January 2011

Sony has been gaining ground on Canon and Nikon lately by focusing on innovation, creating new technologies and entering the mirrorless market early while the two mega-corps have mostly been content with playing it safe with their popular products. Sony recently filed an interesting patent in Japan that shows some of this creative thinking at work. It's a design for a compact camera in which the panel that hides the lens on the front of the camera turns into a camera grip when the lens is …

DOF Calculator is an app for Android phones that helps you easily calculate depth of field and hyperfocal distances. Simply tell it your camera, lens, and aperture setting, and it'll spit out the numbers you need for optimally sharp landscape photographs. You can download it for free by searching for "DOF Calculator" in the Android Market.

Erik Pettersson was looking for a nice digital frame, but found that all the commercially available ones were too small, ugly, and cheap looking. He had an old Thinkpad T42 laptop lying around, so he decided to make his own custom frame. After installing Linux and writing some custom scripts for operating the frame, he disassembled it and joined it with a nice-looking IKEA frame. Best of all, he documented his entire process and published it online as a tutorial for those who want to make their …

Think your camera gear is safe in your zippered bag just because you have have sliders locked up? Think again. This video shows how easy it is to break into a zippered bag without leaving a trace.

Digital hyper-realist artist Bert Monroy spent four years creating an incredibly detailed Times Square scene. The 5x25 foot image weighed in at 6.52 gigabytes as a flattened file, and involved more than 750,000 separate Photoshop layers and over 3,000 separate Photoshop and Illustrator files. The image is actually a "who's who" for the world of digital imaging, and features individuals who have made an impact on the history of the field, including Photoshop's founders, imaging experts, and …

Design firm XNcreative shot some photographs with a Canon Rebel 550D (T2i) while flying over various locations in the western US, but didn't feel the still photos captured the original grandeur of the locations, so they decided to turn the stills into a motion-faked video. It was all done using Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Apple Motion. You can find a walkthrough for how it was created here if you want to try your hand at this 3D effect.

There's a sweet deal on some popular magazines going on over at Discount Magazines. Annual subscriptions to Popular Photography, Digital Photo, American Photo, and Outdoor Photographer are just $5 if you use the coupon code "PHOTO" at checkout. You can subscribe for up to 3 years for all of them except Outdoor Photography, which is limited to one year.

Chris Kotsiopoulos of GreekSky created this mind-boggling panoramic photo of the sky that shows the passing of a day. He writes, …

What does it take to shoot portraits of random strangers on a sidewalk? Photographer Clay Enos, known for his portraits for the movie Watchmen, walks us through his process for capturing impromptu portraits of passers-by on a white backdrop.

Valentine's Day is just around the corner (February 14th, to be exact), and if the special person in your life is a photography-lover, you might want to think about ditching the cards, flowers, and chocolates, and going with something a little more... lomo. Lomography has released two special edition Diana cameras for this special occasion. The "Love is in the Air" Diana Mini costs $119 and the "Take My Heart" Diana F+ costs $99.

SunCalc is a super-simple web app created with Google Maps and Javascript that helps you determine the best time to shoot depending on the quality of light you want in your photos.

This unique video shows an uncut series of 2,000 photographs taken by professional photographer Chase Jarvis over the course of 5 days. He estimates that only 6 to 10 of the photographs will ever be used as a commercial or fine-art photo. If you find that only a few of your shots after a long day of shooting are acceptable, don't be discouraged -- it's like that for the pros as well!

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

Big, expensive television cameras aren't the only kind recording the action at the Australian Open. During the Federer vs. Djokovic semifinal match last night, the camera cut to this guy recording Novak with a Canon 7D. Luckily for him, it didn't get smashed by a broken racquet.

What you see here is the history of Kodak stock starting from 1978. In the mid-1990s the stock peaked at over $90 per share, but has experienced a slow demise since then, and is currently at $3.70 a share. What's more, the company just announced yesterday that profits fell a staggering 95% in the fourth quarter of 2010. During that quarter the company earned just $22 million, compared to the $443 million it earned during the same period a year earlier.

Samsung recently partnered up with viral marketing agency The Viral Factory to launch 200 paper airplanes carrying SD cards from the edges of space. We first reported on this experiment back in September of last year, but they followed through with the plans and just published this video this week showing how they accomplished it. The balloon was launched in Germany, and each SD Card carried a message for the finder to prove how durable they are.

