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Leica and Sony aren't the only camera companies that slice their cameras and lenses down the middle to give the world a peek at their guts -- Canon does it too. On the first floor of one of its headquarter buildings in Japan is a small museum that has a cross-sectioned Canon 1Ds DSLR and 400mm f/4 DO IS USM lens on display. Back in the day, the camera had a price of $5,500 and the lens cost $8,900, meaning Canon sliced nearly $15,000 of gear in half for this display.

If you're both a photography lover and a Mac user (there's a lot of you out there, right?), computer expert Lloyd Chambers has an uber-helpful section on his Mac Performance Guide website for photographers who want to learn how to optimize a Mac for Photoshop and other photo editing programs.

Used in New York back in 1938, this revolver camera was a Colt 38 with a tiny camera that would capture a photograph whenever the trigger was pulled. I sure hope those sample photographs taken with this revolver were shot while the gun wasn't loaded...

The Coleman LED Quad Lantern is an area lantern that features four detachable LED panels that function as individual lights, with each one containing six LEDs, a handle, and a rechargeable battery. While it's designed for outdoor use (e.g. camping), it can also be used as a cheap solution for lighting your photos on the go.

Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner was randomly selected and announced below.

Photographer Linhbergh recently purchased a used camera from B&H Photo Video and found a Compact Flash card left inside the camera containing photographs taken from inside the store offices. They offer an interesting glimpse into the operations at the largest non-chain photo equipment store in the United States.

Check out this photograph of camel thorn trees in Namibia shot by Frans Lanting. It looks like a painting but is actually a photograph...

Vodafone recently ran a pretty creative advertising campaign called "Pixel Hunt" for the purpose of illustrating how many pixels LG's 5-megapixel Optimus phone packs. They published a 5-megapixel photograph (presumably taken with the phone) on a website and invited people to zoom in and click individual pixels, with 100 of the pixels "containing" a free Optimus phone. It took 300,000 visitors a whole month to click each of the 5 million pixels.

Ever wonder how photographs magically appear on Polaroid pictures? Photojojo offers a simple explanation of how the process works: …

Photographer Darren Samuelson spent seven months building a massive homemade large-format camera that's about six-feet-long when fully extended. He shoots with 14×36-inch x-ray film that's about 1/12th the cost of ordinary photographic film but much harder to develop.

Inspired by Todd McLellan's photos of disassembled gadgets, electrician and photography addict Kelly Hofer decided to do the same thing with his broken 4-megapixel Canon PowerShot A520. Check out the high-res version, or the behind-the-scenes video he shot while arranging the pieces.

This epic advertisement for The Camera Store imagines what would be like if wars were fought with cameras instead of guns. In this alternate reality, massive telephoto lenses and flash(bang)s sure come in handy!

Samsung just published a followup to the NX lens engineer interview video that we shared a couple weeks ago featuring Q&As with the planners, marketers, and designers behind the lenses. Included on the page was this interesting photograph that appears to show a bunch of prototype cameras developed in the company. Check out the cube-shaped camera and another one with three retro dials at the top!

Here's a short and sweet video in which famed wedding photographer Joe Buissink shares some advice regarding the "psychology" of wedding photography, or how to capture genuine emotions and expressions on camera. The tips he shares are useful for other kinds of photography as well, not just wedding or engagement photography.

Color photography was born on this day 150 years ago in 1861 when Scottish physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell and photographer Thomas Sutton -- inventor of the SLR camera -- shot the above photograph of a colored ribbon.

Last week The Daily Mail published some photographs of British singer Seal passing through LAX airport with his family. While at first glance it might look like the camera hanging around his neck is a Leica MP film rangefinder, look a little closer and you'll see that it's not -- it doesn't have a battery compartment, a film reverse lever, or a film advance lever...

Who says you need a heavy and expensive lens to capture a beautiful shuttle launch photograph from far away? After the Space Shuttle Endeavour blasted off yesterday on its final mission, one of the photographs that went viral was shot from an airplane using an iPhone. Another was this stunning photo made by Trey Ratcliff using a Nikon 50mm prime lens while thousands of photographers around him were holding massive lenses.

