November 2010

You might be seeing your photography enthusiast friends upgrading their camera straps left and right, opting for fancier ones that are attached to the bottom of a camera via the tripod mount, but what if you're super attached to your traditional strap? Say hello to the C-Loop, a simple little attachment being developed by Custom SLR and funded through Kickstarter. It's an elegant solution for transforming your beloved (albeit ordinary) strap into a fancier R-Strap-style one.

One day, ordinary digital cameras might be able to capture not just the image of a scene, but the depth information of that scene as well, allowing 3D representations to be built afterward. UC Davis visualization researcher Oliver Kreylos took the Microsoft Kinect webcam-style sensor and built such a camera. The video above shows him demonstrating how the scene can be viewed in three dimensions after combining the information from the device's infrared and color cameras.

"Photocopy Romance" is a creative stop motion video made with a scanner.

TIME magazine has named the Sony Alpha A55 as one of the top 50 inventions of 2010. They write, …

Wow, who knew this little toy camera by Penchan would beat all the big camera corps in being the first to offer terapixel photos?... Now all you need is a terapixel petabyte memory card.

Amazing! A TV show finally gets image enhancing right! …

Over at Leica User Forum, member dkpeterborough wrote a series of posts detailing how he and a fellow member of the Peterborough Photographic Society named Tony Lovell created a beastly 900mm lens. The lens uses optics salvaged from a government flight simulator projector lens, and cost only hundreds of pounds in parts (comparable lenses cost thousands).

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.

The i dropper is a conceptual device designed to make transferring photographs from different devices and computers intuitive, quick, and easy. To move a photograph from your iPad to your desktop, all you would have to do is "suck up" the photo on your iPad using the stylus pen-shaped device, and "drop" the data onto your computer screen. What's more, the data contained in the pen is displayed on a little screen to inform you of what's ready to be dropped.

What's with underwater photographers getting mugged by large sea creatures these days? Dutch photographer Karin Brussaard was doing ocean photography off the Bahamas recently when a 7-foot-long shark decided to grab her DSLR camera rig and swim off. Luckily, like the other animal thieves we've written on in the past, the shark decided to drop the rig a little while later relatively undamaged. What's even cooler is that they managed the capture the above shot of the klepto shark.

The photo-sharing startup scene is getting hot, with social apps on mobile devices receiving quite a bit of money and attention lately. Instagram has hundreds of thousands of users now after just a month, and competitor PicPlz just raised a cool $5 million from the same VC firm that invested in Instagram.

If having a plastic shelled memory card just isn't enough for you, Hoodman's new RAW STEEL line of SD cards goes a step further by reinforcing the card with steel plating. In addition to being rugged, the epoxy assembly makes the cards waterproof as well. No word on how well these cards would survive being roasted in a burning car, though. They'll be available starting mid-November, 2010.

Learn about how stop-motion started through a stop-motion video using paper cutouts.

We featured Flickriver's Lens Explorer page a couple days ago for browsing photos taken with specific lenses, but many of you responded saying you wanted to see other options (e.g. camera model) provided as well. Pixel-peeper is a similar sample photo site that has a higher degree of filtering. Using the Advanced Search page, you can specify everything from lens and camera combo to focal length, aperture, exposure time, and ISO. If you're considering a new lens or body, this might be a useful …

Mark J. Rebilas was shooting a drag race with a remote camera rig recently when an out-of-control dragster flew into the rig at high speed. In a split second, he lost $11K worth in camera gear, including a Nikon D700 with battery grip, a Nikon 400mm 2.8 lens, and a Pocket Wizard Plus receiver. He should have outfitted the rig with an "ejection seat".

Apparently, these are the representative faces of the Sydney, Australia population as a whole. The Face of Sydney project shot portraits of thousands of Sydney residents, and the "averaged" the resulting photographs to produce the compacted photos seen above. The oldest participant was 93, and the youngest was only two weeks old.

OK Go, the kings of viral music videos, just released their latest video for the song "Last Leaf". It's a stop motion video in which individual pieces of toast are used as each frame of the animation. 15 still shots (made with the Samsung NX100) were used for each second in the resulting video, with the final video using 2,430 pieces of toast.

