December 2010

As 2010 comes to an end, here’s a look back at 10 of our most popular articles from the past year: …

Update on 12/18/21: This video has been removed by its creator.

You've probably seen the special keyboard covers for Mac keyboards that show you the Photoshop shortcut each key is used for, but what if you're looking for something more old school (or don't have a Mac)? These Photoshop Keyboard Stickers should do the trick. They're individual vinyl stickers that you individually stick onto each key, allowing you to stay old school and giving your keyboard a very childish look. You can pick up a set for about $8 on Amazon.

Forget throwing water balloons at people's faces -- if you ever get your hands on a super expensive slow-motion camera, tossing around water is awesome enough. Shinchi Maruyama is an artist that photographs hand-tossed liquid sculptures using a Phase One P45 camera and a Broncolor Strobe. He also used a high-speed camera to capture video of sculptures being "made". The results are beautiful.

Yesterday the last certified Kodachrome processing facility -- Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas -- finally stopped supporting the legendary film. They decided to create a t-shirt for mourning photo-geeks that sports the classic Kodachrome colors. If you'd like this tiny slice of Kodachrome history, you can get it for $13 over at Dwayne's Photo.

For the BBC documentary "Polar Bear: Spy on the Ice", special hidden cameras were designed with unobtrusiveness and durability in mind. They didn't succeed very well in either, as the polar bears quickly detected and destroyed the pesky cameras intruding on their privacy. What they did accomplish was capturing footage showing what it looks like to have polar bears perform CPR on you. Luckily they didn't have real photographers crouching in those domes!

Earlier this year photographer Daniel Morel was shocked when a photograph he captured during the devastating earthquake in Haiti and posted to TwitPic was distributed by Agency France Presse (AFP) and published on the front page of newspapers around the world -- all without his permission.

After Kodak announced the end of Kodachrome's production in June of 2009, the number of photo labs that developed the film began to dwindle until finally only Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas remained as the lone certified Kodachrome processing facility in the world. Today, they will be processing their last roll of Kodachrome, bringing the film's storied career in the photo industry to an end. CBS News Sunday Morning did a neat feature looking back on the popular film.

4K video recording may soon be available to Canon T2i/550D users willing to load a firmware hack onto their cameras. Apparently a guy known as Earz62801 on YouTube will be releasing a firmware hack on 1/1/11 that will give the T2i/550D 4K, 3K, and 2K recording capabilities and bit rates between 45MB/s and 175MB/s. He claims that 91 seconds of footage can be recorded at 2K and 175MB/s, though the time drops down to 6 seconds for 4K.

Wow. People are taking chicken head camera stabilization pretty seriously after the fact that chickens have image stabilized heads went viral recently. Research is ongoing, and people are reporting their interesting experimental findings on YouTube.

If PetaPixel's very own Leica skin for the iPhone isn't enough photo geekery for you, there's also a Polaroid Land Camera skin being sold over at Infectious. We think it would go very nicely with your retro-photo apps! The skins run $15 a pop and are available for not just the iPhone, but for other devices as well (e.g. Blackberry, iPad, etc...).

Pinhole cameras are usually very low-tech and dumbed-down in their operation, but how would one go about making it fancier like a digital camera? Basil Shikin decided to build his own custom pinhole camera using Lego Mindstorms, adding all sorts of awesome features to an ordinarily simple kind of camera. Features include automatic shutter speed calculation using a sensor, automatic film rewind, and the tracking of how much film remains.

Samsung has announced the NX11, a mirrorless camera nearly identical to the NX10 (released earlier this year) except for a new grip design and support for the i-Function lens system introduced with the NX100. i-Function lenses allow photographers to change camera settings using the focus ring and a special button on the lens. The specs otherwise remain unchanged: 14.6 megapixels, 3-inch LCD screen, and HD video of 720p at 30fps. It'll come bundled with a 18-55mm kit lens for $650 in February …

Pardon the obnoxious watermarks, but Gadget4all is selling this funky USB speaker that looks just like a Canon 5D Mark II 7D and 24-105mm lens. It's a 1:1 clone of the actual camera, though the camera and lens both sport "Caoon" as the brand. Audio files can be played from a computer, USB devices, or SD/MMC memory cards, and various buttons on the back of the camera have been changed to control volume and playback. If random photography novelty gifts is your thing, you can pick this one up for …

There's a number of notable iPhone apps out there that add a vintage look to your photographs (e.g. Hipstamatic and Instagram), but what if you want to shoot vintage-looking video? 8mm Vintage Camera is an app that does just that, allowing you to choose between a number of films and lenses. You can also turn on "jitter", adding an extra measure of realism to the look.