Having figured out how to embed a projector into the body of a compact camera with the S1000pj, Nikon is now apparently looking to do the same with DSLR cameras. A recent patent filing by Nikon in Japan describes a DSLR camera that has a projector function. The text reads, …

You've likely seen this DIY trick before, but it doesn't hurt to share this for those who haven't. Instead of carrying around a tripod or monopod, you can easily stabilize your camera using a washer, some string, and a bolt. It's a cheap and easy stabilizer that you can carry around with you in your camera bag for those moments when you wish you had a steadier hand.

Tech analysis company Chipworks recently did a teardown of the Nikon D7000, and confirmed that the 16.2 megapixel APS-C sensor within is manufactured by Sony (the IMX071 to be exact). This is likely the exact same sensor used by Sony in the A55 translucent mirror camera and the A580 DSLR.

Ever wonder what Canon's Image Stabilization technology looks like in action? Like a lens element doing a jig, that's what! …

Enda O’Donoghue finds photographs of people taking self-portraits through social networks and blogs, and recreates them as paintings after finding the owners and requesting permission.

Need to hold down the shutter release for extended periods of time, but don't want to shell out money for a remote shutter release? Flickr user Dennis Calvert found that a pencil eraser and hair tie do the job well, allowing you to do star trail photographs with bulb mode.

It's been a while since we've done a giveaway here, and we haven't done one yet in 2011, so here goes: we're giving away a Photo Urban Disguise 70 bag by Think Tank Photo worth $189. This is a briefcase style bag that can hold up to two DSLRs with lenses attached without drawing attention to itself as a camera bag.

Canadian artist James Birkbeck shot this creative photo wearing paint to look like a van Gogh self-portrait painting.

Update on 12/18/21: This video has been removed by its creator but it can still be watched over at The Guardian …

CES is over, but Panasonic has no plans of letting the camera announcements end -- they've just announced four new Lumix compact cameras in addition to the eight they introduced at CES earlier this month.

Freelance designer Kim Neill had the awesome idea of creating Pantone Chip cookies, and stuffed some Pantone tins full of them as gifts for her clients. Needless to say, they were a hit, and she soon began receiving requests for refills.

Meet the Roulot'ographe, a Luxembourg-based mobile trailer that doubles as both a giant camera obscura and a photography workshop classroom. All the mobile studio needs is an electrical connection and access to running water.

Pirela Neuman created this 3D concept design of a Leica R10 camera, a digital successor to the 35mm film R9. Your thoughts?

Redditor and DeviantArt user mygrapefruit took Alfred Eisenstaedt's famous photograph V-J Day in Times Square and colorized it, giving us a glimpse into what the photo might have looked like had Eisenstaedt used color film.

Here's another site you can bookmark if you're constantly on the hunt for cheap, used camera gear to play with: PropertyRoom.com is an online auction site through which law enforcement agencies can sell goods that were stolen, seized, or found. There's a section just for for photography that includes cameras, lenses, and accessories. Like the Goodwill auction site we featured last year, the fact that these auctions sites are lesser known means it more likely that you'll be able to find a crazy …

Forget those fake plastic (but wildly popular) mugs that look like Canon lenses, there's a one of a kind custom lens cup made from a real $1,300 Canon 300mm f/4 L lens being auctioned on eBay. Kai over at DigitalRev had an accident while shooting a video about the lens and, instead of tossing it out, they decided to convert it into a cup and auction it off for charity (all proceeds will go to help victims of the recent Australian flooding).

The camera market may look vastly different in the future than the Canon and Nikon dominated one we see today if recent trends continue. Amateur Photographer is reporting that the combined share of Canon and Nikon dropped a whopping 11% in Japan through 2010, and is currently at 60.4%. What's more, Sony has increased its share to 15.2%, and has in fact overtaken Nikon in the UK, capturing 25% of interchangeable cameras sold compared to Nikon's 20%.

This semifinal performance at the Eurovision Song Contest 2009 has an awesome steadicam shot starting at 2m35s. While it might seem like they used a super high-tech RC helicopter or some computer-generated trickery, it was actually done with a segway, a steadicam, and a whole lotta talent.

Julio César Assis is a hardcore Canon fan. To show his loyalty to the brand and his allegiance to fellow Canonites, he decided to have the logo tattooed on his bicep.

