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

Google unveiled a new image format today called WebP that it hopes will make the web faster by cutting files sizes of images without affecting quality. According to a blog post they published earlier today, photos and images account for 65% of the bytes transmitted by websites. In their tests done using 1 million randomly selected images from the web, re-encoding images as WebP resulted in an average file size reduction of 39%. Here's a gallery with image and file size comparisons.

Just earlier this year Facebook upped their maximum photo size to 720px, an increase of 20%. Today, they've announced that the maximum size is increasing to 2048px, about eight times larger than the previous maximum size. A download link will be included with photos allowing people to download the high resolution versions.

Hine Mizushima creates unique camera cases for point-and-shoots and sells them through her Etsy store. Each felt case is unique and hand-stitched by Mizushima, and looks like a toy camera. Check out this Flickr set for all the different designs that have been created in the past.

We've seen GoPro cameras in quite a few stories as of late, with people using them for things ranging from making friends with Great White sharks to capturing amazing home videos of space. Good news if you've been thinking of getting one for action footage -- they've just released the cheaper HD Hero 960. You get 960p instead of 1080p, and you lose an expansion port for external displays and batteries, but you pay $180 instead of the $300 it costs for an HD Hero.

No, these aren't movie stills from the upcoming Tron movie. Evan Ackerman over at BotJunkie wanted to know exactly how the Evolution Robotics’ Mint went about cleaning an open space, so he shot long exposure photographs of the robot sweeping and then mopping. Yay for automated light painting!

A great way to learn and become inspired is to look at great photographs. Even better is listening to experts discuss those images as you're looking at them. The above video shows National Geographic editors picking their favorite photographs from their ongoing Your Shot contest and discussing why they feel the photo is so great.

Did you know you can turn your DSLR into a pinhole camera by using a body cap with a tiny hole in it? Photojojo just started selling body caps converted for this purpose in their store, but if you don't want to pay $50 for them to bust a hole in a cap for you, there's a neat tutorial over at Photocritic teaching you how to make your own.

We received a tip from someone in the future the other day. Canon becomes Skynet.

Update on 12/18/21: This video has been removed by ABC Nightline.

Back in 2009 there were rumors that the upcoming Iron Man 2 would make use of Canon's 5D Mark II DSLR for certain scenes, and now details are emerging as to how exactly the the camera was used.

Earlier this month Kodak announced their new Portra 400 color negative film, replacing the Portra 400NC and 400VC professional films. This might seem like backwards thinking, since so many films have been discontinued as of late, but Kodak believes film is making a comeback. In an interview with the British Journal of Photography, Kodak's US marketing manager Scott DiSabato states, …

Sony has issued an "important notice" that shooting HD video for semi-long periods of time with the A33 and A55 may cause the sensor to overheat, shutting off the camera. How long the camera lasts depends on ambient temperature and image stabilization is enabled. If it's 30° C (~86° F) the A55 can only go 6 minutes with IS turned on.

DropMocks is a new photo sharing service designed to help you share photographs online as quickly and easily as possible. Created with HTML 5, the service has a minimalistic homepage that invites you to drag and drop photos into the browser. It then adds those photos into a simple gallery, and provides you with a short URL you can share. It's a bit like file hosting service DropBox, except for photos and done through the browser.

The golden ratio is used by nature, photographers, and now... Twitter! Did you notice it in the new Twitter design?

One of the features that Nikon emphasized when they announced the D3100 was HD video with continuous autofocus, the first of its kind in DSLRs. Sure it sounded great on paper, but how well does it work in the real world? Here are a couple videos showing the D3100's continuous autofocus in action, created by Oscar Cheng.

Heather Champ is cofounder of Fertile Medium, an online community consultancy. She was formerly the Director of Community at Flickr and the co-founder of JPG Magazine, which she started with her husband Derek Powazek. Visit her website here.

Shukhrat of MINIMUS DESIGN created this time-lapse video of his favorite places in San Francisco, using a tilt-shift effect to make them look like miniature models. It reminds me of "The Sandpit", a similar video done in New York City that went viral on the web back in February.