When Fujifilm unveiled the upcoming FinePix X100 back in September, the sleek retro design was enough to cause many photo-enthusiasts to start drooling and saving up money. Now, more details about the technological advances incorporated into the camera are becoming available, undoubtedly causing more camera lust. One of the big features offered by the camera is a novel hybrid viewfinder that can toggle between optical and electronic modes with a single touch, which overlays even the optical …

The winter hasn't been friendly this year to certain areas of the US, with flash floods hitting Southern California and blizzards tormenting the East Coast. Vimeo user Michael Black decided to document a blizzard by setting up a Canon DSLR with a remote timer, snapping a photograph every five minutes. He combined the resulting photographs into a time-lapse video that shows 20 hours of intense snowfall in 40 seconds. Boy does that snow get high.

If you love the fact that IKEA furniture is cheap and easy to put together, but hate the fact that it's always so plain and minimalistic, then Mykea might be the solution for you. Aside from selling pre-made decals, they also allow you to create your own custom decals from your photographs, turning your furniture into a mini-space to display your work. Price depends on the furniture, with a single panel coffee table decal starting at €12.5 (~$16.5).

The size and video quality of GoPro cameras opens the door to all kinds of unique experimental footage that would be extremely difficult (or impossible) with large and bulky HD-capable cameras, whether it's documenting the everyday life of a cat or capturing video from the edges of space with a balloon. Here's an even wackier idea -- attaching a GoPro Hero camera to the end of a broadsword with duct tape and capturing video as the sword is being swung around. The resulting footage is strange, …

For Christmas, Kyle's girlfriend Sarah wanted to give him something photography related, so she gutted a broken Kodak Brownie Holiday Flash camera and turned it into a one-of-a-kind clock! …

When photographers Larissa and Trevor over at Ambient Studios needed to come up with invitations for their wedding, they came up with the brilliant idea of sending the information rolled up in film canisters and delivered in brown paper and ribbon. It took an assembly line of 5 people to put together 40 of these awesomely creative invitations. Check out more photos on this blog post.

With a huge arsenal of camera gear at their disposal, the folks over at BorrowLenses can do a lot of fun and random experiments that us ordinary folk can only dream about. After first stacking lens filters and then teleconverters, they've gone to the next level by stacking $150,000 worth of camera gear into a Christmas tree.

If you'd like to take "lo-fi" photographs with your DSLR, but don't want to spend money on a pricey specialty lens just for this purpose, you're in luck. In this tutorial I'll be showing you a simple "mod" with which you can get a similar effect for no money at all! You’ll need a piece of scotch tape, scissors and a lens.

While some photo-enthusiasts are content with carrying a camera around with them around the clock, others go a step further and show off their love for the art by having a camera tattooed to their body.

iPhoneography (i.e. iPhone photography) is exploding in popularity, and undoubtedly many people jumping into the craze will want to share their work in a non-digital way in addition to broadcasting their photos on the Interwebs. The Boo Box by hatchcraft is a handmade bamboo frame designed specifically for iPhone photographs. It's available in three different colors (light, mixed, and dark) and costs $20 from the hatchcraft store.

Watch out GoPro -- you've got competition headed your way. The Poco Pro is an upcoming camera by Iain Sinclair Design that claims to be the world's smallest 14 megapixel camera and thinnest 1080p HD camcorder, perfect for action photography and helmet cams.

A couple days ago Flickr published a blog post featuring a handful of member photographs of the December 2010 lunar eclipse. The first image in the post was "The 2010 Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse over Jersey City, NJ" (shown above) by photographer Steve Kelly.

Apparently Homer Simpson is quite handy with tools and savvy with camera repairs. Here he demonstrates the proper technique for getting a broken camera to magically work again... or for installing a custom tripod thread to the top of a camera.

Cameras usually hide what it's shooting from you when the sensor is capturing light, so you can't watch slow shutter speed photographs as they're being shot. Magic Shutter is an app for the iPhone that shoots these long exposure using the camera's video feed, which allows you to see the photograph as its being "developed" on the screen.

In the present day world of photography, "mainstream" digital cameras aren't nearly as modular as desktop computers since components can't easily be swapped in and out of the camera body. The future might look quite different, and Nikon is taking a step in that direction with a recent patent filing for interchangeable sensors on EVIL cameras. In addition to choosing a particular lens depending on the desired photo, photographers would be able to choose different sensors as well.

"Dueling Cameras" is a... unique little short by Noah Kalina (of everyday fame) and Adam Lisagor. We love their deadpan expressions and the reactions of passers-by.

The "Flutter in Pinhole" is a beautiful concept camera that combines a cardboard pinhole camera with instant film to make sharing memories a breeze, and could be the high-tech postcard of the future.

Now here's a novel way to shoot the moon: stack five separate Canon 2x extenders to boost the focal length of your 800mm lens. Supposedly (and surprisingly) this rig actually captured a decent photograph of the moon.

If your wall needs decorating and you have a lot of time on your hands (and we mean a lot), you can try making a giant calendar for you wall with photos. All you need to do is go photo-hunting for numbers, days of the week, and filler squares. Then print out the photos as squares and arrange them on your wall based on the current month.

