If you're the proud owner of a Wi-Fi-connected digital camera, there's something you need to be aware of: your camera could be used to spy on you.
At the hacker conference Shmoocon 2013 last month, German security researchers Daniel Mende and Pascal Turbing reported on findings that Internet-connected cameras can easily be exploited and turned into spy cams.
Holsters are becoming pretty popular for keeping camera gear on your hip and at the ready, and now Washington-based gear company Rhino Camera Gear wants to bring the concept to batteries. It has unveiled a new product that's designed to cut a few seconds out of the time it takes you to switch out empty batteries for fresh ones.
The accessory is called the Rhino Battery Holster, and moves your juiced batteries from inside your camera bag to your side.
This camera is a poor man's large format camera. It is made with a simple shoebox acting as a dark room.
Photographer Váncsa Domokos created a neat do-it-yourself camera accessory that uses optical fibers to control the direction and intensity of a flash unit's light. Instead of having light come directly out of the flash unit, the accessory redirects it through a thick bundle of optical fibers, allowing you to point the light in any direction -- and in different directions if you'd like.
The hearts of many a film photographer sank last June when it was reported that Fujifilm would soon be killing off most of its Velvia film lines, including all off the sheet film lines, leaving only 35mm and 120 format films for Velvia 50. If you're one of the people who went out and began stockpiling the film for future use, here's some good (and perhaps bad?) news for you: reports of Velvia's death were greatly exaggerated.
Faced with another birthday party at Chuck E Cheese, a place my daughter loves but low ISOs do not, I decided to get creative. I shot a collection of photos with a set of three Yongnuo YN-560 and YN-560 II flashes with a diffuser cap/"omni bounce" inside of small lampshades placed along the table.
New cameras are like new computers. Both of them depreciate quite quickly as new technologies and new models are churned out year after year. This presents a perpetual problem for photographers, as many constantly grapple with the question of whether to upgrade their camera to a more recent model, or whether to purchase a higher-end model so that it keeps its value longer.
Market research software company Terapeak recently did a study that looks at depreciation in Canon EOS DSLRs. The results are pretty interesting.
Fujifilm has announced two new consumer-level cameras that go extreme in different ways. The first is the new FinePix XP200, a new rugged cameras for outdoor environments. The second is the FinePix S8400W, a bridge camera that packs a massive zoom for photographers who are always shooting faraway subjects.
Swiss photography duo Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs were featured here in April of last year for their DIY large format camera created out of a stack of books. It turns out books aren't the only things the two are making cameras with: they also have cameras that mix the worlds of taxidermy and photography.
For their project titled Camera Collection, Onorato and Krebs created one-of-a-kind cameras out of extremely unusual things -- including an armadillo (shown above).
One week ago, we reported that Canon had sent out spy-style projector pens that teased an upcoming PowerShot announcement. Well, that announcement came yesterday alongside the two new entry-level DSLRs that were unveiled (the SL1 and the T5i).
It's the new PowerShot SX280 HS, a camera that may not look too special on the outside, but packs something quite interesting on the inside: Canon's next generation DIGIC 6 processor.
In the past, we've shared how you can create a cheap and simple rain cover for your camera and lens using a Ziploc bag. While that solution is effective in protecting your gear, it might make it a bit difficult to adjust your lens and operate the rings.
If you'd like a little more access to your lens, you can also create a rain guard using the plastic cylindrical cover that comes with writable optical discs.
Here's a walkthrough of how I hooked up my Android phone to my DSLR. Why did I do this? Because of Dropbox, social media, quick editing for the web, an intervalometer, macro/low-angle photography, an external LCD screen for video, Wi-Fi, and more.
If flashlights can be solar and mechanically powered, why can't digital cameras? Turns out they can. Superheadz Japan has launched a new digital camera called the "Sun & Cloud." It's the world's first digital camera that's capable of generating its own power so that you don't need to constantly be worrying about battery drain and recharging.
