May 5, 2011

Google Street View photos won't be limited to the exterior of buildings for much longer -- the company has just announced Google Business Photos, a service that will allow Google websites to show the interiors of local businesses. If you thought having vehicles equipped with Street View cameras driven up and down every street in every city was a tedious project, for Business Photos Google is planning to have photographers sent to businesses that apply for the service. Crowd-sourcing the imagery …

You might not know this, but virtually all of the still photographs you've seen in the press showing President Obama announcing the death of Osama bin Laden are staged photographs. Reuters photographer Jason Reed wrote an interesting behind-the-scenes blog post on Monday, explaining: …

Photographer Alan Sailer works out of his garage shooting things with a high-speed pellet rifle and photographing the results using a homemade flash unit. An interesting series of photographs he has, titled "The War Against Christmas", involves filling Christmas tree ornaments with various things and shooting them for unique explosions of texture and color. The photograph above shows an exploding ornament that was filled with washable kids tempera paint.

One of the main stumbling points for new photographers is the seemingly random series of numbers that we have come to know as the f-stop scale or aperture scale. Things start out innocently enough f/1, f/1.4 (just add 0.4 every time, right?), but things get ugly quickly -- f/2, f/2.8, f/4. Why would anyone invent such an arbitrary scale?

Between late 2010 and early 2011, photographer Dominic Boudreault visited Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto, Manhattan, and Chicago, shooting gorgeous images of the cityscapes at night using a Canon 5D Mark II. The images were then combined into this beautiful time-lapse video showing the hustle and bustle of highways, sidewalks, streets, and rivers.

If you're the proud owner of a Polaroid 600 camera (and have deep pockets), this news will be music to your ears: Impossible has launched its new PX 680 Color Shade First Flush line of color instant film to replace the popular Polaroid 600 color film that was discontinued back in 2008. In addition to Polaroid 600 cameras, the film is also compatible with SX-70 models as long as you use a neutral density filter. It seems like Impossible is getting better and better at resurrecting Polaroid films …

While we're on the subject of Fujifilm's sizzlin' hot FinePix X100, here's what the camera looks and sounds like when shooting at its maximum rate of 5 frames per second. Silent but deadly.