My friend recently had two stray kittens randomly walk up to her doorstep. I was called over to see them, and carried my 5D and 24-70mm along. There wasn't much light to work with, and I didn't bring a flash, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO for any chance of capturing a sharp image of the energetic kittens. I haven't done a walkthrough post for quite some time (opting to post guest posts instead), but here's a quick walkthrough of how I post-processed one particular image of a kitten. I used …

Photokina 2010 came and went without any bombshell EVIL announcements by Canon or Nikon, but murmurs about impending cameras persist. According to Taiwanese newspaper DigiTimes, Nikon is ready to enter the "mirrorless DSLR-similar camera" market: …

This is Adobe Photo Shop version 0.0. It doesn't have content aware fill, just a whole lot of... adobe.

Luke Geissbuhler and his kids decided they wanted to send an HD video camera high into the stratosphere, so they spent eight months researching and testing for their project before finally launching their Go Pro Hero HD-laden balloon from Newburgh, New York. The balloon rose for 70 minutes to a height of 100,000 feet (19 miles) above the Earth before popping.

At Photokina 2010 Pentax had a toy capsule vending machine that spit out mini Pentax DSLR cameras in exchange for coins. The colorful cameras are made to attach to standard hot shoes, giving your camera a little buddy while shooting.

Charges have been dropped against Anthony Graber, a motorcyclist who filmed a plainclothes Maryland State Trooper during a traffic stop and uploaded the video to YouTube. According to the Baltimore Sun,

Who needs an uber-expensive Phantom camera or fancy slow-mo software when you can fake the effect with dance? This doesn't have anything to do with photo gear or software, but we found it interesting since we've been sharing a lot of slow motion work lately. These are music videos for songs from retired MMA-fighter Genki Sudo's album "World Order". The name of the dance group is "World Order" as well.

IKEA recently created a baking cookbook titled "Hembakat är Bäst" (Homemade is Best) and hired photographer Carl Kleiner to provide images for the recipes. Kleiner shot beautiful photographs of the recipes' ingredients, neatly arranged in geometric patterns by Evelina Bratell.

Remember the 102-year-old lens experiment we shared a week ago? Daire Quinlan did something similar -- he combined his grandfather's 6x9 Pocket Kodak lens from 1920 (90 years ago) with homemade bellows to create his own tilt-shift lens to play with. Unlike Timur Civan, who used his 102-year-old lens on a 5D Mark II, Quinlan used his frankenlens with a Nikon film camera.

At times mounted photos can be a bit tricky in regards to how to display them if you do not want to use a frame. Leaning them against the wall or propping them up next to another object doesn't always work. One simple way to display your mounted photos is by creating custom photo holders using vintage wooden spools. The end product is practical, unexpected and pleasing to the eye. The process for creating these is simple.

Check out these super-special Polaroid-themed greeting cards by Heather Champ. They're made using two dark slides from expired Polaroid 600 film: …

Viral marketing agency The Viral Factory is helping Samsung with an experiment in which they're planning to drop 100 SD cards attached to paper airplanes from 21 miles above the Earth in the stratosphere. Instructions will be printed on the paper airplane informing anyone who finds one of the experiment and what they can do to participate. Finders are encouraged to shoot with the cards and then upload anything taken to the Project Space Planes website.

Andrew Rees shot this beautiful black and white time lapse in Cardiff, Wales using a Sony A700 DSLR. He shot 700 pairs of photos (a total of 1400 shots) with 2.5 seconds in between pairs, and combined the resulting HDR photographs into a 12fps time lapse video.

The Photo Album Story Teller is a nifty device that allows you to add voice notes to your physical photos. It works with color coded stickers that are used to identify photos. Place the sticker next to the photo, scan it with the device, and record a message. Come back later and rescan the sticker to hear the note that was recorded.

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

Time lapse photography allows us to view ordinary things in unordinary ways, whether it's the clouds passing overhead or plants shooting up out of the ground. I recently came across these two videos that I found pretty interesting. They show the decomposition of food over many days and how mold and maggots do their thing. Don't watch while eating.

Panasonic decided recently that it would be a good idea to put up a giant inflatable balloon of their spokesmodel, Japanese actress Haruka Ayase, to promote its new Lumix camera. Apparently passersby reacted with fear and confusion rather than enthusiasm, though we can't imagine why...