Newer Leica lenses have a special lens code on the mount flange of each lens that informs the camera of what's mounted on it, and allows lens-related EXIF data to be embedded inside photographs. If you have an older Leica lens or a third-party lens on your hands, you might not have this special code, but did you know that you can apply the code manually to a code-less lens using black and white paint?
La Vida Leica! has published a tutorial showing how simple the process is: it only takes around $15 and 15 minutes to do.
Canon's special announcement today is the its tiny new Rebel SL1 DSLR, but it has a second new DSLR to show off. The Rebel T5i succeeds the Rebel T4i (AKA 650D AKA Kiss X6i) as the new flagship Rebel, and is geared toward entry-level photographers.
Canon did a pretty good job of keeping its new tiny DSLR a secret... until last week. One week after rumors of the camera first emerged, Canon has officially announced the Rebel SL1, the world's smallest and lightest DSLR.
This strange looking vintage camera was created by Guangzhou Art Academy student Hu Shaoming, who spent four months disassembling two cameras from the 1930s and 1940s and rebuilding them with a zipper that reveals the inner mechanical components.
Canon's new pint-sized DSLR, the EOS-b/EOS100, leaked onto the web over the past week, but there's a second DSLR that's likely going to be announced around the same time -- and that one has now leaked as well. It'll be called the Rebel T5i, which succeeds the Rebel T4i/650D.
Canon's soon-to-be-announced pint-sized DSLR is now nearly completely leaked. Just days after detailed specs were leaked by Best Buy, two photographs of the camera itself have emerged on the web.
Photographer Florian Knorn recently took a Fastcam SA4 high speed camera -- ordinarily used for observing things like ballistics and fluid dynamics -- and pointed it at a Sony HVL-F58AM flash unit, capturing what a camera flash firing looks like when captured at 500,000 frames per second and then slowed down to to 25fps.
A Nikon Repair Center based in Taiwan reports that it recently repaired a damaged Nikkor lens by boiling it. The lens, an $1,800 Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8, had been accidentally dropped into the ocean and damaged by salt water.
Rumors that Canon has a smaller DSLR on the way gained a big boost this morning when Best Buy leaked the camera's product page, complete with a detailed spec list. The camera -- currently making the rumor rounds under the name "EOS 100D" but labeled EOS-b on the leaked page -- is rumored to make official landfall on either March 21st or 22nd alongside another new EOS.
Memoto has been making an appearance at the SXSW 2013 festival over the past week. When founders arrived at the show last Thursday, they wore two of the tiny lifelogging cameras they've been developing. The devices snapped one photo ever thirty seconds, and the duo soon amassed tens of thousands of point-of-view images capturing the things they were experiencing in Austin, Texas.
If you're curious about the image quality of the wearable cameras, the company has published a set of initial sample photos.
At a launch event in NYC last night, Samsung unveiled its latest flagship smartphone: the Galaxy S4. It's a phone that looks remarkably similar to its predecessor, and one that is heavily geared toward photography. Having just launched a smartphone-style compact camera, the Galaxy Camera, Samsung appears to have stuffed many of the same technologies and features inside this latest smartphone.
A few years ago, photographer Samuel Chapman of The Rocket Factory found himself with an annoying problem on his hands. After purchasing a number of neutral density filters for his DSLR, he found that Nikon's $2,000 14-24mm lens didn't have any good way of being used with a filter.
He had already paid hundreds of dollars each for his fancy filters, so he decided to make a makeshift adapter for the 14-24mm lens... using a sponge. The result is a product Chapman calls the "FX Sponge Filter Holder 5000."
Most high-end digital cameras (not named Ricoh) aren't designed to be modular. If you want a new sensor in your camera, you'll need to buy an entirely new camera. Want to use a different lens system? You're out of luck.
What if there existed a universe in which all the major camera companies came together to form an extremely versatile modular digital camera? That's what Korean designers Dae jin Ahn and Chun hyun Park are attempting to answer with their concept camera design, called Equinox.
