"Dolly zoom" is a technique that was popularized by Alfred Hitchcock in his film Vertigo, after which it was commonly referred to as "Hitchcock zoom" and the "vertigo effect". The basic idea is to photograph (or film) a subject while moving towards or away from it, and at the same time changing the focal length to keep the subject at the same size in each frame. French photographer Micaël Reynaud used this technique on a beach last year, snapping photos of a stone block at focal lengths ranging from 24mm when he was closest to it to 840mm when he was farthest away.

After narrowly missing the opportunity to acquire Instagram, it seems that Twitter was eager to try again; this time with one of the most popular paid camera apps, Camera+. Apparently, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey actually met with tap tap tap -- the makers of Camera+ -- to discuss an acquisition shortly after news of Facebook's Instagram acquisition broke.

By and large, as a professional of whatever description, clients hire you based on experience and expertise, grace under pressure, problem-solving skills, and your finely-tuned ability to transcend the limitations of the assignment and distill the essence of an idea into its most purely realized form.

Okay so that’s what they tell you in college, but honestly it’s mostly just blather. Assignment photography is a hot-dog factory where the end results are images rather than sausages. If people saw what went into some of this stuff there’s no way they’d want anything to do with it. The sad reality is that there are all kinds of reasons you’re brought in on projects, some of them more edifying than others. Sometimes you’re exactly the right person for the job, other times you’re just a camera monkey. My favourite is the “wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if” call, where everyone gets all excited about an idea that turns out to be completely impractical. Well, this is the story of one of those ideas that actually managed to see the light of day.

Cinematographer Jim Geduldick was lucky enough to be the first to test out …

At first glance, some of Simon Davidson's photographs look like Harry Potter stills showing flying cars floating in the clouds. They're actually a glimpse into the burnout subculture that's growing in Australia. These are competitions in which drivers try to create as much smoke as they can by spinning their tires in place.

A couple of days ago the world was wowed by the up and coming BlackBerry 10's new camera app. The app, demoed by RIM at BlackBerry World 2012, allowed you to select someone's face and scroll through frames captured before and after you hit the shutter button. If you thought the app looked familiar, you were right: it's actually a rebranded version of Scalado Rewind.

We've seen many a photo collage in our day, but New York artist Michael Mapes' Specimen Boxes are an entirely different creature. To create these unique photo compartments, he dissects various photos of his subjects into many corresponding bits and then mounts those bits on or in different materials -- much like what you see in insect collection boxes. Sometimes it's vials, sometimes it's push pins, and sometimes it's gel caps, but it always turns out looking really interesting.

Last week we reported on how photographers and a magazine are being sued for $300,000 for allegedly …

Photographer Lauren Marsolier’s Transition series consists of minimalist landscape photographs of desolate locations. The various places don't actually exist -- Marsolier creates them by combining photographs captured in different places at different times.

Columbus, Ohio-based photographer Nick Fancher works as the lifestyle photographer of Men’s online …

Michele over at The Scrap Shoppe offers this handy trick for hanging picture frames: hammer a nail through a clothespin and use it to determine nail placement. Simply hang the picture on the clothespin nail, figure out where you want to place the frame, and then push the clothespin into the wall to make a small indent. Voila! Target acquired.

Aerial photographer Stephan Zirwes shoots amazing images of patterns and repetition seen in landscapes while looking straight down from a helicopter. From his perspective, things like cars, shipping containers, and people blend together into abstract designs.

Flash diffusers come in all shapes and sizes, from DIY Home Depot versions to more expensive professional grade equipment. None of these solutions seemed adequate for 30 year photography veteran Les Tirmenstein, however, and that's why he designed the FlashPipe.

People ask me, “Jun Shen, how do you shoot so fast on the streets?!?” I’m like a ninja, whipping out my camera, shooting it, and putting it away so quickly that my subjects don’t know what hit them. They walk away whispering to themselves, “What was that? Did he take our photo?

It’s thanks to video games, folks. Read on to find out why.

It might not be very applicable to the vast majority of photographers, but NASA astronaut Captain Alan Pointdexter has written up a fascinating article over on Luminous Landscape in which he shares advice about doing photography in space. Taking photos on the ground is one thing, but imagine using not just the sun, but the earth itself as a source of light.

