April 2010

Slow motion videos have a way of making most things (that move) fascinating. Cupcakes being shot at faces are no exception.

In 2007 NASA scrapped plans to include a 3D camera on the Curiosity Mars rover, which is scheduled to leave for the red planet in 2011. However, Avatar director James Cameron was able to convince NASA administrator Charles Bolden to include the 3D cam again, and is now helping to build the camera with San Diego-based Malin Space Science Systems.

Taiwanese electronics company BenQ isn't a very big name in the digicam world, but its latest camera has something others don't: "HDR" in the name. The BenQ E1260 HDR, slated to be released May 2010, captures photographs at 12 megapixels, shoots video at 720p, and has a 2.7 inch LCD. What we find most interesting is that they're trying to market it as an HDR-capable camera. In their press release, the company states: …

37 previously unseen photographs of the Beatles have been found after being forgotten for nearly half a century. Photographer Paul Berriff captured the photographs during a Beatles tour in 1963 and 1964 when he was just 16 years old, but the negatives ended up being forgotten for over 45 years along with 850 other negatives.

It's nice to see that Adobe's corporate culture allows for some "self-deprecating fun". Yesterday Photoshop product manager John Nack posted the above video, in which a "Photoshop fan" starts an Apple-esque waiting line outside what appears to be a Best Buy.

For those of you who have been itching to try the new Content Aware Fill and Puppet Warp features in Adobe Photoshop CS5, today's your lucky day. CS5 became available for purchase through the Adobe website, and you can now download a 30-day free trial of the software just to play around with the amazing new features if you're not sure yet you want to upgrade.

This video wasn't filmed with a DSLR, but it's so beautiful we just had to share it with you. Patrick Lawler filmed some of his favorite locations in San Francisco using a RED ONE camera at 4K 16:9 resolution, creating a breathtaking glimpse of this wonderful city.

Y Combinator-funded photo startup Picwing started out in 2008 as a typical photo-sharing service that also beamed your photos to a fancy, $249 digital picture frame that you could use to easily share photos (i.e. baby pictures with your parents). Turns out people weren't willing to drop that much cash on a digital frame when similar products were bigger, cheaper, and similar in functionality.

Last week we reported that one of Nokia's top execs made the prediction that cameraphones would soon make DSLRs obsolete, and that HD-video recording would be coming to mobile phones in the next 12 months. This video shows off the HD-video capabilities of the upcoming Nokia N8, captured at 720p. While we still don't think cameraphones will win over DSLR users, this is pretty amazing footage, considering it was captured on a cell phone.

Instant film is trying to make a comeback, and Polaroid wants in. Two years after calling it quits on instant film, the company has just announced the Polaroid 300 camera, which uses real self-developing film rather than the printer-in-the-camera thing they've been trying lately.

Ken Rockwell posted some links to photos of a Canon AE-1 Program Digital a couple days ago, and photo-enthusiasts around the web have been discussing whether or not it's a real camera.

Filmmaker Kevin Shahinian of Pacific Pictures has a knack for unconventional wedding videos. In the past, he's turned one wedding flick into a thriller, starring the newlyweds.

Laptopograms give "taking a screenshot" a new meaning. These are images made by pressing photosensitive paper to a computer screen, exposing the paper with an image on the screen for a period of time, and then developing the paper. The process is similar to making contact prints or photograms.

Fine art now comes in concentrate. This video, created by graphic design student Chris Peck, shows every painting in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as they were on April 10, 2010.

If you have multiple lenses and not enough space in your camera bag, carrying an extra lens might require you to stack a lens on top of another in a single lens compartment. The problem is that the bottom of one lens might rub against and scratch the lens below.

Tom Hogarty, the Lightroom product manager over at Adobe, has posted a sneak peek at the automatic lens correction technology that will be included in Lightroom 3 and Adobe Camera Raw 6 (included in CS5).

