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Yesterday we shared a disconcerting art project by Kyle McDonald in which he installed apps in Apple Stores throughout NYC to secretly photograph customers staring into the computers. We predicted that Apple wouldn't be too happy about it and, lo and behold, it's pissed. The company has reportedly enlisted the help of the US Secret Service to investigate McDonald's actions. Mashable writes, …

If for some reason you've always wanted pair up your SLR lenses with the tiny sensor found on the iPhone 4, Photojojo has a new mount that can make your dream come true. The package includes a special aluminum case for your phone, a UV filter attachment, and the lens adapter, and almost guarantees that you'll be the strangest looking iPhone shooter on your street.

Kodak uploaded a video to YouTube recently thats been causing quite a bit of controversy. It's a talk by Rob Hummel at Cine Gear Expo 2011 in which he states that bringing your digital camera onto an airplane will damage its sensor and cause dead pixels (it's about 8min into the video). The reasoning is that at altitudes of 20,000ft and higher, you would need 125ft of concrete to shield yourself from the gamma rays, which induce voltages in the sensors and fry the photo sites. He also claims …

The legal battle between photographer Mike Hipple and sculptor Jack Mackie over a photo of Mackie's public art piece "Dance Steps on Broadway" has ended with Hipple paying a settlement out of court. Mackie writes, …

Here's an interesting trailer for Artists & Alchemists, a documentary film coming out later this year about the resurgence of 19th century chemical photography.

A 268-megapixel sensor might suffice for photographing the stars through a telescope, but apparently a sensor many times more powerful is needed for photographing alien planets from space.

Kyle McDonald wrote a stealthy app that captures a single photo every minute and sends it to his server if it contains a face. He then went around to different Apple stores around New York City and installed it on the computers, collecting more than a thousand photos.

Astronomy and photography enthusiast Alex Cherney spent 31 hours over six nights shooting photographs of the Milky Way over the Southern Ocean using a Nikon D700 and Nikkor 14-24mm lens. The resulting 2.5 minute time-lapse video was named the overall winner of this year's STARMUS astro-photography competition.

While real cameras generally max out at two card slots, this camera wallet packs five. It also "snaps" closed to keep your cash and cards safe. Pick one up over at fredflare for $34.

Update: We hear that all charges against Rhonda Hollander have been dropped after a judge found the testimony "not credible." …

Niklas Roy built a unique electronic "instant" camera using an old black & white video camera and thermal receipt printer. When turned on, the printer slowly prints the live video feed from the camera onto cheap receipt paper. Since the image isn't stored anywhere first, the subject has to remain still during the three minutes it takes for the image to be printed.

Australian PhD student Hamish Innes-Brown lurked around Tullamarine Airport in Melbourne and shot these beautiful photographs of airplanes landing using a Mamiya C330 twin lens reflex camera and Kodak Portra 160NC medium format film.

Want to use Instagram filters without using Instagram? Creative director Daniel Box carefully recreated a number of filters from the popular iPhone app as Photoshop actions, providing a quick and simple way to retrofy your digital photos. Download the actions file to get started.

For his project titled "Texters", photographer Joe Holmes captured unsuspecting people lost in their own worlds while texting on their phones. If you want to photograph strangers on the street without getting noticed, this seems like a good way of doing so...

Here's a beautifully designed cheat sheet by Miguel Yatco that you can use to introduce people to the fundamental concepts in photography. You can also order it as a poster for your wall over on Zazzle.

Mashable is reporting that Google will be rebranding Picasa as "Google Photos" within the next six weeks, coinciding with the public launch of its Google+ social networking service. Blogger will also be rebranded as "Google Blogs". Furthermore, images up to 2048x2048px won't be counted towards the 1GB of free storage offered by the service for Google+ users, up from the 800px rule announced earlier this year. Larger images uploaded after the storage limit is reached will be automatically …

Three years ago wildlife photographer David Slater spent three days photographing a group of crested black macaque monkeys in an Indonesian national park. As he was trying to fend off some monkeys, another monkey approached his tripod-mounted Canon 5D and started playing with the remote shutter release.

Fans of the Fujifilm X100 who are hoping the company will release an interchangeable lens successor to the camera may soon get their wish. Camera division chief Takeshi Higuchi strongly hinted at their plans for an interchangeable lens camera in an interview with Reuters: …

Nikon has been doing a pretty good job with its "I AM NIKON" advertising campaign in Europe -- so good, apparently, that one Flickr user went as far as to get the slogan tattooed on her forearm. Too bad Nikon chose to run Ashton Kutcher commercials in the US instead of these ads...

