After being invented in the early 1800s, photography and cameras have gone through three major eras: the plate era, the film era, and the current digital era. This article is a brief history of photography through the lens of these eras.
This photo is of a woman known as "Aunty Moser," who was possibly 102 years old when she sat for a daguerreotype portrait in 1852, making her one of the earliest-born people to be photographed.
Spinn.Design has launched the Spinn.Design CP.02 camera carrying system on Kickstarter. Made of both a plate and a strap, the company claims it gives photographers a more comfortable way to carry cameras and lets them be ready to shoot at a moment's notice.
If you constantly move your camera from one device to another in the course of your work, you may have experienced the annoyance and inconvenience of different manufacturers offering different plate designs. What they generally have in common, however, is the same standard tripod screw. The folks at Edelkrone used this fact to create the QuickReleaseONE, which the company claims is the world's first universal quick release for switching between plates.
Rumors of a soon-to-arrive iPad Mini are heating up, but one photo gear company has beaten Apple to the "mini" game: Custom SLR announced its new M-Plate Mini today. It's the smaller sibling of the company's M-Plate Pro, which takes up more space because it includes a couple of extra connection points for attaching accessories (e.g. the company's strap and hand-grap strap mount).
There are a number of products out there that connect your strap to your DSLR via the tripod mount, allowing it to swivel, but taking up the mount is an inconvenience for photographers who actually use it regularly with their tripod. San Francisco-based Custom SLR (makers of the C-Loop) has come up with a solution that offers the best of both worlds: the M-Plate.