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John Chiara is a San Francisco-based photographer that uses an uber-large format camera the size of a trailer that he constructed himself. The camera is so dang big that setting up the thing requires a car jack and lots of yanking. After setting up the film inside the camera, Chiara climbs out of the camera through a long black garbage-bag style tube. To develop the prints, he uses an 18-inch diameter sewage pipe that he pours chemicals into and rolls around on the ground.

Asters of any kind provide such potential in photography: the colours and the gentle curve of their tiny thin petals combines with their close-growing nature to give the impression either of flowers fighting each other for space and light or of a mass of colour, huddled together for comfort. The clump of asters shown in this shot are a soft, luscious purply-cerulean-cornflowery-blue. Light seems to dance off the petals. Or it would, had there been much light when I took this. Instead, it was a …

German photographer Carolin Wanitzek's Die Grenze (The Border) project explores the intersection of dreams and reality.

It looks like the mysterious white camera that we've been tracking is the upcoming Samsung NX100 after all (after we stated it wasn't yesterday). Engadget received a handful of photos showing that camera will come in white, explaining why the three strange cameras leaked in the National Geographic video all look similar.

Here's just a fun tidbit to chew on while we wait for the official Nikon D7000 announcement: Nikon Rumors discovered today that the Nikon sites of certain European countries (e.g. Germany, Poland, and Italy) have already put up placeholder pages for the upcoming camera. There are no links to these pages, but they can be accessed by using "d7000" in the URL.

Drew Kunz has a pretty neat way of creating abstract pinhole photographs. Using a film canister as his "camera", he drills small holes into rolls of color film, distresses the film further with a small nail, and then develops the exposed film first with coffee and sodium carbonate, and finally with C-41.

Here's an easy to follow video tutorial by photographer Lucas Ridley teaching you how to create custom bokeh shapes using a construction paper cap placed over your lens. Ridley's design is flexible, allowing you to swap shapes easily by sliding them in and out of the cap.

A photo and diagram of the upcoming Samsung NX100 were leaked today on the dpreview forums by a guy named Alex Ramos. According to Mirrorless Rumors, the NX100 will be a 14.6 megapixel HD video capable (720p) camera with an ISO range of 100 to 6400. An electronic viewfinder can optionally be attached via the hotshoe, and there is no built-in flash.

Darren Chan recently attached his $6,500 Leica Noctilux 50mm f/1 lens to his Sony NEX-5 camera using an adapter in order to test out the unique combo. As you might expect, the combo is great for creamy bokeh and doing nighttime street photography in areas with low light.

Nikon recently (and quietly) replaced their LF-1 lens cap with the LF-4 (so much for Nikon tetraphobia), including the new cap with new Nikon lens announced since August. The new cap looks similar to Canon's rear lens cap, the Dust Cap E (Rear).

Imagine you snap out of unconsciousness and realize you've been in a pretty serious accident. You have no memory of what happened, but luckily you were wearing a motorcycle camera that was filming your ride.

New York City-based photographer Zack Seckler's Less than Ordinary series is composed of beautifully captured photographs that have clever twists and creative concepts that make you look twice.

For whatever reason, Vimeo user Aniebres decided to combine the bulkiness of an SLR camera with the lowly sensor of a phone camera. Taking an old Canon film SLR, he gutted it and created a space for his iPhone to snap into place. What's sad is that the SLR acts as a completely useless shell, and the lens has to be removed for photos to be taken. If only he took off the lame Apple sticker on the front, he might be able to pass off as a photographer... as long as he only snapped photos while …

Japanese website sankeibiz.jp is listing September 9th as the date Hoya will be announcing new DSLRs, presumably under its Pentax brand name. Here's what the line looks like when translated by Google: …

This is probably the strangest story you'll read today. When Neil Berrett quit his job in 2009, he sent his boss a kindly written resignation letter written on a cake. The photo of Berrett and his cake become widely circulated, and received hundreds of thousands of views.

Nikon's President Makoto Kimura did an interview with Reuters a couple days ago in which he stated that Nikon is trying to develop a camera that creates a new camera market.

