Besides sharing some impressive specs at that Google Maps presentation we mentioned yesterday, Google also unveiled a new street view tool that should go a long way in further mapping out our world. The Street View Trekker, as they call it, is a backpack-mounted street view camera that allows the wearer to photograph and document places that can only be reached using the good ol' shoelace express. According to Engadget, the 40lbd Android powered backpack packs 15-megapixel cameras, an on-board hard drive, and enough battery to run for an entire day.

Alongside picture and spec leaks for Canon's soon-to-be-announced T4i, details on their up and coming 40mm f/2.8 pancake lens have also surfaced. Besides pictures and schematics, which you can see above and below, we now know that the new EF lens will also be an "STM" lens -- meaning it will be sporting a silent AF motor. Weighing in at only 130 grams and with a speculated price under $200, this has the potential to be come a portable amateur favorite pretty quick.

Here’s another behind the scenes video showing fashion street photographer Scott Schuman (AKA …

Just one short day away from the official release, massive leaks have sprung regarding Canon's new Rebel T4i. Courtesy of Canon Rumors, we now have a full list of specs for the T4i/650D. As previously rumored, the camera will indeed sport an 18-megapixel APS-C sensor, articulating touchscreen LCD, 9 cross-type AF points and a better "hybrid" AF system for live view and video recording. But the specs we hadn't yet heard of include: ~5fps continuous shooting, ISO 100-12,800 (expandable to 25,600), and the same viewfinder and metering system found in the previous Rebel T3i.

In many Asian cultures it's common for families to gather together for formal portraits on special occasions, but this tradition is becoming much harder to coordinate as more and more young people are moving abroad for work. Photographer John Clang has a new series of photographs that features an interesting solution to this problem: Skype webcam projections. Clang visited various individuals around the world and had them video chat with family members in Singapore. By projecting the feed onto a wall and having the entire family pose, Clang shot traditional-style family portraits with the subjects separated by thousands of miles.

Fresh off the press: Canon Price Watch just put up the first images …

Mike Warren has written up an in-depth tutorial on how you can build a 360° camera hat using 6-8 disposable cameras. The cameras are worn around the head like a crown, and are simultaneously trigger using a single shutter release with the help of servo motors that depress the shutter when triggered. Warren writes,

With the camera array sitting on your head, you're able to capture a 360° panorama view of your surroundings. This project requires no special electronics knowledge and can be assembled in about an hour.

I designed this camera array off something I saw on the "Radar Detector" music video by Darwin Deez. But, after making the camera hat, everyone kept asking if it was a low-fi version of Google Street View. It's more the former than the latter, but people can draw their own interpretations.

Earlier today Google gave a sort of “state of Google Maps” address to many of the biggest names in …

Peter West Carey of DPS has a neat trick for always having a …

Here's a neat idea for a photo shoot: tarp surfing. This involves faking the look of surfing photographs using a giant blue tarp and a skateboarder riding across it. Have someone pull the tarp over the skateboarder and photograph him riding through the tube.

Photographer Christian Lobo came up with this thrifty macro setup that uses his Canon Rebel T3/1100D and a 50mm f/1.8. It might look ghetto, but it actually functions pretty well for casual macro photography.

Sony's new Cybershot -- specs and pictures of which were leaked just a couple of days ago -- was just made official this morning, accompanied by quite a few nods of approval from tech and photo nerds everywhere. PC World are even calling it the "Best Pocket Camera of All Time," and they may not be far off. That's because the new Cybershot DSC-RX100 is a fixed lens point-and-shoot compact that packs a wallop.