Last night there was a total lunar eclipse that just so happened to coincide with the Winter solstice. If you missed the eclipse in person, University of Floria professor and photographer William Castleman created this beautiful time-lapse video with photographs he captured from Gainesville, Florida.

Last week Alexandre Oudin's creative Facebook portrait idea spread like wildfire on the Interwebs, and was even featured by CNN. If you'd like to do the same thing with a portrait or photograph of yours but don't have the time or technical know-how to do so, there's a new website called Pic Scatter that does all the work for you. All you need to do is upload and resize and reposition the image to your liking, and the website will allow you to download all the individual photos for the "hacked" …

In the current world we live in, it's often the case that one person taking photographs for a group might promise to share the images as soon as they can but end up forgetting the images in some corner of their hard drive, never to be enjoyed by the other people in the photo. Enter the Samsung UCIM concept camera, designed by Jung Eun Park. Rather than store images onto a memory card owned by one person, it records images onto USB flash drives through three USB ports, allowing two other people …

Being a photographer for the National Geographic opens the door to all kinds of photo opportunities that other photographers would die for. For a Nat Geo story on "The Power of Light", photographer (and now blogger) Joe McNally climbed to the very tip of the Empire State Building to capture a stunning wide angle photograph of the antenna light bulb being changed. Luckily for the rest of us, they also created an awesome behind-the-scenes video giving us a glimpse into how the photo was made.

Google's new Books Ngram Viewer is a cool new site that allows you to search for words and view a graph of how the usage of that word has fluctuated over time. A quick search of the word "photography" in books published between 1835 and 2008 provides a pretty interesting look at the history of photography.

The soft cases that are often bundled with higher-end lenses are good for preventing minor scrapes and bruises, but offer little when it comes to protecting your glass against harsher dangers. The BETA Shell line of SLR lens cases are designed to guard your lens against most things extreme environments can throw at them, offering protection from water, impacts, and extreme temperatures.

This surreal video might seem like some sort of abstract, computer-generated art project at first glance, but take a closer look and you'll probably realize what's going on. Flickr user cshimala attached a GoPro Hero HD to his front windshield and shot some footage as he drove around Chicago. He then mirrored the footage in post, sped it up, and set it to Liquid Summer by Diamond Messages.

Forget the uber-expensive Leica cameras with their special edition embossed ostrich skin. Custom cut exotic skins is what it's all about! CameraLeather is a company that can outfit or restore your camera with a wide range of different materials. You can go from the basic goat skin leather all the way up to lizard and snake skins. The above Olympus camera is sporting the black & white cobra skin covering. It's not too pricey either -- outfitting a 35mm SLR with snake skin starts at $40.

Inanimate objects in video games have long been quite realistic, but facial expressions on human characters haven't been nearly as believable. For a new game called "L.A. Noire" by Rockstar Games, a newly developed piece of technology called MotionScan was used in which real actors are surrounded by a whopping 32 cameras to accurately document both their body motions and facial expressions. As you can see in the behind-the-scenes video above, human characters in video games are about to get a …

Now that you're older and not playing with stuffed animals any more, you're probably not keeping coins in a piggy bank either. Instead, you can save up for your next camera or lens with this awesome "piggy bank" that look like a Canon 350D with an 24-105mm L lens attached. Coins are inserted through a slit in the lens, and can fill up the camera body as well. it's available for about $23 over at 100milligrams.

In addition to slowly replacing the need for compact cameras, the cameras found on mobile phones will also have a huge impact on how we live our lives in the area of augmented reality. Word Lens is a crazy new free app for the iPhone that translates between Spanish and English in real-time in the video feed, allowing you to read the world in your language through your cell phone. As this technology becomes available for more and more languages, it will change the way people survive in foreign …

Sorry that this year's list of awesome photography gifts comes even later than last year's... we'll try to have it ready earlier in 2011. This year we have 10 fun, novel, and/or useful gifts for photography-lovers you love...

Leica recently ran a series of billboard advertisements promoting the S2 medium format DSLR and V-Lux 1. The billboards were quite unique in that they were individually made to show the wall they were placed on, with the details of the wall blown up to highlight the 12x optical zoom of the V-Lux 1 and the 37.5 megapixel sensor of the S2.

Chris Kotsiopoulos of GreekSky made this crazy lightning photograph by stacking a large number of separate shots. He tells us, …

I don't know about you, but if it weren't for the protective case on my smartphone, it would have probably needed to be replaced a long time ago. If cell phones have protective skins and cases, why shouldn't cameras? Camera Armor is a protective case that's custom designed for each separate DSLR model, and is available for both Canon and Nikon bodies -- and a few others as well.

Tagging friends in massive group photographs is about to get a whole lot easier. Facebook has just announced "tag suggestions", which uses facial recognition technology to automatically group together photographs that have the same face in them.