October 11, 2011

Forget sending cameras up to the edges of space on a weather balloon: rockets are much, much cooler (and faster). A man named Derek Deville created a homemade rocket in an effort to win The Carmack Prize, which offers $10K to anyone who can launch a rocket to above 100K feet, take a GPS reading, and then recover the vehicle. Although he failed to take a GPS reading, Deville's rocket managed to reach 121,000ft (~23 miles) in 84 seconds.

Back in August, it came to light that some of Leica's $7,000 M9 cameras had a problem in which they would corrupt the SD card being used -- a problem that caused one photographer to permanently lose work after a day of shooting.

By Martin Pannier on picuous …

Videographer Joel Loukus created a continuous ring light source -- which he calls the "WreathLight" -- using a wreath frame and two strings of Christmas lights. The total cost came out to $24. It's a cheap and easy way of adding some soft lighting to your portraits.

Instagram just celebrated its first birthday last week, and now early adopters have a new toy to play with: And7YearsAgram. It's like Photojojo's Photo Time Capsule, but for Instagram instead of Flickr. The service sends you a daily email with the photographs you captured on that day the year before, giving you a fun and visual glimpse of your past (and reminding you of how fast time flies).

Thailand is experiencing the worst flooding it has seen in more than 50 years, and Nikon is also getting hit hard. A statement released by the company today (and photos emerging from the area) reveals that the company's entry-level DSLR factory there is now swamped with water: …

After seeing his close-up photographs of human eyes become enormously popular last year, photographer Suren Manvelyan turned to a more difficult subject: animals. He somehow managed to create a series of photographs showing the stunning eyes of animals ranging from crocodiles to horses.

Here's a quick and easy photo hack: cut a slice out of a white film canister to soften the light from your DSLR's built-in flash.

Expose two images without advancing your film, and you have yourself an in-camera double exposure photograph. With the advent of digital photography, creating a double exposure image has largely moved to image editing programs. The MINIMO-X, however, is a digital camera that has double exposure built-in as a feature. The pocket-sized toy digicam lets you snap two exposures on the same frame, combining the fun of analog with the convenience of digital. You can find them for $130 each over in the …

Advertising photographer Paul Ripke's project "Man Babies" features portraits of parents with their children... with their heads swapped. Ripke enlisted the help of two professional Photoshoppin' friends, and says that the photographs were purely for fun and to test the limits of Photoshop.