Want a phonecamera instead of a cameraphone? It's something that we were joking around about just months ago, but it might soon become a reality. It has only been two days since rumors of a Samsung Galaxy-based camera emerged, but now photos, specs, and details about the camera have been leaked. Portable gadget blog Pocketnow somehow got its hands on a press kit, revealing details about the compact camera that the web has been itching to find out.

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

For our "giveaway o' the week" this week, we're giving away three copies of Adobe Lightroom 4 worth $150 each. If you went on vacation this past summer and have a boatload of photographs that you need to organize and post-process, this program can help you do it.

After weeks of leakage on the Internet, the Sony NEX-5R mirrorless camera was finally announced today. As the rumors said, the camera features both Wi-Fi and downloadable apps -- two things that look to be huge trends in the camera world this year.

The basic specs for the camera are as follows: it features a 16.1 megapixel APS-C CMOS sensor, a hybrid autofocus that combines phase and contrast detection (a first for the NEX lineup), a max ISO of 25,600, 10 frame per second continuous shooting, 1080/60p HD video recording, and a 3-inch tilting LCD touchscreen.

Not too long ago, I was approached by a newspaper (Journal Le Droit, a large daily newspaper distributing print in the Ottawa-Hull area) asking if I would allow them to print a few of my pictures in an upcoming special feature on a nearby town, Rockland, Ontario. Having photographed much of Rockland in the past three years, I gladly accepted and figured that I could somewhat benefit from some exposure.

Just to make sure, I asked if they were offering monetary compensation. They responded that a photo-credit would be placed at the bottom of the image in lieu of payment. Why not?

Although Adobe Photoshop's introduction in 1990 spawned the term "Photoshopping", the manipulation of photos has been around pretty much as long as photography itself. To show this fact, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will be holding an exhibition titled, "Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop." The show will feature 200 'shopped photographs created between the 1840s and the 1990s, providing a glimpse into how photographers of old use their work to humor and deceive.

XKCD recently published this humorous comic explaining how you should interpret star ratings online. These are the ratings you come across when browsing online stores (e.g. Amazon) and customer review websites -- ratings that supposedly provide an accurate glimpse at how consumers feel about the product. Do they, though?

As the comic shows, the answer is: yes and no.

The veil of secrecy is starting to lift from Sony's upcoming high-end full frame DSLR. sonyalpharumors has published a detailed list of specs that give a pretty complete picture of what we'll be seeing in a few weeks. The camera features a 24.3 megapixel full frame CMOS sensor and Sony's Single-Lens Translucent (SLT) technology.

If the photograph was a living person, what would his Facebook timeline look like? Photo aggregation service Pixable decided to answer this question, creating a giant infographic on the history of the photograph with the layout of a Facebook timeline. It all starts at the very bottom of the timeline, with the photograph's birth at around 1000 AD. Over the years, we see the marriage he has with Kodak, the Kodachrome process born to the couple a few decades later, and a subsequent relationship she has with Digital Camera.

When overhead bins on airplanes fill up, flight attendants will often ask passengers to gate-check their carry-on bags. If this happens to you, be sure you take out your camera gear out of your bag prior to handing it over to the attendant. It's not just for peace of mind in knowing that your gear isn't being thrown around and abused: major airlines generally have provisions in their contracts that keep them from being held responsible for electronics in checked bags. If the camera is damaged or stolen, you might be out of luck.

If you swooned at the Fujifilm X-Pro1's retro design and fantastic image quality when it was announced at the beginning of this year, but then balked when you saw the $1,700 price tag, you might want to keep a close eye on the upcoming Fujifilm X-E1. Photo Rumors has published the specs of the camera, revealing that the camera will hit shelves at a price somewhere south of $1,000.

Children often incorporate things they see in the news and in movies into their playtimes, whether it's soldiers engaged in battle or a superhero saving innocent people. Canadian photographer Jonathan Hobin has a project titled In The Playroom that offers a darker and more troubling look at this truth. The photographs show children at play, except instead of more traditional imaginary ideas, they're reenacting the horrors of things seen in the news -- things like 9/11, Jonestown, and the death of Princess Diana.