You might have seen examples of Photoshop's Content Aware Scaling feature in action, but do you know what goes on behind the scenes that allows it to magically work? This presentation from the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference sheds some light on the technical mojo that allows you to manipulate the size and shape of photos in crazy ways.

These might not be as practical as the USB cufflinks we shared a while back, but with Christmas just around the corner, camera cufflinks might be a fun gift idea for a photog in your life. They sell for £7.95 (~$12.5) over at Weesh.

This timelapse video of runners in the 2010 New York City Marathon makes 40,000 people look like little particles flowing through tubes. We love it when photography allows us to see ordinary things in unique ways.

Sarah Ann created this beautiful full deck of 52 playing cards using Instax Mini instant film prints. Each card is a unique, and is a photograph of the card it represents.

Here's a quick tip by Vimeo user Braxton McCarthy: use rubber bands when panning and tilting on a tripod to make the movement smoother.

If you thought the Panasonic Lumix phone looked like a camera, check out the new LG L-03C. The 12-megapixel camera has a 3x zoom lens by Pentax, a Xenon flash, a 3-inch LCD, ISO that goes up to 3200, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/3G capabilities, and 720p video recording. Oh, and did we mention it makes calls? …

Have a busted lens that isn't worth repairing? Instead of throwing it away, you can turn it into a flower pot! Kenneth Yung has a series of photos showing how he did this with his broken Nikon 18-55mm lens (translation here). This can definitely add a fun touch to any boring workspace!

If you're looking into buying a certain lens, you might be interested in seeing what kind of photography other people have done with that lens. Flickriver's Lens Explorer page is a pretty easy way to quickly look through example photographs on Flickr that were captured with a specific lens. Just choose a brand and model, and begin browsing the river!

DXOMark.com just published their review of the Pentax K-5 sensor, finding that it was superior to every other APS-C sensor they've tested: …

Here are a couple mockups by MacRumors showing what Photoshop might look like on mobile computing devices like the iPad or iPhone. Adobe recently published a presentation they did on various things they're exploring with such devices. An example was using Content Aware Fill to modify a scene by painting over objects to be removed using your finger.

For Halloween these Boing Boing readers decided to open themselves up in Photoshop and press Shift+Ctrl+U (or Shift+Command+U on a Mac).

ThinkGeek is selling a spy-themed T-shirt with a twist -- the camera being used by the spy in the design is actually a working camera. The Electric Spy Camera Shirt shoots 640 x 480 images (storing about 150) with a remote you can use while having it tucked away in your pocket. It costs $40 from the ThinkGeek store.

You've probably seen weird DIY light experiments before, but what about using only iPads as your main light sources? Photographer Jesse Rosten did just that, using 9 iPads (worth a cool $4,500) on maximum brightness on a recent photoshoot. On his blog, he writes, …

A Texas-based photographer named David Langford received quite a surprise earlier this year when his friend tipped him off about a photo of his being used on vehicle registration inspection stickers in Texas. Turns out an estimated 4.5+ million stickers used a silhouette created from a photo of his from 1984 titled "Days End 2". Langford is now suing the state to stop further use of his photo on the stickers -- designed by prison inmates as part of a contract between the Department of Criminal …

Last year, Canon celebrated its 50th anniversary in manufacturing SLR cameras and released three super detailed paper craft cameras that you can print out and build yourself. These included the Canonflex, the AE-1, and the EOS 5D Mk II. Unless you have a good amount of time you can set aside for arts and crafts, this probably isn't for you -- each camera has dozens of pages of detailed instructions and a ton of tiny pieces that come together to form the final replica camera.

Did you know that the first digital camera invented in 1975 didn't actually produce the first digital photograph? The first digital photo actually came almost two decades earlier in 1957 when Russell Kirsch made a 176x176 pixel digital image by scanning a photograph of his three-month-old son. The low resolution was due to the fact that the computer they used wasn't capable of storing more information.

As the cameras on mobile devices are used more and more for augmented reality applications, one thing we'll undoubtedly see more of is augmented reality gaming, where the real world becomes part of the game. The above video shows some test footage of the upcoming game "Star Wars Arcade: Falcon Gunner", which uses the camera on the iPhone (or iPod Touch) to turn real locations into places you need to defend from the Empire's attack.