Here's a short inspirational video featuring Canadian photographer Jeff Wall in which he talks about his method of allowing his eyes to do "photography" first before using his camera.

The power of the Internet is awesome when it helps reunite people with lost photos, but it's even cooler when it uses photos to help reconnect people with relatives. That happened recently with a 71-year-old shoe shiner in China named Shufang Zhong. Zhong's daughter had moved to a far away city five years ago, and although they could speak on the phone, her daughter desperately wanted to see her face. The problem was, Zhong had absolutely no Internet access and no idea how to reach her daughter.

The Negative Effect is a documentary film by Malaysian director Dick Chua about a group of youngsters obsessed with film and lo-fi photography. He followed the group of about 40 photo-enthusiasts back in 2008 as they traveled to Penang Island in Malaysia to shoot and put on a photography exhibition without any sponsorship or support. The film premiered in Malaysia in 2009 and Singapore in 2011. Hopefully it'll start showing internationally soon, or at least become available as a DVD.

If you've ever wanted a lens to hug at night but found your actual glass to be a bit uncomfortable, then these plush pillows are designed for you. Plushtography is a new company that makes these lens-lookalike pillows by hand using "fleece, felt, and a little bit of love". You can buy a small prime pillow for $41 with shipping included or a pro zoom lens for $77.

As we sign off for this 4th of July weekend, we leave you with this neat experiment by videographer Jeremiah Warren. He recently purchased some small keychain cameras off eBay and mounted them to various fireworks, giving us a glimpse into what it's like to be a 4th of July firework.

When Lomography teamed up with Threadless for a t-shirt design contest back in 2008, nearly 400 photography-related designs were submitted. This one by Sebastian Guadarrama Gomez, titled "Striped Bird", was crowned as the winner. You can check out all the other submitted designs here -- there's a lot of awesome ones that we'd love to wear.

Here's a step-by-step video tutorial teaching how to develop your B&W film using instant coffee and powdered vitamin C instead of actual developer. You'll still need some darkroom gear and some fixer, but it's a neat way to experiment with film photography. Photo geeks call this solution Caffenol, and there's even a special Flickr group dedicated to making homebrew developer.

Facebook can't be too pleased with Google right now. In addition to releasing a Facebook competitor called Google+, the company has also beaten Facebook to the mobile photo sharing space with a new app called Pool Party. Like Google+, the app is currently invite-only, but if you can score an invite it's a free download for both iOS and Android. The app is based around collaborative group albums called "pools" that allow you to share pictures with friends and family in real-time.

A great way to get inspired is to listen to other people who are serious about photography talk about their work and things they've learned. Here's a short video in which photographer Daniel Milnor talks about capturing stories through film photography. After getting into the "fast lane" by switching to digital, Milnor hit a wall and rediscovered his passion for photography by going back to shooting film with Leica rangefinders.

Between 1969 and 1972, NASA left 12 Hasselblad cameras on the moon to make room for moon rocks. One camera that wasn't left there was a 16mm camera called the "Data Acquisition Camera" used during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. It's now in the center of a legal dispute between the US government and astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth person to set foot on the moon. Mitchell claims that NASA allowed him to keep the camera as a souvenir after the mission, while NASA says that no evidence of this …

Eli Stonberg created this creative video by recording skateboarder Aryeh Kraus with seven separate cameras, with six of them on Kraus or the skateboard. When they're all viewed at the same time it's a pretty unique visual experience. Like the splitscreen short film we shared yesterday, hopefully this one will give you a healthy dose of inspiration.

Ricoh is purchasing the Pentax camera business from optical glass-maker Hoya for roughly 10 billion yen (~$124.2 million) in order to jump into the DSLR game. Hoya had purchased Pentax back in 2007 mainly for its medical technologies and was widely expected to sell off the camera division of the company. Ricoh already makes a number of quality compact cameras, but the market is slowly being eaten up by large-sensor interchangeable lens cameras and mobiles phones. The company is planning to …

One of the gripes some people have with Flickr is that it doesn't offer an easy way to download your complete collection of photos if you ever want to move your images elsewhere (though, hopefully you're not using it as your only backup).

This light painting photograph was created by a group of students over in Germany using a swarm of seven Roomba automated vacuum cleaners. Each one had a different colored LED light attached to the top, making the resulting photo look like some kind of robotic Jackson Pollock painting. There's actually an entire Flickr group dedicated to using Roombas for light painting -- check it out of you have one of these robot minions serving you in your home.

Nokia held a competition with a $10,000 prize this year asking filmmakers to create a short film using only the Nokia N8 cell phone. Director JW Griffiths won with this super creative and beautifully shot film titled "Splitscreen: A Love Story".

