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If you’ve never been on a budget and blow money like a vuvuzela at a football game, don’t bother reading any further. If you like saving money and are on a budget, then please continue reading.

"Seaweed" is the sixth lo-fi video experiment by London-based filmmakers Luke White and Remi Weekes, who go by Tell No One. It's a beautiful video in which a "still" frame is captured and frozen every few seconds, resulting in a seaweed sculpture created with human arms.

Here's a creative idea that we love - cut out giant letters, gather up some friends, and spell out words with shadows! Justin Swindle, a student at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, created the above image by cutting the sides off the biggest cardboard moving box he could get his hands on. He then traded the letters freehand and cut them out using a razor.

Randomly came across this camera today on Wikipedia in the article on Stasi, the secret police of East Germany. Apparently it's a "quiet" camera that was able to capture photographs through 1mm holes in walls. Now that's a pinhole camera.

Frank Taylor, the guy behind the unofficial Google Earth Blog, is currently on a 5 years sailing trip around the world called The Tahina Expedition. Google is actually a partner in the expedition, and is acquiring content generated by the trip for use in their products. One thing Taylor has been doing is taking aerial photographs of locations using a kite, resulting in imagery that's much clearer than the photos Google gets from their satellites up in space. Google has already begun …

First there was the House season finale filmed entirely with the Canon 5D Mark II to show the HD video recording potential of DSLRs, and now there's a star studded short film titled "The Commuter" being shot entirely on the new Nokia N8 cell phone, which boasts a 12 megapixel sensor and Carls Zeiss optics. The project -- directed by the McHenry Brothers -- began filming at the end of September and stars Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire), Pamela Anderson, and Ed Westwick (Gossip Girl).

Olympus is ditching the entry-level DSLR in favor of its Micro Four Thirds mount PEN line of EVIL cameras. In an interview with Fotopolis, Toshiyuki Terada -- the Product Manager of Olympus' SLR Planning Department -- is quoted as saying, …

Sam O’Hare is developing quite a reputation for his tilt-shift, miniature faking videos. O'Hare is the same guy that created The Sandpit, a beautiful tilt-shift video of New York City that has been watched nearly 2 million times. He was recently commissioned by the Coachella Music Festival to create a similar video for Coachella 2010, and the resulting video (shown above) is just as stunning.

The New York Times recently issued an apology for staged photographs that appeared alongside an art review that ran at the end of September.

We're having a hard time deciding whether to laugh or cry. Sony has been on top of the innovation game lately, but today's announcement is a bit silly -- they held a special press event to announce a pink version of the NEX-3 mirrorless camera. Earlier in October rumor sites were already reporting the October 12th press event scheduled to "announce a new mirrorless SLR". Other websites began speculating as to whether or not it would be a new EVIL model to compliment the NEX-3 and NEX-5. Turns …

SortMyPhotostream is a tool that most Flickr users will have no use for, but one that some might find invaluable. It all depends on whether you would like your Flickr photos' upload dates to reflect the day they were actually taken. For example, if you're doing a Project 365 and would like each photo to show up on the day it was taken in your calendar view, then this app can help you make that happen.

The Friend Poster is a fun product product offered by grad student Benjamin Lotan through his new website PrintingFacebook. For $20, you'll receive a 20 x 40 inch high-quality poster with thumbnails of the profile pictures of all your friends (works best for 200 to 2,200 friends). What's neat is that the posters are created using a traditional photographic print process: …

TDK has unveiled a monstrous 1 terabyte (1000 gigabyte) optical disc at CEATEC 2010 (the Japanese equivalent of CES), which wrapped up a couple days ago. The disc has 16 layers on both sides that each store 32GB of data, and is the equivalent to about 213 of the recordable DVD discs that you might be using to back up your image files.

Ars Technica published an interesting story today about how photos uploaded to Facebook remain on their servers months -- or even years -- after they're "deleted" from the service. We decided to test this out ourselves, uploading the above photo to Facebook, copying the direct URL to the image file, and then deleting both the photo and the album. As you can see from the hotlinked photo above, the image continues to live on as a zombie photo on Facebook's CDN servers.

Content aware fill was mind-boggling enough when it came out earlier this year, but what if the same concept could be applied to video... while the camera is recording? That's the idea behind Diminished Reality, a topic being researched by Jan Herling and Wolfgang Broll at the Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany. Basically, you select something in the scene against a uniform background, and it disappears from the resulting video. Pretty crazy.