Photojournalist Daniel Morel shot an iconic image of a shocked woman looking out from the rubble moments after last January's earthquake in Port au Prince, Haiti. Within an hour, Morel jumped on Twitter to share 13 high resolution images he had uploaded on Twitpic. By the next day, the photo of the woman was picked up by Agence France Presse (AFP) and Getty Images, was run on the cover of several publications and websites.

Steven Monteau is a French photographer who creates wild do-it-yourself cameras, including "the Jaw" and "the Guillotine". His latest creation, the Battlefield pinhole camera, uses 3 rolls of 35mm film and exposes them simultaneously to capture unique looking images.

The graduating class of the BA photography program at the University College Falmouth needed to raise money for their end of the year show, so they decided to make and sell a cookbook. What's neat is that each of the recipes was submitted by a famous contemporary photographer.

Okay, so Polaroid partnered with Lady Gaga, and Sony has teamed up with Taylor Swift. How about Canon? Well, they've just gone a step further by releasing a Jackie Chan-branded version of the Canon Rebel T2i (AKA 550D).

In March, The Impossible Project announced that it had successfully brought Polaroid film back from the dead, releasing the new PX100 and PX600 instant films. Next up: a physical store in New York City.

If you have deep pockets, Nikon has a wonderful new $6,999.95 lens for you. They've just announced the new Nikon AF-S 200-400mm f/4G ED VR II, a super telephoto lens for sports, nature, and travel photographers. Nikon claims that the latest Vibration Reduction technology, VR II, provides the equivalent of an extra four stops of light, which is one stop more than the previous version of this lens released in 2003. Additional improvements include Nikon's proprietary Nano Crystal Coat, which …

This amazing video by Spacecraft Films shows the July 16, 1969 launch of the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first humans on the moon. The camera was rolling at a whopping 500 frames per second, allowing the first 30 seconds of the launch to be slowed down into this 8-minute narrated video of pure awesomeness.

Country-pop darling Taylor Swift has joined the growing list of camera-toting celebrity spokespersons. Swift's partnership with Sony hit the limelight in January during CES2010, when Swift joined in the Sony press event to announce her use of Sony 3D technology during her current tour.

Someone spotted a wild version of Sony's upcoming EVIL camera, the NEX3, at a pub in Asia recently and anonymous sent the photographs to the blog Sony Alpha Rumors. This comes just a week after an iPhone 4G prototype was found in a California bar, purchased by gadget blog Gizmodo for $5,000, dissected, and published.

Pencil Vs Camera! is a wonderful series of photographs by Belgian photographer and painter Ben Heine in which he blends his pencil sketches with photographs to create new realities: …

There's an interesting discussion going on over at the DPReview forums regarding how the human eye compares to the technology we have in digital cameras.

Photography and electronics enthusiast Michal Zalewski recently built a simple scanning device using a diode laser and custom gearbox that allows him to create 2.5D images when used with a Canon 5D Mark II. These are regular photographs that are enhanced with accurate per-pixel depth information.

If you can't shoot right-handed, or need to shoot left-handed for some reason (i.e. demonstrating something in a photo with your right hand), you can simply flip your camera over and use your pinky finger to press the shutter. Problem is, this ergonomically unfriendly grip is hard to do, and puts your camera at risk of slipping out of your hand. Instructables member bertus52x11, the same guy behind the PVC pipe camera support, has clever hack that solves this problem.

This amazing video by Romain Pergeaux and Alex Profit shows a journey around the cities of the world in 80 seconds through stop-motion. It was shot with a Sony HX5V compact camera, and shows 640 different photographs at 8 photographs per second. A special rig was also used to show a physical globe with pins in every shot, and the photographs were taken over the course of only 3 weeks. From the official website for the video, it looks like a viral promotional video for Sony's camera, but it's a …

The New York Civil Liberties Union has teamed up with amateur photographer Antonio Musumeci in a lawsuit that challenges a federal ban on photography. Musumeci, a software programmer, filmed the arrest of a protester outside of the Manhattan Federal Court last year, and then was himself arrested.

It happens all the time, but does that make it acceptable? According to a court decision this week, what Current TV's vice president Michael Streefland calls "standard practice in digital media" is legal after all.

