If you’ve always wanted to see what a Canon 5D Mark II looks like opened up, you’re in luck. zakums06 over at DCHome converted his 5D Mark II to a mirrorless version for filmmaking purposes, and documented the whole mirror removal surgery:

To see the rest of the 23 photographs zakums06 posted, check out this forum thread. The mirrorless camera can still do photography, but you’ll have to use LiveView since the whole viewfinder system is gone.

Needless to say, don’t try this at home!

(via Canon Rumors)

The Last 3 Minutes is a beautiful short film by cinematographer Shane Hurlbut, the cinematographer of Terminator Salvation. It was shot using the Canon 5D Mark II, and was sponsored by Canon to show off the latest firmware that enables 24p (frames per second) recording, giving it a “movie quality”. Filming spanned 17 locations across 4 1/2 days, and a wide assortment of Canon prime L lenses were used.

The present day portion of the film in the beginning was shot at 24p, while the flashbacks were filmed at 30p and converted to 24p in order to produce a dreamlike quality. You can read more about how the film was made on Hurlbut’s blog.

(via PDNPulse)

The Digital Economy Bill has passed in the UK with a vote of 189 to 47. In spite its initial controversy, many photographers are breathing a sigh of relief.

Before its passage, the bill had stirred up a great deal of unrest in the photo community with a clause that threatened photographers’ copyright ownership, but now many photographers are celebrating the defeat of Clause 43.

Clause 43 alarmed several photographers who feared that their work could become classified as “orphaned work” – a label given to work whose author or owner could not be traced. If a work is “orphaned,” it can fall under Extended Collective Licensing, and thus be legally and freely redistributed.

Given the nature of the digital world in which dissemination of information, particularly photographs, many photographers questioned how easily their work might suddenly become free and available to the public.

Following their victory, the campaign organization stop43.org posted on their blog:

The way is now open for photographers and other creatives to present new thinking enabling the legitimate use of our genuine orphan works for strictly defined non-commercial “cultural” purposes in a way that will satisfy the needs of the cultural sector, to prevent the future orphaning of our work, and to redress defects in current copyright law.

(via Amateur Photographer)

Flickr has its own URL shortening system to make links suitable for things like Twitter. However, for some strange reason, the short URLs to photographs aren’t readily available on the photo pages themselves.

There are some services out there that allow you to quickly generate flic.kr URLs, but I decided to quickly write my own, and called it shortenr.

The service is extremely simple. Simply enter a long Flickr URL to have it shortened, or a short flic.kr URL to have it expanded. It’s also available as a bookmarklet to shorten URLs while you’re on the Flickr photo pages themselves: simply drag this link into your bookmarks: shortenr

If you’d like to see additional features added to this simple app, leave a comment. Hopefully some of you will find this useful.

Google Books, an ambitious project to make millions of physical books searchable online, found itself in yet another legal battle today after photographers followed in the footsteps of authors by launching their own class action lawsuit for copyright infringement.

In 2005, the Authors Guild of America sued Google for copyright infringement due to the fact that Google was scanning massive amounts of copyright material and storing them in its private database. Though Google entered into a settlement agreement in 2008, the judge presiding over the case would not allow other photographers’ groups to be involved in the case.

For this reason, American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) filed its own separate class action lawsuit against Google today, and is joined by a number of other organizations including the North American Nature Photography Association, the Picture Archive Council of America, and Professional Photographers of America.

Like the Authors Guild, the ASMP’s lawsuit deals with the fact that Google is scanning, indexing, and storing copyright work without permission of the copyright holders. The difference is that this new lawsuit focuses on photographs and visual works rather than written text. In a press release posted on its website, the ASMP states,

The suit [...] relates to Google’s illegal scanning of millions of books and other publications containing copyrighted images and displaying them to the public without regard to the rights of the visual creators [...]

We strongly believe that our members and those of other organizations, whose livelihoods are significantly and negatively impacted, deserve to have representation in this landmark issue [...]

We are seeking justice and fair compensation for visual artists whose work appears in the twelve million books and other publications Google has illegally scanned to date. In doing so, we are giving voice to thousands of disenfranchised creators of visual artworks whose rights we hope to enforce through this class action.

Furthermore, the ASMP states that the lawsuit is not limited to Google’s Library Project, but includes “Google’s other systematic and pervasive infringements of the rights of photographers, illustrators and other visual artists.”

While this is a pretty vague statement, we reported last month that Google had begun including copyrighted photographs from websites such as Flickr in its Maps application.

What are your thoughts on Google’s projects and how they impact copyright holders? Have photographers’ lives been “significantly and negatively impacted” by Google’s activities?

