Equipment

The Triggertrap name has appeared on PetaPixel many times before: from the very early days of v1 on Kickstarter, to an interview with CEO Haje Kamps, to the release of Triggertrap Mobile and beyond. Now we have another exciting reason to write about Triggertrap, and that reason is called Redsnap.

Redsnap is the evolution of the original Triggertrap V1 that was so successful on Kickstarter, and what it provides that the v1 didn't is infinite expandability through attachable sensors. It is, according to Triggertraps description, "one of the fastest, easiest to use, and most affordable high-speed flash and camera triggers money can buy."

Admittedly, the a7 and a7R have sort of stolen the show when it comes to camera announcements today, but those two weren't the only shooters Sony debuted. The company is also adding another camera to high-end RX Cybershot lineup. Jointing the full-frame RX1 and the popular RX100MII is the RX10: a high-performance superzoom.

After all of the anticipation, rumors and leaks we sincerely hope the announcement still has you excited, because Sony has finally made the long-awaited a7 and a7R official. That's right, the cameras once known only as the "NEX Full-Frame" have finally arrived, with full specs, press photos and a lens and accessory lineup to prove it.

We told you about the upcoming Panasonic GM1 back in September when the rumors first surfaced, but now we have the first leaked photos of the camera that intends to claim the title of "world's smallest interchangeable lens camera" without compromising on quality.

It's hard to look at  the spec sheet on the upcoming Sony A7 and A7r mirrorless compacts and not be impressed. With a 36 MP full-frame sensor (on the A7r), compact body, interchangeable lens system, and a price tag that undercuts most full-frame DSLR's by a good margin, some will be tempted to call it the perfect camera on its expected announcement date of October 16th.

A few might agree with that sentiment, but a better way to look at Sony's newest wunderkind is as a manifestation of the trend towards diversification in the digital camera market.

Another leak sprung over the weekend -- if, that is, you believe it's a leak and not a strategic move by the company. This one, however, doesn't have to do with an upcoming camera, but rather some new glass. It's the first official-looking photo of the rumored Sigma 24-105mm f/4 lens.

Over the weekend, we got our first official glimpse at what the Sony A7 full-frame E-Mount mirrorless camera looked like. But that uber-blurry image has been replaced by a few official-looking full-sized photos that truly show what we have to look forward to.

Patrick over at Fujirumors has published what appear to be the first leaked photos of an upcoming Fujifilm X-E2. Sent to him by an anonymous source, the photos suggest that the camera will have a frontside that's nearly identical to the X-E1.

In my last article, I wrote about the fact that every copy of a given lens has …

Students at a British university may have hit upon the basis for the next generation of image sensors -- a living module based on bio-engineered, light-sensitive bacteria.

The world of camera lenses can be a bit daunting when you first start out, and so a videographer and photographer have joined forces to put together a fun (and funny) introduction to all the basic lens options, what they do, and what situations you might use them in.

Since its spec sheet leaked on Monday, there's been plenty of buzz surrounding Pentax's newly-released K-3 APS-C DSLR. Many are particularly atwitter about the K-3's unique anti-aliasing system, which relies on a vibrating sensor to remove moire-effects. Because it's not filter-based, the effect can be turned off.

Therefore, the K-3 offers the moire-eliminating effect of an anti-aliasing filter when it's needed, and the greater sharpness of a filterless sensor when it's not. Not only do people care about this innovation, but for many it was a cardinal feature of the camera.

If you've been wishing and hoping for Lytro-like 'take now, focus later" technology to appear in smartphones, it looks like a couple of different companies are planning on making that wish come true. Not only did Toshiba announce its own refocusing module just a couple of weeks ago, it seems OPPO will be putting similar tech into their future camera phones too.

Canon's 50mm lens lineup is getting crowded... at least that's what Canon seems to think. According to a fresh rumor, the company has plans to replace the current 50mm f/1.4 USM. But it won't be replaced by another f/1.4. Instead, Canon might do away with the lens altogether and release a high-end 50mm f/1.8 IS USM instead.

There are all kids of systems for clamping a lens onto a phone, but few are as versatile as the Beastgrip, a Kickstarter project about halfway to delivery stage. Not only will the gadget work with just about any smartphone, it'll also adapt lenses and other accessories you may already have for your SLR.

We've heard a lot about the one-of-a-kind Jonathan Ive-designed Leica M as rumors turned to official word that the camera would be auctioned off at a (RED) auction in November, but until now, we had no clue what the thing actually looked like.

Those who loved the D600 (and why wouldn't you, it's a great camera) will have no reason to dislike the D610, but Nikon might not have given you enough reason to upgrade either. The new shooter, which was unveiled at midnight last night, is a marginal improvement on the D600 that adds just a few new or improved features.

