October 2010

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

American NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless II is suing British singer Dido over the photo used for the album cover of "Safe Trip Home". The photo shows McCandless "free-flying" hundreds of feet from the Orbiter using a Manned Manuevering Unit (MMU). McCandless was the first person to do an untethered spacewalk.

Editor's note: The checklist presented in this post is also available as a text file for you to print out and carry along for reference. This post was first published here.

The Internet was abuzz yesterday due to a secret meeting at Adobe's offices between the head honchos of Microsoft (Steve Ballmer) and Adobe (Shantanu Narayen). The New York Times reports: …

When Jon Martin found an old Kodak Ektar 101mm f4.5 lens from the 1940's at work, he decided to try it on his D700 by freelensing to testing and see if it was compatible. After finding that it was, he began on building a rig to use it as a tilt-shift lens. He ended up building a rig using old camera gear and some custom wood parts.

Some battery chargers (e.g. those that come with Canon's pro and prosumer cameras) plug directly into the wall and have prongs that fold into the charger, while others (e.g. the Canon T2i charger) connect to the wall via a removable cable. Though this may be more space efficient when connecting to a socket or surge protector, the extra chord takes up space and can be a hassle. CheesyCam has a clever solution: use an Apple wall plug duck head adapter to transform the charger into a wall charger.

This has got to be one of the saddest uses of imagery ever. The Daily Mail is reporting that iPhone owners in the UK are using satellite photos and GPS to cheat at getting out of corn mazes. By seeing their current location in a birds-eye view of the maze, visitors can quickly solve even the most challenging corn mazes.

Update on 12/9/21: This video has been removed by its creator.

If you're sick of having your precious photographs ripped off and digital watermarking isn't your thing, you can use this translucent copyright symbol to embed an obnoxious copyright symbol in all of your photographs! The mysterious Martin Nachtwey tells duckrabbit, …

The above photo of a defiant Herring Gull braving a wave has won this years British Wildlife Photography Awards, netting photographer Steve Young the £5000 cash prize.

It was only at the beginning of the year that the megapixel race for cell phone cameras hit 14.6 megapixels, but now Sony has unveiled a 16.41 back-illuminated CMOS sensor that can shoot 15 frames per second at full resolution, and is capable of HD video recording (30fps at 1080p and 60fps at 720p).

Pixilation is the stop motion technique in which humans are used as the subject, moving through slight changes in pose and position in each successive frame. Eric Hanus, a recent graduate from Indiana University, created the above video (titled "Day Drunk") using the technique, and doing it with a old, hacked film camera to boot. Hanus tells us,

The Internet viral sensation "Double Rainbow" video was captured on January 8th, 2010. About two weeks later on the 23rd (and long before that video went viral), I saw a double rainbow myself when looking out my window. I quickly grabbed my camera (a Canon 40D at the time) with my 16-35mm lens (I wanted the widest shot possible) and ran out to shoot the rainbow.

Here's a pretty clever ad by Panasonic promoting their Lumix G2 camera. It's fun seeing photographic terms appear in a commercial, and understanding what the terms mean make the commercial even funnier for photo enthusiasts.

Instagram is a new iPhone photo app developed by Stanford grads Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger that offers Hipstamatic-style filters for your photos, easy uploads to popular services, and a Tumblr-esque community built right in. While photo sharing apps in the App Store are a dime a dozen, there are a few things that set Instagram apart.

This video is hardly new (appeared back in 2008), but could be helpful for those of you who haven't seen it yet. In it, photographer Joe McNally teaches how you can use your body to stabilize the camera, gaining a stop or two of light. McNally says his technique is mostly useful for left-eyed shooters, but you can adapt many of the things taught regardless of which eye you use.

SonyAlphaRumors received a pretty interesting tip yesterday regarding the design of the upcoming Sony Alpha A77 (which is still a rumor at this point). The anonymous tipster wrote that the camera -- successor to the A700 -- will have an innovative design that boasts a hybrid viewfinder by blending optical and electronic images: …

UK-based designer Chrissie Macdonald was commissioned by Marque Creative to create art for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Among the things she made was a neat camera and flash created entirely using card stock. It almost looks like it's a digital creation done using Adobe Illustrator.

A French book titled "Obtenez le maximum du Nikon D800" (translates to "Getting the most from the Nikon D800") has popped up on Amazon and decitre.fr, possibly leaking details of an upcoming successor to the Nikon D700. The description is computer translated as, …

Joe Wigfall is a photo enthusiast and street photographer that won WNYC's Street Shots Challenge back in 2008.

I have a small obsession with cameras, also, a slightly smaller obsession with film cameras. My favourite camera is Lubitel 166B. It is a medium format camera, this basically means it has a large image area to capture photos, using the larger 120mm film. The Lubitel's were twin lens reflex (TLR) cameras. They have a little pop up cover on top, you then look down through the viewfinder. The nature of holding the camera like this will getting the settings set up for the shot can sometimes be a …

Cassandra C. Jones created the above tribute to Eadweard Muybridge's horse motion studies by sifting through 5,000 digital photographs to find 12 that matched the frames in his study. Jones then looped the 12 images in an animation, resulting in a "snap motion" video of a horse galloping.

