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Google Takes Street View Photography into the Wild with Camera Backpacks

Google has already photographed quite a bit of our world using a fleet of cars, submarine-style cameras, tricycles, and snowmobiles, so what else is there to include in Street View? Places where vehicles can't go, of course. The company has begun capturing 360-degree imagery using the Trekker -- a special backpack with a Street View camera rig sticking up from the top.

The Art of Photographing People Being Scared Out of Their Minds

One year ago, the haunted house called Nightmares Fear Factory in Niagara Falls, Canada scored a major marketing win after its candid photographs of horrified guests went viral online. With Halloween 2012 only a week away, Jakob Schiller over at Wired caught up with the house's marketing director Vee Popat for the inside scoop of how the images are shot:

At one point in the attraction [...] the groups come to a spot where they trigger a Nikon D80 camera and flash at the exact moment where they encounter some unknown fright that is so scary it provokes grown men to hide behind their wives and friends to jump into each other’s arms.

The idea for the photos was inspired by photos of people yelling as they ride rollercoasters. Popat says the owner used to actually sit in the haunted house and take the photos himself. Just like amusement parks, attendees at Nightmares can purchase their photos after they’ve recovered from the excitement and the “best of” photos circulate on monitors in the lobby.

Joby GripTight: A Universal Clamp-Style Tripod Mount for Smartphones

GorillaPod maker Joby announced a new product today designed for people who regularly use their smartphones for photography or videography. Called the GripTight, it's a universal tripod mount that'll work with most popular smartphones. It's basically a compact spring-loaded clamp with a tripod mount built into the bottom. Stretch the rubbery clamp over your phone, and it'll grip it tightly in place.

BTS: Shooting Portraits of Scientists for the Cover of Wired UK Magazine

Earlier this year we received a call from across the Atlantic Ocean. The editors at Wired UK magazine had an incredibly ambitious project ahead of them that they asked us to be a part of: one week, four photographers, over thirty photo-shoots, and a triple gate-fold cover featuring sixteen of the brightest and most inspiring minds in the world at the MIT Media Lab. How could we say no?

Creative Photos of Fruits and Veggies Cut and Arranged into Geometric Shapes

The photograph above may look like it shows a photo of apples mounted to a wall, but it actually shows real apples that were packed into a neat little square. Turkish artist and photographer Sakir Gökçebag has an entire series of photographs showing various fruits and vegetables carefully sliced up and placed into neat arrangements.

Dropbox iOS App Now Downloads Full-Resolution Photos from the Cloud

If you've been using Dropbox as a photo backup solution and the official iOS app for accessing your images in the cloud, you may have noticed that downloading photos to your device didn't give you the exact files that you wanted. Instead of beaming the full-resolution images to your Camera Roll, the app would shrink photos to a much smaller size to speed up downloading times. A 14MP 4592x3056 photo would only be saved at 960x638, for example.

This week, Dropbox finally updated the app and removed the resolution ceiling from downloads. Now you can save your entire photos from your backup to your iOS device without seeing it pass under a shrink ray.

Canadian Prime Minister Randomly Drops in on Couple’s Wedding Photos

Wedding photographers always try to prepare themselves for unexpected events and unplanned photo ops, but there's no way photographer Laura Kelly was expecting what happened this past weekend. While photographing couple Jocelyne Potvin and Patrick Sullivan on their wedding day, an unexpected guest came in to the frame: Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Photographs from the Edge of the World

Mikko Lagerstedt is a self-taught photographer based-in Finland who only started shooting back in December 2008. Since then, he has captured a number of hauntingly beautiful landscape photographs showing both stars and self-portrait silhouettes hovering over the horizon line. His latest project is simply titled "Edge", and features "atmospheric photography" of the Finnish landscape.

Commercial Features Water Drops Frozen With Sound and the Camera’s Frame Rate

Earlier this year, we shared a crazy example of how you can make water drops look like they're frozen in midair simply by passing the water over a speaker and using sound vibrations to sync the drops with the frame rate of your camera. Well, Japan's largest music channel, Space Shower TV, has taken the idea and turned it into clever commercial. What you see above is ordinary footage using this trick -- there's no fancy CGI trickery, reversal during post, or high-speed camera footage involved.