We've shared beautiful timelapse videos already for San Francisco and Toyko, and now here's one of New York City. It was shot by Josh Owens using a Canon 5D Mark II (with the 14mm 2.8L, 24mm 1.4L, 50mm 1.2L, and 70-200 2.8L), and a Dynamic Perception timelapse dolly.

Did you know that Idée Inc., the company behind reverse-image search engine TinEye, also has a web app called BYO Image Search Lab that can take any photo you provide it and find photographs that look similar to it? It's a neat way to be inspired by how other photographers approached shooting similar scenes.

Ordinary DSLR cameras too big and bulky for you? Check out the CHOBi CAM ONE, a DSLR-style toy camera the size of an eraser that actually has lenses you can swap in and out. It shoots 1600×1200 still photos and VGA video at 30 frames per second.

Derick Childress spent three nights shooting a massive light painting photograph with the message "Emily, will you marry me?" drawn out on the streets of Raleigh, North Carolina as a proposal to his girlfriend Emily Kern. The final image was made up of about 800 individual stills that each took 10 seconds to expose.

iPhone photography continues to grow in popularity, but transferring photographs to your computer can be a hassle. If you're sick of having to plug in your device via USB every time you want to sync your photos, you might want to take a look at Cinq, a free app that allows you to wireless transfer full-resolution photographs to your computer as you take them. You simply download the app to both your computer and your phone, and photos taken through the app will automatically be sent to a folder …

Just last month we featured a video showing what life is like for a broadsword, and now here's a video showing how it feels to be an arrow. Jeremiah Warren decided to attach a small camera with a wide angle lens to an arrow and record it being shot in various ways (straight up, at an angle, etc...). The fletches on the arrow were removed to keep it from spinning too much.

I needed a foot switch for my DSLR camera so that I could take hands-free pictures. On a long-shot, I went down to the local Radioshack to see if they had one. As expected, they didn't have any camera foot switches, but I did luck out that they had all the parts necessary to build my own. Here is how to throw together a 5-minute camera foot switch with easily obtainable parts from Radioshack.

Here's a quick tutorial on how you can fake a slow motion effect with only still photos using Adobe After Effects.

After Alan Taylor started "The Big Picture" photo blog over at the Boston Globe in 2008, it quickly became one of the most popular sections of the website. In addition to starting a large format photo blogging trend among news organizations, it has also won two Webby Awards and a SXSW nomination for "Best Blog". Taylor announced yesterday that he will be leaving "The Big Picture" to start up a new photo blog over at The Atlantic called "In Focus". His last post at The Big Picture will be on …

Ambrotype photography came into use in the 1850s, and involves creating a positive image on a sheet of glass. This behind-the-scenes video shows ambrotype photographer Harry Taylor creating three portraits using this process, and should be interesting to watch if you've never seen this method of photography before.

Nikon's entry into the mirrorless camera market may only be a few months away. Mirrorless Rumors is reporting that, according to "good sources", Nikon will unveil a new mirrorless system in April 2011. Unlike the existing EVIL cameras on the market today (e.g. Sony NEX, Samsung NX, and Micro Four Thirds cameras), the new system will not be geared towards amateurs and photo enthusiasts, but rather professional photographers.

If you love both traveling and photography, a fun photo project might be to shoot through a checklist of atmospheric phenomena. You probably know about auroral lights, but have you heard of parhelia, aka sun dogs? These are bright spots of light in the sky, often seen on a bright halo around the sun when it's low in the sky.

Todd Bieber was skiing in Brooklyn's Prospect Park after the recent blizzards when he stumbled upon a white canister of film hidden in the snow. He had the roll developed, and found photographs taken in the area documenting the blizzard -- photographs that are quite good. He then decided to create this nicely narrated video in an attempt to locate the owner. If you recognize anyone in these images, you can contact Bieber via email.

Utku Can over at Mint Digital had the fun idea of turning an iPod Nano into the world's smallest gallery for displaying Instagram photographs.

The "Photo Hanger" is a mini steel wire paperclip shaped like a miniature clothes hanger, and can be a neat way to display photographs your wall when combined with pushpins. You can also hang some string across your room or wall, and hang the photos up like you would hang clothes on a clothes line. Novelty and awesomeness, however, comes at a price -- for $9.50 you get only 7 of these sweet clips over at arango.