If you use a Mac, you've probably taken strange photographs of yourself using the fun house distortion effects that come with Photobooth. Brookyn-based designer Mark Pernice decided to take one such photograph and turn it into a unique looking mask of his own face. Knowing the context, the mask is pretty funny and awesome. If I just randomly woke up in the middle of the night and saw this, however, it'd probably be one of the creepiest sights ever.

There's some serious artiness going on over at MoMA. Artist Marina Abramović has a new performance called "The Artist is Present" that involves her sitting silently across from museum visitors. The show runs from March 14 to May 31 and, with the exception of a few days, Abramović sits from before the museum opens and continuously through when the museum closes. MoMa also provides a live stream of her performing.

Google recently added high-quality street level photographs to Google Earth, presumably using the imagery captured through its Street View van cameras. While it's an interesting development, the fact that everything is flat is a bit strange, and makes you feel as though you're looking at an outdated video game. How many more years do you think it will be until we'll be able to virtually tour the streets of a city in true 3D?

This might be old news for some of you, but I just came across it so I'm guessing many of you haven't seen it before either. This is a 4GB USB drive that looks exactly like a miniature Canon 5D Mark II, with an EF 24-105mm lens as the drive, and the camera body as the case.

Prints of some of history's most recognizable nature photographs will be auctioned at Christie's today for the 40th annual Earth Day. The proceeds from the "40 Greatest Nature Photographs of All Time" will be given to various environmental organizations.

LensVector, a Silicon Valley startup working on novel lens technology, has received its latest round of funding from In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit venture firm that invests for the sole purpose of boosting US intelligence capability by providing the CIA with state-of-the-art information technology.

This amazing pinhole camera is so small that it's amazing it actually works. It was created by Francesco Capponi (Dippold on Flickr), the same guy who created the nifty printable 35mm cardboard pinhole camera we featured a while back.

The Technical Image Press Association (TIPA) Awards are among the most prestigious awards for photography equipment, software, and accessories, and this years winners have just been announced.

Hong Kong photographer Lok Cheung found that manual focusing his Olympus E-P1 Micro Four Thirds camera was a pain because it lacked an electronic viewfinder (EVF). He then discovered that attaching a Rollei TLR viewfinder to the camera provided a makeshift EVF: …

Speaking on the explosive improvement of camerephone technology in Helsinki yesterday, Nokia Executive Vice President Anssi Vanjoki shared his vision of the future for cameraphones -- a future without DSLRs.

Last week when Reuters released photographs of the volcanic activity at Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, one photograph stood out to Wade Laube, the photo editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.

Bhautik Joshi, the guy who made the Phone-O-Scope that we tweeted a while ago, has a new do-it-yourself project for those of you who enjoy this kind of hack-ish photography project.

This breathtaking timelapse was created by Tom Lowe of Timescapes, showing footage from his first film, "Southwest Light". We love how camera movement adds another epic dimension to the footage, as if the stars spinning in the expanse overhead isn't enough. If you have a minute and a half to spare, definitely take a look at this video.

The BeetleCam is a remote controlled car that has a Canon 400D DSLR and two flash units strapped to the top. It's the brainchild of brothers Will & Matt Burrard-Lucas, award-winning wildlife photographers based in the UK, and allows them to capture some unique photographs of some of Africa's most dangerous animals.

You might have seen the coffee mug that looks like a Canon L Lens, but have you seen this camera lens that looks like a coffee mug? …

Verizon and HTC have recently unveiled the HTC Incredible phone, which runs on the Android 2.1 OS, and carries some pretty impressive camera functions.

Two weeks ago we featured the short film "The Last 3 Minutes" by cinematographer Shane Hurlbut, which showcased the potential of the Canon 5D Mark II for filmmaking.

Famed for his role as Harry Potter's best pal Ron Weasley, actor Rupert Grint says he's a bit of a tech geek and jumped at the opportunity to review the Fujifilm W1 3D.