If James Nachtwey were a street photographer, he wouldn't be the type to stand on the opposite sidewalk and stealthily capture unsuspecting strangers using a telephoto lens. As you can see from the photograph above, Nachtwey has a fearless attitude when shooting in dangerous situations, getting up close and personal with the subjects.

You've probably seen do-it-yourself pinhole cameras or even large format cameras created with foam core, but what about a solid metal do-it-yourself 35mm camera? That's exactly what Denis Mo decided to create, posting his step-by-step documentation to French camera forum collection-appareils.fr.

If you use GIMP as a Photoshop alternative, but would like a free program to handle the processing of Raw image files as well, check out RawTherapee. It's a free raw image processing program that has a polished user interface and a solid list of features. Unless you want to compile the source code yourself, you can download the latest version of the program from this page. It's available for Linux and Windows, though Mac OSX versions are available too (though they might not be as stable).

When Ria van Dijk of the Netherlands was sixteen years old back in 1936, she visited a shooting gallery in which a camera shutter was triggered every time a target is hit. She fell in love with the gallery, and faithfully visits it each and every year, only missing the years 1939 to 1945 due to WWII. Ria van Dijk is now 88 years old, and still collects a photo of herself hitting the target. The resulting photographs have been compiled into a book titled "In Almost Every Picture 7".

You've probably seen time-lapse videos spanning hours, days, weeks, or months, but how about years? Ramon, a videographer based in Paris, spent three years shooting the same location in Paris, documenting the teardown of an old skyscraper and the construction of a new one. The photographs were shot between January 2007 and September 2010 using a Pentax K110D DSLR, and a whopping 45,000 photographs were captured.

It's Friday, so let's kick back - here's a dose of completely-useless-but-kinda-interesting trivia: Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs has done wedding photography. Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison is good friends with Jobs, and when Ellison married novelist Melanie Craft in 2003, Jobs was the official wedding photographer. The other photographer was Ellison's son David.

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

American NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless II is suing British singer Dido over the photo used for the album cover of "Safe Trip Home". The photo shows McCandless "free-flying" hundreds of feet from the Orbiter using a Manned Manuevering Unit (MMU). McCandless was the first person to do an untethered spacewalk.

Editor's note: The checklist presented in this post is also available as a text file for you to print out and carry along for reference. This post was first published here.

The Internet was abuzz yesterday due to a secret meeting at Adobe's offices between the head honchos of Microsoft (Steve Ballmer) and Adobe (Shantanu Narayen). The New York Times reports: …

When Jon Martin found an old Kodak Ektar 101mm f4.5 lens from the 1940's at work, he decided to try it on his D700 by freelensing to testing and see if it was compatible. After finding that it was, he began on building a rig to use it as a tilt-shift lens. He ended up building a rig using old camera gear and some custom wood parts.

Some battery chargers (e.g. those that come with Canon's pro and prosumer cameras) plug directly into the wall and have prongs that fold into the charger, while others (e.g. the Canon T2i charger) connect to the wall via a removable cable. Though this may be more space efficient when connecting to a socket or surge protector, the extra chord takes up space and can be a hassle. CheesyCam has a clever solution: use an Apple wall plug duck head adapter to transform the charger into a wall charger.

This has got to be one of the saddest uses of imagery ever. The Daily Mail is reporting that iPhone owners in the UK are using satellite photos and GPS to cheat at getting out of corn mazes. By seeing their current location in a birds-eye view of the maze, visitors can quickly solve even the most challenging corn mazes.

Update on 12/9/21: This video has been removed by its creator.

If you're sick of having your precious photographs ripped off and digital watermarking isn't your thing, you can use this translucent copyright symbol to embed an obnoxious copyright symbol in all of your photographs! The mysterious Martin Nachtwey tells duckrabbit, …

The above photo of a defiant Herring Gull braving a wave has won this years British Wildlife Photography Awards, netting photographer Steve Young the £5000 cash prize.

It was only at the beginning of the year that the megapixel race for cell phone cameras hit 14.6 megapixels, but now Sony has unveiled a 16.41 back-illuminated CMOS sensor that can shoot 15 frames per second at full resolution, and is capable of HD video recording (30fps at 1080p and 60fps at 720p).