Yesterday we reported on a very early stage rumor that Canon may be building an ultra-portable DSLR that packs the punch and form of a DSLR in a body the size of a mirrorless camera. The rumor has heat up overnight, and now there's a first list of leaked specs that offer a better idea of what the camera may be like.
Leica's Hermes edition M9-P is a beautiful camera that comes with a steep price of $50,000. If you don't have a spare 50 Gs lying around waiting to be burned, check out this replica created by Halifax, Nova Scotia-based photographer Chris McVeigh using 114 LEGO pieces. Sure, it may not be functional as a camera, but it's a great conversation piece, and one that you can build yourself at home!
Canon's EOS M mirrorless camera is meant to offer DSLR-caliber image quality inside a compact camera-sized body. However, stuffing an APS-C sensor into a tiny form factor may not be the only way Canon is trying to go small. There are now murmurings that Canon may have a super small DSLR camera in the works for photogs who need a little extra portability.
It’s fairly well known that not all lenses are created equal. Put that in combination with manufacturing variables and lenses don’t always perfectly align with the camera mount. Generally the differences are minor and for the most part negligible, but I buy old Minolta lenses from eBay and I want to get the best bang for buck out of them.
I started making micro adjustments to my lens/camera combinations when I first got Sony’s a77, and have now micro adjusted all my lenses for the a99 and D3. After reading what the Internet had to offer regarding “micro adjustment” or the “fine tune” functions higher level DSLRs offer, I quickly printed off some charts similar to rulers and taped them to my wall to start making adjustments.
Lumio is an innovative new LED light idea that has been making quite a splash over on Kickstarter. Conceived by San Francisco-based industrial designer Max Gunawan, the lamp has raised nearly half a million dollars from nearly 5,000 backers over on Kickstarter -- after an initial goal of just $60,000. It's a lamp that's inspired by the design of a book: open the cover and the light turns on, close it and it shuts off.
Remember that beautiful cardboard Hasselblad created by designer Kelly Angood a couple of years ago and released as a PDF template? If you'd like to build your own but don't want to go through the trouble of printing the design onto cardboard and cutting out the pieces, you'll be glad to know that Angood is working on launching a do-it-yourself kit for the camera.
Facebook is preparing to launch a new smartphone through HTC, and Instagram will be one of the beneficiaries of the partnership. Unwired View has published a leaked list of specs for the "HTC Myst", as it will reportedly be called, which reveals that the photo sharing app will come preinstalled on the phone.
If you're a fan of Leica's digital rangefinders and have been skeptical of DxOMark's ability to determine sensor quality through its rigorous tests, you might want to skip over the lab's newly published test results on Leica's M series sensors.
Here's a thrifty DIY idea courtesy of Netherlands-based photo enthusiast Rob Gipman. After getting rain on his lens a while ago, Gipman decided to take an unwanted piece of water-resistant fleece and make a do-it-yourself covering for his Canon 100-400mm lens.
Carl Zeiss' legendary glass is coming to Fuji X and Sony E mount cameras. If you have an X series or NEX mirrorless camera, you'll soon be able to purchase a 12mm f/2.8, a 32mm f/1.8, or a 50mm f/2.8 macro. In 35mm terms, these lenses are equivalent to 18mm, 48mm, and 75mm lenses, respectively. Here's a sneak peek at what will soon be arriving for your system.
Samsung's upcoming NX1100 has been leaked... by the company itself. Samsung Germany published the camera's full manual this week. While that download page has since been taken offline, an English version of the manual still remains on Samsung USA's website at the time of this post. The manual reveals that the camera will be a minor refresh of the NX1000, which hit store shelves less than a year ago in April 2012.
Fotodiox has announced a new mount system called the RhinoCam that turns a Sony NEX mirrorless camera into a digital back for 645 medium format photography. The kit allows NEX owners to shoot with classic medium format camera lenses to capture 140+ megapixel photos.