To show off its collection of eyewear for kids, Very French Gangsters shot cute mugshot-style portraits of gangster children who were obviously booked for being too hip for their own good.

RGBDToolkit is a project that layers HD video recording with a DSLR over Microsoft Kinect's depth maps, creating trippy 3D footage that may be an indication of what we'll be documenting life with in the future.

Back in November of last year Kodak sold off its sensor business — Kodak Image Sensor Solutions …

Last October, Portland-based 17-year-old photographer Brendon Burton began an ambitious project in which he committed to creating one self-portrait every day for a year. Now, half a year later, Burton is still going strong and his Flickr photostream is full of beautiful and creative images that document his development as a photographer.

Users of both Flickr and Pinterest will …

Canon has received some pretty bad publicity over the past month due to the 5D Mark III’s …

If you have a Canon compact camera running the Canon Hack Development Kit …

Time-lapse in motion can be a bit of a nightmare. Not only do you need to have your intervalometer set properly to control when and how your camera takes pictures, you also have to have the camera on a dedicated track, hopefully moving at a consistent speed, and preferably without you being the one moving it.

In the past, people could either choose to go the manual route or buy very expensive equipment. Fortunately, makers of the Genie -- Ben Ryan and Chris Thomson -- decided to make the process easier and, if not cheap, at least cheaper.

German photographer Christian Stoll's "Epic" series features epic wide angle photographs of futuristic locations. The spaces are immense and the scale dizzying.

In case you missed our earlier post, let's get you up to speed: in the internet age, the argument is that you don't own anything anymore. This is relevant because yet another copyright infringement lawsuit has made its way across our computer screens, this time between a student photographer and the Colorado University newspaper The CU Independent that printed and distributed his now famous falling bear image.

The latest rumor circulating around the “entry-level full-frame” topic is that Nikon may shying away from Sony when it …

The world of photography is full of "nuts," but these are the first we've seen that you could actually crack open with a nutcracker. For its latest photography marketing stunt, Olympus has been sending out a box complete with two walnuts and a note that simply says "coming soon." TechRadar received one, and PhotographyBlog received another.

Back in August we featured a service called JPEGmini, which gives anybody the ability to shrink their photos up to 5-times in size without any visible quality difference -- a substantial claim, but one that the service seemed to live up to quite well (we use it regularly).

Yesterday One World Trade Center officially became the tallest building in New York …

Words certainly won't do Kevin Michael Connolly justice. Born without legs, this part-photographer, part-professional skier, part-writer is, ironically enough, an inspiration to us all (we say ironically because in the Today Show interview above they talk about how much he hates to be called an inspiration).

The new BlackBerry 10 operating system was unveiled BlackBerry World 2012 today, and one of the amazing new features that wowed the crowd was the camera app. It features a seemingly-magical "timeline" lens that lets you rewind sections of photographs in order to recover moments that your fingers weren't fast enough to capture. Did your subject blink in the photo? No worries... simply rewind their face and you're good to go! Basically, the camera is constantly capturing frames as soon as the app is loaded, so there's always a small buffer of previous moments stored for you to recover.

Concept products aren't a rarity. In the world of cars and computers concepts usually make us ooh and ahh at their beautiful styling and implied functionality, but in the world of cameras things can get a bit, strange. Such is the case with a new SLR concept by industrial designer Arti Patel called the All.Round SLR.

Ever since she entered the world 30 some-odd years ago, Alison has had her father Jack Radcliffe's camera pointed at her. Radcliffe, a Baltimore, MD-based photographer, started out by documenting her life casually as new parents commonly do, but slowly became more interested in the relationships involved in growing up.

The United States is a diverse country, but there are few places in the US as diverse as New York City: "the greatest city on earth." In many ways The City's diversity makes it a street photographer's gold-mine, and it's this mine that photographer Brandon Stanton has been meticulously digging through over the last couple of years.

