September 30, 2010

Google unveiled a new image format today called WebP that it hopes will make the web faster by cutting files sizes of images without affecting quality. According to a blog post they published earlier today, photos and images account for 65% of the bytes transmitted by websites. In their tests done using 1 million randomly selected images from the web, re-encoding images as WebP resulted in an average file size reduction of 39%. Here's a gallery with image and file size comparisons.

Just earlier this year Facebook upped their maximum photo size to 720px, an increase of 20%. Today, they've announced that the maximum size is increasing to 2048px, about eight times larger than the previous maximum size. A download link will be included with photos allowing people to download the high resolution versions.

Hine Mizushima creates unique camera cases for point-and-shoots and sells them through her Etsy store. Each felt case is unique and hand-stitched by Mizushima, and looks like a toy camera. Check out this Flickr set for all the different designs that have been created in the past.

We've seen GoPro cameras in quite a few stories as of late, with people using them for things ranging from making friends with Great White sharks to capturing amazing home videos of space. Good news if you've been thinking of getting one for action footage -- they've just released the cheaper HD Hero 960. You get 960p instead of 1080p, and you lose an expansion port for external displays and batteries, but you pay $180 instead of the $300 it costs for an HD Hero.

No, these aren't movie stills from the upcoming Tron movie. Evan Ackerman over at BotJunkie wanted to know exactly how the Evolution Robotics’ Mint went about cleaning an open space, so he shot long exposure photographs of the robot sweeping and then mopping. Yay for automated light painting!

A great way to learn and become inspired is to look at great photographs. Even better is listening to experts discuss those images as you're looking at them. The above video shows National Geographic editors picking their favorite photographs from their ongoing Your Shot contest and discussing why they feel the photo is so great.

Did you know you can turn your DSLR into a pinhole camera by using a body cap with a tiny hole in it? Photojojo just started selling body caps converted for this purpose in their store, but if you don't want to pay $50 for them to bust a hole in a cap for you, there's a neat tutorial over at Photocritic teaching you how to make your own.

We received a tip from someone in the future the other day. Canon becomes Skynet.