Just a reminder: the season finale of the popular TV show House, which was filmed entirely with the Canon 5D Mark II, will be airing tonight. The fact that the show turned to the HDSLR was one of the big stories last month, after the show's director Greg Yaitanes made the announcement on Twitter and had a Q&A session via the service.
Self-described creative technologist Thiago Avancini hacked this Atari 2600 joystick into a shutter release cable -- complete with an autofocus control for his Canon T2i. The controller is considerably larger than the average cable release or remote control, but it's a pretty nifty.
At just 3 years old, young photographer Ruby Ellenby captured the attention of her hometown last month with her first solo exhibition in San Francisco. Tonight, Ruby's story was featured on NBC Nightly News. The piece offers a mini behind-the-scenes peek at how Ruby goes about shooting, and some of her fans share their thoughts. Cute!
Sony recently announced an interchangeable lens camcorder, but if you can't stand the wait until it's released, cheap gadget dealer Brando has these Vivikai camcorders that come equipped with an 8x telescope. The Chinese company, Vivikai (no relation to Vivitar) has more photos of this Frankenstein camcorder mod on their site.
Kodak made the surprising announcement today that their Chief Marketing Officer Jeffrey Hayzlett is resigning on May 28th to "pursue personal projects." …
The Strobella is a small shoot-through umbrella that you mount to your flash unit using a velcro elastic band. The website states that it "doesn’t just softens the shadows but can reduces them significantly." Hmm...
Gadgets haven't been doing a good job of staying secret in Vietnam lately. Just a couple days ago an iPhone 4G was found, filmed, and completely disassembled there. Now, photos and details of Sony's entry level DSLR replacement, the A290, have emerged on Vietnamese forum Tinhte. This camera replaces the A230 reportedly has a 14 megapixel sensor, 3200 max ISO, 2.7 inch LCD screen, and 2.5fps maximum shooting speed.
We reported yesterday that Adobe had launched a "Freedom of Choice" ad campaign against Apple, the latest shot in their ongoing battle over Flash. The above nerd joke is supposed to show what it might look like if Apple responded to Adobe with their own advertisement.
I started PetaPixel one year ago today during my last few weeks as an undergraduate computer science student at Berkeley. I worked on the blog quite a bit that summer, and in August 2009 I went back to Berkeley for graduate studies in computer science.
When Sean Stiegemeier saw the photos and videos that were emerging on the web from the eruptions at Eyjafjallajökull last month, it prompted him to fly over and shoot his own footage.
The tech war is on between Apple and Adobe, and it's starting to sound political. What's fairly interesting is how Adobe's been running "We [heart] Apple" as well as "We [heart] Choice" ads, suggesting that this tech war is all about word choice -- or perhaps the word, "choice." …
The crazy awesome folks over at Google's London office recently created a photo-mosaic of the company's logo... by hand. Using 884 individually printed 4x6 photographs, they 5.5 hours assembling the piece, and used a camera to snap a photograph every 7 seconds. The resulting timelapse video shows the whole thing in a little over a minute.
Here's an interesting gadget that can help you with wildlife photography, or can simply make you look beastly while doing street photography. This tactical sight can help you lock your camera onto a faraway animal, making finding it much easier to find when you start looking through your massive telephoto lens. With longer focal range lenses, it can be pretty easy to lose sight of where exactly your subject is, and finding it again might require pulling your eyes away from the viewfinder. This …
Canon announced today that it has produced a whopping 40 million EOS-series SLR cameras since the series was first introduced in 1987. What's even more amazing is that half of those are digital, as they've also passed the 20 million mark for DSLRs. The company passed the 10 million mark in 1997, the 20m mark in 2003, and the 30m mark in 2007. Needless to say, SLR photography has gotten more and more popular in recent years. Congratulations Canon!
Gosh, and we though having HD video on a cell phone was enough. Sharp has just announced the world's first 3D HD camera designed for cell phones and point-and-shoot cameras. This thing is capable of filming 3D footage at 720p, and will see mass production starting in 2010.
New York City graffiti artist Poster Boy, Henry Matyjewicz, is famed for his rearrangement of subway advertisements into bizarre satirical collages. But as of late, the 28-year-old has been mired in legal troubles, ending in an 11 month sentence for missing a hearing.
peekfreak is a collaborative project between industrial designer Wai Lam and experimental photographer Yann Huey in which they explore the possibility of making cameras using everyday objects. The cameras they've made so far use things such as discarded bike parts, plastic containers, and 3.5'' floppy disks.