Here’s a tongue-in-cheek “leaked advertisement” for Instagram’s new camera: the Instagram Snap. The camera is sure to become a …

MIT researchers are at it again: the university’s latest research project to receive attention from tech blogs the world …

The Olympus OM-D EM-5 generated quite a bit of buzz when it was …

We'll go ahead and start by saying that we're using the term "photographer" lightly; in reality we should probably say "users." But there's a certain irony to calling celebrity Instagramers "photographers" that we quite enjoy. Unlike Flickr where many of the best loved users are well known photogs showcasing their most recent work, Instagram's top users are made up entirely of celebrities.

John Herrman over at BuzzFeed has written up an interesting piece on how and why "grabby" terms of service have become ubiquitous in the online world of social media:

Korean photographer Lee Eunyeol creates beautiful nighttime scenes by installing lights in various landscapes. His artist statement reads,

Starry night expresses private spaces given by night and various emotions that are not able to be defined and described in the space. I’ve chosen analogue type for the expression which attempts to install electric bulbs in an objet to be expressed using back space of night by taking advantage of huge studio. There are two spaces in photographs. One is a space before electric bulbs of familiar landscape are installed and the other is a space after electric bulbs expressed by dispersing personal emotion are installed. Unified light from these two spaces generates a mysterious landscape.

In each of his photos, it almost looks as if the stars have fallen from the sky onto the ground.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Polaroid sponsored shows like "The Tonight Show" during which the hosts would take time to endorse the cameras during the show itself rather than cut to commercials. The montage above takes viewers back to a time when fancy new Polaroid cameras cost $69.95 -- or $1.19 a week.

When we told you about the StrikeFinder app earlier, we mentioned that what set it apart was that it used your actual iPhone's camera; it wasn't just acting as the trigger. Well, Trigertrap's new mobile app is just acting as the trigger, but it's acting as a very comprehensive trigger.

Matthew Gore of Light & Matter created this beginner-friendly video tutorial on the …

One of the interesting features in Olympus’ OM-D EM-5 retro-styled camera …

"Dancing with Invisible Light" is a project by San Francisco-based photographer Audrey Penven, who used an infrared camera to capture portraits illuminated by the invisible structured light emitted by a Microsoft Kinect.

There are plenty of light-sensitive triggers on the market, some triggers even use your smartphone, but Ubertronix's new StrikeFinder app is the first mobile app that lets you actually take the pictures with your phone. Instead of designing a trigger app that attaches to an external camera, the StrikeFinder app released earlier today lets everyday iPhone users simply point their phone camera in the direction of say, lightning or fireworks, and the phone does the rest for them.

Not so much a "leak" as the proverbial flood gates opening, earlier today the Indonesian website Yangcanggih released what amounts to a full gallery of both the new NEX-F3 and A37 cameras, giving Sony fanboys (and girls) plenty to get excited over. The pictures confirm many of the previous rumors: the NEX-F3 does have a pop-up flash, and the 180-degree tilting screen is also a feature; while the A37 is receiving an articulating screen as well.

Last November Google launched a Photography Prize for finding the "photography stars of the future". After receiving entries from 20,000 students in 146 countries, Google announced the winners last week. The grand prize winner was Viktor Johansson, a 24-year-old photography student from Sweden who photographed the loneliness of competitive diving:

The judges were impressed and captivated with his series that focused on Christoffer Eskilsson, Sweden’s best male diver from 10 metres. Viktor has chosen to show us an alternative view, one that we are not used to seeing from sport photography in the media. Instead of glamorous action shots of an athlete in competition, he has produced arresting and unexpected photographs that focus on the long, lonely hours of repetitive training and practice that it takes to excel in your field.

With Nikon rumored to be working on the D600 as an entry-level full-frame for later this year, it's only right that Canon jump into the fray as well, and jump they have (maybe). Rumors that Canon has had a new entry-level full-frame in the works began circulating at the end of March, and now we're hearing that an announcement may be planned for the 2012 Holiday Season.

Every photo has a story, and this particular photo has one of the most interesting stories of them all -- a story of anonymous fame, and famous anonymity. To this day the above photo, titled "Firing Squad in Iran," is the only anonymous photo to ever win a Pulitzer Prize. And although the photo was taken in 1979, the photographer behind the lens didn't receive credit until 2006.