July 12, 2011

San Franciscan Tanya Vlach lost her left eye in a car accident back in 2005. Dissatisfied with her prosthetic eye, she's trying to raise money to develop an in-eye camera that captures blink-activated still photos and 720p HD video. Her wish list of features include geotagging, IR/UV capture, facial recognition, and sensor activated zoom, focus, and on/off. Vlach's Kickstarter project is titled "Grow a new eye", and has a set goal of reaching $15,000 in funding by August 3rd, 2011.

If you're not convinced that Google is jumping into the photo-sharing pool head first, get this: the company has not one, but two stealthy photo sharing apps in private beta. Besides the Pool Party app that came to light at the beginning of the month, the rumored Photovine service has now materialized into a website -- well, a landing page, at least.

French design duo Zim & Zou (Thibault Zimmerman and Lucie Thomas) these papercraft versions of Polaroid and Leica cameras -- they're super realistic, except the colors are quite trippy!

A student in Germany created this fake Canon 5D Mark III commercial for a school project, and fooled quite a few people online.

Last year Scott Bourne caused some commotion among photo-enthusiasts by claiming that Twitter's ToS forced photographers to give up rights to photos shared through the service. After Google launched their new Google+ social network, Bourne again wrote a very similar post warning his readers about the ToS. We weren't planning on weighing in, but seeing that the FUD has spread to our comments and even The Washington Post, we'd like to clear some of it away for our readers.

Last year map geek Eric Fischer created heat maps showing where Flickr photos are taken in large cities and comparing tourist vs. local hotspots. Now he's back again with beautiful maps showing geotagged Flickr photos and Twitter Tweets, and the maps aren't limited to cities -- there's maps for continents (see North America above) and even the whole world! The orange dots show photos, the blue ones indicate Tweets, and a white one means both were found in that location.

Nikon has just announced the new AF-S DX Micro NIKKOR 40mm f/2.8G lens, which has a FoV equivalent to a 60mm on a full frame body. It boasts a minimum focusing distance of just 6.4 inches, and has a reproduction ratio of 1:1.

The AP has sacked photographer Miguel Tovar for "deliberate and misleading photo manipulation" after Tovar cloned out his own shadow from a feature photograph. The Photoshopping came to light after an alert photo editor spotted a strange looking dust pattern in a photo of Argentinian children playing soccer.

You might have heard about Leica's legendary manufacturing quality, but have you seen it? The company released this promotional video a couple days ago providing a behind-the-scenes peek into its production facilities.