It looks like the Olympus financial scandal is finally coming to an end. It has been nearly a year since it came to light that there were massive cases of fraud and coverups going on in the upper echelons of Olympus management. What started as a CEO's firing quickly spiraled into one of the biggest scandals to ever hit corporate Japan -- the country's equivalent of the US' Enron fiasco.

Haute couture and Occupy protests are two things that are completely at odds with one another -- the perfect combination for a photo shoot dripping with satire and social commentary. Photographer Ben Ritter did an American Psycho-themed fashion shoot featuring models wearing pricey suits hanging out among semi-homeless Occupy protestors camped out in Zucotti Park in New York City.

What you're looking at is the most zoomed-in photo ever shot by mankind. Titled the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), it's a followup to the famous Hubble Ultra-Deep Field photo created in the mid-2000s. Scientists combined 10-years-worth of Hubble Space Telescope photos to create this resulting image that shows 5,500 individual galaxies, some of which are one ten-billionth the brightness of what our human eyes can see.

The world of camera gear is getting really into this whole touchscreen thing. Touchscreen interfaces appeared on a bevy of cameras at Photokina this month (especially when paired with Android OS) and even on a new light meter, the Sekonic L-478D. The latest guest to crash the party? The flash.

The new Metz 52 AF-1 is the world's first hot-shoe mounted flash unit to offer a touchscreen interface. Granted, the screen isn't as flashy as the touchscreens found on the devices mentioned above -- it won't be winning any beauty contests anytime soon -- but it gets the job done.

Earlier this year, we wrote about a new company called Fourandsix (pronounced "forensics"), a collaboration between a former Photoshop product manager and a professor who's an expert in digital forensics. The goal of the new startup was to build powerful tools that would make detecting digital photo manipulation easy. Well, the first Fourandsix product is now available.

Called FourMatch, it's an extension for Photoshop CS5/CS6 that "instantly distinguishes unmodified digital camera files from those that may have been edited."

Adobe has announced Photoshop Elements 11, the latest refresh to the company's more-affordable and easier-to-use counterpart to Photoshop, which it claims is the #1 selling consumer photo editing program.

New features in this version include a complete overhaul of the user interface to make it more straightforward, better organization of photos by people/places/events, new guided edits for semi-automatic image adjustments, new filters for giving your pictures funky looks (e.g. comic, graphic novel, pen & ink), new intelligent extraction tools for selecting specific portions of photos, and built in sharing to popular social networks such as Facebook.

Google's Street View imagery features plenty of photographs of people, but they're often distorted and almost always feature blurred faces. Street Ghosts is a project by artist Paolo Cirio that reintroduces these distinctive portraits back into the real world. After choosing a particular photo containing a person in Street View, Cirio prints it out as a life-sized print on thin paper, cuts out the person, and then uses wheat-paste to affix the giant person photo onto the exact location where the photo appeared in the virtual world.

"New York Sliced" is a beautiful and creative projected by photographer Richard Silver. No, it's not a project about the multitude of pizza shops in The Big Apple. Instead, Silver applied a very interesting technique he calls "sliced-time photography" to documenting the architecture found within the city.

It has been nearly a year since Lytro announced the world's first consumer light-field camera that lets users focus photographs after they're shot. Throughout this time, the camera has only been available direct from the company when ordered through the website. That'll soon change, as the company announced today that it will be partnering with major retailers around the world to have the camera appear on a store shelf (and website) near you.

Fujifilm is a camera company that's going all-in on the idea of "retro design". We're not complaining. Its new XF1 compact camera brings the sleek design of X-Series' cameras to the world of "point-and-shoots", featuring a minimalist aluminum body that's covered with faux-leather. The camera feels very nice and solid in the hand. It's not as compact as other point-and-shoots (the Canon S110 is around 30% smaller and 20% lighter), so I'd say it's purse-sized rather than pocket-sized. What it lacks in portability, however, it makes up for in beauty and brawn.

For the past year, Washington, D.C.-based photographer Dave Engledow has been shooting a humorous series of photographs titled World's Best Father. With help from his wife Jen, he comes up with all kinds of random (and creative) photo shoot ideas to do with his young daughter Alice Bee. The photographs generally portray him as a distracted, incompetent father who lacks basic life skills and who lets his daughter get into all kinds of mischief. Thankfully, the photos aren't candid snapshots of what his life is actually like.

It's not uncommon for camera manufacturers to launch their own online photo storage or sharing service, but Canon is looking to make a bigger splash than most. At Photokina last week, the company announced Project 1709, an upcoming cloud-based service that will allow photographers to store their entire library of photographs online. As with most cloud services, the images would then be available from anywhere in the world, accessible using any device (e.g. computer, tablet, smartphone, Internet-connected camera).

