Rayqual, a Japanese manufacturer with a Geocities-esque website, recently announced a new line of adapters that will allow you to use Canon, Nikon, and Leica lenses on the Sony NEX line of EVIL cameras. While using your existing glass on the cameras might be nifty and buy you some image quality, what you lose is the ability to autofocus. Another downside is that these adapters aren’t exactly cheap – they will cost between ¥19,950 and ¥25,200 (roughly $220 and $275).

(via Engadget)

This is one of the most intense do-it-yourself videos I’ve seen, showing how to hack a Canon 18-55mm kit lens into a super macro lens for extreme closeup shots. It involves sawing, disassembling the lens, using wires from a floppy drive cable, and all sorts of advanced awesomeness. Unless you’re extremely good with your hands, you probably won’t be trying this, but it’s very interesting to watch nonetheless.

OK Go, an LA-based rock band, makes some of the most creative music videos you’ll ever see, from the treadmill video that amassed over 50 million views on YouTube to their gigantic Rube Goldberg machine one that dropped jaws around the world. Their latest video for the song “End Love” is yet another display of pure creativity, as they blend stop motion and slow motion techniques in strange and awesome new ways.

OK Go is pretty much the Pixar of music videos.

Editor’s note: The creative photographic negative business card idea that we shared recently was pretty popular with our readers. Here we’ve asked Steph Goralnick to share how exactly it was made in case you want to make your own.

The realization that I had run out of my regular business cards the night before I was scheduled to attend a weekend-long special event inspired me to create a small edition of extra special cards on the fly. I was aiming for a simple design with a unique construction that would showcase my skills as both a photographer and a graphic designer. Due to the fact that time was an issue, traditional vendors out of the question; and since I didn’t need more than a couple dozen cards, I decided to make them myself at home using an inkjet printer and some negatives.
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If you’re a geek (as most of you apparently are) and prefer doing stuff through command line rather than a GUI, Google has just introduced a new command-line utility that allows you to access various Google services.

GoogleCL is an application written in Python that lets you do things like upload a whole folder of photographs to your Picasa account with a simple command like this:

google picasa create --title "My album" ~/Photos/vacation/*.jpg

This would grab all of the JPG photographs in your vacation directory and upload them to a new album called “My album”.

Here are the possible commands for Picasa:

create: Create an album. create –title “Summer Vacation 2009″ –tags Vermont ~/photos/vacation2009/*
delete: Delete photos or albums. delete –title “Stupid album”
get: Download photos. get –title “My Album” /path/to/download/folder
list: List photos or albums. list title,url-direct –query “A tag”
post: Add photos to an album. post –title Summer Vacation 2008″ ~/old_photos/*.jpg
tag: Tag photos. tag –title “Album I forgot to tag” –tags oops

The utility isn’t limited to Picasa, of course. You can also manage Blogger, Calendar, Contacts, Docs, and YouTube data.

To get started head on over to the GoogleCL Google Code project to download the tarball. There’s also a manual and a page of example commands.

A couple days ago we reported that the upcoming Nintendo 3DS will have a built-in 3D camera system, instantly putting 3D photography into the hands of those lined up to buy the system.

If you can’t wait for the DS to play around with 3D photography and instant feedback on a 3D screen, Hammacher Schlemmer has unveiled a 3D camcorder with virtually the same imaging specs as the 3DS. The device, which ships on July 2, also shoots and records at 640×480 (VGA) resolution and has a special 3D screen that allows you to review your photographs in 3D on a screen that doesn’t require special glasses.

Unlike the 3DS, however, this 3D camcorder has a 7 inch screen, almost double the 3.53 inch screen of the 3Ds.

The downside for this device is the price — it’s listed at $600, which is much more than most people think the 3DS will be sold for.

Unless you’re desperate to get your hands on this technology, it might be prudent to wait a year or two. Presumably 3D cameras and camcorders will be capturing at much better resolutions by then (unless you’re willing to pay around $21,000, of course).

(via Wired)

Pick&Zip is a simple web application that lets you easily download Facebook photographs with a few clicks.

You can download photos tagged with your name, your own albums, photos tagged with friends’ names, or your friends’ albums. After selecting the photographs you’d like, you can download them as a ZIP or PDF file.

I just tried it out, and the service works pretty well, allowing you to pull photos at the highest resolution Facebook stores (720px) quickly to your computer without having to click and download individual photos.

Something that’s slightly annoying is that you can’t seem to download all possible photos with one click, but must “select all” on each individual page. The app is pretty useful, nonetheless.

Flickr has just announced a new feature that lets you to add a “Request to License” link to all of your photos stored on the service, allowing visitors who wish to license your photos to send you the request through Getty.

Visit any of your photos while logged in, and you should see a link under “Additional Information” that says “Want to license your photos through Getty images?”. Follow the instructions after clicking this to change your preferences.

Once you’ve enabled the “Request to License” link, visitors can click through to be put in touch with a Getty representative, who will then handle the details and send you a FlickrMail with the licensing request.

The companies are mum regarding the rates paid for photos, but BBC News reports that the average rate may be between $150 and $240.

One complaint that members are making on the Flickr forum is that the feature is globally enabled or disabled rather than allowing you to choose which photographs to show the link for. Presumably Flickr is working on changing this to give users more control.

Have you sold any photos on Flickr through Getty? If so, what was your experience?

Lexar recently put out this video showing what goes on inside their quality labs. It’s pretty much an advertisement for the brand, but it’s an interesting look at how the memory cards we use are tested for quality. It’s pretty crazy how each of the memory card lines are tested on the 800+ cameras and devices stored in the lab, and how there’re high-tech machines for testing everything from shocks to temperature in a controlled way.

(via Imaging Insider)

A rumor making its rounds today is that a photograph of an upcoming Samsung NX 20mm f/2 pancake lens was leaked. The photo (shown above) looks pretty legit, and does not seem to be obviously fake or “photoshopped”.

Well, in the thread on PentaxForums where the image was posted yesterday, someone pointed out that the “leaked photo” looks suspiciously like the Samsung 30mm.
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