January 31, 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.