London-based photographer Tony Ellwood has a project called In No Time that deals with our perception and awareness of our passage of time. All the photographs are of the same pier on a beach that Ellwood visited over a period of six months. His technique, which took him 18 months to develop and perfect, involves visiting the location multiple times for each photo -- sometimes up to three times a day for multiple days. Using a 4x5 large format camera, Ellwood creates each exposure across multiple sessions, as if he were doing multiple exposure photography, but of a single subject and scene. Each exposure time ranges from a few seconds to multiple hours.

Good news, Flickr fans: new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is paying attention to your service, and is planning to make it a big part of her plans to turn the company around. Mayer will be holding her first "all hands" meeting tomorrow, during which she will reveal her plans on how to fix the beleaguered web pioneer. Among these plans are an emphasis on user experience over advertising revenue and special attention given to Flickr.

After Osama bin Laden's death in May 2011, there was immediately a public outcry for the release of photos showing his dead body. The AP even took legal action to force the publication of the images, but that effort was squashed by a federal judge earlier this year.

While it's unlikely that we'll ever set eyes on the photos in question, more information on how they were captured is emerging.

Light painting has become quite trendy as a photography project as of late, but it's by no means a new idea. The earliest known light painting photos were created back in 1914, and the technique has been employed by countless photographers over the years -- including Pablo Picasso in 1949.

Another artist to use light painting decades ago was American artist Eric Staller. In the 1970s, Staller would roam the streets of New York City, armed with a Nikon 35mm SLR camera, some 4th of July sparklers, and a set of Christmas lights. The surreal light art he created at the time is better than many of the light painting efforts seen these days with the latest and greatest digital cameras.

When Leica announced at Photokina last week that future M and S cameras won't have numbers attached to the model name (e.g. Leica M), I wrote that the company seemed to be taking a page from Apple's book by having generations rather than models. Turns out that's not the case. Leica doesn't want to be what Apple is to the gadget industry, but what Porsche is to the automobile industry.

Watch out Google Glass: you've got competition in the life-documenting game. Autographer is an upcoming camera that's designed to document your life in photographs without you having to raise a finger. It's a fancy wearable camera that uses algorithms and five built-in sensors to make decisions on when to snap pictures. It can snap up to 2,000 high-resolution photos of the course of a single day, giving you a visual record of your life experiences.

We live in strange and exciting times in which phone camera photos can be compared side-by-side with top-of-the-line DSLR photos without anyone laughing (too hard). Having just gotten his hands on a shiny new iPhone 5, photographer Dustin Curtis decided to test out its camera's quality by pitting it against his Canon 5D Mark III (with a 50mm lens fixed at f/2.8).

When XQD memory cards were announced in December 2011, the CompactFlash Association touted the format as the successor to CompactFlash cards. We definitely seemed to be moving in that direction at first: one month after the unveiling, Nikon's flagship D4 DSLR was announced with XQD card support. The day after that, Sony became the first major memory card maker to announce a line of XQD cards. Six months later, Lexar also announced its intentions to join the party.

Since then, things have died down to the point where you can hear grasshoppers chirping. Not a single XQD-capable camera was announced at Photokina 2012 this past week. Despite being the first to make them, Sony strangely decided to leave the cards out of its top-of-the-line cameras as well.

We had a chance to play around with the new Fujifilm X-E1 at Photokina 2012, at a meeting attended by people who were the brains and hands behind the camera. Announced back on September 6, the X-E1 is the more affordable counterpart to the well-regarded X-Pro1. It's an interchangeable lens mirrorless camera with the same beastly APS-C sensor, shedding 30% in size, 21% in weight, the fancy hybrid viewfinder in favor of an all-electronic one, and 41% in price (from $1,700 to $1,000).

Lost Memories is a beautiful 3-minute-long short film by Francois Ferracci that imagines a future in which cameras can share images with the world as soon as they're shot -- oh wait, that's now -- and can beam holographic photographs into the air for easy uploading or editing. In such a futuristic world, would analog photography still have any role to play?

Wealthy people who want to flaunt their wealth are attracted to shiny and pricey things. It’s no surprise then, …

When news of Google's acquisition of Nik Software emerged a week ago, most of the tech press (and this blog) focused on one particular offering: Snapseed. It's a highly-acclaimed mobile photo editing app that has been growing like a weed as of late, so it made sense that Google would want it to participate in the ongoing mobile photo sharing war, right? Well, maybe not.

