Instructables user art.makes has a tutorial on how you can make a pair of paper iris glasses with adjustable apertures. You could definitely build upon the idea to make each side more like a camera lens (e.g. adding barrels, f-stop values) — perhaps as part of a geeky Halloween costume?
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Here’s a quick and easy tip from Scott Kelby for portraiture: reduce the number of distracting elements in the shot by positioning yourself with the background in mind. Sure it’s a simple and obvious tip, but those are usually the kind that come in handy most often.

(via ISO 1200)

If you’re a Flickr loyalist that hasn’t jumped ship for competing services, Flickr is rewarding you with a couple new tools for sharing your photos. Today the company announced an official app for Android and a new photo-sharing feature called Photo Sessions.
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Ask a photographer to shoot a time-lapse portrait of a city, and they might choose a number of famous locations to photograph with a fixed camera. Photographer Jesse Kopp, however, prefers to stay at the ground level and photograph what it feels like to actually be roaming around the streets. He visits famous cities around the world and creates time-lapse videos out of photos taken while walking from landmark to landmark. It’s an awesome way to get a feel of what each city is like (the video above shows Paris).
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Bits of Everything has a great tutorial on how you can make a large and beautiful picture collage for your wall on the cheap: the entire project costs less than $20. Mod Podge glue, which dries clear, is painted over the entire thing to give board a matte finish. This could definitely make for a fun and photographic weekend project.

Wall Picture Collage [Bits of Everything]

Deal alert: you can buy a 16GB Kingston 266x CompactFlash card over at Buy.com for just $23 with shipping included. Just for comparison, these cards are listed for $33 everywhere else. Not sure how long this deal is good for.

Kingston 16GB Ultimate CompactFlash Card (via Photography Bay)

Update: Reader Benjamin Watson points out that the deal involves a mail-in rebate, and that your checkout price will be $33.

Singer Bob Dylan is being accused of plagiarism after several paintings in his recent art show were found to have “striking resemblances” to works by photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dmitri Kessel and Léon Busy. An example is Dylan’s painting titled Opium (above left), which appears to be directly copied from Busy’s Vietnam (above right). A Flickr user also found that Dylan had copied six photographs — one of which an artificial Photoshop edit — from his Flickr stream.
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The Sharpen Tool in Photoshop has always been useful in that it allows you to quickly sharpen specific areas in a photograph, but a major problem was that it had the tendency to introduce nasty artifacts into the image. Alternative methods that avoid this issue (e.g. using a new sharpened layer) became popular, leaving the Sharpen Tool to gather dust on many users’ tool pallets.

Well, if you’ve recently upgraded to Photoshop CS5, you might want to take another look at the tool. They’ve quietly introduced a new feature (on by default) called “Protect Detail”, which allows for brush-based pressure-sensitive sharpening without the annoying artifact problem.

(via John Nack via Photography Bay)

There’s plenty of mini-tripods out on the market, but Joby’s new GorillaPod Micro tripods are special in that they’re designed to stay attached to your camera at all times. The legs fold up neatly when not in use, allowing you to stick your camera into your pocket or a case without having to remove the tripod. It features zinc alloy legs, rubber feet, and a head that offers 36-degrees of tilt-motion.

The tripod comes in two models: the $20 Micro 250 supports 250g and is meant for compact cameras, while the $30 Micro 800 supports 800g (~1.8lb) and can be used with larger mirrorless cameras.

Thanks for the tip, Bryn!

The next time you’re walking around with a DSLR around your neck and a stranger asks you for directions, you might want to keep a hand on your lens. Yesterday BBC’s “The Real Hustle” included a short segment in which they demonstrated how easy it is to steal a lens on the street. The con artists simply detach and pocket the camera lens of an unsuspecting photographer while pretending to ask for directions. Apparently this is a real con that thieves are using these days…

(via Pixiq)