cool

A company called Lytro has just launched with $50 million in funding and, unlike Color, the technology is pretty mind-blowing. It's designing a camera that may be the next giant leap in the evolution of photography -- a consumer camera that shoots photos that can be refocused at any time. Instead of capturing a single plane of light like traditional cameras do, Lytro's light-field camera will use a special sensor to capture the color, intensity, and vector direction of the rays of light (data that's lost with traditional cameras).

[...] the camera captures all the information it possibly can about the field of light in front of it. You then get a digital photo that is adjustable in an almost infinite number of ways. You can focus anywhere in the picture, change the light levels — and presuming you’re using a device with a 3-D ready screen — even create a picture you can tilt and shift in three dimensions. [#]

Try clicking the sample photograph above. You'll find that you can choose exactly where the focus point in the photo is as you're viewing it! The company plans to unveil their camera sometime this year, with the goal of having the camera's price be somewhere between $1 and $10,000...

We shared a video of Canon’s Image Stabilization technology in action in the beginning of the year, …

What if you could take perfect group photographs by first shooting multiple frames and then selecting the best portions …

Hacker Rob Flickenger wasn’t satisfied with ordinary …

Photographer Gary Cruz is one lucky dude — not only did he get …

Photographer Ian Richardson made this paper camera out of the novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens, with a small glass pot serving as the lens.

Here's a neat photo project for you to try: find a friend who loves photography just as much as you do, and share a roll of film. After one person finishes using up a roll, rewind it and send it to the other person. That's what photographers Lexi and Natalie did with their project Exposed Far Away.

With HD video cameras getting smaller and smaller, people are constantly attaching them to random things to give us …

Photographer Matthew Nicholson created this paper Leica M3 that's a working pinhole camera. It's loaded with 35mm film, and even the strap is realistic and made with paper!

How do camera makers describe their cameras? To answer this question, we took the press releases of some popular cameras and made word clouds with them that are based on the number of occurrences of non-common words. The above word cloud is for the Canon 5D Mark I.

Bryce Bell of cardnetics created this business card design that features a built-in …

Did you know that you can turn any wall magnetic by painting it with magnetic primer? Communications company M Booth did this with one of its walls, then sent out employees onto the streets of NYC with Fujifilm Instax cameras. The result is this impressive wall displaying 800 instant photos!

What you see above is the inside of the world's largest pinhole camera measuring 45x160x80 feet. It's an abandoned airplane hangar in Irvine, California that was converted over the course of two months into a gigantic pinhole camera. 24,000 square feet of plastic, 1,300 gallons of foam filler, 1.52 miles of tape, and 40 cans of spray paint went into darkening the hangar.

Vodafone recently ran a pretty creative advertising campaign called “Pixel Hunt” for the purpose of illustrating how many pixels …

Photographer Darren Samuelson spent seven months building a massive homemade large-format camera that's about six-feet-long when fully extended. He shoots with 14×36-inch x-ray film that's about 1/12th the cost of ordinary photographic film but much harder to develop.

Inspired by Todd McLellan’s photos of disassembled gadgets, electrician and photography addict …

Camera innards are often shown in cross section diagrams, but here’s a Sony Alpha camera and lens that were …

Reddit user Bryce Hoeper recently broke an old Zeiss Ikon Contina L he purchased for $7 from Goodwill after it took a nasty tumble down some stairs. After being bummed for a while, he stumbled upon Timur Civan's experiment with sticking a 102-year old lens on a modern DSLR, and decided to attempt the same thing. He spent a few hours taking apart the camera body to extract the lens, then super glued it to a Canon body cap that he cut a hole in, allowing the lens to be mounted to his Canon 5D Mark II.

If colleges offered camera equipment anatomy classes, this Leica lens cutaway might be one of the things you'd be examining in the lab. It's a Leica Tri-Elmar-M 28-35-50mm sliced cleanly down the middle, revealing all the glass and pieces inside that go into making the lens.

Photography studio StaudingerFranke created this mind-boggling image of a Polaroid OneStep Land Camera …

Hong Kong-based camera enthusiast TM Wong has 1000+ instant cameras in his collection -- possibly the world's largest collection. That's enough cameras to use a different one each day for nearly three years!

If you thought the Polaroid beeswax candle we shared yesterday was cool, check out this candle designed …

There's a lot of paranoia when it comes to doing photography in and around airports these days -- much to the dismay of plane spotters -- but wedding photographer and airplane enthusiast Lynn-Kai Chao came up with a neat way to do airplane photography without worrying the TSA: by using airplane models. Believe it or not, the above photograph is actually a Photoshopped photograph of Chao holding a model airplane.

If you have an instant camera, have you ever tried taking digital photos of the prints right after you made them? For his series titled "Instax Windows", Shawn McClung carries around a digital camera and snaps a digital photo of his Fuji Instax prints right after they're taken, with the scene in the print lined up with the real world.

Photographer Chuck Miller got his hands on a roll of Super-XX 120 government surplus film from eBay with an expiration date of May 1959 -- film that's 50+ years old and, as Miller notes, older than the Los Angeles Angels baseball team.

Photographer Cary Norton built a working 4x5 large format camera using Lego bricks, a 127mm lens he purchased for $40 on eBay, and a film holder and ground glass in the back.

Here's an idea: find a bunch of photography-lovin' friends, borrow their DSLR cameras, and shoot your own Matrix-style bullet time videos from home! The above video shows a workshop where they were able to bring together 24 cameras for this awesome purpose.

YouTube user haakvi was taking pictures of a small lake near Oslo, Norway …

Using Lego pieces, Flickr user and Lego fan Larry Lars created an uber-accurate miniature version of his home photo studio. Maybe this could be a new method of creating lighting diagrams?

So this is what the new Fujifilm Finepix X100 camera looks like when it's completely disassembled...