There was a much-hyped transit of Venus yesterday in which Venus appeared as a small black circle moving across the face of the sun. This rare phenomenon occurs in pairs of eight years separated by more than a century: the previous transit was in 2004, but the next one won't occur until 2117. If you missed out, don't worry -- there's a boatload of beautiful photos and videos out there that can give you an even better view than what your eyes would have seen. The amazing high-definition video above was created using images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Due in large part to the massive accounting scandal that Olympus found itself in at the end of last year, the company hasn't been doing that great financially. And now, according to Reuters, Panasonic is preparing to jump to Olympus' aid by providing approximately 50 billion yen (635 million dollars) in capital. The move will benefit both parties, as Panasonic, who are struggling with sub-par TV sales, will become top shareholder in the company and hopefully add a new stream of revenue to their portfolio.

Photographer Joseph O. Holmes spent four years between 2007 and 2011 documenting the place where a person's personal and professional lives meet: their desk. He traveled around to various companies and businesses making photographs of workspaces exactly as he found them.

After rolling out a similar mobile update a few weeks ago, Facebook is now bringing the “bigger …

If you’re looking for a thrifty way to have gigantic (monochrome) prints made of your photographs, look no further …

This video points to a pretty horrific, disturbing future if the scourge known as Vertical Video Syndrome — VVS …

In early May, Adobe had CS5 users in a tizzy when they announced …

Contrary to popular belief, Google can't be everywhere at once (they're working on it), and one of the most obvious examples of this limitation is the extent of Street View functionality in Google Maps. Of course, tons of roads and even some obscure neighborhoods have been mapped out with street view, but all too often your own front yard is left un-street-viewable. And while that may not be much of a tragedy for most people, those that would rather change that now have the option to with DIY Street View's new Street View Camera System.

If you didn’t quite get your Disney fix with the creative splash mountain video we featured earlier, …

You Are Not Banksy is a project by Los Angeles-based photographer Nick Stern in which he recreates popular Banksy graffiti artworks through photography.

One tip that instructors often pass onto the beginning photographers is to use their …

If you keep up with interesting photography projects you might have heard about the Disposable Memory Project -- a disposable camera endeavor in which people take a photo and the leave the camera sitting somewhere for someone else to pick up, the person who takes the last photo sends it in. Well, from the minds behind that comes another disposable camera project, this one with a bit of an age-y twist. Instead of sending out cameras and the leaving them lying around (only 30 of the 410 DMP cameras have returned so far) they're sending a camera to 100 people ages 1 to 100 and they're calling it The 100 Project.

A while back I was too cheap (lazy?) to get around to purchasing some speedlights and in typical DIY fashion for me, I figured I could replicate most results using nothing more than a flashlight. So one evening with my friend Sean and his wife, we decided to try out some long exposure light painting ideas.

A month ago, quite a bit of controversy was stirred up when Amateur Photographer pointed out some stringent and seemingly unenforceable restrictions included in the London 2012 Ticker Holder Agreement. Initially it seemed that attendees might have been prevented from posting images to social networks (an assumption which was later refuted). But even though attendees will be allowed to post images to Facebook to their heart's content, amateurs and non-media who wanted to get some commercial-grade pictures of the Olympic events are still out of luck.

Luke Pierre Barats of the sketch comedy duo Barats and Bereta spent a …

Here's your interesting piece of photo trivia 'o the day: John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, was the first president to have his photograph taken (the earliest photo still in existence, at least). The daguerreotype was shot in 1843, a good number of years after Adams left office in 1829.

Photographer John Cyr has an ongoing project titled Developer Trays that features photographs of developer trays used by famous photographers. He writes,

I am photographing available developer trays so that the photography community will remember specific, tangible printing tools that have been a seminal part of the photographic experience for the past hundred years. By titling each tray with its owner’s name and the years in which it was used, I reference the historical significance of these objects in a minimal manner that evokes thought and introspection about what images have passed through each individual tray.

The tray above was used by Ansel Adams.

