September 2010

Here's a fun bit of trivia: did you know that at one time Apple (then named Apple Computer) made compact digital cameras? Launched in 1994, the Apple QuickTake was actually one of the first digital cameras available to consumers. Three models were built by Kodak and Fujifilm, and the cameras boasted a whopping 0.3 megapixels and the ability to store eight photos at this resolution. The camera had a flash, but lacked zoom, focusing, image review, and file deletion (the entire contents had to be wiped).

If you live in an urban area, you probably don't see the night sky very clearly due to light pollution. Luckily, there's videos like this one to remind us how beautiful the sky above is when there aren't artificial lights drowning out the stars. This is a high-definition time-lapse of the Milky Way floating across the sky.

Lensbaby unveiled a new accessory at Photokina called the Tilt Transformer, which allows you to use Nikon mount lenses on EVIL camera bodies as an instant tilt-shift lens with twice the tilt of normal TS lenses. It's currently available for Micro Four Thirds bodies, but will be available for Sony NEX cameras as well starting on October 28, 2010. The Tilt Transformer comes with the Lensbaby Composer in a $350 package, or separately for $250.

When American photographer Alex Soth arrived in the UK earlier this year to work on a commission for the city of Brighton's photo biennial, he was told by the customs officer at the airport that he couldn't do his photography work without a work visa, and that getting caught might result in two years of jail time.

Instead of going ahead with the project anyway or calling it off, Soth decided to hand his camera over to his 7-year-old daughter Carmen. The duo strolled around Brighton for a few hours each day, with Alex directing many of Carmen's photographs while Carmen looked to check off entries on the shooting list she made (shown above).

Photographer Achim Lippoth of London-based creative agency edsonwilliams recently created this series of photographs for Kid's Wear Magazine involving children with dolls that look just like them. Beautiful portraits with a hint of cute and a dash of creepy!

It looks like the wait for plenoptic cameras to hit the market is shorter than we thought when we reported earlier today on Adobe's interesting demonstration on the technology. In fact, there is no wait -- you can already purchase a plenoptic camera. German company Raytrix is the first to offer plenoptic cameras that allow you to choose focus points in post processing and capture 3D images with a single sensor.

Here's a fun idea: take famous landscape paintings and add a tilt-shift effect to them! This series of images was created by Artcyclopedia using famous Van Gogh paintings. We love how the selective focus gives the paintings a new dimension.

In the future, focusing on the wrong subject when taking a picture might be a thing of the past. At Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference this year Adobe gave a demonstration of how plenoptic lenses can be used to allow focus to be arbitrarily chosen after the image is captured during post-processing. These are microlens arrays containing hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands (Stanford researchers used a camera with 90,000 lenses) of tiny lenses that record much more information about a scene than traditional single lenses.

Update on 12/11/21: This video has been removed by its creator. Here’s a suggestion for how to create some instant …

Barcodes can be found everywhere, but using existing barcode systems with ordinary cameras require that the barodes be printed large or that the camera be placed close to the code. MIT's Bokode project is a new system that magically stuffs barcodes into bokeh, allowing ordinary cameras to be used as barcode readers from a distance. The codes are contained in little points of light that only turn into codes when viewed through an out-of-focus camera lens. You've probably seen how little bright points of light grow into larger and fainter points of light when you defocus.

Leica may have teamed up with the Audi design team for the limited edition Titanium M9 they …

Here are a couple new commercials for Brothers printers that blend stop-motion and time-lapse photography in pretty interesting ways with real people. We love how the technique makes the people look like claymation figures walking around in miniature sets. The foreground is done in stop-motion while time-lapse photography provided the scenes shown in the animated paper.

It would have been crazy if they had actually printed out each individual paper of the scene on the wall.

Earlier this year when Hasselblad announced the H4D-40, we found it interesting that Hasselblad claimed to be …

National Geographic cameraman Bob Poole was in Mali searching for elephants when he …

In China there's a belief that burning paper representations of a deceased person's belongings allows it to be transfered to the afterlife for the departed person to use.

London filmmaker Temujin Doran created this great little video for Lego that doesn't involve any flashy effects or fancy camera techniques -- just a child-like imagination. It won a prize at the prestigious Cannes Lions advertising festival in 2010.

Leica's announcements at Photokina have been pretty dull so far compared to some of the other cameras that have been unveiled. Aside from announcing a Panasonic LX5 rebranded as a Leica D-LUX 5 and a Panasonic FZ100 rebranded as a Leica V-Lux 2, they've also announcement a "Titanium" version of the M9 digital rangefinder of which only 500 pieces will be made.

Editor's note: This tutorial was inspired by Phillip Maisel's "A More Open Place" project, which we featured here last week.

I saw an article on Gizmodo the other day that was just a photo of an album over a long exposure, I'm not sure what process the creator went through but I've emulated it here.

Apparently Sigma worked so hard on ensuring image and build quality on its new flagship SD1 DSLR that they …

A couple days ago we featured a compilation of stunning time lapse clips shot in the desert …

Panasonic announced the Lumix GH2 today at Photokina. Here's the low down: the GH2 is a 16.05 megapixel Micro Four Thirds EVIL camera with an ISO range of 160 to 12800, 23 autofocus points, face detection, a 3-inch swiveling LCD screen, and HD video recording at 1080p (60i/24p). You can also use the 3D lens Panasonic announced recently to capture 3D photos with this camera. This camera will ship by the end of this year at a price of $900 for the body only.

