June 20, 2011

We've heard of digital photos being recovered after lost cameras drift for 1,000 miles (in underwater casing) or spend a year at the bottom of the ocean floor, but is there any hope for a camera that experiences four years of abuse at sea? Turns out there is. A man named Peter Govaars was walking along a beach in California when he stumbled upon a battered camera "skeleton" with a memory card still attached. He took the SD card home, took it apart, spent 30 minutes cleaning it, and was …

About a year ago, engineer and photo-enthusiast Morten Hjerde began brainstorming ideas for the next generation of photographic lighting after concluding that most of the lights used by photographers these days are simply glorified light bulbs.

Ryan Burnside recently set out to find a cheap way to shoot 360-degree panoramas of scenes, and discovered that shooting a Christmas ornament (or any other spherical reflection) captures all the information needed -- all that's needed is a way to "unravel" the spherical image. Burnside found that the free image editor GIMP can do the trick.

After Polaroid stopped manufacturing instant film in 2008 -- breaking the hearts of Polaroid lovers around the world -- a small new company called The Impossible Project purchased Polaroid's manufacturing equipment and factory in the Netherlands in an attempt to save the film from extinction. They were successful in doing so, announcing new lines of instant films in 2010. The above video is an interesting mini-documentary that gives us a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on at The Impossible …

"Lonely Traveller" is a new photography-related t-shirt for sale over on Threadless. Basically, elephants have nature's version of the XShot Camera Extender.

Shoot a stunning time-lapse video of the Milky Way, and there's a good chance it'll go viral. Photographer Randy Halverson used a Canon 60D and Canon T2i with Tokina 11-16, Sigma 20mm F1.8, and Tamron 17-50 lenses to shoot these beautiful images of the night sky over South Dakota.

Even though it seems like the photo sharing market is saturated with services competing for the world's photos, the incredible growth of many young companies (e.g. Instagram) shows that there's still plenty of untapped areas for growth, with mobile sharing being one of the big ones at the moment. A trademark for "Photovine" filed by Google earlier this month seems to suggest that the search giant is looking to expand beyond Picasa.