gigantic

You didn’t ask to learn about bellows extension factors, but we're going to cover it with the most absurd camera that you may ever see!

If you want to own photographer Peter Lik's epic photo book Equation of Time, you'll need a lot of money and a lot of space: the gigantic photo book costs $2,950 (for the open edition) and weighs in at 106 pounds (~48kg).

There are perks to doing your PhD on optical studies of the aurora, and among them is that you might just stumble across a very exotic lens like the De Oude Delft 105mm f/0.75 in the cabinets of the research group you're working with.

That's what happen to photographer Jason Ahrns, and although they wouldn't let him buy the lens, he was allowed to take it home on an extended loan and try to put this monster through its paces.

If Optimus Prime ever decided to retire from saving Earth and take up photography as a hobby, this is one camera he might consider using. Called the Hyper Suprime-Cam, it's a 870-megapixel ultra-wide-field camera that stands 3 meters (~10 feet) high and weighs in at 3 tons. The comparison illustration above shows what the camera looks like next to a 5.2-foot-tall girl.

Check out this photo of a gigantic Canon 9.3-930mm broadcast lens mounted to a tiny Panasonic GH2 mirrorless camera. The size difference is so great that it might be more accurate to say that the camera is mounted to the lens.

SigZilla is gone now. You’ll be able to see its work in action if you watch the World Series. I wouldn’t be surprised if you catch a glimpse of it mounted to FOX’s Vision Research camera. Before it left, though, we were able to -- with a great deal of difficulty -- get it mounted in the lab and run one basic Imatest series.

Sigma's 200-500mm telephoto lens is so large (2.3 feet long and 34.6 pounds) and so expensive ($26,000) that many people just can't take it seriously. Last year we shared some hilarious customer reviews that poked fun at "the green monster." If you've been wondering how the lens actually looks, works, and performs, the folks over at LensRentals recently purchased a copy of the lens for their inventory and snapped some behind-the-scenes photos of their initial tests.

The folks over at Tucson, Arizona-based ArtsEye Gallery love the Holga so much, that decided to create a gigantic version of the plastic 120 format toy camera for an annual photo competition they host. They were originally planning to create it as a fun prop, but midway through the construction process, they had the brilliant idea of making it as a functioning camera.

For his project Vanishing Cultures, photographer Dennis Manarchy is traveling around the country documenting various cultures with a one-of-a-kind, 35-foot-long camera called "Eye of America". Styled like an old fashioned large format camera, it's so large that a person can work comfortably inside it. The negatives measure 6x4.5 feet, and are so large that windows must be used as lightboxes to examine them. The detail in a portrait subjects' eyeball alone is a thousand times greater than what you get with the average negative. Resulting portraits will be featured on prints 2 stories tall.

Back in September we featured a project called This Was Found that promotes art by leaving framed prints out and about in the UK. Now, printing company Jondo is taking it to the next level with a project called Art Heist. They've left 26 gigantic, museum-quality 40x60inch canvases in various secret locations around Los Angeles. Find one, and you're free to take it home. Just make sure you have a good way of bringing home the massive photo!

Last year Canon announced the world’s largest CMOS sensor — an 8-inch chip that’s 40 times the …

Jolayne Attwood (jolayne on Flickr) was at the International Photography Fair in Bièvres earlier this year when she came across this gigantic Instamatic 133 camera. There's no covert street photography or shooting from the hip with this baby.

Obviously, what we have here is a brilliant conversation piece.

At the Glastonbury Festival this past weekend, a giant panoramic photograph containing 70,000+ attendees was snapped during the halftime of an England World Cup match. Afterward, the photo was put online and opened up to tagging via Facebook Connect. Since then, over 2,500 faces in the photograph have been tagged, making it (unofficially) the most tagged photo in the world.

If you have an extra $45,000 lying around, you might still be able to purchase the Canon 5200mm f/14 lens that was listed on eBay last month. It ended on December 14th with 0 bids (I wonder why...).