Are we past the age of entry-level DSLRs? Dan Nosowitz over at …

Social photo aggregation service Pixable has been acquired by Singaporean telecommunications company SingTel for $26.5 million. The service helps in photo browsing and discovery by aggregating photographs from your various social networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flicker) and using a special ranking system to only show you the interesting images. Billing itself as a "photo inbox", users can also keep up with their friends' photographs on-the-go using the company's popular iOS and Android apps.

Photokina 2012 came to an end in Cologne, Germany today. If you weren't able to make the show this year and are wondering what the show was like, we've collected some photos of the fancy booths set up by major camera makers. Hopefully they can provide you with a glimpse of how the big brands went about showing off their latest and greatest wares.

The photo above shows the gigantic photo globe found between two of the halls. Called "the world's largest photo globe", it measures over 19 feet in diameter and was created as a collaboration between companies in the Photographic Industry Association.

The frenzy of Photokina 2012 is coming to an end, but that doesn't mean crazy camera rumors are going anywhere. A big one currently floating around is that Canon is working on a DSLR with a massive number of megapixels. Northlight Images writes that we may see a preview of the camera at PhotoPlus 2012 in New York, which starts October 24.

We're told to expect to see a 'preview' of a 'high MP EOS DSLR' at the upcoming PhotoPlus show in New York (Oct 24-27). Although the current official line is that 20ish MP is a 'sweet spot' for DSLRs, D800 specs, price and performance is considered 'worrying' in some market areas.

Nikon's D800 has a highly-acclaimed 36.3MP sensor. Here are the specs that Canon will reportedly respond with: 46.1 megapixels, 5fps continuous shooting, 16-bit RAW images, and an ISO range of 100 to 12800.

On a mountaintop in Chile is the most powerful digital camera mankind has ever constructed. Called the Dark Energy Camera, the phone booth-sized device shoots 570-megapixel photographs using an array of 62 separate CCD sensors and a 13-foot light-gathering mirror. Planning and building the thing took 120 scientists from 23 international organizations a whopping 8 years.

Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond of NOTsoNOISY created this amazing stop-motion animation titled "Animated Tower." He found students and staff volunteers to turn an 11-story-building at the University of Health Sciences (HESAV) in Switzerland into a giant 10 by 11 display, with each window serving as a single pixel.

iPhoneography has made some significant advancements in the past couple of weeks due to the launch of the iPhone 5 and the release of iOS 6. Here's a brief report on some of the interesting improvements and changes.

What if there existed a lightbulb that you could completely control using your phone? And by "completely control", I don't mean simply switching on and off. I mean being able to precisely control the brightness of the light emitted, and even the exact color of the light.

If you thought the design and hardware specs of Canon's upcoming 4K-capable 1D C are strangely similar to the company's flagship 1D X, you're right: the two models feature identical hardware loaded with different firmware. At Photokina 2012, DSLR filmmaking blog EOSHD spoke to Canon representatives, who confirmed this fact to be true.

At first glance, New York-based photographer Richard Barnes' Civil War photos might look like they were taken from some museum or historical photographic archive. Look a little closer, however, and you'll begin to notice things that are quite peculiar. In one of them, there's a pickup truck parked in the background. In another, a man wears a T-shirt and baseball cap -- certainly not the fashion you'd expect to see in a mid-1800s photo.

The truth is, Barnes creates beautiful war photos that appear to be from over a century ago by using the Civil War-era process of wet plate photography to capture modern day Civil War battle reenactments.

Here's something to give you a chuckle as we head into the weekend. It's a parody iPhone 5 commercial that pokes fun at the fact that the phone has been stretched out in height without any change in width. But instead of being 7% taller, the imagined phone stretches that figure out to 795%. The result is a device that has some pretty interesting photographic applications.

Facebook is testing out a new feature for its Android mobile app called "Photo Syncing". The feature automatically backs up your smartphone's photographs by uploading them to Facebook as they're shot, tucking them away inside a private "Synced from Phone" tab on your photos page that isn't visible to anyone but you. You can then later choose which photos you'd like to make private and which you'd simply like for Facebook to hold on to.

Nikon's new entry level full frame DSLR, the Nikon D600, is supposed to be a lightweight camera with heavyweight image quality. DxOMark confirms it to be true. The camera equipment measurement company has announced its sensor quality results for the D600, and the score is sure to put a big smile on the faces of Nikonians around the world. Rated at an overall score of "94", the camera received the third highest score ever, and falls in third place behind the D800 and D800E -- cameras that cost roughly $1,000 more.

