmy Kimmel Live, once, where he spoke about Cloud services, and just how absurd it sounds to pay someone you don’t know to look after your personal pictures.

That video’s been getting reposted pretty frequently since what happened over the weekend, and it’s no wonder why. For those who don’t know by now, last Saturday the private pictures of over 10 different celebrities were leaked onto the internet by an anonymous user on 4Chan. According to the running stories, the pictures may have all came from iCloud, and someone found a way to hack into the servers. Literally hours after appearing on 4Chan, those pictures were on the front page of Reddit; twenty-four hours later, the FBI released a statement declaring that the leaker will be brought to justice.

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Photographers: Why We Should Share What We Know

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I think I feel a bit of a rant coming on.

First a little background. Something you should know about me. One of the many reasons I decided to leave the practice of law almost ten years ago was the constant adversarial nature of the beast. I thrived on it in the courtroom, but the daily incessant back-and-forth bickering was just making me miserable. Of course there were exceptions, but not enough of them to sustain my collaborative spirit. My initial reaction when I switched to full-time professional photography had me excited in a way I hadn’t been in years. I was fortunate enough to meet and get to know some truly amazing photographers– generous, creative, collaborative people who were willing to throw open the vault and share so much of themselves. The breath of fresh air was as amazing as it was refreshing. To a certain extent, however, it was also fleeting.

Let’s take a look at three photographers almost all of us know.

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Everything You Wanted To Know About Codecs And Why They Matter

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If you’ve done any video work in your life, there is more than a slight chance that you were staring at Adobe Premiere (or Avid, Or Final Cut) export screen and drooling a bit while you were trying to understand what the heck all those dials on the screen mean.

David Kong just release what I would as the best primer to codecs I have ever seen.

David covers everything from what codecs are (compression and decompression); what is the difference between a codec and a container; what are the pros and cons of using each codec and touches a bit about his workflow.

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Getting Started In High Speed Photography Without Breaking Your Budget

It takes a larger than usual pile of money to purchase all the gear a lot of professionals use for high speed photography. In many of our realities, the chance of us ever owning a Broncolor lighting setup is relatively slim. The good news is, you don’t really need a Broncolor to get started in business of high speed photography.

As the DigitalRev team demonstrates for us in the classically humorous video tutorial you’ll see below, you can still manage to pull off some pretty interesting shots using relatively basic gear. Armed with nothing more than a Canon 550D, a cheap 50mm 1.8 lens, a Canon 600 EX RT, and a Triggertrap Mobile Dongle they are able to capture some pretty sweet colored powder shots plus, they get to smash stuff with a gold club in the process. [Read More…]

Zeiss Starts New Manual Focus, Manual Exposure Loxia Line

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Zeiss believes that the digital market has not lost its passion for manual glass and are announcing a new family of lenses – the Loxia. Those are manual-focus, manual-aperture lenses.

Te lens will come in two flavors, both with max aperture of f/2 – a 50mm version and a 35mm version. Both lenses are compatible only with Sony e-mount. The list of features (which we’ll address shortly) suggests that Zeiss is targeting video shooters as well as high-end stills photographers in the same lens.

Aside from the optical qualities, both lenses are winking at the video market with an interesting set of features:

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