Memoto: A Wearable Camera That Gives You a Photographic Memory

One of the big ideas that seems destined to explode over the next decade is lifelogging, the ability to automatically capture and store one's life and experiences for future reference. Memoto is a new camera that's trying to be a pioneer in this emerging market. Its name and tagline should give you a good sense of what it does: "Memoto Lifelogging Camera: A tiny, automatic camera and app that gives you a searchable and shareable photographic memory."

BTS: Shooting Heisman-Winning Football Players for Nissan Advertisements

Photographer Gary Land was recently hired by Nissan to shoot a series of car advertisement photographs featuring the famous Heisman Trophy-winning football players Charles Woodson, Bo Jackson, Robert Griffin III, and Herschel Walker. Luckily for all of us, the team produced a series of behind-the-scenes videos offering short glimpses into how the photographs were created, the gear they used, and tricks they came up with to their turn ideas into reality.

Upcoming Nikon 70-200mm f/4 Said to Feature 5-Stop Vibration Reduction

We reported last week the Nikon is set to fill a gap in its lens lineup by introducing a new Nikkor AF-S 70-200mm f/4G ED VR lens -- a lens that should be smaller and cheaper than its f/2.8 counterpart. As we move closer to the lens' announcement (rumored to be sometime this week), new details about it are starting to emerge.

Interview with Elijah Hurwitz, a Man Who Quit His Job to Photograph the World

Elijah Solomon Hurwitz is an NYC-based photographer keen on documentary and street photography, and social and cultural issues. He has photographed in over 40 countries. Visit his website here. He also publishes a running log of photos (on Instagram as @elijahsol) and thoughts.

PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Elijah Hurwitz: Until this last year I wouldn't characterize my story as particularly unique. I grew up in a 'planned community' suburb of DC/Baltimore finding ways to get into/avoid trouble and playing video games. Studied business at a midwestern state college, and then spent the next ten years in marketing roles for technology and entertainment brands in Seattle and NYC. I've always been really into music, traveling and the outdoors. I better put the brakes on, this sounds like an online dating profile.

Ethereal Photographs from Wonderland

Take a look at the portfolio of Washington D.C.-based photographer Cade Martin, and you'll feel like you're looking at movie stills from an upcoming live action Alice and Wonderland film. His beautiful, dreamlike photographs have themes of grace, beauty, repetition, and light.

Canon 5D Mark III to Receive Major Video and AF Upgrades Next Year

Don't worry Canon 5D Mark III shooters: Canon didn't forget about you after all. Less than a week after announcing a highly-requested firmware update to the Canon 1D X to address AF complaints, Canon has revealed that a similar -- but even better -- update is also coming to the Canon 5D Mark III.

The upcoming firmware update will not only add support for cross-type AF using lens/extender combos with a max aperture of f/8, it'll also allow for clean uncompressed HDMI out!

Marketing Fail: A Demo of AF Speed with a Lens Set to MF

In the beginning of last month, Nokia was caught faking sample photos and footage in a promo video for the camera on its new Lumia 920 phone. A couple of weeks later, bogus information about camera sensors was found on the official website for Hasselblad's new Lunar mirrorless camera. This week, we have a new episode of "camera marketing fail" for you, this time brought to you by Phase One.

Mosaic Turns Your iPhone Pictures into Beautiful Cookie-Cutter Photo Books

Back in September, we wrote that there was a new service by photo-book company Mixbook called Mosaic on the way. New details have been unveiled that offer a better look at how the service will work. In short: it's an iPhone app that's designed to make turning your photos into photo books as easy and as affordable as possible.

Rumors: Multiple High-MP Prototypes in the Wild, Canon Miffed About Rumors

PhotoPlus is going down over in New York City in the second half of this week, and that's when we might be hearing a peep out of Canon regarding its rumored high-resolution DSLR. If there's any mention of the camera at all, it will probably at most be an "in development" announcement that confirms rumors but doesn't reveal too much else.