The K-3 webpage leaked yesterday (and along with it much of the information we now have) but now we're done with leaks and rumors: Ricoh Imaging's Pentax K-3 is official. A beastly APS-C shooter with a stacked spec sheet, the camera is sure to please serious photographers.

Samsung seems to be hard at work making sure that smartphone camera quality continues to improve in leaps and bounds. In addition to debuting ISOCELL technology a couple of weeks ago, the company has now announced a new smartphone camera module that will offer twice the optical image stabilization of anything on the market, while also capturing better photos in low light.

ZEISS announced that it was working on a new line of ultra-high-quality lenses last year. These lenses were being designed from the ground up to provide unmatched optical performance for high-resolution full-frame cameras like Nikon's D800.

Well, the first fruits of all that labor have finally arrived on digital shelves in the form of the Distagon 55mm f/1.4 Otus: a lens ZEISS promises will perform better for you than anything else on the market... assuming you can afford it.

We've said it before and we'll say it again, October is looking to be a big month for camera announcements. And of course, along with announcements come leaks. Case in point: the upcoming Pentax K-3 isn't supposed to be announced for another 24 hours or so, but someone at Ricoh accidentally let the webpage go live briefly.

Photography has a rich history that is really fun to peer back into once in a while when you have a spare minute to stop oogling over the next piece of gear (*cough* NEX full-frame *cough*) that'll steal your heart and most of the funds in your bank account.

On that note, check out this awesome old review of the Pentax Spotmatic. It was written in 1965 by the late Fred Springer-Miller, and it might make you think twice before you take today's technology for granted.

Medium-format, questionable build and instant prints? Lomography has hit yet another trifecta with the new Diana F+ Instant Film, a low-fi shooter that adds instant printing capability to one of the company's most popular models.

Now that we're a few days into October, it's time to start getting ready for some serious camera announcement mania. And, if your comments are to be trusted, the camera that will make the biggest splash will be Sony's NEX full-frame (or rather full-frames). So here's a rumor roundup that brings together everything we know so far.

With all of these upcoming digital camera announcements rumored for October, nobody was paying particular attention to GoPro until today, when the company unveiled the followup to its popular Hero3, the Hero3+ -- a smaller, lighter and more capable new offering for adventure junkies everywhere.

The big camera companies get criticized fairly often for failing to innovate, but Nikon at least has been giving us a lot to write about recently in the patent department. Case in point: the Japanese company has just filed a patent for a camera that will allow you to swap out, not lenses, but sensors.

As the battle for cameraphone supremacy rages on, companies want to win over amateur and professional shooters alike. That's not to say that Nokia or Apple expects you to replace your SLR with a Lumia 1020 or iPhone 5S, but they would probably love to claim that "most professional photographers use our phone."

To that effect, Nokia has put together this video showing how its own camera expert Ari Partinen managed to pull off a real studio portrait shoot using only the Lumia 1020 and some synced external flashes.

Researchers at the University of California-San Diego are fine-tuning some new tiny camera technology that could dramatically boost the detail and field of view of smartphone cameras. Joseph Ford, a professor in the university's Jacob School of Engineering, describes the system in a paper to be presented next week at the Optical Society of America's annual meeting.

According to Ford, his team will soon have the system -- seen above next to a Canon 5D Mark III setup -- refined to a camera assembly with 85-megapixel resolution, 120-degree field of view and f/2 aperture, all in a package about the size of a walnut.

Each year, the WestLicht Photographica auction house puts some incredible historic cameras on the block and lets us mere mortals "oh" and "ah" at them before some collector with deep pockets plunks down hundreds of thousands of dollars to take them home (where they will, of course, be used daily right?...).

So far, the title of world's smallest interchangeable lens camera fell (for the most part) to the cameras in the Pentax Q-series -- starting with the Q, then the Q10 and finally the most recent Q7. But that title won't be held by Pentax (or is it RICOH?) for much longer. If rumors are to be believed, October will see the release of the Panasonic GM1, which will claim the title for itself.

High resolution, super slow-motion video is usually reserved for movie studios or individuals with very deep pockets. Once the frame rate capabilities reach into the thousands, the price range often hits the tens of thousands.

Two MIT-trained engineers are looking to change all that, and with their new edgertronic super slow motion camera, they've done just that.

Last month, we reported on a rumor that Nikon's upcoming D610 DSLR will simply be a D600 clone that fixes the sensor speck issue that some owners grumbled about a while back. Now, a newly leaked set of camera specs seems to confirm that initial report.

Collecting vintage equipment isn't an uncommon hobby among photography and camera enthusiasts, but it is one that has apparently gotten one Ukrainian man in trouble with the law. A well-known collector and dealer named Alexandr Komarov (seen above) was recently arrested for possessing decades-old Soviet spy cameras, and now faces up to 7 years in prison for the offense.

Engineers at Ohio State University have imitated aspects of human and insect eyes to create what may turn out to be the next big advance in camera lens technology.