In addition to being an internationally successful musician, Moby is also an avid …

Update: Apparently they’ve decided to not allow external embedding of this promo video… You can watch it …

Fresh off the rumor mill: Sony will be announcing a new large sensor …

Here’s another video featuring SF photo shop Photobooth and its tintype …

A new iOS app from design studio Maybe It’s the Lightening, simply titled Stilla, works with one simple premise: every photo has a second photo -- or third or fourth -- that your camera missed. For every picture of your friend on the boat, there's a beautiful sky and a glorious reflection of that sky in the water that you missed. Stilla seeks to remedy that.

A new Nikon patent unearthed by Egami shows that the company has developed …

After losing the battle over photo taking, filtering and sharing supremacy to Instagram last year, the app and website PicPlz is finally throwing in the towel and calling it quits on July 3rd.

If you’ve never been a fan of using sunblock, here’s a photograph that might change your feelings toward it.

Brooklyn-based photographer Henry Hargreaves teamed up with food stylist Caitlin Levin on his project "Deep Fried Gadgets", which -- as its name indicates -- shows various electronics deep fried. The purpose of the project is to highlight the wastefulness of consumer culture and its rapid consumption of the latest gadgets.

We live in an analytical time, where most of the information we receive -- be it about the stock market or the presidency -- comes in way of charts, graphs, and other visual representations of hard (or sometimes soft) data. And it's this dependency on analysis that Sherwin Tibayan's diagnostic take on Robert Frank's "The Americans" -- the second "The Americans" spin off we've seen in two weeks -- focuses on.

If you’re a fan of shooting portraits in outdoor environments, David Hobby of …

Filmmaker Brandon Davis Cole's interesting take on the traditional follow focus does something that few, if any, products have ever thought to do -- integrate bicycle technology into DSLR cinematography. Cole essentially reinvented the follow focus. By instituting a "brake lever" system, the SnapFocus allows cinematographers to keep their camera steady and pull focus quickly and easily to wherever it's needed, all without ever moving your hands from the SnapFocus handles.

French artist Pierre David has a project titled "The Human Pantone" in which he recreated Pantone's popular color guide using photographs of 40 different models. The work was commissioned for the Museum of Modern Art in Brazil, so David selected 40 people from the museum to serve as his models. The resulting work is found on paint cans in addition to swatches, and is meant to highlight the issues of beauty, diversity, acceptance, and racism.

Several major rumors surfaced over the last couple of days about Japanese camera giant Canon, ranging from release dates to specs for cameras that up until now were spec-less for the general public. First up, according to Canon Rumors, the long awaited and rumored Canon Rebel T4i will be released later this week on June 8th. In addition, specs for the T4i should be exactly as the original rumors suggested: 18-megapixel sensor, 9 cross-type AF points, touchscreen LCD and continuous AF for live view and video recording.

Someone finds your work on Flickr. They contact Getty Images to buy it. Getty Images contacts you for permission to sell it to their buyer. Do you do it?

When a group of facial hair aficionados got together late last year at the first inaugural Battle of the Beards in Atlanta, photographer Josh Meister took it as an opportunity not just to compete himself, but to take some portraits as well. The resulting photo series, simply titled "Beards," shows off some seriously impressive facial accoutrement.

We’ve featured more ambitious projects before — you may remember Cesar Kuriyama’s video which consisted of 1 …

Perhaps sadder than the moment when a company officially discontinues a film is the moment when the last of that film is used, and that's what has just happen to Kodak's famous Plus-X 5231 movie film. Plus-X was discontinued a couple of years ago, and according to the LA Daily News, independent filmmaker Paul Bunnell's "The Ghastly Love of Johnny X" will be the last feature shot using the film. A film that for many years was a favorite of black and white cinematographers everywhere.

In a couple of short days, Don Pettit intends to do something that has never been done before: photograph …

It's difficult to ignore the fact that photographers are finding it harder to get paid for their work now more than ever, but a recent altercation between concert photographer Dan DeSlover and the band Alter Bridge took on a different dynamic -- criticizing a photographer for asking to get paid.

Starting off Sunday on a slow motion note, this is just a downright cool 1000fps video of skateboarders doing …