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The record for world's largest camera is currently held by an aircraft hangar camera, but back in 1900, a photographer by the name of George R. Lawrence built the massive camera seen above. He was commissioned by the Chicago & Alton Railway to shoot the world's largest photo of one of its trains -- a photo measuring 8 feet by 4.5 feet. The camera weighed 900 pounds, required 15 men to move and operate, and cost a whopping $5,000 -- enough money back then to buy a large house.

Confused about what Google's new Photovine photo sharing app is all about? Here's a short video published yesterday that explains the service without blinding us with hairy-chested dudes. "Instead of just posting a photo, you plant it and watch it grow." …

Norwegian design studio Skrekkøgle -- the one that printed a photo with a cremated dog -- has a creative project called "Big Money" in which they made a giant 20:1 replica of a 50 cent Euro coin. They then placed the coin next to large objects and photographed them together, making the objects look like tiny toy replicas.

I love what the Internet has done for the sharing of photography. Social websites such as Flickr make it so easy to get our work in front of the faces of people on the other side of the Earth so easily that it boggles my mind sometimes. This incredible ability of technology has one horrible side effect however. I'm talking about title fields.

The 684th triple play in the history of baseball happened yesterday in a game between the Boston Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays, and Boston Globe staff photographer Jim Davis managed to capture photos of the rare occurrence (they happen a few times per year) through anticipation and preparedness. Here's a short video in which Davis explains how he did it.

Ever wonder why certain people always seem to engage in meaningless Canon vs Nikon vs et al. camera brand debates at every opportunity? A recent study conducted at the University of Illinois has found that the more knowledge and experience you have with a particular brand, the stronger your self-esteem is tied to it.

Google's new Photovine mobile photo sharing app for iOS is now out of private beta and open to public signups. Here's how the iTunes download page describes it: …

There's all kinds of things people do to remember their beloved pets after they pass away, but here's a pretty creepy one: a dog owner in Norway had a photo of their Gordon Setter named Susie printed with her ashes. Norwegian design studio Skrekkøgle figured out a way to rebuild a printer to accept dog ashes as "ink", allowing them to print a vintage-looking black-and-white photograph of Susie.

Here's a mind-bending video in which someone created the famous checker shadow illusion in real life. The optical illusion takes advantage of the way our brains process lighting and shadows.

Talk about a Kodak acquisition seems to be heating up as giant tech companies -- including Google, Microsoft, and Apple -- continue to engage in a patent-hoarding war. Just two days ago, Google agreed to acquire Motorola for $12.5 billion in order to snatch up the roughly 25,000 patents owned by the handset maker. Bloomberg writes that the patents held by Kodak may be worth five times more than the company itself, making it a prime acquisition target: …

The Daily Mail is no stranger to copyright infringement accusations, but this time they've taken it even further -- publishing a photo after the owner denied them permission to do so.

"Genetic Portraits" is a series by Canadian photographer Ulric Collette in which he blends the portraits of two members of the same family into a single face. It's interesting to see the similarities and differences among people who share DNA -- especially when there's identical twins.

National Geographic recently gave expedition photographer Jimmy Chin the assignment of shooting a feature story on the Yosemite climbing culture. This jaw-dropping behind-the-scenes video shows the lengths to which Chin goes to capture shots that few photographers would dare attempt. It's both beautiful and inspiring.

Last week it came to light to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had filed a patent for having airbags built into cell phones to protect them if they're ever accidentally dropped. Rather than having a NASA-style airbag that completely envelops the phone, micro air jets orient the device so that it lands on a tiny airbag that pops out of the bottom. Wouldn't it be interesting if this kind of thing became common on digital cameras in the future? The idea is pretty farfetched, but some people I know would …

Freelance videographer Dave Wallace made this creative stop-motion video for ClickPixx using 2335 printed photos. By patiently swapping the photos in and out of 10 picture frames arranged on a wall, Wallace managed to create a stop-motion video within a stop-motion video. You can also find a behind-the-scenes video here to see how it was made.