Peter Funch is a New York City-based photographer who we featured a while back in a post titled "4 Creative Projects that Bend the Reality of Street Scenes". Funch photographs scenes for extended periods of time, and then combines people who share something in common. In the photograph above, he chose to include only people who were carrying manila envelopes.
Pentax has unveiled a new "Rainbow" version of the K-x DSLR camera. The limited edition camera will only be available in Japan through Tower Records starting on July 23, 2010.
Today, the New York Times' Lens blog posted the end result of a global photographic project. "A Moment in Time" is an interactive collection of all the images taken May 2, 2010 at 15:00 U.T.C. by the Times' readers all over the world. By May 4, the Times estimated they had 14,000 images, and were still accepting submissions until May 7.
If you need a 2 minute dose of relaxation, check out this video by Jeff Scholl of GravityShots. It was filmed with a Canon 550D/T2i-equipped helicam Whitefish, Montana Scholl used a 14mm lens, filmed at 720p, and rendered at 24fps. This kind of helicam footage reminds me a lot of dreams in which I'm flying, since the helicopter glides so slowly while everything on the ground moves at normal speed.
As Newsweek continues to cause its parent company to bleed money, a new magazine is trying to defy the demise of print by being agile and efficient. 48 Hour Magazine is a project that aims to "write, photograph, illustrate, design, edit, and ship a magazine in two days." …
Canon isn't letting Sony have all the fun today -- they've announced their latest Digital ELPH camera, the SD4000 (also known as the IXUS 300HS outside the US). The 10-megapixel camera has two features that really popped out to us: 240 frame per second slow motion video at 320×240, and ISO 6400 for low-light shooting. It can also capture 720p HD video, just not in slow-motion. If you've always wanted to play around with slow motion, this camera can enable you to do so (just for lower-res …
Sony officially announced their new EVIL cameras, the NEX-3 and NEX-5. There wasn't really anything in the announcement that we didn't know before today. After all, the actual camera was spotted in an Asian bar at the end of last month, and official photos and specs started appearing online yesterday.
Everyone knows that Sony's going to announce the new NEX-3 and NEX-5 cameras at a big press event tomorrow. However, it looks like Digital Photography School accidentally let the cat out of the bag by publishing their review a day too soon. The review was published and taken down within the span of an hour. Here's how it started: …
In 1998, this US Navy photo was published, showing a Nikonos camera no one recognized from the IPTC caption: NAVAL AIR BASE CORONADO, California (June 8, 1998) -- Navy SEALs attached to SEAL Team One, Naval Air Base Coronado, CA, conducts training using the Nikon/Kodak DCS 425 underwater digital camera which can sends real time digital images to decision makers, and an LPI LPD tracking device uses brevity codes to send both mission status and precise longitude/latitude. U.S. Navy photo by …
Everything big is Dubai. They boast the world's tallest building, the world's largest shopping mall, and now the world's largest photograph. Gerald Donovan recently created the 45-gigapixel panorama of the Dubai skyline as a technical test to explore the limits of hardware and software. At the end of last year, the largest photo in the world was a 26 gigapixel shot of Dresden, Germany.
Olympus' new commercial for the Olympus PEN E-PL1 is pretty typical, except that it has an interesting twist at the end. It'll probably make you want to watch the commercial twice.
Over the weekend, Best Buy sent out weekly advertising that included a Canon 7D bundle. Funny thing is, they don't seem to understand that the 7D only takes CompactFlash memory cards, and are selling the bundle with a SanDisk 8GB SD card. Also, it's not just the advertisement -- the online product info also shows the SD card in the images and in the text.
