The people behind camera comparison and recommendation website snapsort have just launched lenshero, a site designed to recommend the lens you need at the price you want. After telling the application your camera and what you’re looking for in a lens (e.g. type, focal range, price), the site will spit out some recommendations of lenses that fit your criteria, ordering them by their pros and cons. It’s a neat little app that you might want to bookmark if you’re in the market for some new gear.

In 1877, photographer Eadweard Muybridge settled a longstanding debate on whether or not a horse completely leaves the ground at any point during its gallop by taking a single photograph of a horse completely airborne. In the same way, photography was also used recently by a group of researchers to uncover the mystery of how cats drink.
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The expression “shooting from the hip” might soon become “shooting from the ear” for iPhone photographers. There’s a new app in town called Camera Camouflage that allows you to sneakily photograph while appearing to be engaged in a phone conversation. The app can activate your phones ringtone, allowing you to “take a call”, and then snaps photos whenever you talk (it’s voice activated). On the iPhone 4, the app deactivates the flash by default, helping you avoid potentially embarrassing situations.

For some stealthy street photography, you could simply chat on your phone while strolling down the sidewalk. Taking portraits of people becomes as easy as stopping in front of them, turning your head to look at something to the side, and saying something random.

You can get your hands on Camera Camouflage for $0.99 in the App Store.

(via Gizmodo)

SortMyPhotostream is a tool that most Flickr users will have no use for, but one that some might find invaluable. It all depends on whether you would like your Flickr photos’ upload dates to reflect the day they were actually taken. For example, if you’re doing a Project 365 and would like each photo to show up on the day it was taken in your calendar view, then this app can help you make that happen.

All you do is give the app permission to access your Flickr account, and it automatically changes the “Uploaded on” date of each photo to the “Created on” date found in the EXIF data. If this isn’t the kind of thing you need, don’t play around with the app — changes made by it are permanent.

DropMocks is a new photo sharing service designed to help you share photographs online as quickly and easily as possible. Created with HTML 5, the service has a minimalistic homepage that invites you to drag and drop photos into the browser. It then adds those photos into a simple gallery, and provides you with a short URL you can share. It’s a bit like file hosting service DropBox, except for photos and done through the browser.

You don’t need an account, though you can create one to keep track of the “mocks” you create. Here’s an example mock we created using some photos from PetaPixel’s Flickr account. Keep in mind that since the galleries are publicly accessible through private URLs, don’t upload anything you wouldn’t want to be made public.

DropMocks (via Lifehacker)

Apparently babies can’t resist a good checkboard pattern. ShutterBuddy is a camera attachment that surrounds your camera or lens with a checkerboard pattern, causing babies to stare uncontrollably at your camera (whether in fear or fascination, we have no idea). You can order your own for $15 through the ShutterBuddy website, or you can spend some time creating a do-it-yourself version by printing out or drawing your own checkboard pattern.
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We wrote about Snapsort at the beginning of this year, when it was still a newly-launched, bare-bones website for comparing digital cameras. Though it was spartan, the service was useful for comparing the specs of cameras and seeing how they stack up against each other.

The service has gotten even more useful in the past few days, with a massively updated website taking the place of the first version. In addition to the sweet new design, the service now offers much more than simple comparisons. New features include detailed camera pages, customized advice (i.e. by budget), and a learning section filled with bookmarkable material. You can even compare cameras that haven’t hit the market yet.

If you’re currently in the market for a digital camera, you’ll definitely want to give this page a peek.

If you’re a geek (as most of you apparently are) and prefer doing stuff through command line rather than a GUI, Google has just introduced a new command-line utility that allows you to access various Google services.

GoogleCL is an application written in Python that lets you do things like upload a whole folder of photographs to your Picasa account with a simple command like this:

google picasa create --title "My album" ~/Photos/vacation/*.jpg

This would grab all of the JPG photographs in your vacation directory and upload them to a new album called “My album”.

Here are the possible commands for Picasa:

create: Create an album. create –title “Summer Vacation 2009″ –tags Vermont ~/photos/vacation2009/*
delete: Delete photos or albums. delete –title “Stupid album”
get: Download photos. get –title “My Album” /path/to/download/folder
list: List photos or albums. list title,url-direct –query “A tag”
post: Add photos to an album. post –title Summer Vacation 2008″ ~/old_photos/*.jpg
tag: Tag photos. tag –title “Album I forgot to tag” –tags oops

The utility isn’t limited to Picasa, of course. You can also manage Blogger, Calendar, Contacts, Docs, and YouTube data.

To get started head on over to the GoogleCL Google Code project to download the tarball. There’s also a manual and a page of example commands.

Pick&Zip is a simple web application that lets you easily download Facebook photographs with a few clicks.

You can download photos tagged with your name, your own albums, photos tagged with friends’ names, or your friends’ albums. After selecting the photographs you’d like, you can download them as a ZIP or PDF file.

I just tried it out, and the service works pretty well, allowing you to pull photos at the highest resolution Facebook stores (720px) quickly to your computer without having to click and download individual photos.

Something that’s slightly annoying is that you can’t seem to download all possible photos with one click, but must “select all” on each individual page. The app is pretty useful, nonetheless.

If you need to fix some red-eyes in a photo, but don’t have an image editor handy, Red iGone is a quick and easy way to get the eyes corrected. It’s a simple web-based application that requires only that you select the eyes to be corrected. After that, all you need to do is download the fixed photo.

Here’s an example photograph that we ran through the app:

We were pretty surprised at how well the adjustment worked. It’s a great app for when you only want to fix red eyes and nothing else. PicTreat also offers web-based red-eye reduction, but it touches up the rest of the photo as well.