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Google's Street View cameras have gone to the ends of the Earth, from under the sea to desolate deserts, in order to document the world in photos. The project is grand, but its latest effort is on a much smaller scale -- literally.

The company just announced Street View for the famous Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany, the world's largest model railway. To shoot the images, Google mounted tiny cameras to tiny vehicles (they also had a tiny Street View car look-alike drive around).

Check out this pint-sized Sony a7R II mirrorless camera. No, Sony didn't decide to release a new miniature version of the highly-acclaimed camera. What you see is actually an extremely detailed USB drive.

Here's a fascinating video about how photographer Michael Paul Smith creates and photographs Elgin Park, a 20th century town created through miniature 1/24th-scale models. Smith creates incredibly realistic photos by capturing the detailed dioramas with an ordinary compact camera, and his images have gone viral in recent years on the Internet (the project has over 70 million views on Flickr).

Micro-drones are typically thought of as more of a toy rather than a tool. If you want to capture real recreational aerial footage, you buy a bigger, heftier drone, right? Well, not necessarily. ZANO wants to change all that by packing both power and ease of use into a tiny package that measures just 2.5 x 2.5-inches and weighs just over 1.2lbs.

From images of graphene flowers and foam to a portrait of a self-taught engineer fixing one of his elephant pumps that is providing clean water for a village in Malawi, the winning images and other impressive entrants in the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering's photography competition beautifully illustrate how art, science, and humanity mesh.

We've seen and shared LEGO cameras before, but never before today have we seen a camera made from a single 2x2 stud LEGO brick. That, however, is what a Colorado State student recently managed to create.

Tokyo-based artist Satoshi Araki is a man whose eye for the detail is immediately evident when you look at his dioramas... if you can even tell they're dioramas, that is.

For each miniature, Araki painstakingly plans out the layout of his trashed and scattered street scenes and photographs in such a way that, often, you'd be hard-pressed to identify them as dioramas at all..

There is beauty in imperfection. In fact, imperfection might be considered the subject within a subject that photomicrographer Danny Sanchez tirelessly seeks out to create his stunning photography.

Sanchez's main subjects are gemstones, but the colorful, alien 'landscapes' he captures are made up of imperfections called 'inclusions' that actually make a gem less valuable. You might say that one gem merchant's trash is a gem photographer's treasure.

This latest device from technology licensing company Rambus goes to show: when you combine information-gathering sensors with powerful algorithms, you can yield some incredible results.

Developed by research scientist Patrick Gill, this 200 micron diameter glass sensor is capable of capturing an image of remarkable quality for its size. Etched with a spiral pattern, the light reflecting off of whatever object is being "photographed" is transferred as a pattern, in the form of spherical light, to the CMOS sensor.

Samsung is reaching out to the smartphone generation today with the release of its thinnest and lightest interchangeable lens compact yet. Actually, to be more accurate, they're reaching out to the smartphone generation with the thinnest and lightest ILC EVER: the NX Mini.

In about a month's time we might have a new contender for world's thinnest interchangeable lens camera. Leaked images and specs from earlier today indicate that Samsung is working on a new camera dubbed the NX mini, and this cam is going to be tiny indeed.

This is just plain beautiful, no matter which way you slice it. Using the magic of time-lapse photography and microscopy, Vyacheslav Ivanov captured the formation of those ice crystals we call snowflakes that caused so much grief in the northeastern US over the past several weeks.

Photographs of galaxies far far away rarely convey just how large what you're looking at really is -- after all, how can you even fathom something that is measured in light years across. But these photos of the cosmos do an even worse job. By applying the tilt-shift effect in post, these photos show galaxies and nebulae look like they could fit comfortably in the palm of your hand.

Just when we thought we were done with all the teasers, it looks like Canon is picking up where Nikon left off. To be fair, the teaser released by Canon Korea today is an ad, not a video. And chances are there won't be another ad every other day until the camera comes out... but who knows.

Either way, we have another camera to anticipate, and Canon is teasing this one with the words, "Canon will start from the white world."

Small interchangeable lens cameras (ILCs) usually come with small sensors and a diminutive spec list. Take the Pentax Q7 for example, its 1/1.7-inch sensor was a big (or rather a small) deterrent for serious photographers who want a small yet capable camera of their own.

Fortunately for those photographers, however, Panasonic has their back with the newly-announced GM1. It's not, as previously rumored, the world's smallest ILC, but it isn't far off, and it does grab the title of smallest Micro Four Thirds (MFT) camera.

It wasn't long ago that Canon revamped its compact line-up, adding a new flagship compact G16 and a few minor other updates. Now, just a few weeks behind, Nikon is doing something similar by announcing a new flagship prosumer point-and-shoot, an ultra-portable compact and a movie light for the Nikon 1-series mirrorless cameras.