Jeffrey Martin, the guy behind the world's largest indoor photo, has done it again -- the founder of 360cities was hired by Wembley Stadium to shoot a massive 20 gigapixel 360-degree panorama of the 2011 FA Cup Final this past weekend. About 1000 photographs shot with a DSLR and robotic tripod head were needed to capture the 90,000 fans in attendance, and the final image was processed with a workstation that had 192 gigabytes of RAM and 24 CPU cores! …

If you've ever tried saving a layered file in Photoshop CS5 that's more than a 1GB in size, you've probably experienced pretty sluggish performance. This is because the program always does image compression on the file that shrinks the file size at the expense of your workflow. If you're rich in hard drive space but short on time, Adobe has released a plugin called that lets you disable image compression, speeding up the saving of large layered files by 20x! …

Camera innards are often shown in cross section diagrams, but here's a Sony Alpha camera and lens that were actually sliced cleanly down the middle (we're guessing a lightsaber was involved). The build quality of the lens definitely looks cheaper than the sliced Leica lenses we shared last week (as it should). Brownie points if you can identify both the camera model and the lens.

Planking (AKA the "lying down game") is a growing fad that involves lying face down in strange places with your arms to the side and snapping a photograph of it.

Here's a quick video tutorial by Olivia Speranza teaching how to create an infinite white background.

Photography lovers in Canada may soon be caught in the crossfire of the music industry's fight against piracy. The Canadian Private Copying Collective is pushing for a new tax on memory cards that would be based on the capacity of the cards -- $0.50 for 1GB or less, $1 for 1-8GB cards, and $3 for any card with over 8GBs. Law professor Michael Geist writes, …

Reddit user Bryce Hoeper recently broke an old Zeiss Ikon Contina L he purchased for $7 from Goodwill after it took a nasty tumble down some stairs. After being bummed for a while, he stumbled upon Timur Civan's experiment with sticking a 102-year old lens on a modern DSLR, and decided to attempt the same thing. He spent a few hours taking apart the camera body to extract the lens, then super glued it to a Canon body cap that he cut a hole in, allowing the lens to be mounted to his Canon 5D …

If your house was going up in flames and you only had a few minutes to gather up a few things to save from the fire, which of your possessions would you choose? The Burning House is a neat photo project by Foster Huntington that asks this question, with photographs submitted by various people showing their most valuable possessions neatly arranged. Unsurprisingly, cameras and photographs are at the top of many peoples' lists.

Portrait-a-day time-lapse videos show the passing of time in a pretty striking way, but so does this project by a guy named Sam Klemke.

Last week we showed you some photographs of Leica lenses cut cleanly down the middle. This week we have some interesting photographs of what a Leica M6 rangefinder camera looks like when the outer layer is removed.

PetaPixel turns two today. I won't bore you with statistics like I did last year, since those are shared at the end of each calendar year, but our readership continues to grow at a pretty healthy clip. This marks the end of my first year of publishing PetaPixel as my full time job -- I haven't really used my computer science education at all, but I would take blogging about photography over a programming job any day! …

Photographer Laurence Kim wrote an interesting article titled "The Photography Business and the American Dream" in which he takes a look at the economics of doing photography as a career, coming to the conclusion that it's one of the worst things you can do from a wealth creation standpoint.

When the iPad 2 was announced a couple months ago, it was called "the first 'camera' to have a sensor resolution lower than the display resolution." Commenters were quick to point out that Apple never intended for the device to be used as a camera like the iPhone is, and therefore was probably able to keep costs down by limiting it to a 0.7 megapixel sensor. Now, with millions of the devices in consumers' hands, Flickr's camera statistics confirm what we suspected all along: no one uses the …

If colleges offered camera equipment anatomy classes, this Leica lens cutaway might be one of the things you'd be examining in the lab. It's a Leica Tri-Elmar-M 28-35-50mm sliced cleanly down the middle, revealing all the glass and pieces inside that go into making the lens.

Frank Oscar Larson was an auditor living in Queens back in the 1950s who had a passion for street photography. Every weekend he would travel around the city armed with his Rolleiflex camera, photographing the things that caught his eye. After Larson died of a stroke at the age of 68 in 1964, his photographs quietly sat in a cardboard box for 45 years before finally being discovered by his son's widow in 2009. They offer a beautiful look into what life in NYC was like half a century ago.

Photography lens manufacturers use all sorts of abbreviations and acronyms to explain the features of their lenses. In an effort to educate use, the photography lens manufacturers really just confuse us. Hopefully you’ll understand a bit about the different lens feature abbreviations by reading this post.

Photography studio StaudingerFranke created this mind-boggling image of a Polaroid OneStep Land Camera exploding into pieces. Reminds us of Todd McLellan and his exploding Pentax Spotmatic F photograph.