Sending a camera up to the edges of space on a weather balloon has been done quite a bit now, but perhaps none of the projects have been as creative as Ron Fugelseth's effort. Ron worked with his 4-year-old son to give his son's favorite toy train Stanley a fun and exciting ride to space. They built a rig consisting of a weather balloon, a styrofoam box, an HD video camera, and an old cell phone for GPS. Stanley was then attached to the outside of the box using a rod, positioned so that the camera would be perpetually pointed at Stanley with the world in the background.

There are currently two interchangeable-lens rangefinder-esque cameras in Fujifilm's X-Series lineup: the X-Pro1 and the X-E1, both of which contain APS-C sensors. Owners are gushing over the cameras, which are actually quite similar aside from the viewfinders (hybrid vs. electronic only). They feature sleek, retro designs that are very similar to Leica's classic M-line of rangefinders. A common sentiment that I've heard is that the X-Series would be absolutely perfect if the company simply introduced a full frame body.

That time might not be too far off.

Lunch atop a Skyscraper is one of the most recognizable photos of the 20th century. The 1932 photo shows 11 construction workers taking a lunch break on a girder 850 feet above New York City. A second photo from the same shoot shows four of the men sleeping on the beam. The images are iconic and epic, but may not be as candid as they seem.

At The Impossible Project's booth at Photokina 2012, there was a Impossible Instant Lab camera printer/camera being demonstrated. This is the device that was announced a couple of weeks ago that lets you quickly turn your iPhone photos into Polaroid pictures (i.e. Impossible's instant film or whatever stock you have left).

French photographer David Chambon is a master of macro insect photography. An amateur photographer for over 10 years, his goal is to capture the magical beauty of nature through his imagery. All of his macro shots are amazing, but it's his morning dew series that stands out from the rest. He ventures out early in the morning, and photographs various insects perched on flowers and leaves, glowing from the tiny beads of dew that coat their bodies.

It seems that everyone has something to say about Hasselblad's new line of Lunar mirrorless cameras, with "ugly" being one of the common adjectives used. The fact is, Hasselblad is trying to pull a Leica by taking the Sony NEX-7, rebranding it, "upgrading" it with a new look and rare materials, and slapping a $6,500 price tag on the resulting camera. The Lunar's Photokina booth, brochure, and website feature concept sketches that show how the camera's design came about.

Lexar has set a new bar in SD memory card capacity with its new 256GB card -- the largest size offered in the SDXC (Secure Digital eXtended Capacity) format. SDXC has an upper limit of 2TB, compared to the 32GB cap that restricts the SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) format.

The official name of the card is the Lexar Professional 400x SDXC UHS-I. It's geared towards photographers who need to "capture, store, and transfer a large number of high-quality photos" and videographers who need to record massive amounts of HD video.

Some weeks ago, I received an invitation from Leica for a special launch party they were planning to hold the day before Photokina 2012 opened. The event was titled LEICA - DAS WESENTLICHE, which translates to "The Essentials". Aside from stating that there would be product premieres and "photographic and musical highlights", the invitation did not reveal much else about the event, which went down this past Monday. Here's a first-hand account of what it's like to attend one of these Leica parties.

Nick Ut is the Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photojournalist who shot the iconic Vietnam War photo that most people refer to as "Napalm Girl". PetaPixel sat down with Ut about his life, career, and his most famous photo that is instantly recognized around the world.

If you're wondering why PetaPixel's coverage of Photokina 2012 -- the largest photo trade show in the world -- has been so slow, here's the explanation: it isn't intentional. Getting access to the Internet over here hasn't been as easy as I would have hoped -- the Wi-Fi at the hotel I'm at has been down for two days (I hear the same is true for other hotels as well), and there isn't free public Wi-Fi at Photokina.

Announced on Monday, Leica's new M rangefinder does away with the classic numbering system and simply goes by its model name. We got a chance to handle one a couple of times after the initial announcement... after fighting through the hoards that were clamoring to get a peek.

Immediately after handling the Canon 6D, we also got a chance to play around with the new Nikon D600. Unlike the 6D, Nikon's cameras were locked down to the display booth, making it more difficult to get a feel for the weight. However, based on the announced specs alone, we know that the Nikon camera is even lighter than the already-light 6D (760g vs 770g), though it is a bit chunkier in its dimensions. Despite being so light, the D600 also feels quite sturdy. It's cheap in its price but not in its build quality.

Canon's new 6D is the company's attempt to make full frame photography more affordable and accessible to more photographers. Our initial impression of the camera is exactly what the company is boasting about: that it's small and light. The camera's lightness makes it feel much more Rebel-y than its beefier full-frame siblings, but at the same time it doesn't feel cheap. It's not simply a full frame sensor stuffed inside a Rebel body. Canon has chosen to use magnesium alloy for key parts of the camera, giving it strength where needed, while using lighter materials for other parts to reduce the weight.