Photographer Darren Samuelson spent seven months building a massive homemade large-format camera that’s about six-feet-long when fully extended. He shoots with 14×36-inch x-ray film that’s about 1/12th the cost of ordinary photographic film but much harder to develop.
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Hong Kong-based camera enthusiast TM Wong has 1000+ instant cameras in his collection — possibly the world’s largest collection. That’s enough cameras to use a different one each day for nearly three years!
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Lomography has a huge exhibition going on in Hong Kong’s Times Square shopping center featuring 40,000 Lomo photographs, massive film cartridges, and giant cameras loaded with trampolines.
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Photographer Jeffrey Martin, founder of 360cities, recently use a Canon 550D and 200mm lens to shoot the largest indoor photograph ever made: a ginormous 40 gigapixel photograph of a 18th-century baroque library in the Strahov Monastery in Prague, Czech Republic. Over 5 days of shooting with his robot control camera, Martin collected 2,947 separate photos that went into the resulting panorama. The RAW photos then took a day to batch process, 111 hours to stitch, and 20 hours to Photoshop, finally ending as a single 283 gigabyte photograph.
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Digital hyper-realist artist Bert Monroy spent four years creating an incredibly detailed Times Square scene. The 5×25 foot image weighed in at 6.52 gigabytes as a flattened file, and involved more than 750,000 separate Photoshop layers and over 3,000 separate Photoshop and Illustrator files. The image is actually a “who’s who” for the world of digital imaging, and features individuals who have made an impact on the history of the field, including Photoshop’s founders, imaging experts, and notable photographers (see if you can pick any out!).

Times Square (via Photography Bay)

Derick Childress spent three nights shooting a massive light painting photograph with the message “Emily, will you marry me?” drawn out on the streets of Raleigh, North Carolina as a proposal to his girlfriend Emily Kern. The final image was made up of about 800 individual stills that each took 10 seconds to expose.

There’s more behind-the-scenes information on this “making of” page.

In the future when DSLR cameras shoot at 2.3 gigapixels, this is how we’ll be viewing photos on a computer. You can browse the image yourself here (1.9GP version).

(via f stoppers)

The Canon 1200mm f/5.6 L lens is a legendary optic that B&H calls “The Mother of all Telephotos“. It’s a 36 pound behemoth that costs $120,000 if you can find one for sale — only a handful of them were made at a rate of 2 per year (delivery time was 18 months). When coupled with a crop factor body (e.g. the Canon 7D) and a 2x extender, the lens is the equivalent of a 3840mm f/11. In the above video, Bryan Carnathan of The Digital Picture gives us a glimpse of the lens in action.

TDK has unveiled a monstrous 1 terabyte (1000 gigabyte) optical disc at CEATEC 2010 (the Japanese equivalent of CES), which wrapped up a couple days ago. The disc has 16 layers on both sides that each store 32GB of data, and is the equivalent to about 213 of the recordable DVD discs that you might be using to back up your image files. As someone who uses multiple external hard drives and countless DVD-Rs to backup my photos, I’d love to use these massive discs for backups and redundancy.

However, unlike improvements in hard drives, optical discs technologies can take forever to find their way to consumers — just look at how long it took Blu-ray to become the de-facto successor to the DVD. We can dream though, can’t we?

(via Engadget)