Kiel Johnson is an American sculptor and painter that creates a lot of his work using cardboard. Among his works are a collection of cardboard cameras that are extremely realistic (given that they're cardboard, of course). Now all he needs to do is team up with some brilliant engineer that can help him figure out how to have these awesome things actually make photos.

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

The stop motion music video for Oren Lavie's song "Her Morning Elegance" took the web by storm last year, amassing over ten million views on YouTube and receiving a Grammy nomination.

Nikon quietly launched its new Nikon USA online store today, allowing Nikonians to buy gear directly from their beloved company rather than through a third-party. Unfortunately, the awesomeness of buying straight from the camera maker is dwarfed by the not-so-awesome prices -- most cameras and lenses appear to be listed at MSRP. Thus, if you're cost-conscious (why wouldn't you be?) you'd be better off sticking with the larger online retailers.

Canon is showing off all sorts of crazy hardware at Canon Expo 2010 over in NYC. One of them is an omnidirectional camera (shown above) that shoots a 360° photograph in a single exposure. It creates the seamless panoramas using a 50 megapixel CMOS sensor and an aspheric mirror.

About a week ago I did a shoot with the band Strange Birds as we were walking there was a point that I saw light rays trickling down right in front of us. I told all of the guys to stop and arranged them to my liking.

When we featured Strobox back in 2009, it was a simple idea: provide an easy way for photographers to create lighting diagrams and share them with others. Since then, they've upgraded their website to include a gallery where you can browse photographs done by others, view their lighting diagrams, and comment on them.

This is either marketing at its best or worst. Vivitar has a new site and infomercial for a plastic 35mm film camera for $10. Who would buy such a thing? Probably really, really old people who aren't reading this blog.

Portrait photographer Gregory Heisler has done quite a few portraits for Time Magazine covers, including a few for their Person of the Year issues. This is an informative video where he steps through how he went about photographing Rudy Giuliani at the top of Rockefeller Center with the Empire State Building in the background. If you're interested at all in portraiture and/or lighting, you'll find this video quite educational.

Sony just announced a new video camera that's quite a worthy challenger to the Flip Video. The Bloggie Touch replaces the original Bloggie video camera and boasts a much sleeker design (dropping the swiveling LCD), a 3-inch touchscreen, 4 to 8 GB of internal memory, 1080p HD video recording, and 12.8 megapixel photographs. Like the Flip, it's designed for quick and easy photos and videos on the go, and can connect to computers via a built-in USB connector.

Apparently there's a series of hipster dinosaur coloring book photos going viral on the Interwebs. One of them (shown above) shows a T-Rex wearing hipster glasses and lamenting over the extinction of Polaroid's classic instant film. BuzzFeed has a full collection of the drawings done by Molly Lewis.

Next time you're attend a fireworks display, try shooting your photographs or video out of focus. This video by Danny Cooke is a pretty beautiful look at what you can achieve by doing this. What's more, if you focus on the spectators in the foreground, it looks like they're watching bokeh fireworks as well!

Apple had a special event this morning where they announced a few new products. In addition to the introduction of HD-video recording on the iPod Touch, an interesting new announcement was the HDR Photography feature in iOS 4.1, which is found on the iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad (though the iPad doesn't currently have a camera).

Canon Expo 2010 is going on over in New York City right now, and one of the interesting things being displayed is a funky multipurpose 4K camera. The 8-megapixel CMOS camera is capable of super high definition video and photography at 60 frames per second, and has a do-it-all 24-480mm zoom lens.

So this is how high-rollin' Canon photographers roll. This coffee table is much easier to do now with those Canon lens coffee mugs, but the 1D bodies would still cost a pretty penny.

If you think shooting fast moving animals is difficult, try shooting bullets slicing water drops. That's the kind of mind-boggling photography that Alexander Augusteijn does. There's no tricks or clever Photoshop manipulations involved... just dedication and a whole lotta patience.

Now here's a "photomantic" story: Andy met Kayla two years ago through Flickr when they were 2,300 miles apart. Andy just popped the question a few days ago, and hid the engagement ring inside his Lensbaby!