Here's a old-fashioned wooden camera tape dispenser that would make a cute gift and addition to a photography-lover's desk.

Everyone knows that mail carriers and dogs don't mix very well. San Diego mailman Ryan Bradford decided to document his encounters with the canine adversaries along his route using a disposable ISO 400, 35mm camera purchased from Rite Aid. The delightful photo essay that resulted, titled "All the Dogs Want to Kill Me", shows dogs glaring and barking at Bradford from the other side of fences, doors, and mail slots.

The White House is ending its long-running practice of reenacting speeches for still photographs after the controversy was rekindled last week by President Obama's Osama bin Laden speech.

The Canon EOS-0 is what you get at the Apocalypse when all the major camera, software, and operating system companies get together to unleash unspeakable evil into the world. It's a camera with a little bit of everything: support for every major lens mount, a drive for various kinds of discs, Windows Vista as the operating system (shudder), Photoshop available on the giant widescreen LCD, etc... Pretty much the only thing you won't find on this camera is a toaster.

Cindy Sherman's "Untitled #96" from 1981 has become the world's most valuable photograph after selling for a staggering $3.89 million at a Christie's auction yesterday (it was estimated to be worth up to $2 million). The winning bidder was Philippe Segalot, a private advisor to some of the world's wealthiest art collectors. The photo takes the top spot away from "99 Cent II Diptychon" by Andreas Gursky, which enjoyed five years as the world's most valuable photo after selling for $3.35 million …

Photographer and blogger Thomas Hawk has an ongoing project called $2 Portraits in which he gives $2 to people on the street in exchange for a portrait: …

Panasonic has announced its latest Micro Four Thirds camera, the Lumix DMC-G3, the world's smallest and lightest system camera with a viewfinder. It's a slim 16-megapixel camera (up from 12) that does 1080p HD view recording and does 4fps continuous still shooting (or a whopping 20fps when you drop down to 4MP). On the back you'll find a large 3-inch touchscreen LCD that features touch focusing, allowing you to press any area on the screen to focus on particular locations. It'll hit shelves in …

Update: This giveaway is now over. The winners were randomly selected and announced below.

Hong Kong-based camera enthusiast TM Wong has 1000+ instant cameras in his collection -- possibly the world's largest collection. That's enough cameras to use a different one each day for nearly three years!

Back in February 2011, Leica Camera and Magnum Photos announced a partnership that will spawn a series of multimedia essays created by Magnum photojournalists with Leica equipment. They also created this inspirational video telling the story of how many of history's iconic photographs were captured by Magnum photographers using Leica gear.

In mid-2010, Time Magazine showed off a demonstration of a slick tablet app they were making in collaboration with The Wonderfactory. As it became widely shared across the web, HDR photographer Trey Ratcliff of Stuck in Customs started receiving messages from fans who spotted his work in the video demo. Problem was, he had never given the magazine or the agency permission to use his work.

Dutch consumer product website Beste Product ("best product") decided to set up a royal rumble between the two heavyweights of the camera industry: Canon and Nikon. They created an infographic comparing the two companies in things such as expert and user opinions, popularity, and sales. Even if you're sick and tired of the endless comparisons and debates (as you should be), the infographic provides some interesting facts about how the two companies are doing.

Ever wonder what the fees involved in doing photography for an ad campaign look like? Jess Dudley, a producer over at Wonderful Machine, has an insightful post on A Photo Editor breaking down an estimate he recently did for a client: …

Redscale is a technique where film is exposed on the wrong side -- rather than having the light hit the emulsion directly, you expose the film through the non-sensitive side.

Videographer Michael Justin Porco walked around Central Park in NYC a few days ago snapping photographs, after starting to shoot photos for a time-lapse of Bethesda Fountain, it began drizzling and he only shot ten frames (one every 5 seconds using an intervalometer). When he reviewed the frames, he was amazed to discover that he had accidentally captured a sequence of photographs showing a man proposing to his girlfriend.

The Rolleiflex MiniDigi AF 5.0 is a tiny 5-megapixel digital camera designed to look just like the Rolleiflex 2.8F 6x6cm twin lens reflex camera. The camera even operates like an old school TLR: you look into the camera from above via a square 1.1-inch LCD screen, the camera needs to be readied for each shot by turning the handcrank on the side, and the photos taken are square format. It's available on Amazon in black or red versions for about $270.