February 2010

Collapsible Tent Pole Tripod by Tamrac

Here's a "carry around" tripod for your carry around lens and camera: The ZipShot is a "compact, ultra-light tripod" by Tamrac that has aluminum-alloy legs that resemble the collapsible poles used in tents. While it's not very useful in windy situations, or with heavy professional gear, it might suffice for most ordinary uses and lighter cameras (supposedly it can hold up to 3lb). The biggest benefits are obviously weight (11oz) and setup time.

A Shortener for… Your Photographs?

Liquid Scale is an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that offers content aware image resizing. What does that mean? Basically it's like a URL shortener for your photographs, reducing the dimensions of the photograph but retaining the meaning.

Uncle Jack Shot with a Pentax K-7

Pentax recently asked a couple production companies to shoot short films demonstrating the HD filming capabilities of the Pentax's flagship K-7. After the recent flurry of short films shot with Canon and Nikon DSLRs, it seems Pentax would like to remind us all that they're still in the game. The two films were recently released, and are titled "Uncle Jack" (embedded above) and "The Rider".

Google Brings Street View to the Mountains

Just in time for the Winter Olympics, Google announced on Tuesday that Street View now includes imagery of several runs at Whistler Blackcomb ski resort, where many of the events will be held. To capture the photographs, Street View cameras were mounted on a snowmobile that made runs down the slopes.

Flickr Co-Founder Returns to Roots

Some of you might know that popular photo sharing service Flickr was originally a set of tools built for a massively multiplayer online game called Game Neverending. In November of 2009 we also reported that Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, had left Flickr and was returning to his original project, Game Neverending.

First Large Format Skydiving Photographs

Aaron Gustafson, a Seattle-based artist, has become the first person to ever shoot large format photographs while skydiving. Using a custom large format helmet camera he designed himself, Gustafson made one large format photograph on each jump while traveling at speeds upwards of 130 miles per hour.

Canon Announces the EOS 550D

Today's big story is announcement of the Canon 550D, also known as the Canon Rebel T2i. This camera offers many of the same features as the Canon 7D, including an 18 megapixel sensor, an ISO range of 100–6400, full 1080p video (at 30, 24 or 25fps with manual exposure control), 1.6x crop factor, and a 3-inch LCD screen.

Astronaut Tweets Earth Photos from Space

For the past two weeks, Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi has been beaming down photographs of Earth from the International Space Station using his TwitPic account. The photographs, taken with a Nikon D2Xs, show various cities and landmarks around the world as the ISS flies roughly 200 miles overhead at an average of 17,227 mph.

Saving JPEG Photos Hundreds of Times

Most of you probably know that JPEG is lossy compression method, meaning compression permanently throws out data and detail. Luckily, a typical compression can save 10 times the space of an uncompressed image without sacrificing much noticeable quality. However, if the image is repeatedly compressed and saved, artifacts introduced during compression become more and more obvious.

Fold Your Own Photo Kaleidocycle

Looking for a neat new way to show off your photographs? Foldplay has a cool web application that can help you print and fold your very own kaleidocycle, a moving paper sculpture that turns endlessly.

Dell Buys Entire Magnum Press Archive

Billionaire Michael Dell's investment firm MSD Capital, L.P has purchased the entire New York print archive of renowned photo agency Magnum Photos, totaling nearly 200,000 images. The collection includes some of the most iconic images throughout history, including photos of world leaders, celebrities, and major events such as World War II. Though the price was not disclosed, the collection was previously insured for over $100 million.