Anyone interested in shooting photos or videos using continuous light without breaking the bank has likely looked at purchasing or building a lighting setup based around CFL bulbs. Earlier in the year, I decided to go this route myself because I film interviews and generally prefer the way that soft continuous light reacts with a subject's pupils and comfort levels for photography.

The popular mobile triggering solution Triggertrap just announced version 2.0 of its mobile application, complete with a visual overhaul and a total of 14 triggering options that promise to "make advanced photographic techniques available to everyone -- even photographic newbies."

We told you yesterday to watch out for a "rugged" Nikon 1 announcement in the next 24-hours, and lo and behold, it happened. Introducing the Nikon 1 AW1, a camera Nikon is calling "the world's first waterproof and shockproof interchangeable lens camera," with a convenient asterisk added in for those of us who remember the Nikonos system.

Hey, not everybody wants a homemade gun. So how about using that 3D printer you've borrowed to make your own home-brew point-and-shoot digital camera?

DIY portal Instructables now has directions to do just that, thanks to creator Randy Sarafan's plans -- including a downloadable template to print the body -- and RadioShack's mighty JPEG Color Camera Board to go inside. The final product would make a fine companion to the OpenReflex 3D-printable film SLR for those ready to go digital.

The Bonzart Lit should look somewhat familiar since we shared its big brother, the Ampel, with you back in June. But even though the toy camera-style design is the same, the two cameras offer very different experiences.

The Ampel was a not-quite-toy camera with a tilt-shift lens built in, whereas the Lit is a very-much-toy camera that offers a fun and strictly non-professional photo experience on the cheap.

Adobe made several announcements yesterday, and one of the most talked about revolved around projects Napoleon and Mighty, the digital ruler and pressure sensitive stylus the company debuted in early May.

Back then, both pieces of hardware were basically prototypes in the "technology exploration" phase, but now Adobe has announced that Mighty and Napoleon will be hitting store shelves in the first half of 2014, and they won't be alone. Two accompanying iOS apps -- Parallel and Contour -- are being designed as well.

In conjunction with the iPhone 5S debut, Apple also announced that the phone -- or more importantly, it's camera -- would be put to the test at luxury fashion house Burberry's London fashion show. And now that the show is over, the duo is sharing photos and videos taken with the phone to whet your appetite for the September 20th release.

Fujifilm has some very capable X-Mount shooters in its repertoire, and today that repertoire grows with the addition of the X-A1 entry-level X-Mount interchangeable lens camera. After months of rumors and photo leaks, the official camera is finally here.

For those people who are fed up with constantly wiping water drops off of their lens when shooting in rainy weather, Tokina has a pretty ingenious solution for you: a hydrophilic "rain dispersion filter."

We told you about it in March of 2012, but the Digital Bolex D16 Cinema RAW camera only just made it into a few choice cinematographers hands this month, giving them a chance to put together sample footage that'll make the videographers out there salivate.

SanDisk made it clear last September that it would not be pursuing the XQD memory card format, but instead would focus its energies on CFast 2.0, the then newly-announced high-speed CompactFlash spec.

Almost a year later, SanDisk has finally debuted the fruits of that decision: a card that is both the world's first CFast 2.0 card, and the world's fastest memory card of any kind.

I get asked a couple of questions every time I publish a graph showing Imatest results for multiple copies of lenses like the one below. Most people understand that some copy-to-copy variation is inevitable in the manufacturing process. Most are surprised, though, at how large the sample variation seems to be. Heck, I was surprised at how large the sample variation was when I started doing this kind of testing.

ExpoImaging has just announced a new DSLR attachment for the amateur photographer who wants better flash capability, but doesn't feel the need to buy an external flash. It's called the Rogue Safari Pop-Up Flash Booster, and once mounted to your Canon or Nikon SLR, it promises to provide up to 8x more light and a lot more range from your less-than-capable pop-up flash.

Recent rumors have hinted that Canon might be making a move into medium format -- be that by investing heavily in a medium format manufacturer or building its own camera -- but a new patent seems to indicate that Nikon is at least thinking about it as well.

jstream.PlayerFactoryIF.create({
base: "eqa292biws.eq.webcdn.stream.ne.jp/www50/eqa292biws/jmc_pub/jmc_swf/player/",
contract_id: 628,
meta_id: 28,
player_id: 1,
width: 620,
height: 349
});

Please enable JavaScript to watch this content.

Back in March, Canon announced that it was working on a special 35mm low-light sensor that would blow away all other competition when it came to seeing things in near complete darkness. In order to further prove that point, the company sent a prototype out to shoot tiny fireflies in less than 0.01lux on Japan's Ishigaki Island.

It's more or less a given these days that cameras are everywhere and privacy is a quaint notion from the past. But it turns out that people were already starting to feel that way in the 1880s, when advancing technology allowed the production of cameras small and fast enough to be hidden by the user and produce shots of unprecedented candidness.