Robotic panorama devices are making the creation of gigantic photographs easier and easier. Donovan used a Gigapan EPIC Pro to create his image, along with a Canon 7D and 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L at 400mm. After 3.5 hours of shooting, he had 4,250 JPG images that took up 27.5 GB of his 32GB memory card. If the photograph were to be printed, it would result in a print the size of nearly 1,200 billboards.
Olympus’ new commercial for the Olympus PEN E-PL1 is pretty typical, except that it has an interesting twist at the end. It’ll probably make you want to watch the commercial twice.
Over the weekend, Best Buy sent out weekly advertising that included a Canon 7D bundle. Funny thing is, they don’t seem to understand that the 7D only takes CompactFlash memory cards, and are selling the bundle with a SanDisk 8GB SD card. Also, it’s not just the advertisement — the online product info also shows the SD card in the images and in the text.
Perhaps next time they should put a photographer in charge of creating their special offer packages.
Do you think they’re actually giving people SD cards with this camera, or is it simply a huge typo/”photoshopo”?
One of the biggest stories last month was that an upcoming episode of the popular TV series House was filmed entirely with the Canon 5D Mark II. I know a lot of you are looking forward to seeing how it turned out, but now you can get a sneak peek: Fox has uploaded a short teaser of the episode to YouTube. It’s not HD, but it’s a pretty neat glimpse into what they were able to do:
Stephen Von Worley over at Weather Sealed just received a lens he calls “The Glass Frisbee”. In the photo above it’s placed next to a Canon 50mm f/1.4 for size comparison. It’s a $250, 195mm f/1.25 lens that’s sold to people who need it for custom uses. The description on Surplus Shed says,
We believe these will make great wide field low power telescopes, incredible binoculars especially suited for low light conditions, or astrographs. Other uses may be for building a camera, projector, HDTV projection, telephoto, finder for your huge scope, low light compact camera obscura, etc, etc.
Von Worley plans to use his for large format photography:
I bought the Frisbee for its incredible combination of 200mm focal length and f/1.3 aperture, which I’ll use to push the limits of narrow depth of field. By the laws of physics, once shoehorned onto my large-format 4×5 monorail camera, it’s the optical equivalent of a 50mm f/0.35 lens on a full-frame SLR.
Until he gets around to it, he’s using the lens as photography-nerd bling:
Kristofer Minkstein from Embed Article recently contacted us asking whether we’d like to be a launch partner for a new service they’re planning to launch in a month called Embed Image. Unauthorized image use isn’t a big problem for us, so I don’t think we’ll be using the service, but the idea was interesting enough that I thought I’d share it with all of you.
Both Embed Article and Embed Image have the goal of preventing unauthorized use of content, whether it’s text or images. Embed Article prevents people from copying text with Ctrl-C (or Command-C), displaying a overlay with some embed code for the text instead. In the same way, when visitors of a site using Embed Image hover over a photo, an “embed image” button appears that displays some javascript embed code when clicked. The embed code will display your photo on other websites, just like how YouTube videos can be embedded. To see a live demo, check out the example they’ve put up.
So why would you want to do this? The idea is that giving people an authorized way of embedded an image may prevent unauthorized use. The embedded image automatically links back to the original, and even contains ad space you can use to monetize your photos with. Furthermore, the service will have reporting that shows you where and how your images are being used.
What do you think of this idea? Do you think embeddable images will become popular with photographers and photobloggers?
Researchers at the University of Toronto have come up with a new video camera that can achieve infinite depth of field even when objects are immediately in front of the camera. What they did was stuff an array of video cameras into a single camera, with each camera focused at a different distance. Software then calculates the distance of each object in the scene, and selects the individual pixel that has the object in focus. The resulting image is one in which every object, both near and far, is in focus.
Maybe in the future consumer cameras will also have an array of cameras, allowing us to have much more control over the photo (or video) in post-processing.
What The Duck already has a line of clever photo-related t-shirts and other merchandise, including a customized Flip cam, but the camera strap is the first actual WTD photo accessory.
The straps come in black and blue, with lots of ducks, for $35 from the customized camera strap makers, HighKey.
Here’s a big reason not to use stock images in a political ad campaign – the model’s “loyalty” can be bought.
According to BBC News, a witty public relations battle has sprung up between two opposing political parties in Northern Ireland, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the Ulster Conservatives and Unionists (UCU).
A designer for the UCU recognized the image of the woman on the DUP poster from a stock photo agency. He purchased another image of “Kristen” to run in a spoof advertisement, which says she had a change of heart. A UCU spokesperson then challenged the opposite party, asking them to verify which voter constituency in Northern Ireland the woman was from.
In spite of their PR predicament, the DUP responded, saying that the situation has only upped their publicity. There’s always a silver lining.
It looks like Nokia’s executive knew what he was talking about when he claimed that HD video will be hitting cell phones very soon. Preset values found in the iPhone 4 Beta SDK (software development kit) seems to show that the next iPhone will be capable of 720p resolution for video capture.
More specifically, one of the presets found in the SDK is called, “AVCaptureSessionPreset1280x720″.
It makes sense that the next iPhone would have HD video, since it’s no secret that the soon to be released Nokia N8 will have it. In fact, Nokia has already released a sneak peek clip showing the video quality.
Regarding the next iPhone’s sensor, the rumor is that it will be a 5 megapixel sensor produced by LG.
It looks like Nokia’s executive knew what he was talking about when 
