September 2010

Japanese website sankeibiz.jp is listing September 9th as the date Hoya will be announcing new DSLRs, presumably under its Pentax brand name. Here's what the line looks like when translated by Google: …

This is probably the strangest story you'll read today. When Neil Berrett quit his job in 2009, he sent his boss a kindly written resignation letter written on a cake. The photo of Berrett and his cake become widely circulated, and received hundreds of thousands of views.

Nikon's President Makoto Kimura did an interview with Reuters a couple days ago in which he stated that Nikon is trying to develop a camera that creates a new camera market.

Kiel Johnson is an American sculptor and painter that creates a lot of his work using cardboard. Among his works are a collection of cardboard cameras that are extremely realistic (given that they're cardboard, of course). Now all he needs to do is team up with some brilliant engineer that can help him figure out how to have these awesome things actually make photos.

Update: This giveaway is now over. The winners were randomly selected and announced below.

The stop motion music video for Oren Lavie's song "Her Morning Elegance" took the web by storm last year, amassing over ten million views on YouTube and receiving a Grammy nomination.

Nikon quietly launched its new Nikon USA online store today, allowing Nikonians to buy gear directly from their beloved company rather than through a third-party. Unfortunately, the awesomeness of buying straight from the camera maker is dwarfed by the not-so-awesome prices -- most cameras and lenses appear to be listed at MSRP. Thus, if you're cost-conscious (why wouldn't you be?) you'd be better off sticking with the larger online retailers.

Canon is showing off all sorts of crazy hardware at Canon Expo 2010 over in NYC. One of them is an omnidirectional camera (shown above) that shoots a 360° photograph in a single exposure. It creates the seamless panoramas using a 50 megapixel CMOS sensor and an aspheric mirror.

About a week ago I did a shoot with the band Strange Birds as we were walking there was a point that I saw light rays trickling down right in front of us. I told all of the guys to stop and arranged them to my liking.

When we featured Strobox back in 2009, it was a simple idea: provide an easy way for photographers to create lighting diagrams and share them with others. Since then, they've upgraded their website to include a gallery where you can browse photographs done by others, view their lighting diagrams, and comment on them.

This is either marketing at its best or worst. Vivitar has a new site and infomercial for a plastic 35mm film camera for $10. Who would buy such a thing? Probably really, really old people who aren't reading this blog.

Portrait photographer Gregory Heisler has done quite a few portraits for Time Magazine covers, including a few for their Person of the Year issues. This is an informative video where he steps through how he went about photographing Rudy Giuliani at the top of Rockefeller Center with the Empire State Building in the background. If you're interested at all in portraiture and/or lighting, you'll find this video quite educational.

Sony just announced a new video camera that's quite a worthy challenger to the Flip Video. The Bloggie Touch replaces the original Bloggie video camera and boasts a much sleeker design (dropping the swiveling LCD), a 3-inch touchscreen, 4 to 8 GB of internal memory, 1080p HD video recording, and 12.8 megapixel photographs. Like the Flip, it's designed for quick and easy photos and videos on the go, and can connect to computers via a built-in USB connector.

Apparently there's a series of hipster dinosaur coloring book photos going viral on the Interwebs. One of them (shown above) shows a T-Rex wearing hipster glasses and lamenting over the extinction of Polaroid's classic instant film. BuzzFeed has a full collection of the drawings done by Molly Lewis.

Next time you're attend a fireworks display, try shooting your photographs or video out of focus. This video by Danny Cooke is a pretty beautiful look at what you can achieve by doing this. What's more, if you focus on the spectators in the foreground, it looks like they're watching bokeh fireworks as well!

Apple had a special event this morning where they announced a few new products. In addition to the introduction of HD-video recording on the iPod Touch, an interesting new announcement was the HDR Photography feature in iOS 4.1, which is found on the iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad (though the iPad doesn't currently have a camera).

Canon Expo 2010 is going on over in New York City right now, and one of the interesting things being displayed is a funky multipurpose 4K camera. The 8-megapixel CMOS camera is capable of super high definition video and photography at 60 frames per second, and has a do-it-all 24-480mm zoom lens.

So this is how high-rollin' Canon photographers roll. This coffee table is much easier to do now with those Canon lens coffee mugs, but the 1D bodies would still cost a pretty penny.