December 20, 2011

Olympus has something big up its sleeve. In an interview with Impressjapan, manager Mr. Ogawa revealed that the company is working on a new mirrorless camera that features an "epoch-making" viewfinder -- presumably one that's even more advanced than the hybrid viewfinder found on the Fujifilm X100. The upcoming viewfinder sounds like it'll also be some kind of fusion between electronic and optical. There's not much that's know about the technology at the moment, but we should be hearing more …

Colin Mika and Brandon Vedder of All Cut Up Films created this amazing time-lapse video of Los Angeles by photographing the city through a "snow globe". They captured 4000 images with a custom rig, which consisted of a Canon 5D Mark II, a homemade tilt-shift lens, a light bulb filled with water, and paper cutouts for shaped bokeh.

EXIF data embedded in an image file can shed quite a bit of information about a photo, including how it was created and the owner of the copyright. It's useful, but can be easily stripped away. A new consortium led by three organizations (IPTC, 4A's, and ANA) is pushing to make metadata permanent.

QR codes have become an extremely popular way of linking to digital things from the physical world, and more and more businesses are displaying them in order to direct customers to their websites. Photographer David Sykes (whom we previously featured here) decided to take advantage of the craze to promote his new website and blog. Instead of an ordinary QR code, however, he decided to create an 8-foot square model of the code using things such as boots, calculators, briefcases, boomboxes, and …

Polaroid and Chase Jarvis teamed up to create this "Will It Blend"-style advertisement for the the Polaroid Z340 instant digital camera. It's a clever idea, but poor cameras!

Christmas is almost upon us, and for the second straight year PetaPixel's gift guide comes incredibly late. Think of it as a general guide to nifty photo-related gifts that have emerged over the past year rather than a Christmas gift guide -- after all, gifts are great to receive year-round, right?

Gav of The Slow Mo Guys made this interesting video comparing different high-speed camera frame rates. Using a Phantom HD camera, he films coffee mugs shattering on pavement at 500, 1000, 2500, 5000, and 10000 frames per second.

Want to go beyond using ordinary wrapping paper for your Christmas gifts? You can make some DIY wrapping paper out of photographs. Print out your favorite photos at home onto ordinary copy paper for smaller presents, and tape multiple sheets together for larger packages.