Inkodye sells a line of light sensitive textile dyes that you can use to print photos onto fabrics. An example is this photo-printed hair ribbon, created using some white silk ribbon and Inkodye Violet. Check out the tutorial over at Upcraft.it to learn how to make your own.

Ryan McGinnis is a photographer and storm chaser. You can visit his website here.

Reddit user rocketchef strapped a GoPro video camera to a bike helmet and had their two-year-old daughter wear it during a trip to the playground. The resulting footage is a fun look at what the world looks like to a two-year-old.

You probably know that, like computers, digital cameras depreciate pretty rapidly -- especially when a replacement model is announced every 2 or 3 years. A sad truth about digital cameras is that the digital sensor inside DSLRs cause them to be more expensive than comparable film SLRs when purchased new, yet less valuable further down the road when purchased used. Ken Rockwell calls this "digital rot", and writes, …

Check out this fictional Nikon DSLR spotted in the British science fiction TV show Torchwood. It looks strangely familiar.

Wanna know how to capture a wide-eyed and wide-mouthed photo of your dog? It's easy! First, set up your camera on a tripod and point it at your dog. Then, simply throw it some tasty treats with one hand while snapping photographs with the other. There are all kind of expressions you might capture using this technique, but this one by Andrea Sillem is pretty priceless.

What do you think of this photo of a refinery by photographer Sander Roscoe Wolff? Apparently Long Beach police don't think very highly of it. Wolff was detained after capturing it last month, and now the police chief is saying that stopping photographers for photos with "no apparent esthetic value" is part of department policy. The Long Beach Post writes, …

Here's a neat image showing the different field of views offered by focal lengths ranging from 16mm to 200mm. It's not simply lines overlaid on a single photo -- the different focal lengths were actually used to capture what the scenes looks like through the lenses.

mr-korn over at Lomography recently snagged a cheap Olympus Zuiko 50mm lens on eBay, but the lens didn't come with a lens cap. Rather than try and find a replacement cap for that particular lens, he decided to craft his own DIY cap using a can of Coke.

One amazing perk that comes with being a NASA astronaut is that you can watch meteor showers up close and from above. Astronaut Ron Garan captured this awesome photograph from the International Space Station of a Perseid meteor burning up in our atmosphere.

There's a good chance the digital photos you've stored on hard drives and DVDs won't outlive you, but what if there was a disc that could last forever? M-Disc, short for Millenial Disc, is a new type of disc that doesn't suffer from natural decay and degradation like existing disc technologies, allowing you to store data safely for somewhere between "1000 years" and "forever".

Flickr user Henrique Feliciano Silva made this neat photograph by hollowing out a light bulb, filling it with water, hanging it upside down on his balcony, and shooting his neighborhood through it with a shallow depth of field.

It seems like everyone has access to some kind of camera these days, but will the digital images captured survive long enough to become part of the historical record of our time for future generations?

For his project "Day Into Night", photographer Stephen Wilkes set up a 4x5 camera with a 39-megapixel digital back 40-50 feet off the ground in a cherry picker, and photographed the scene throughout the course of one day. Keeping a constant aperture, he adjusted his shutter speed to compensate for the position of the sun. Afterward, the hundreds of images captured were edited to roughly 30-50 photos, and then seamlessly Photoshopped together to show a gradual transition from day to night.

Here's a fun and cute baby picture idea for photo enthusiast parents. Nikon should drop Kutcher and hire this little guy as its new ambassador. The brand would skyrocket in popularity with the baby demographic.

Update: It looks like the video was taken down by the uploader. Sorry guys.

Local TV station WGN made this beautiful tilt-shift time-lapse video of Chicago, giving us a neat miniature peek at what the "The Windy City" is like.

Here's some interesting innovation on the tech-side of photography: on August 24, Sony will be unveiling a new lens adapter called the LA-EA2 that will let customers use large Sony Alpha DSLR lenses on their small NEX mirrorless cameras. Unlike most lens adapters, this one actually does a lot more than adapt lenses -- it has its own translucent mirror and phase-detection autofocus sensor to aid the camera in providing snappy autofocus. It's almost like an accessory that helps turn small NEX …

Another week, another strange photo fad. The latest one is "horsemaning", and involves photographing two people to look like one decapitated person (like the headless horseman). Apparently it started in the early 1920s with the photo seen above, and is making a comeback as of late.