Image credit: In Google We Trust by sonicbloom

Yale University has announced the acquisition of American photographer Lee Friedlander‘s archive, and 2,000 prints from his collection. The joint acquisition by Yale’s Art Gallery and Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library involves over 40,000 rolls of film and contact sheets by the prolific photographer.

So far, 2010 has been a year of big photographic acquisitions. Just over a month ago, billionaire Michael Dell’s investment firm purchased Magnum’s entire press print archive, which was then relocated to the University of Texas at Austin.

Image credit: Friedlander by -will wilson-

A common gripe about the iPad is that it doesn’t contain a built-in camera. Developer Yusuke Sekikawa saw this need, and wrote two applications that allow an iPhone 3GS to be used as an iPad camera.

Here’s what you need to do: download the CAMERA-A app ($0.99) onto your iPad, the CAMERA-B app (free) onto your iPhone 3Gs, connect the devices via Bluetooth or WiFi, open the apps, and voila! The iPhone should be function as an external camera for your iPad, allowing you to take photos using your iPad.

If you have trouble with the link, try disabling Wifi.

Camera for iPad is another app set that uses an iPhone as an iPad camera. While the $0.99 app will allow you to use a non-3Gs iPhone, it doesn’t capture images on the iPad directly, but transfers them to the iPad when taken.

Future apps might use this same iPhone/iPad setup for video chatting — something that wasn’t possible with a non-forward facing built-in camera.

(via Gizmodo)

Image credit: Shoot iPad Photos Using iPhone by Photo Giddy

A photograph of a Canon 7D with firmware version 1.2.0 has appeared before any official word of the update from Canon. It was posted to POTN by forum member garycoleman, who says,

My 7D came from the Canon headquarters in NY because it was a replacement for my defective one. The serial starts with 077xxxxxxxx and has firmware 1.2.0 which I find interesting because the Canon only goes up the 1.1.0 on their webpage. Maybe 1.2.0 is going to be released any day now?

Canon Rumors reports that the firmware update will fix problems related to third party batteries, and adds support for future remotes, accessories, and lenses.

It doesn’t look like the firmware update will be a big deal, but it’s interesting that it appeared in the wild from Canon before any official announcement was made.

Earlier today, photographer Chase Jarvis announced his partnership with creativeLIVE, a free, live online class site. Each class presentations is filmed live, to an in-person audience in Seattle, and streamed on the creativeLIVE website.

“The goal here is to help democratize creativity,” Jarvis wrote on his blog.

Jarvis said that he had been working on the site for the past year, in order to create a live, interactive classroom.  As an innovative model, Jarvis is offering the actual live, streaming footage for free, but the recorded versions of past classes must be purchased. The revenue goes towards supporting the site and the instructors.

The growing list of instructors boasts some pretty big names: Vincent Laforet tweeted that he will be leading a live three-day HDSLR workshop at the end of the month, and Zack Arias said he will be leading a studio class.

The calendar of upcoming webcasts and course list are available on the creativeLIVE site.

Instructor John Greengo is currently leading a 10-week Fundamentals of Digital Photography class, which began today.

Update: Here’s a short video announcement by Jarvis:

As more and more people are ditching compact cameras for their camera-equipped phones, it’s clear these hybrid devices will be playing a big role in casual imaging in the years to come. One of the leaders in this space is the Apple iPhone, which boasts countless applications that improve and customize the photography that can be done with it.

Some recent events have shed a little light into the direction Apple may be headed.

The first clue is a recent job posting on Apple’s website with the job title “Performance QA Engineer, iPad Media”:

The Media Systems team is looking for a software quality engineer with a strong technical background to test still, video and audio capture and playback frameworks. Build on your QA experience and knowledge of digital camera technology (still and video) to develop and maintain testing frameworks for both capture and playback pipelines.

Given that the iPad does not currently offer any kind of photo or video capture, this suggests that camera(s) may appear in the next iPad.

Furthermore, Electronista is reporting that sensor corp OmniVision may play a role in future Apple devices:

OmniVision executives today gave JP Morgan analyst Paul Coster hints that they may have deals for cameras in next-generation Apple devices. After a discussion, Coster understood that ‘top-tier smart phone companies’ would move from three-megapixel cameras to five in the second half of the year. He added that OmniVision was “well-positioned” to provide camera sensors for both the new iPhone and even the next iPad, which in its initial form doesn’t have any cameras.

At the beginning of the year, we reported that OmniVision had developed a 14.6 megapixel sensor for cell phones that is also capable of high-definition video recording.

The iPad is a bit to big to be a carry-around point-and-shoot replacement, so any camera that appears on it might be more geared towards video chatting, while we might see the quality of iPhone photography skyrocket in the near future.

Image credit: iPad Girl by ajstarks