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Kodak to Cease Camera Production

Inventors of the digital camera step back from their creation

You can't always finish what you started. Even those responsible for some of the most important inventions of our time must sometimes back away and let somebody else take over their creations instead. Sometimes, other people can do what you do better than you. At least, that's the situation that the Eastman Kodak Company has just found itself in the midst of. The company will stop selling its own digital cameras, even though it was the one to invent them way back in 1975.

Photo Project Ideas for the New Year

A photo blog that I used to follow on a fairly regular basis (Photojojo) has now delivered to its audience a newsletter format. The content is still just as engaging as it was when it was a simple photography blog.

The creators of Photojojo have also opened up a store of the most bizarre and odd photography gadgets that you could find anywhere on the web. They’re also planning to create a new online store front called, Material and have quite the promising job offer for anyone interested.

Recently, Photojojo featured an article dedicated to photo projects suggested for the New Year. One of my favorites is the daily photo concept idea of taking photos from where you’re standing. This idea may be great, specifically for someone who loves the idea of taking photos and sharing their photography regularly, but doesn’t enjoy having pictures of them taken. Read more about Photo Project Ideas for the New Year

Photographs Evoke Chinese Ink Drawings

Mimicking the old with the new

Some artists spend years upon years practicing their hand at photorealism. It takes a lot of effort to get a painting or drawing to look exactly like the scene it's recreating, and while most photorealistic renderings don't necessarily add a lot to the art scene, they are impressive for their technical feat alone. But an equally impressive and most curious feat is to do the reverse; to create the illusion of hand-rendering in a photograph. Don Hong-Oai spent his career doing just that.

Remembering 2011

Photographically speaking, 2011 was a very destructive year, physically and emotionally. A Tsunami tore up Japan in March. Then, a little later in the year, protests broke out in Cairo, Egypt. Riots struck in London in August. While in September and October, Occupy protests broke out worldwide. Suddenly police were legally allowed to spray protesters when the FDA classified pepper spray as a vegetable.

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Iconic Photographs

The Battle of Gettysburg- everyone remembers listening as their high school history teacher droned on and on about it. Yet, none of us were actually there, none of us can sympathize. Perhaps Timothy H. O’Sullivan may cause us to, with his photograph (pictured).

You can see the blood on the faces of the dead soldiers. In the background, you can see one of the victorious cavalry soldiers looming in the hot July heat. They’re standing guard, proudly atop their horse. Yet they are a mere shadow in this iconic photo. Viewing all this… you can imagine the blazing summer sun coursing through the veins of every soldier, dead or alive. Read more about Iconic Photographs

Absolutely Amazing Images Captured in 2011

National Geographic is having their annual photo contest that ends November 30^th. The Atlantic’s In Focus column with Alan Taylor was able to get a sneak peek at submissions. Here you can view 45 of his favorites from the submissions that have been posted within the community. The photo contest runs under three different categories: People, Places and Nature.

Detachable Phone Camera Lenses

Are you in that middle place between cell phone party shot snapper and arty DSLR-hauler? Not quite ready to commit to a camera and lens that cost you hundreds, but still want to take better than average photos? Photojojo might just have your fix. Their three cell phone lenses will transform your phone's camera into a tiny professional piece.

Microlawns

It might be wrong to categorize Microlawns as a photography blog. The text that accompanies each image makes up at least half the art of the series. But it's the images featured that unleash the floodgates of suburban ennui, the odd things we middle-class humans do to introduce living sparks into our mostly banal and uniform existences.

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Cosplay Portraits from Comic-Con NY

It isn't Halloween yet, but the dedicated cosplayer needs no season to show off their stuff. Nerd conventions happen all year and the nerds of the world show up in full force to emulate their favorite characters. Geek culture is pretty widespread and inclusive; you'll see Star Wars characters and general steampunkers at comic conventions and characters that never made it off the page at video game gatherings. And of course, nerd groupings of all varieties and sizes are never without their zombie contingent. Portrait photographer Senen Llanos took the time to document some of the best outfits at New York's Comic-Con this weekend. The results are pretty spectacular.

Dear Photograph,

Photographs were invented to be artifacts, paper proof that we lived, that we existed in the world, that light once reflected off our faces. We were real once. They didn't have to be professional to mean something. A candid Polaroid of a parent could be a thousand times more meaningful to somebody than any studio portrait. They were just images but they served as points of light in an increasingly darkening timeline of memory.

There's something different about the new model of photographs--the Facebook system, the enormous bank of pictures taken primarily to be shared with the world. Maybe it's the ubiquitous exhibitionism that's been surging through our culture, or just the fact that those photographs are no longer personal but public. Photographs used to be objects that could only be seen by their takers or recipients, only to be shared with those who deeply cared about the memories contained within. Now, every image we capture streams out into the open. Now we don't mind who looks at our vacation photographs so long as a few people hit the "like" button.

What's more, you can't bring a digital photograph around with you in the same way. Sure, you can keep it on your smartphone, but then it's prone to disappearing with the battery life or getting lost when you get a new phone. And you can't hold a digital photograph up to the location where it was taken and see how the old blends in with the new.

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