If you ever get a chance to visit the National Media Museum in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, be sure to check out the Kodak history area, which contains various Kodak cameras that appeared in the history of photography. One of the exhibits is the "Queen Mary's Doll's House Camera," an amazing 1/8th-scale replica of an old Kodak 2C Brownie. As if the detail of the camera weren't enough, here's the kicker: the model is actually a fully functional camera!

For his most recent album Immunity, musician Jon Hopkins wanted to create visuals that would match the colors he sees in his mind when he's composing his music. The thing was, he would rather they not be computer generated -- his music is organic, he wanted the visuals to match.

Enter photographer Linden Gledhill and art director Craig Ward. In partnership with The Creators Project, they came up with a solution: use abstract imagery of things that happen on a microscopic scale.

How old were you when you first started working with Photoshop? 14-year-old Natick, Massachusetts-based photographer and retoucher Zev has been at it for 6 years now, which means he first picked up his camera and laid his mouse cursor on Photoshop's Toolbox when he was just eight years old!

Just like the human eye, the arthropod eye is a marvel of natural engineering. But unlike human eyes, insect eyes approach seeing very differently. Instead of a curved lens focusing an image onto a plane of rods and cones, insects have curved eyes covered by "ommatidia," each acting as a tiny pixel.

In a paper published today in the scientific journal Nature, a team of researchers from the U.S., South Korea, Singapore and China announced that they have managed to create a camera that mimics that type of eye -- and all of its advantages and pitfalls along with it.

The all-mighty selfie has gained a lot of ground over the years -- even the Mars Rover Curiosity is doing it -- but high-quality has never been its trademark. This is due, in part, to the horrible quality of most front facing smartphone cameras. Having to sandwich a sensor between a whole mess of other stuff leaves little to beef up quality.

OmniVision aims to solve that space issue, and it's doing so by packing a whole lot of power into an itsy bitsy sensor: the newly announced OV2724.

JTT has released what looks to be the smallest consumer night vision camera in existence. About the size of your typical CF card, the CHOBi CAM 3 can snap 11MP photos and take 1080p video for up to 120 minutes on a charge -- and it does it all in the dark.

Are you a fan of small things? UK-based photo enthusiast Greg Dash is trying to launch "the world's first digital Lomo-fisheye." It's a pint-sized digital toy camera that packs a 170-degree fisheye lens.

Canadian photographer Joel Robison regularly creates surreal self-portraits that show what his life might be like if he found himself on the receiving end of a shrink ray. The conceptual photo-manipulations show him interacting with objects that are suddenly the size of trucks. In one image he is seen sitting on a Christmas tree next to some body-sized ornaments. In another, he's exploring a globe while perched on top of a bottle of Coke.

Model train enthusiasts often photograph their miniature locomotives placed in realistic dioramas, but for his project titled "The Canadian: Ghost Train Crossing Canada," photographer Jeff Friesen decided to use the real world as a backdrop. He photographs the train in various outdoor locations across Canada to capture its scenic journey. In some of the photos, its difficult to tell that the train is a tiny model rather than the real thing. Friesen says that his goal was to document the beauty of his huge country in a creative way.

Some photographers have made names for themselves by creating and photographing extremely detailed dioramas: miniature tabletop scenes that are so realistic that viewers often mistake them for the real world. Belgian photographers Maxime Delvaux and Kevin Laloux of 354 Photographers have put an interesting spin on the diorama photo concept by Photoshopping real people into their miniature scenes. The series is titled "Box".

Projecteo is what you would get if you crossed a View-Master with a carousel slide projector and then miniaturized the love child using a shrink ray. It's a tiny LED-illuminated, battery-powered projector that takes in wheels created from 35mm slide film. Each wheel holds 9 photographs, and focusing the resulting image is done by twisting the lens barrel on the tiny gadget.

You've probably seen macro photographs of everything from bugs to blooms, but have you seen any of ocean waves? That's the niche that Australian photographer Deb Morris has carved out for herself, and it's working out quite nicely.

Big Appetites is a project by photographer Christopher Boffoli that features miniature people living in a world of giant food. The subjects are seen mining for strawberry seeds, chopping up giant blocks of chocolate, and lobster wrangling. Each of the figures (meant for miniature train models) are hand-painted with meticulous detail.

Etsy shop Tyndall's Polymerclay sells earphone jack accessories shaped like tiny DSLRs. The plugs are based on popular camera models (e.g. Canon 5D, Nikon D90, Nikon D3), and are created from polymer clay for the body and resin for the lens.