December 17, 2010

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...