October 24, 2011

Here's the current state of imagery: still cameras can shoot HD video, video cameras can capture high quality stills, and data storage costs continue to fall. In the future, it might become commonplace for people to make photos by shooting uber-high quality video and then selecting the best still. However, as any photographer knows, selecting the best photograph from a series of photos captured in burst mode is already a challenge, so selecting a still from 30fps footage would be quite a …

Photography enthusiast and retired physicist Milo Shott of Oxford, England has found a way use his love for cameras to raise boatloads of money for the poverty-fighting charity Oxfam: camera repair. 11 years ago, Shott noticed some workers at an Oxfam store throwing out an old piece of camera equipment. After saving it from the trash, he fixed it up and helped the store sell it for £270.

Step into the Foto Henny Hoogeveen Leica store in Lisse, the Netherlands, and you'll be greeted by a giant stainless steel Leica camera that weighs a whopping 350kg (~772lb). The sculpture was crafted by Chinese artist Liao Yibai, and there are only three of them in existence. Besides the one found in the shop, the other two are owned by Leica itself and a distributor. The camera isn't based on any one model, but is instead a hodgepodge of features found on the M6, M7, and M9.

Canon's new 1D X is an impressive fusion of the old 1D and 1Ds lines, boasting state of the art sensor quality combined with impressive speed, but there's one downside that may be a big disappointment to some photographers: the camera loses autofocus when used with lenses with a max aperture of f/8.

A 'vortograph' is a photo taken using a triangular arrangement of three mirrors. The process was invented back in 1917 by an American photographer named Alvin Langdon Coburn. Photographer Simon Gardiner decided to try his hand at vortography, and created this beautiful Inception-esque photograph of the Champs-Élysées in Paris [using Photoshop].

GoPro has unveiled the HD Hero2, the followup to the highly popular HD Hero from 2009 that has been adopted by daredevils around the world. The new camera is similar in design but offers major upgrades: more angles of view (90°, 127°, and 170°), 11-megapixel still photos (up from 5MP) at 10fps, a helpful LCD display instead of a single character code system, a mini-HDMI port, and a faster sensor that allows for faster frame rates (e.g. 960p at 48fps, up from 30).

Here's CNET's introduction to the new Lytro camera. The square LCD screen on the back of the camera might be small, but it's a touchscreen display that lets you play around with the focus directly in-camera rather than having to connect the device to a computer.

Photographer Dennis Calvert creates amazing light painting portraits that look more like video game illustrations than photographs.

Photographer Lisa Bettany has an interesting post over at Camera+ comparing the iPhone 4S camera to the cameras on each of the previous versions (and a couple other cameras as well). It's an interesting look at how much cell phone cameras have improved since the original iPhone was announced at the beginning of 2007.

Photographs of happy babies are cute, but not-so-happy babies can also make for great photo subjects. Photographer Evan Kafka has a knack for capturing wonderful expressions of both varieties.

More news from the ongoing Olympus scandal: despite an official explanation issued by Olympus last week, the company's stock has continued to plummet. It closed today at ¥1,099, down from around ¥2,500 before the crisis began. Investors are apparently spooked after a major Japanese newspaper suggested that the payments at the center of the controversy could have links to the criminal underworld (something the company has denied). The New York Times is reporting that the FBI is now involved in …

Here's a super-awesome way of using stop-motion photography to announce the birth of a new baby.