Last week we featured Shopobot, a new website that can show you the price history of camera gear and tell you whether it’s stable or not. Decide is a new service (just launched yesterday) that goes a step further — it not only tells you whether to buy or not based on price stability, but checks to see whether there’s a newer model available or likely to be announced in the near future. The service bases each decision on 40 price factors, historical trends, and relevant rumors regarding upcoming announcements. With a new camera being announced every 45 hours on average, Decide might just help you avoid the pain of buyers remorse.
Update: A reader reports that the retailer AJRichard (which reportedly does bait and switch scams) is listed on Decide. Be smart when choosing where to purchase from! (Thanks Ryan!)
We’ve heard of digital photos being recovered after lost cameras drift for 1,000 miles (in underwater casing) or spend a year at the bottom of the ocean floor, but is there any hope for a camera that experiences four years of abuse at sea? Turns out there is. A man named Peter Govaars was walking along a beach in California when he stumbled upon a battered camera “skeleton” with a memory card still attached. He took the SD card home, took it apart, spent 30 minutes cleaning it, and was surprised to discover 104 photographs taken within a 2 week period in June 2007. Read more…
About a year ago, engineer and photo-enthusiast Morten Hjerde began brainstorming ideas for the next generation of photographic lighting after concluding that most of the lights used by photographers these days are simply glorified light bulbs.
Using embedded electronics and microprocessor programming, he set out to explore ways to create a different kind of light. A light that would go where the current lights could not go. Exploring the possibility and feasibility of actual digital light. Light that could be pushed and tweaked like you push and tweak the pixels on your computer screen. [#]
He set up a company called Rift Labs, and decided to open source the design and software involved in creating this digital light source. The video above provides some interesting background on the project.
Ryan Burnside recently set out to find a cheap way to shoot 360-degree panoramas of scenes, and discovered that shooting a Christmas ornament (or any other spherical reflection) captures all the information needed — all that’s needed is a way to “unravel” the spherical image. Burnside found that the free image editor GIMP can do the trick. Read more…
After Polaroid stopped manufacturing instant film in 2008 — breaking the hearts of Polaroid lovers around the world — a small new company called The Impossible Project purchased Polaroid’s manufacturing equipment and factory in the Netherlands in an attempt to save the film from extinction. They were successful in doing so, announcing new lines of instant films in 2010. The above video is an interesting mini-documentary that gives us a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on at The Impossible Project.
“Lonely Traveller” is a new photography-related t-shirt for sale over on Threadless. Basically, elephants have nature’s version of the XShot Camera Extender.
Shoot a stunning time-lapse video of the Milky Way, and there’s a good chance it’ll go viral. Photographer Randy Halverson used a Canon 60D and Canon T2i with Tokina 11-16, Sigma 20mm F1.8, and Tamron 17-50 lenses to shoot these beautiful images of the night sky over South Dakota.
Shot in RAW format, the Milky Way shots were 30 seconds exposure F2.8 or F1.8 with 2 second interval between shots, for 3-4 hours run time. ISO 1600
Ten seconds of the video is about 2 hours 20 minutes in real time.
Also be sure to check out Terje Sorgjerd’s time-lapse of the Milky Way above Spain if you haven’t already.
Even though it seems like the photo sharing market is saturated with services competing for the world’s photos, the incredible growth of many young companies (e.g. Instagram) shows that there’s still plenty of untapped areas for growth, with mobile sharing being one of the big ones at the moment. A trademark for “Photovine” filed by Google earlier this month seems to suggest that the search giant is looking to expand beyond Picasa. Read more…
Here’s a lighthearted video as we sign off for the weekend: photographers Larry Chen and Joe Ayala recently found themselves stuck overnight at Dallas Fort-Worth Airport with $30,000 in photographic equipment (including Canon 5D Mark IIs and GoPros, so they decided to make best use of the opportunity and film themselves fooling around in the empty airport.
