June 29, 2011

OpenPhoto is a new "open" alternative to Flickr being built by programmer Jaisen Mathai -- an engineer who quit his job at Yahoo (Flickr's owner) back in May 2011. Instead of storing images using company servers, this new service will allow users to connect their own online storage accounts to store their data within arms reach. This would be like using Flickr to share your images while having the photos themselves be stored in a location that you control (e.g. Amazon S3, Dropbox, etc...).

Earlier this week an Internet user in China visited their county government website and was greeted with a horribly Photoshopped photograph showing three government officials inspecting a road.

CAPA magazine over in Japan asked some professionals in the camera industry to speculate on the rumored Nikon D4 and D900 DSLR cameras, and came up with some concept drawings for what the cameras might look like based on the information gathered. Their imaginary Nikon D4 packs a full-frame 18MP sensor, ISO 51200, 11fps burst mode, a tilting LCD screen, built-in Wi-Fi, and a 51-point cross-type autofocus system.

Here's a nice bit of encouragement for times when you feel like everyone else is coming up with neat ideas while you're stuck with lame ones.

Why settle for one boring lightning bolt when you can show 70+ bolts in the same photograph? Photographer Chris Kotsiopoulos of GreekSky recently shot a severe thunderstorm from Ikaria Island in Greece using a Canon 550D and 50mm 1.8 Mark II. He stacked 70 separate 20-second exposures to create the crazy image you see above.

Fujifilm recently put out this infomercial showing the company's efforts to restore production capabilities after having their manufacturing plant damaged by the disastrous earthquake and tsunami back in March. We get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what the manufacturing plant looks like, and the assembly line that puts the X100 together.

Forbes released its list of 100 most reputable companies in the world earlier this month, and a number of camera makers made the cut. Sony placed 6th, Canon 8th, Panasonic 13th, Kodak 41st, Samsung 43rd, and Fujifilm 47th. The Reputation Institute conducted the study with 48,000 consumers: …

Inspired by Tor Even Mathisen's stunning time-lapse of the aurora borealis over Norway, amateur photographer Ágúst Ingvarsson decided to try making his own time-lapse video to show the world what the northern lights look like over Iceland. Using a Canon 7D and Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 lens, he shot roughly 6,500 still photos between December 2010 and March 2011, using most of the images for this beautiful video.