One of the biggest stories last month was that an upcoming episode of the popular TV series House was filmed entirely with the Canon 5D Mark II. I know a lot of you are looking forward to seeing how it turned out, but now you can get a sneak peek: Fox has uploaded a short teaser of the episode to YouTube. It's not HD, but it's a pretty neat glimpse into what they were able to do: …
Stephen Von Worley over at Weather Sealed just received a lens he calls "The Glass Frisbee". In the photo above it's placed next to a Canon 50mm f/1.4 for size comparison. It's a $250, 195mm f/1.25 lens that's sold to people who need it for custom uses. The description on Surplus Shed says, …
Kristofer Minkstein from Embed Article recently contacted us asking whether we'd like to be a launch partner for a new service they're planning to launch in a month called Embed Image. Unauthorized image use isn't a big problem for us, so I don't think we'll be using the service, but the idea was interesting enough that I thought I'd share it with all of you.
Researchers at the University of Toronto have come up with a new video camera that can achieve infinite depth of field even when objects are immediately in front of the camera. What they did was stuff an array of video cameras into a single camera, with each camera focused at a different distance. Software then calculates the distance of each object in the scene, and selects the individual pixel that has the object in focus. The resulting image is one in which every object, both near and far, …
Fans of Aaron Johnson's webcomic, What the Duck can look sharp with new (and uber cute) WTD camera straps.
Here's a big reason not to use stock images in a political ad campaign - the model's "loyalty" can be bought.
It looks like Nokia's executive knew what he was talking about when he claimed that HD video will be hitting cell phones very soon. Preset values found in the iPhone 4 Beta SDK (software development kit) seems to show that the next iPhone will be capable of 720p resolution for video capture.
Jonathan Berqvist needed a shoulder rig for stabilizing his Canon 7D when filming, and his father Erik is quite good with woodworking, so they built a do-it-yourself a wooden shoulder rig using a a single tree branch. What's awesome about the shoulder rig is that it has follow focus built into one of the two handles used to hold it.
The British government recently commissioned photographer Simon Roberts to create a public photo collaboration called The Election Project. In short, Roberts is creating documentary-style photography that follows the 2010 UK General election, and he is organizing a website to which people all over the UK can submit their own photographs of local political activities.
Google just released the latest beta version of its Chrome browser, and created a pretty amazing video to demonstrate how fast pages load. Using a Phantom v640 high speed camera, they film the browser racing random Rube Goldberg-style contraptions at up to 2700 frames per second. For example, in one test Chrome races a potato gun. Sweet.
The freshly announced Canon CanoScan 9000F is designed with film-faithful photographers in mind.
Polaroid stopped making instant cameras back in 2007, and ceased production of instant film two years later. Before Polaroid pulled out completely, the Dutch-based Impossible Project purchased Polaroid's old equipment and factory in the Netherlands in an attempt to save Polaroid film from going extinct.
Sony recently hired Superfad to create a video for its global "make.believe" campaign, and got its money's worth. This jaw-dropping video was created with a Phantom HD cinema camera shooting at 1,000 frames per second, and blends live action and CGI into ethereal scenes that are sure to leave you take your breath away.
Forget complicated kite photography kits that actually require skill. UK-based industrial designer Matthew Clark has a fun solution for taking photographs from high up: the Aeriel Capture camera.
Mopho is a new photo sharing service with a strange name -- until you realize it's a domain hack using Tonga's ccTLD, making it mopho.to.
There's a video demonstration of a Chinese military shovel that's becoming quite popular on YouTube. Induro's PHQ-Series tripod heads are similar in that they seem to do a little of everything. These are a cross between flexible ball-heads and accurate pan-heads, offer five directions of precise control (quintaxial positioning), and are equipped with five different bubble levels to help you adjust. Want to take 3D photographs? There's a feature for that.
Olympus just launched a new online publication called "PEN - The Magazine". It's available through a Flash viewer online (sorry iPad users), or as a PDF you can download. The first issue features six users of the Micro Four Thirds PEN system, and also an advertisement for why you should be using the system too (gasp!). Now all the other camera companies need to release free online magazines for their camera systems as well.
This camera rig might not be the best to bring to a public photo shoot.
Hanson's new music video for their single, "Thinking 'Bout Somethin'" is really something -- and it's no MMMBop.
Here's some nerdy news: Israeli facial recognition startup Face.com has just opened up its API, allowing developers to integrate its facial recognition technology in third-party websites and applications. Since launching a year ago, the company has scanned more than 7 billion photos and tagged more than 52 million faces through its Photo Finder and Photo Tagger applications on Facebook.
There's a Nikon 11/2000mm Reflex-Nikkor-C lens for sale on eBay. The price? A mere $19,950.