How creative could you be if you could only photograph through a single window your house? That's the kind of self-limitation South Korean photographer Ahae placed on himself. His photography, titled Through My Window, features a million nature photographs captured over the past two years through a single window in his studio. He snaps a staggering 2,000 to 4,000 from his window every single day, rain or shine, documenting the story of the landscape and wildlife through that single point of view.

After the viral success of Noah Kalina's self-portrait-a-day video everyday, there has been no shortage of people copying the idea and creating their own versions of the project. However, not many come close to the awesomeness and creativity of the video above, created by a guy named Mike (Thisnomyp on YouTube).

Almost exactly one year after Kalina's video hit the web, Mike began taking one self-portrait each day, starting on August 25, 2007. Five years later, this past weekend, Mike was able to compile all the photos into the video seen above, titled "Jump Man."

Want to light your nighttime photographs with something that can be mistaken for a portable sun? Check out this monstrous homemade flashlight composed of 513 separate LED lights. Created back in 2008 by Ledcreations, the device offers a whopping 3500-4000 lumens of light -- way more than the hundreds of lumens offered by other powerful flashlights on the market.

Stamps, coins, comic books, and baseball cards. Those are some of the popular things people around the world collect as a hobby. Not Ying Nga (Cecilia) Chow. She collects unprocessed photographic camera film.

Neil Armstrong passed away this past Saturday at the age of 82. In addition to being the first man to walk on the moon, he was also the first photographer to set foot on that hunk of rock 238,900 miles away. Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin snapped a total of 122 70mm color photographs using modified Hasselblad 500EL cameras during their short visit on July 21, 1969. However, not all of them were pretty.

American Photo magazine writes that the photographic record left by those two men shows a very human picture of that first landing. Some of the "dud" photos show accidental shutter preses, focusing errors, lens flare, and even photobombed landscape shots.

What if there existed a high-profile, high-powered, and high-art photographer who worked exclusively in Instagram? That's the premise of this sketch by comedy webshow K-LOL. It offers a glimpse into the life of a fictional photographer named Flam Wenders, who's called the "Andy Warhol of Instagram".

Designer Andrew Kim thinks that point-and-shoot cameras aren't simple enough for many ordinary consumers. After all, if you're only looking to take snapshots of everyday life, having buttons and dials that can toggle undesired functions is more of an annoyance than a benefit. Taking a page from Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa's book, Kim created a concept camera that he calls the Pentax Si.

Photographer Dinah Fried has a series of photographs titled Fictitious Dishes that features the the meals described in five famous novels: The Catcher in the Rye, Oliver Twist, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Moby Dick. Working off a few lines of text in the books describing what the characters ate, Fried cooks up the food herself and then photographs the meals from above (the perspective reminds us of IKEA's recipe book photos).

The worlds of digital photography and cloud storage have been colliding as of late, with industry players such as Adobe and Apple coming out with services (Revel and Photo Stream, respectively) that synchronize your photo collections with the cloud.

Mosaic View is one of the newest entries in this increasingly crowded space, offering a product specifically geared for Adobe Lightroom. Launched a couple weeks ago, the desktop and mobile app allows photographers to carry their Lightroom catalogs with them wherever they go.

There's a fascinating rumor floating around in the gadget world today. Apparently Samsung is planning to introduce a point-and-shoot camera that's powered by Android OS and based on the popular Galaxy S smartphone. GSMArena, which first published the rumor and created the mockup seen above, reports that the camera will be named the "Samsung Galaxy S camera" (creative, I know). It's said to feature a giant 4.8-inch screen and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Photographer David Johnson recently captured a beautiful series of firework photos while attending the International Fireworks Show in Ottawa, Canada. During the Spanish fireworks performance, Johnson decided to deviate from the standard long-exposure style that pretty much everyone uses when shooting firework displays. Instead of fixing his focus at a certain point in space, Johnson introduced refocusing as part of the equation.

NASA's Curiosity Rover snapped photographs at 5 frames per second as it descended onto the face of Mars a few weeks ago. The footage that results when the images are combined into a 15 frame per second HD video is pretty amazing, but apparently not amazing enough for a YouTube user named hahahaspam. He spent four straight days taking the 5 fps footage and interpolating it to 25 frames per second. This means that instead of a video showing the choppy landing at 3 times the actual speed, his video shows the landing smoothly and in real time!