Last month, Sony's not-yet-announced A77 DSLR was revealed in leaked photographs, and now there's a video that gives us a another sneak peek at what the 24-megapixel camera will look like. The short 30 second video was uploaded to YouTube yesterday with the title "sony alpha A77 ?" and description "Taiwan". Rumor has it that the camera will become official later this month.

Check out this ceramic Canon 24-105mm shot glass, crafted by DERELIQ and for sale over at Photojojo. They come in a set of three for $18.

Here's a nifty visual guide to all the keyboard shortcuts you have access to when viewing a photograph on Flickr. Don't bother bookmarking this page though -- Flickr just added these guides to every page on the site. Simply press the "?" key for the popup to appear!

#phonar, short for "Photography and Narrative", is a free and open undergraduate photography course run by Jonathan Worth at Coventry University in the UK. Worth spent nearly 15 years as a successful commercial portrait photographer in New York before taking this part-time teaching position, and invites some pretty prominent photographers to guest lecture in the class. Participants have access to recorded lectures, assignments, and special discussions.

When filmmaker Paul Kroeker happened across a dragonfly that lay dying on his deck, he decided to flex his creative muscles, creating this haunting short film with his Canon 7D and Canon 100mm f/2.8L IS macro lens. Perhaps it'll inspire you to think outside the box when thinking of things to photograph or film.

For his project "Back from the Future", photographer Sander Koot asked his subjects to find old photos of themselves that brought back good memories. He then made portraits of those people reliving those happy moments.

It's finally happened -- companies are starting to realize that the two lenses on 3D cameras look a whole lot like eyes. This 3-megapixel "Felyne" camera is designed to look like a character from the video game franchise Monster Hunter, and goes on sale later this month in Japan for about $90. Something tells me we'll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing if 3D cameras start becoming popular.

Apparently the universe isn't perfect enough for Apple's products. David Kaplan, a keen-eyed physics professor at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, noticed that an entire galaxy is missing from the image of the Andromeda Galaxy used as OS X Lion's default wallpaper.

It took six months of on and off shooting for photographer Colin Rich to create this amazing time-lapse video showing Los Angeles at night. He used a Canon 5D that's still chugging along after 120,000 actuations. Be sure to watch it in HD and in fullscreen!

Film usually comes in pretty boring boxes, but what if you could reuse those boxes as a pinhole camera? Designer Linna Xu won the Packaging category of the 2010 Adobe Design Achievement Awards with this concept, creating these awesome boxes for Ilford medium format film that double as pinhole cameras resembling old school twin-lens reflex cameras. Each box allows users to explore the world of medium format photography without even having a medium format camera!

Celebrity portrait photographer Chris Buck offers this tip for portraiture: be genuinely enthusiastic. Your enthusiasm can be infectious and make your subjects more comfortable with your ideas.

Mechanical engineer and Flickr user Some Guy (Art) was bored at his job where picture taking was explicitly disallowed, so he did what any rebellious photo-fanatic would do: build a makeshift camera out of trash! Bringing $5 worth of parts (e.g. dowels, bolts, super glue) from home, he successfully turned some machine core -- which he calls "cardboard toilet paper tube on steroids" -- into a 35mm pinhole camera.

The Guardian has published a piece on how a four-man news operation called Sangat TV has stolen the headlines from big news outlets during the England riots, armed with just a "point-and-shoot camera": …

Photo Stats is a new iPhone app that can help you visualize your iPhoneography habits by automatically generating interesting infographics showing things such as where you snapped photos and the time of day you shoot the most. You can buy it for $1 in the App Store.

Photoshop product manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes offers this quick tip for getting better results with Content Aware Fill: use smaller selections for more accurate results.

Apple's upcoming iOS 5 will offer a number of welcome photography-related upgrades for iPhone shooters, but here's one that will surely cause a love/hate response: filters.