A day after photos of the upcoming Sony A33 and A55 DSLR cameras (rumored to have pellicle mirrors) were leaked, photos and specs of what appear to be the upcoming A560 and A580 cameras have also sprung up. Like the photos leaked yesterday, the front view of the two cameras show exactly the same body with only the model number Photoshopped. Not sure why this is.
The two cameras will be 14 and 16 megapixels (respecitively), and will offer features similar to comparable cameras from the Canon and Nikon camps. These include an ISO range of 100-12800, 1080p HD video recording, 15 autofocus points, 5 frame per second shooting, and a swiveling LCD on the back. Read more…
Last week we featured a stunning time-lapse video that unfortunately failed to capture Perseid meteor shower well because of too much air traffic in the area. Landscape photographer Henry Jun Wah Lee attempted the same kind of video in Joshua Tree National Park. Even though there’s still quite a bit of air traffic, you can clearly see quite a few shooting stars that light up the sky.
Regarding the issue of shooting stars being so brief in a time-lapse video (an issue that arose in the comments of our previous post), Lee writes in the Vimeo comments:
Each of the meteors only last 1 frame but with so many during the meteor shower, it looks like a lot going on. Wide aperture also makes the trails look wider/more visible. And I angle the lens so that it picks up as much of the trail as possible when a meteor goes across the sky. In this case, I pointed away from the source direction. So you see longer streaks. I only use 1 second intervals between exposures for smooth motion.
The photos were shot with a Canon 5D Mark II and EF 16-35mm L lens at f/2.8, ISO6400, and 20 second exposures. There’s also the obligatory Sigur Ros music accompanying the video.
It looks like someone hit the “publish” button too early over at CNET Asia, accidentally spilling the beans on the upcoming Canon PowerShot G12. The 10-megapixel camera’s main selling points seem to be features that are also included in the PowerShot cameras announced today by Canon: 1080p 720p HD video recording and a special High Dynamic Range (HDR) scene mode that snaps three bracketed photos for you and combines them into a single photo. Read more…
Canon isn’t going to have Nikon have all the announcement fun today. They’ve unveiled three new PowerShot compact cameras: the S95, the SD4500 IS, and the SX130 IS. The cameras will cost $400, $250, and $350 (respectively), and all offer HD video recording.
The S95 offers a new High Dynamic Range (HDR) scene mode that captures three photos with a single push of the shutter and combines the bracketed exposures into a single HDR photograph.
The SD4500 IS also rises above the other two by offering a 1080p HD video mode (the others have 720p), a super slow motion mode (240fps), and a speed burst mode of 8.4 frames per second.
Expect these cameras to hit the market late August or early September 2010.
After an eternity of rumors and leaks, Nikon has just officially announced the D3100, an entry-level DX format DSLR replacement to the D3000. The main selling point is 1080p video recording at 24fps in h.264 with continuous autofocus, a new feature for DSLR cameras. The 14.2 megapixel camera has 11 autofocus points, a 3-inch LCD screen, an ISO range of 100 to 3200 (can be expanded to 12,800), and 3 FPS shooting. The camera will be out in September at the price of $699, bundled with a 18-55mm VR kit lens. Read more…
A Venezuelan court ordered newspaper El Nacional not to print violent images after the paper published a controversial image of dead bodies piled up in a Caracas morgue.
The photo, taken by an El Nacional photographer in December, ran with a story last Friday about security problems in the country. On Monday, the image was picked up by another newspaper, Tal Cual.
The Venezuelan government deemed the decision to run the photo as a part of a campaign criticizing current president Hugo Chavez, in light of the upcoming September elections.
The court ordered El Nacional and Tal Cual to not publish violent photos, saying the ruling is to protect children:
“(The print media) should abstain from publishing violent, bloody or grotesque images, whether of crime or not, that in one way or another threaten the moral and psychological state of children.”
El Nacional responded to the ruling on Wednesday by running a front-page story about what they call censorship, along with large blank spaces with “Censored” stamped across where photos usually run. Read more…
This music video by YouTube celebrity Joe Penna (AKA MysteryGuitarMan) shows him dancing in various locations while the world around him moves in slow motion. What’s even cooler is that he also published a behind-the-scenes video showing how you can do the same thing. Check it out! Read more…
Yesterday, Canon announced a rather strange and unexciting Canon 7D “upgrade.” It’s not exactly an upgrade either — all of the camera specs for the new Canon 7D Studio Version are unchanged. For $1829 for the body only ($130 more than the current 7D), photographers can have several “locked levels” of the camera. Pay even more and you get a barcode scanning kit and a wireless transfer unit, the WFT-E5A.
So essentially, an extra $900 on top of the regular 7D price lets you have the camera equivalent of parental controls, plus barcode scanning that embeds information into the EXIF data in photos.
Sure, there’s a (somewhat niche) practical application for these features. The locked levels can allow for quick settings that can’t be changed without a password — perfect for head photographers to who send mindless drones out to shoot or have little faith in their assistants. Read more…
Alleged photographs of the upcoming Sony Alpha A33 and A55 DSLR cameras have popped up in an overseas forum. The images look legitimate, though the A55 and A33 front views are identical images that had the model number Photoshopped. Not sure why that is.
These two cameras are rumored to be pellicle mirror cameras. Read this post that we wrote last week to learn more about what pellicle mirrors are. Read more…
The cute photo above of a surprise photo booth proposal is making its arounds around the Internets right now. Angela writes on her blog,
These are the pictures from when we got engaged. I have no idea in frames one and two and am really confused in frame three (lets never make that face again!) and really surprised in frame four.
Turns out the idea of popping the question unexpectedly in a photo booth in order to capture the resulting (priceless) expression is quite popular. Read more…