Every so often, we share a story about how powerful the Internet (and six degrees of separation) can be in reuniting owners with things they lose, whether it's a camera that spent four years in the ocean or a roll of film lost in a blizzard.

Israel-based photographer Guy Prives experienced this amazing power of the Web firsthand recently after snapping a photograph of a mysterious tattooed girl.

A Leica camera from 1923 became the world's most expensive camera earlier this year when it was auctioned for a staggering $2.79 million. The world's most expensive lens has a similar price tag... and is also a Leica.

Planetary conjunctions are beautiful to photograph from Earth, but send a camera to another planet in the Solar System, and you can shoot a planetary conjunction photograph containing Earth!

Back on May 8th, 2003, the Mars Orbiter Camera on the Mars Global Surveyor had the rare opportunity to photograph both the Earth and Jupiter in the same region of space. It was the first planetary conjunction observed from another planet, with the Earth 86 million miles away and Jupiter 600 million miles away. The resulting image (shown above right), contains both planets, along with some of the moons.

This past Friday wasn't a good day for photographers. On the same day that one wedding photographer saw his client drown in a freak accident during a trash the dress shoot, a man hiking in Alaska was mauled to death by a grizzly bear after getting too close to it with his camera.

Do you remember the Instagram Socialmatic? It's a concept camera that made the rounds on the Internet back in May -- a camera that lets people snap photos, share them online, and print them out as squared-shared sticky-note-style instant photos. The camera will soon go from digital concept to physical reality: it's being turned into an actual camera, which is a proposed release date of mid-2013.

Think pancake lenses are flat? In the future, camera manufacturers might be able to replace those bulky glass elements inside lenses with lens elements that are thinner than a piece of paper. The lenses would not only be third-dimension-free, they would also be distortion-free.

Anne Geddes is known internationally for her trademark-style of baby photos showing infants dressed up like tiny animals, flowers, and various fantasy creatures. VICE magazine recently decided to parody her work, and enlisted the help of photographer Lee Goldup to photograph adults instead of babies in Geddes' iconic style.

If you're a wedding photographer, you might want to think twice about doing a trash the dress shoot in a moving river. A newly married Montreal-area woman drowned this past Friday during a photo shoot in the Ouareau River.

Dream Music: Part 2 is an amazing stop-motion and time-lapse video by Marc Donahue and Sean Michael Williams that features a technique they call "lyric-lapsing". Using still photos, they somehow planned the time-lapse sequences just right, so that the singer in the video is actually mouthing the words as he scurries around to various locations. They state that the video is a "musical voyage into the depths of the subconscious", and that it was designed to "transport the viewer from their own reality into a world of dreams and at the end, [...] awake to wonder how we were able to take them there."

The magnitude of the effort is what's truly impressive. The creators spent six months shooting the photos across two states. Every 3-4 seconds seen in the video required about 6-8 hours of work to create.

Dogshaming is a website where dogs around the world (or their owners) can submit photographs in which they confess all the bad things they do. Pet owners are asked to submit photos of their disobedient dogs containing signs that give the dogs a healthy dose of Internet shaming.

Photographing apex predators on land is one thing, but do it in the ocean and it's an entirely different ball game. This behind-the-scenes video follows underwater photographer Marc Montocchio of 36North on a trip he took to the island of Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. His goal was to capture a photograph of a free swimming blue marlin, which required the fishermen helping him to "fish" with a lure and no hook.

One way to shoot surreal photographs is to capture things where they don't ordinarily belong, whether it's glowing cubes in a forest or houses and babies floating in mid-air. Often this type of image is done using photo manipulation, but that's not true of the photos in artist Joy Umali's project titled Ladders. Umali hauled a number of distorted metal ladders onto Rodeo Beach in San Francisco, and then had photographer Walter Kitundu photograph the scene.

Just a few hours ago, a man opened fire at the Empire State Building in New York City, killing a former co-worker before being gunned down by police. Ryan Pitcheralle was passing through the area when the shooting occurred, and used Instagram to capture a photograph of the victim lying in a pool of blood.

Flickr's Creative Commons licensing options allows its users to grant licenses that allow creators to make use of the photographs under a set of terms (e.g. attribution, non-commercial). Most photo sharing services have yet to bake Creative Commons licenses into their websites, but starting today, Instagram users can now release their photos under CC -- albeit through a third-party solution.