Pixilation is the stop motion technique in which humans are used as the subject, moving through slight changes in pose and position in each successive frame. Eric Hanus, a recent graduate from Indiana University, created the above video (titled "Day Drunk") using the technique, and doing it with a old, hacked film camera to boot. Hanus tells us,

The Internet viral sensation "Double Rainbow" video was captured on January 8th, 2010. About two weeks later on the 23rd (and long before that video went viral), I saw a double rainbow myself when looking out my window. I quickly grabbed my camera (a Canon 40D at the time) with my 16-35mm lens (I wanted the widest shot possible) and ran out to shoot the rainbow.

Here's a pretty clever ad by Panasonic promoting their Lumix G2 camera. It's fun seeing photographic terms appear in a commercial, and understanding what the terms mean make the commercial even funnier for photo enthusiasts.

Instagram is a new iPhone photo app developed by Stanford grads Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger that offers Hipstamatic-style filters for your photos, easy uploads to popular services, and a Tumblr-esque community built right in. While photo sharing apps in the App Store are a dime a dozen, there are a few things that set Instagram apart.

This video is hardly new (appeared back in 2008), but could be helpful for those of you who haven't seen it yet. In it, photographer Joe McNally teaches how you can use your body to stabilize the camera, gaining a stop or two of light. McNally says his technique is mostly useful for left-eyed shooters, but you can adapt many of the things taught regardless of which eye you use.

SonyAlphaRumors received a pretty interesting tip yesterday regarding the design of the upcoming Sony Alpha A77 (which is still a rumor at this point). The anonymous tipster wrote that the camera -- successor to the A700 -- will have an innovative design that boasts a hybrid viewfinder by blending optical and electronic images: …

UK-based designer Chrissie Macdonald was commissioned by Marque Creative to create art for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Among the things she made was a neat camera and flash created entirely using card stock. It almost looks like it's a digital creation done using Adobe Illustrator.

A French book titled "Obtenez le maximum du Nikon D800" (translates to "Getting the most from the Nikon D800") has popped up on Amazon and decitre.fr, possibly leaking details of an upcoming successor to the Nikon D700. The description is computer translated as, …

Joe Wigfall is a photo enthusiast and street photographer that won WNYC's Street Shots Challenge back in 2008.

I have a small obsession with cameras, also, a slightly smaller obsession with film cameras. My favourite camera is Lubitel 166B. It is a medium format camera, this basically means it has a large image area to capture photos, using the larger 120mm film. The Lubitel's were twin lens reflex (TLR) cameras. They have a little pop up cover on top, you then look down through the viewfinder. The nature of holding the camera like this will getting the settings set up for the shot can sometimes be a …

Cassandra C. Jones created the above tribute to Eadweard Muybridge's horse motion studies by sifting through 5,000 digital photographs to find 12 that matched the frames in his study. Jones then looped the 12 images in an animation, resulting in a "snap motion" video of a horse galloping.

Panasonic has pulled the wraps off its new Lumix branded phone that we first reported on last week. The website set up for the phone now has photos and diagrams, though it's in Japanese. We now know that it's a slider phone that looks like a stretched out compact camera, with "13.2 Megapixels" etched on the front to remind everyone that your cell phone packs quite a punch.

This watch has a maximum aperture of f/2. Wait... What? That's right, this novelty watch for uber photo geeks by The Unemployed Philosophers Guild has f-stop numbers on its face instead of the 12 hours used by normal people. If you're ready to geek-out your wrist, it's available in their online shop for $36.

We've featured quite a few gigapixel photo projects here on PetaPixel, but this one's a bit different. HAL9000 is a project out of Italy that takes famous paintings and shoots gigapixel photographs of them, allowing you to get up close and personal with the masterpieces through a special online viewer.

Fancy camera bags and backpacks are nice, but they're often thief magnets that broadcast the fact that they contain pricey gear. If you use a messenger bag and would like to use it as a camera bag as well, Tenba sells a nifty insert that transforms it into a stealth camera bag. The insert fits a DSLR body, 2-3 lenses, a flash, and has space for magazines or documents. They're priced at $23 and are available from the Tenba website.

Behold -- A Leica M8 camera created using Lego bricks! Schfio Factory this awesome toy camera using a $50 pink Lego digital camera and carefully building bricks around it to turn into Leica look-alike. It shoots at 3 megapixels and holds up to 80 photographs on its internal memory. Sweet.

What was supposed to be a routine press preview of the Turner Prize exhibition in London turned a two-hour standoff between photographers and Tate Britain gallery contract-wavers.

Erin Hannon, the receptionist on The Office, explains why you should always use real cameras and not disposable ones when taking pictures of important events you want to remember.