A week ago Canon announced the development of a APS-H CMOS sensor that delivers a staggering 120 megapixels. Not content with ruling the megapixel race, they've just announced a physically gigantic sensor -- the largest CMOS sensor in the world.

Apparently babies can't resist a good checkboard pattern. ShutterBuddy is a camera attachment that surrounds your camera or lens with a checkerboard pattern, causing babies to stare uncontrollably at your camera (whether in fear or fascination, we have no idea). You can order your own for $15 through the ShutterBuddy website, or you can spend some time creating a do-it-yourself version by printing out or drawing your own checkboard pattern.

Good news -- We're now shipping our Photographers Rights Gray Cards to Canada and the UK. Most of the guidelines listed on the cards should apply to your country, though you should research and look up the differences if you decide to order our cards. The price is the same as for US residents, and we're offering free shipping to Canada and the UK as well! …

The rolling shutter used by the majority of consumer CMOS sensors can do crazy things to photos and videos. The video above shows what an airplane propeller looks like when shot with a Nokia N95. The rolling shutter makes the plane looks as if it's dropping boomerang bombs that quickly disappear into thin air.

Photojojo just added the "Mini Model Camera" to their store. This is a 1/6 scale miniature model DSLR system that actually allows you to swap the tiny lenses around. It's definitely a cute and unique gift, but it comes at a no-so-miniature price -- the 1.5 inch camera and three lenses are priced at $28.

At first glance (or from far away), these might look like ordinary food photographs. Look a little closer, and you'll see the creativity of photographer David Sykes at work.

The ratio between the focal length and the aperture (diameter) of a lens is called the f/number. The smaller the f/number, the more light is let in. Fast lenses start around f/2.0, and the light let in goes as the inverse square. Compared to f/2.0, f /1.4 lets in twice as much light, f/1.0 four times, and f/0.71 eight times. The fastest camera lenses designed for DSLRs and widely available are between f/1.4 and f/1.2, but lenses as fast as f/0.75 have been made in quantity for special …

NASA joined The Commons on Flickr today, creating 3 sets with 180 beautiful historic photographs from various points in the agency's rich history. If you love looking at launch photographs, one of the three sets is dedicated to those.

Say what you want about cameraphone photography, but this is one beautiful shot. It's a view of the Ebro river in Spain, and was captured by Joan Ramon Bada Suñe on his iPhone 3GS. What's more, the post-processing was done completely in-phone as well.

The t-shirt of the day over at TeeFury is pretty fun and relevant to photographers today. The shirt will be available until the end of the day for $9. It was created by London-based designer Joao Lauro Fonte.

Olympus recently filed a patent in Japan for a novel lens feature that shakes the front element in order to remove droplets of water.

DigitalRev has posted a followup to the destruction tests video they published last week. After abusing two entry-level DSLR cameras in all sorts of random ways (e.g. dropping down an escalator, using them as stilts and hammers, pouring hot liquids on them, etc...), many of us were left wondering to what degree the cameras were still functional. This video answers those questions.

Check out this Fujifilm vending machine found in Japan by Lee Miller of The Other East. The thing sells 35mm and APS film, as well as disposable camera for snagging memories on the go.

Pearls Before Swine has an interesting theory regarding why young women seem to always know when they're being photographed, stick their heads together, and bust into picture perfect smiles.

"Attempts to Fly" is a series of photographs by Conan Thai in which he freezes people as they leap into the air, resulting in photographs that could be mistaken for alien abduction photos. It's a pretty fun idea that you can try with your friends. Bonus points for shots where you can capture jumpers at impossible heights, as Thai does in some of his photos.

Gary Fong, the dude and company behind the LightSphere, has come up with a simple adapter you can use to attach your iPhone 4 or iPhone 3GS to a tripod. Unlike existing tripod adapters that utilize special cases or suction cups, Gary Fong's adapter allows you to simply slide your phone in -- assuming you don't use any kind of case that changes the dimensions of your phone.

Google added a neat feature called "Face Movies" to its Picasa photo software last week. This feature uses facial recognition technology to help you create a movie slideshow where a person's face is aligned in each photograph. An example of something you can do with this feature is to create a slideshow of your child growing up (like in the example Face Movie above).