The soft cases that are often bundled with higher-end lenses are good for preventing minor scrapes and bruises, but offer little when it comes to protecting your glass against harsher dangers. The BETA Shell line of SLR lens cases are designed to guard your lens against most things extreme environments can throw at them, offering protection from water, impacts, and extreme temperatures.
The cases range in price from $45 to $84 depending on the size of your lens, and are available through the official website.
This surreal video might seem like some sort of abstract, computer-generated art project at first glance, but take a closer look and you’ll probably realize what’s going on. Flickr user cshimala attached a GoPro Hero HD to his front windshield and shot some footage as he drove around Chicago. He then mirrored the footage in post, sped it up, and set it to Liquid Summer by Diamond Messages.
Forget the uber-expensive Leica cameras with their special edition embossed ostrich skin. Custom cut exotic skins is what it’s all about! CameraLeather is a company that can outfit or restore your camera with a wide range of different materials. You can go from the basic goat skin leather all the way up to lizard and snake skins. The above Olympus camera is sporting the black & white cobra skin covering. It’s not too pricey either — outfitting a 35mm SLR with snake skin starts at $40.
Inanimate objects in video games have long been quite realistic, but facial expressions on human characters haven’t been nearly as believable. For a new game called “L.A. Noire” by Rockstar Games, a newly developed piece of technology called MotionScan was used in which real actors are surrounded by a whopping 32 cameras to accurately document both their body motions and facial expressions. As you can see in the behind-the-scenes video above, human characters in video games are about to get a whole lot more realistic — we’re just about out of the uncanny valley.
Now that you’re older and not playing with stuffed animals any more, you’re probably not keeping coins in a piggy bank either. Instead, you can save up for your next camera or lens with this awesome “piggy bank” that look like a Canon 350D with an 24-105mm L lens attached. Coins are inserted through a slit in the lens, and can fill up the camera body as well. it’s available for about $23 over at 100milligrams.
In addition to slowly replacing the need for compact cameras, the cameras found on mobile phones will also have a huge impact on how we live our lives in the area of augmented reality. Word Lens is a crazy new free app for the iPhone that translates between Spanish and English in real-time in the video feed, allowing you to read the world in your language through your cell phone. As this technology becomes available for more and more languages, it will change the way people survive in foreign countries.
Sorry that this year’s list of awesome photography gifts comes even later than last year’s… we’ll try to have it ready earlier in 2011. This year we have 10 fun, novel, and/or useful gifts for photography-lovers you love… Read more…
Leica recently ran a series of billboard advertisements promoting the S2 medium format DSLR and V-Lux 1. The billboards were quite unique in that they were individually made to show the wall they were placed on, with the details of the wall blown up to highlight the 12x optical zoom of the V-Lux 1 and the 37.5 megapixel sensor of the S2. Read more…
Chris Kotsiopoulos of GreekSky made this crazy lightning photograph by stacking a large number of separate shots. He tells us,
It was past midnight when I heard from my home at Halandri, Athens an unusual rate of thunders (one every 7-8 seconds!) coming from the Olympic Stadium area 2-3 kilometers away from my home.
Without second thought, I grabbed the camera and the tripod drove quickly to the spot. I set the camera under a tent and I started taking continuous shots. I used an intervalometer so I didn’t have to be behind the camera all the time. I even took a chance by placing my self in the field of view in one of the shots. Fifteen minutes later, it started to rain and the storm was approaching, so I found shelter under the bridge at the right. Finally after 32 minutes, among the hundreds of shots taken, I captured 51 lighting strikes (9 shots where destroyed because of the excess brightness). The photo processing was fairly simple. I stacked the 42 lighting shots with Startrails software, and did some minor improvements with Photoshop.
We’re glad he took the risk of standing in his photo — it’s not often you see one of these shots with people in them. If you want to learn more about how to create this kind of photo yourself, check out this lightning shooting tutorial we posted a while back.
I don’t know about you, but if it weren’t for the protective case on my smartphone, it would have probably needed to be replaced a long time ago. If cell phones have protective skins and cases, why shouldn’t cameras? Camera Armor is a protective case that’s custom designed for each separate DSLR model, and is available for both Canon and Nikon bodies — and a few others as well.
In addition to the silicon body skin, the system also includes protection for your lens, LCD screen, and other individual components of your kit. The cost of this protection is $40, which is pretty cheap compared to some of the novelty items we’ve featured here.