If you desperately want to make your phone look like a camera but our Leica-lookalike skin isn't right for you, you can try printing out a camera yourself if you have a transparent case for your phone. yellow15 over at NikonJin recently transformed his iPhone 4 into a Nikon Rangefinder by printing the image out and sticking it behind his case. He also made the source image available for download. If you have a high quality printer at your disposal this could be quick way to give your phone a …

Here's a glimpse into what viewing photographs might be like for future generations: Brother Industries is working on a special pair of glasses called the AirScouter that can project images directly into your retina, making you see a 16-inch display that doesn't actually exist floating 3 feet in front of your face.

A Day in the Life of MIT (ADITL) is a neat project in which members of the MIT community take pictures on a particular day and then pool the photographs together to provide a snapshot of what life was like on that day. ADITL 2010 happened yesterday, and hundreds of people contributed images to the collection.

Meet the 20x24 Polaroid Land Camera, a mythical beast in the world of large format photography. Polaroid's founder Edwin Land created only seven of these 235-pound cameras over thirty years ago, and only six exist today. Two of them are on display at Harvard and MIT, and only four are in use commercially. According to Forbes, buying prints created with this beast cost $3,500 a piece, while renting the thing for a day costs $1,750 and $200 for each shot. Back in June, an Andy Warhol photo shot …

"Teenage Paparazzo” is a documentary film that will debut on HBO on September 27. It's about the life of Austin Visschedyk, a 14-year-old paparazzi photographer who chases celebrities for 17 hours a day, earning $500 to $1000 for each photograph sold. Hopefully Visschedyk isn't like the paparazzi in the Kate Mos LAX video we posted a while ago (though he probably is).

If you have a Mac, you've probably played around with the mirror effect in Photo Booth. Photographer Bart Nagel takes mirrored photos to a new level with his new project A/symmetrical. Nagel shoots portraits with symmetrical lighting, cuts the portrait in half, mirrors each half, and puts the three photos side by side, resulting in three similar looking people that look slightly off.

Here's a fun bit of trivia: did you know that at one time Apple (then named Apple Computer) made compact digital cameras? Launched in 1994, the Apple QuickTake was actually one of the first digital cameras available to consumers. Three models were built by Kodak and Fujifilm, and the cameras boasted a whopping 0.3 megapixels and the ability to store eight photos at this resolution. The camera had a flash, but lacked zoom, focusing, image review, and file deletion (the entire contents had to be …

If you live in an urban area, you probably don't see the night sky very clearly due to light pollution. Luckily, there's videos like this one to remind us how beautiful the sky above is when there aren't artificial lights drowning out the stars. This is a high-definition time-lapse of the Milky Way floating across the sky.

Lensbaby unveiled a new accessory at Photokina called the Tilt Transformer, which allows you to use Nikon mount lenses on EVIL camera bodies as an instant tilt-shift lens with twice the tilt of normal TS lenses. It's currently available for Micro Four Thirds bodies, but will be available for Sony NEX cameras as well starting on October 28, 2010. The Tilt Transformer comes with the Lensbaby Composer in a $350 package, or separately for $250.

When American photographer Alex Soth arrived in the UK earlier this year to work on a commission for the city of Brighton's photo biennial, he was told by the customs officer at the airport that he couldn't do his photography work without a work visa, and that getting caught might result in two years of jail time.

Photographer Achim Lippoth of London-based creative agency edsonwilliams recently created this series of photographs for Kid's Wear Magazine involving children with dolls that look just like them. Beautiful portraits with a hint of cute and a dash of creepy!

It looks like the wait for plenoptic cameras to hit the market is shorter than we thought when we reported earlier today on Adobe's interesting demonstration on the technology. In fact, there is no wait -- you can already purchase a plenoptic camera. German company Raytrix is the first to offer plenoptic cameras that allow you to choose focus points in post processing and capture 3D images with a single sensor.

Here's a fun idea: take famous landscape paintings and add a tilt-shift effect to them! This series of images was created by Artcyclopedia using famous Van Gogh paintings. We love how the selective focus gives the paintings a new dimension.

In the future, focusing on the wrong subject when taking a picture might be a thing of the past. At Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference this year Adobe gave a demonstration of how plenoptic lenses can be used to allow focus to be arbitrarily chosen after the image is captured during post-processing. These are microlens arrays containing hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands (Stanford researchers used a camera with 90,000 lenses) of tiny lenses that record much more information about a …

Update on 12/11/21: This video has been removed by its creator.