If you want to protect your pricey camera gear from burglars, one of the safest places in your house (besides a safe, of course) is one that might not be very obvious to you: your kid's room. The Readers Digest published a simple slideshow containing home-proofing tips gleaned from the minds of convicted burglars. One interesting tip is that burglars generally don't go into children's rooms when hunting for valuables to steal.

Fuji already introduced retro, Leica-style design to the world of mirrorless cameras with its gorgeous X series line, and now it appears that the company wants to do the same thing for the world of point-and-shoots. New leaked photos, first published on Digicam-info, show an unknown compact camera by Fujifilm that features a slick leather wrap and an elegantly minimal UI -- a camera that definitely wouldn't embarrass fashion-forward folk.

It's a sad day for film photographers: Kodak has announced that it will sell off its camera film business, one of the huge pillars of what made Kodak Kodak in the eyes of consumers around the world. It's yet another step in the company's effort to climb out of bankruptcy, which it hopes to do by next year, and transform itself into a commercial printing company.

Everyone knows that traveling is expensive. Some people say that photography is expensive as well (both creating and buying it). The two things should therefore be a natural fit, right?

John James Audubon, a French-American ornithologist (a person who studies birds), became internationally known in the 1800s for his ambitious goal of painting and documenting all the different bird species found in the United States. His methods, however, weren't exactly bird friendly. To prepare his subjects, Audubon would first kill them using fine shot and then fix them into striking poses using wire.

Ornithologists these days have a much better way of capturing birds for science: mist nets. The nylon mesh nets virtually invisible to birds when suspended between two poles, and allow scientists to capture, study, and release the birds unharmed. Photographer Todd R. Forsgren wants to be the modern day equivalent of Audubon. His project titled Ornithological Photographs consists entirely of photos showing different birds caught in mist nets.

Of the two images above, one of them is a computer render and one of them is an actual photograph. Can you tell which is which? If you can't, why should IKEA?

The Wall Street Journal reports that IKEA is slowly moving away from using photography in its catalogs in favor of CGI for its online and print publications.

Back in July, we reported that Fuji was preparing to launch lower-end and higher-end siblings of its popular X-Pro1 mirrorless camera. We now both what the cheaper camera will be called, and what it'll look like.

Named the "X-E1", the camera had two of its product pictures leaked today through Digicame-info.

If there was such thing as a Photoshop disaster in real life, this story would probably qualify. An elderly woman in the city of Zaragoza, Spain recently took it upon herself to restore an 19th-century fresco of Jesus that had been deteriorating over the past few years. As you can see from the before and after photos above, the results weren't pretty.

Nikon made a big splash in the compact camera world yesterday by being the first major camera manufacturer to bake Android OS into a compact camera, the Coolpix S800c (Polaroid released one a while ago, but it's hardly a major player at the moment). The S800c looks and sounds interesting as far as specs and press releases go, but what's it actually like to use a camera that could be mistaken for a smartphone?

Flickr's Android app is almost one year old now, and the service is getting it ready for its birthday by pushing out an update with a fresh UI and new features. Version 1.5 introduces a new navigation menu, new explore features, metadata editing, new camera options, and more.

Samuel Cox, the "maker of things" whose Minority Report-style photo viewer we shared last year, was recently invited to a friend's wedding. He came up with the neat idea of creating a TARDIS-themed photo booth for the wedding reception, an accessible way for guests to leave photo memories in a lighthearted manner.

Some people who find themselves on hard times try to have themselves arrested so that they can eat for free in prison. It turns out that people in Southern California can do the same thing for a free studio-style headshot. Cat Cora, a chef on the Food Network show Iron Chef, recently got booked for a DUI after drinking three beers and getting behind the wheel. Her mugshot wasn't taken until 11 days after her arrest, so Cora had time to have her hair and makeup done in order to pose for a picture-perfect mugshot. When the photo made its way onto the Internet, websites began to comment on how it looks more like a studio portrait than a police station mugshot.

Humans like preserving their memories. That's one of the big reasons we take pictures. What if you didn't need to actively do anything to preserve those memories? What if you could simply wear cameras that constantly capture photos and videos that are safely stored for your later viewing pleasure? With the rate at which technology -- particularly storage technology -- is increasing, we may soon find "lifestreaming" to be the next big thing.