Sick and tired of your white Canon L lens clashing with your black lens hood? No? Oh well, Vello's new line of lens hoods probably isn't meant for you. The maker of 3rd party Canon lens hoods has launched three new lens hoods that come in white to match the color of Canon's high-end telephoto lenses.
Rumors are starting to heat up about an upcoming Olympus E-P5, which would be the flagship PEN camera sitting on the highest tier (we briefly covered how Olympus' PEN lines are organized in our recent review of the E-PM2). The latest things being said about the E-P5 is that it will have a new retro design, no viewfinder, and a relatively high price point.
As more and more consumers use their smartphones as their primary camera, camera gear manufacturers have been brainstorming new products designed to mount phones to camera tripods. Universal mounts to this point have largely been focused on ways of gripping the phone securely. The JackPod is a new stupidly simple answer to how to get phones mounted to tripods: it uses the standard headphone jack found on pretty much every smartphone on the market.
Entekaphobia is fear of the number 11. I’m a resolution fanatic. I test every new lens for resolution. For personal use, I’ll choose the lens with higher resolution over the one with creamy bokeh every time. When choosing a camera, I have a (yes, I’m ashamed to admit it, but it’s true) strong tendency to want the most megapixels. I’m a resoholic.
Being a resoholic, I’ve always been somewhat fanatical about apertures. Whenever possible I shoot with the lens stopped down at least one stop to wring the maximum sharpness out of my lens. But I’m always careful not to stop down too far because I was taught, soon after I picked up a camera, that if you stopped down too far the dreaded diffraction softening would kick in.
In addition to announcing a long-overdue lens update and the company's very first APS-C compact, Nikon has also chosen today to update one of the members of its Coolpix performance series. The new P330 replaces the P310 and, in one fell swoop, manages to almost overtake the more expensive P7700 announced in August of last year.
It's not uncommon for digital cameras to have burst modes as fast as 10 frames per second these days -- especially in mirrorless and pellicle mirror cameras -- but do you think you have a good understanding of just how fast 10FPS is? If not, check out this video by YouTube user krnabrnydziobak, who pointed a Phantom Miro eX2 at a Nikon D4 to see what 10FPS looks like when captured at a staggering 1920FPS.
Released in 2001, Nikon's original 80-400mm telephoto zoom lens has consistently made it onto owners' "please update" lists for over a decade. It was the first of Nikon's lenses to feature VR, and though it wasn't without fault, it was a very versatile lens.
Now 12-years in the making, the new AF-S Nikkor 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6G ED VR seeks to add to its predecessor's abilities, while improving on common complaints such as slow focus and the inability to use the auto focus with newer SLRs.
Nikon had quite a surprise for the camera world today, as it announced the new Coolpix A -- the company's first compact camera to sport a massive DX-format sensor.
Underwater photo gear company Backscatter has released a new product that's designed to give photographers peace of mind when diving with expensive camera gear in waterproof housings. Called the AirLock Vacuum System, it's a new device that lets you verify that your housing is completely free of leaks before you take it into the water.
Here's an interesting fusion of analog camera technologies: Kevin over at the Hong Kong-based photo site FilMe figured out how to make his Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera shoot Fujifilm Instax instant photos.
Frustrated with how your camera's CMOS sensor performs in dimly-lit situations? Canon has just announced a new CMOS sensor that'll put a smile on your face. It's a new 35mm full-frame sensor that's designed specifically for capturing video in "exceptionally low-light environments." Canon claims the sensor can capture high quality video with high-sensitivity while keeping noise very low.
Here's how sensitive the new sensor is: it will reportedly be able to see meteor shows, rooms lit with incense sticks, and scenes lit only by moonlight.
Olympus first ushered its PEN brand into the digital age back in 2009 with the E-P1. Since then, the lineup has split into three distinct tiers: the E-P line for standard PEN cameras, the E-PL line for smaller "Lite" models, and the E-PM line for even smaller "Mini" models. Goldilockean photographers can therefore choose the size and feature set most appropriate to their needs (and hands).