Panasonic has just pulled the wraps off the Lumix DMC-GF2, the company's smallest and lightest Micro Four Thirds camera. The cameras has a built in flash, employs a 3 inch touchscreen on the back, shoots stills at 12.1MP, captures 1920 x 1080 HD video, and has an ISO range of 100 to 6400. It'll start shipping in January 2011, with the price secret until about a month before then.

Three years before Photoshop 1.0 was released, computer engineers in the USSR were already retouching photographs using some surprisingly advanced technology. The video above shows how the Soviets went about restoring damaged images with the help of rotary scanners, magnetic tape, and trackballs.

Today I spent a couple of hours designing and making a simple box to fit directly onto a normal flash unit. I also made a couple of colored filters. After doing all this I thought I could share this with others and hopefully make them happy by doing so.

We've featured the amazing time-lapse work of Tom Lowe here before (see here and here), but here's another sneak peek at his upcoming debut film titled "TimeScapes" that will drop your jaws. Stunningly beautiful.

Reddit user MacTuitui created this simple diagram (click to enlarge) explaining the idea behind HDR photography. The first low dynamic range (LDR) taken normally with a camera isn't able to capture much of the detail found in the highlight and shadow areas of the scene. Two (or more) photographs are then taken at different exposure values to capture a wider range (the bracketing step) and subsequently combined into a single image with a high dynamic range (HDR). Since most displays aren't …

Turns out having a tripod mount and stand combo is what many iPhone 4 owners have been yearning for -- a Kickstarter funding project for a new mount raised more than ten times what the creators planned to raise. Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost originally intended to raise $10,000 over the course of a month to manufacture the Glif, a new tripod mount and stand for the iPhone 4, but ended up collecting over $135,000 from more than 5,000 backers who want such an accessory. You can find out more on …

If you have a laptop that doesn't have memory card slots built in, then you probably know how annoying it is to have to plug in a card reader every time you transfer photos. The new MR-C25 Series of memory card readers by Elecom tries to solve this problem by making the USB card reader sit flush against the side of your laptop, meaning they can stay attached to your laptop when you stow it away. They also have a 180 degree rotating body that allows you to access other ports that might be …

Here's a pretty interesting 45-minute interview with Pete Souza, which was done via a live web chat at the end of October. Souza is responsible for the behind-the-scenes photographs posted regularly to the official White House Flickr stream. He talks about everything from how photos are selected to crawling around on the floor of the Oval Office to get the perfect shot.

We're giving away two (2) copies of Perfect Photo Suite 5.5 by onOne Software, a set of seven photography plugins that normally costs $500. The seven plugins work for Photoshop, Lightroom, and Aperture, and five of them also work as standalone applications. To see the list of plugins included in the suite, visit this page.

Back in September we featured a creative technique that used an iPad to "light paint" 3D objects and text. Now there's an app called Holographium that allows anyone to light paint words with an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. All you do is provide some text, start taking a long exposure photo, and then drag your iPad (or whatever iDevice) through the photo while the app slowly displays the various slices of the text. The resulting photograph will show the text spelled out in 3D and floating in the …

The British Journal of Photography is reporting today that Geoffrey Crawley -- the world-renowned photographer who debunked the Cottingley Fairies hoax in the 1980's -- has died. The hoax began in 1917 when two cousins named Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths (aged 16 and 10, respectively) claimed to have discovered fairies and, after borrowing a camera, produced photos to prove it. The controversial photographs captured the world's attention for decades and even deceived Sir Arthur Conan Doyle …

Here's another beautiful example of what Twixtor, the $300 frame-rate conversion software, can do for footage captured with ordinary cameras. This one was shot with the entry level Canon 550D (i.e. T2i), a Canon 18-55mm kit lens, and a Sigma 70-300. Though motion approximation can present issues such as warping, this kind of software is a good alternative for people who want slow motion but can't afford to rent ($2,500/day) or buy ($118,000) a Phantom camera.

Fernando Ramírez Martínez (snipfer on Flickr) created this awesomely geeky medium format camera using Lego pieces.