Panasonic has pulled the wraps off its new Lumix branded phone that we first reported on last week. The website set up for the phone now has photos and diagrams, though it's in Japanese. We now know that it's a slider phone that looks like a stretched out compact camera, with "13.2 Megapixels" etched on the front to remind everyone that your cell phone packs quite a punch.

This watch has a maximum aperture of f/2. Wait... What? That's right, this novelty watch for uber photo geeks by The Unemployed Philosophers Guild has f-stop numbers on its face instead of the 12 hours used by normal people. If you're ready to geek-out your wrist, it's available in their online shop for $36.

We've featured quite a few gigapixel photo projects here on PetaPixel, but this one's a bit different. HAL9000 is a project out of Italy that takes famous paintings and shoots gigapixel photographs of them, allowing you to get up close and personal with the masterpieces through a special online viewer.

Fancy camera bags and backpacks are nice, but they're often thief magnets that broadcast the fact that they contain pricey gear. If you use a messenger bag and would like to use it as a camera bag as well, Tenba sells a nifty insert that transforms it into a stealth camera bag. The insert fits a DSLR body, 2-3 lenses, a flash, and has space for magazines or documents. They're priced at $23 and are available from the Tenba website.

Behold -- A Leica M8 camera created using Lego bricks! Schfio Factory this awesome toy camera using a $50 pink Lego digital camera and carefully building bricks around it to turn into Leica look-alike. It shoots at 3 megapixels and holds up to 80 photographs on its internal memory. Sweet.

What was supposed to be a routine press preview of the Turner Prize exhibition in London turned a two-hour standoff between photographers and Tate Britain gallery contract-wavers.

Erin Hannon, the receptionist on The Office, explains why you should always use real cameras and not disposable ones when taking pictures of important events you want to remember.

A fun story over the weekend was the crazy photograph that Mail on Sunday photographer Mark Pain captured while covering the Ryder Cup. Tiger Woods was attempting a chip shot, and launched he ball directly at Ryder, who had his camera up to his face. Without flinching, Pain snapped the above photo moments before the ball struck his camera, bounced off his chest, and landed at his feet.

This foam core 8x10 camera was created by Daire Quinlan, the same guy that attached a 90 year old lens to his camera with homemade bellows.

Photographer Mike Collins created this simple video that gives you a visual look at the difference between full frame sensors and crop frame sensors when using the same lens. The video uses a Canon 5D Mark II for the full frame shots, and a Canon 7D (1.6x crop factor) for the crop shots.

Surf wear maker Rip Curl recently teamed up with Timeslice Films for an ambitious project of shooting surfers in "bullet-time", the effect that many people first saw in The Matrix. They used a crazy camera array of 52 Canon 5D Mark II Rebel DSLRs in order to capture the same shot from 52 different angles, stringing them together for the final footage.

An interesting story that popped up a couple days ago is that Sony is planning to outsource some of their CMOS sensor production to Fujitsu in an attempt to reduce production costs. Sony is currently the 6th largest maker of CMOS sensors, with an output of 16,000 sensors a month. Fujitsu will be taking some of the load off Sony's hands, producing "several thousand" per month. Finalizing the sensors requires proprietary technology, and will still be done behind closed doors in Sony's facilities.

Dentsu London, the same ad agency that recently experimented with iPad light-painting, was recently hired by Canon to create a commercial for the Canon Pixma line of printers. They decided to create super close-up and super slow-mo shots of paint dancing by using sound, and created a rig that spins around the paint super fast to create a sense of motion as they shoot at 5000 fps. As you'll see from the video, this is a great idea for still photos as well.

Jason Lee is a California-based wedding photographer who's quite popular on Flickr for the creative portraits he makes of his daughters.

Remember Sid, the "disturbed, hyperactive, sadistic 10-year-old boy" in Toy Story that abuses his toys? This viral ad for Samsung SD cards shows what it would be like if Sid grew up and became interested in photography.

We might soon have a hard time distinguishing between camera phones and phone cameras. Next week Panasonic will be unveiling a new Lumix brand cell phone, a brand previously reserved for digital cameras. According to the pre-announcement press release, the phone will have a 13 megapixel CMOS sensor, a microSDHC slot, Wi-Fi capabilities, and a 3.3 inch LCD screen.

Photographer Clint Davis was previously the Art Director at a national magazine, so he has first hand experience on the type of photographer promo that grabs the attention of clients. Recently he himself needed to do some self-promotion, so he decided to get creative and create promo mailers filled with awesomeness. He writes, …

Google Street View now covers all seven continents. Brian McClendon, a VP of Engineering at Google, travelled on an expedition to Antarctica with his wife earlier this year, and captured photographs for the Street View of a place called Half Moon Island. Thanks to his efforts, we can now walk around virtually in Google Street maps and pay a visit to the penguins of Antarctica!

Flickr user vamapaull tells the story of how his camera's boring old mode dial magically turned into a wooden one: …

Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner was randomly selected and announced below.