The retro FinePix X100 made a huge splash when it was announced a couple days ago, and …

The latest Transformers movie to crawl out of the Hollywood cookie-cutter machine had a budget of $200 million. The above 2.5 minute short film was created by Amateur Russian filmmaker Alexander Semenov using a Canon 550D (with a 18-55mm kit lens and 50mm 1.8) and a Nikon D5000 (with a 18-55mm kit lens). In other words, the gear used was entry-level quality with kit lenses.

Future generations of photographers may one day look back and wonder why we often blinded each other with painfully bright flashes of light for the sake of proper exposure.

NYU researchers Dilip Krishnan and Rob Fergus are working on a dark flash that eliminates the "dazzle" effect of regular flashes in a low-light room. They've created this camera rig that combines common infrared photography techniques with an ultraviolet flash that produces a dim purple glow instead.

The team placed an infrared filter on the lens of the Fujifilm S5 Pro, which is has a modified CCD sensor that specializes in IR and UV photography. To supplement existing UV light, the team created a modified filter on an external flash to emit only UV and IR wavelengths.

Just unveiled at Photokina, Casio’s new EXILIM EX-H20G point-and-shoot is a pretty ordinary 14.1 megapixel HD video-capable camera with …

It’s funny how humor poking fun at …

This has got to be one of the awesomest uses of a record player ever: photographer Kim Pimmel photographed light sources attached to a spinning record player in the dark, and strung the still frames together into a beautifully hypnotic stop-motion video set to Tron.

Pentax has announced its new K-5 DSLR camera as Photokina is getting underway in Cologne, Germany. The new 16.2 megapixel CMOS sensor camera has nice but pretty standard specs and features: 11 autofocus points, an HDR mode, 7fps burst shooting, a 3-inch LCD screen, an ISO range of 100 to 12800 (expandable to 80 to 51200 via custom functions), 100% viewfinder coverage, 1080p video recording at 25fps, and a magnesium alloy body. The K-5 will be available starting in mid-October at around £1200 (~$1875) with a kit lens.

Wow... Fujifilm just unveiled a new EVIL compact camera it's going to be showing off at Photokina, and it look amazing. The camera is styled like a film rangefinder camera, with a leathery covering surrounding the body and a magnesium alloy top and base plate. Inside the camera is a 12.3 megapixel APS-C sensor that has an ISO range of 200 to 6400 and captures 720p video or stills at 5fps. There's a 2.8 inch LCD on the back, and a new and innovative hybrid viewfinder that can toggle between electronic and optical modes. The lens is a fixed prime 23mm f/2 Fujinon.

The music video for "My Favorite Pillow" by Rhett & Link has the same kind of awesomeness and creativity that made OK Go the kings of viral music videos. Released less than a week ago, the video already has millions of views. It's a backwards music video in which everything is playing in reverse, but the singers still manage to mouth the words correctly. There's also 600 pillows used in the video, which obviously creates instant awesomeness in itself.

Well whaddya know, it looks like besides being a masterful ping pong player, …

This is a stunning montage of timelapse clips created by Mike Flores during the past year. Many of the scenes are layered beautifully, with the desert in the foreground, clouds whizzing across the sky, and the universe spinning brightly in the background.

Mats Wernersson's website is aptly named, "The Camera Maker". Wernersson creates his own custom cameras by hand, making everything from 9x12 field cameras to "frankencameras" created for specific purposes from existing bodies. The above camera is a 3D 35mm camera created by fusing two Konica FS1 bodies together.

My boys have started getting into photography, but often have trouble keeping the camera still enough for really clear shots.

The obvious solution is to buy a mono-pod, but why buy when you can make, especially when you have Sugru?

The above photo by Aaron Yeo, titled “ …

Robert Overweg is a photographer who works in the virtual world. His series, "the end of the virtual world", contains images captured in popular computer games at the edges of the "world". Based in the Netherlands, Overweg has been working exclusively in the virtual world since 2007.

Photographer Timur Civan had a project that required vintage-looking photographs. Originally planning to shoot the project on a 4x5 large format camera, he abandoned that route after calculating the cost for equipment and processing. His lens technician friend then discovered a 1908 Wollensak 35mm F5.0 Cine-Velostigmat hand-cranked lens in a box of spare parts, and spent 6 hours helping him make the lens fit on an EF mount for Civan's 5D Mark II.

Forget the uber-rare Leica MP2 that's going on auction at the end of this year. If you want a unique camera but don't want to trade your house for it, you can save yourself a couple hundred grand by going for this brand new made-for-NASA Hasselblad MKWE up for sale on eBay for a cool $33,751.

We're not sure why the price is so specific or what exactly makes this a NASA camera (it doesn't seem to be branded so), but it's a definitely an eye-catching Hassy.

Less than a year ago when I was a grad student at Berkeley, I heard a guest lecture by Professor Daniel Fletcher in which he discussed his CellScope project. His group aims to transform cell phones into light microscopes to aid in disease diagnosis in developing countries. Turns out the concept can be used for more than medical purposes.

One of the big features touted by Samsung in the unveiling of the …