This Canon 7D and 70-200mm combo only costs $36 and helps you save money. How? Well it's actually a fancy piggy bank! Like the Canon 350D and 24-105mm L piggy bank we shared last year, you use this one by shoving coins into the lens.

Photo restorer Bob Rosinsky of Top Dog Imaging wrote an interesting article describing how he restored a tintype photograph from the 1870s brought to him by a client.

Photographer Elias Politis created this beautiful image showing the June 15 lunar eclipse over the Acropolis in Athens, Greece by shooting a time-lapse video and then combining the stills into a single frame.

Deal alert! Mixbook is offering a free 20-page 11x8.5" hardcover photo book with free shipping today only (June 30th, 2011). The book ordinarily costs $30 and shipping is $7, so you're getting a $37 value. All you have to do is use the code FREEBK [Update: See below] during checkout. The website's servers are getting hammered due to the deal being so popular, but if you can manage to get the site working it's definitely a sweet offer. To get started, go to Photo Books, then click 11x8.5" …

Olympus unveiled a boatload of Micro Four Thirds gear this morning, including three new PEN cameras, two new prime lenses, and a flash. All three cameras pack a 12.3 megapixel sensor with ISO that goes up to 12,800, a speedy new autofocus system (the "world's fastest"), and 1080i HD video recording. The E-P3 (shown above), the flagship camera of the PEN line, features an all-metal body, a pop-up flash, and an OLED touchscreen. It'll cost you $900 when it's out in August 2011.

OpenPhoto is a new "open" alternative to Flickr being built by programmer Jaisen Mathai -- an engineer who quit his job at Yahoo (Flickr's owner) back in May 2011. Instead of storing images using company servers, this new service will allow users to connect their own online storage accounts to store their data within arms reach. This would be like using Flickr to share your images while having the photos themselves be stored in a location that you control (e.g. Amazon S3, Dropbox, etc...).

Earlier this week an Internet user in China visited their county government website and was greeted with a horribly Photoshopped photograph showing three government officials inspecting a road.

CAPA magazine over in Japan asked some professionals in the camera industry to speculate on the rumored Nikon D4 and D900 DSLR cameras, and came up with some concept drawings for what the cameras might look like based on the information gathered. Their imaginary Nikon D4 packs a full-frame 18MP sensor, ISO 51200, 11fps burst mode, a tilting LCD screen, built-in Wi-Fi, and a 51-point cross-type autofocus system.

Here's a nice bit of encouragement for times when you feel like everyone else is coming up with neat ideas while you're stuck with lame ones.

Why settle for one boring lightning bolt when you can show 70+ bolts in the same photograph? Photographer Chris Kotsiopoulos of GreekSky recently shot a severe thunderstorm from Ikaria Island in Greece using a Canon 550D and 50mm 1.8 Mark II. He stacked 70 separate 20-second exposures to create the crazy image you see above.

Fujifilm recently put out this infomercial showing the company's efforts to restore production capabilities after having their manufacturing plant damaged by the disastrous earthquake and tsunami back in March. We get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what the manufacturing plant looks like, and the assembly line that puts the X100 together.

Forbes released its list of 100 most reputable companies in the world earlier this month, and a number of camera makers made the cut. Sony placed 6th, Canon 8th, Panasonic 13th, Kodak 41st, Samsung 43rd, and Fujifilm 47th. The Reputation Institute conducted the study with 48,000 consumers: …

Inspired by Tor Even Mathisen's stunning time-lapse of the aurora borealis over Norway, amateur photographer Ágúst Ingvarsson decided to try making his own time-lapse video to show the world what the northern lights look like over Iceland. Using a Canon 7D and Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 lens, he shot roughly 6,500 still photos between December 2010 and March 2011, using most of the images for this beautiful video.

Gavin of Sydney, Australia created an awesome 2-meter long programmable staff that makes painting giant words and images as easy as waving/walking the staff around during a long-exposure photograph. The staff, which he call the LightScythe (we would have called it the "Lightsaber"), was inspired by the Wi-Fi light painting project we shared here earlier this year.

An integral part of being a respectable artist is to have your artist statement be so confusing that you can't even decipher what it means. If coming up with one of these statements requires more time or brainpower than you have on hand, then check out Instant Artist Statement, an online generator that authors a perfect statement on your behalf for you to paste all over your website, exhibitions, and portfolios. Here's ours: …

We have a bit of a scoop for you today: there's going to be a new Kickstarter-funded gadget announced on Thursday called the Triggertrap. It's a pretty nifty universal camera trigger that can trigger your camera's shutter with anything you can think of using a built-in intervalometer, a laser trigger, a sound sensor, and an Aux input that you can connect custom triggers to: …