Gadgets haven’t been doing a good job of staying secret in Vietnam lately. Just a couple days ago an iPhone 4G was found, filmed, and completely disassembled there. Now, photos and details of Sony’s entry level DSLR replacement, the A290, have emerged on Vietnamese forum Tinhte. This camera replaces the A230 reportedly has a 14 megapixel sensor, 3200 max ISO, 2.7 inch LCD screen, and 2.5fps maximum shooting speed.

(via Engadget)

We reported yesterday that Adobe had launched a “Freedom of Choice” ad campaign against Apple, the latest shot in their ongoing battle over Flash. The above nerd joke is supposed to show what it might look like if Apple responded to Adobe with their own advertisement.

(via Laughing Squid)

Image credit: Graphic by @issaco

I started PetaPixel one year ago today during my last few weeks as an undergraduate computer science student at Berkeley. I worked on the blog quite a bit that summer, and in August 2009 I went back to Berkeley for graduate studies in computer science.

Time sure flies by, and I’m graduating with a master’s degree this Sunday. Writing PetaPixel has been an amazing experience so far, and so much has happened in the past year.

When this blog was launched, the focus was more educational, and I tried to write articles to pass on things I’ve learned about photography. Posts ranged from post-processing walkthroughs to guides on how to buy and sell gear on a student budget. We also had weekly interviews with photographers and giveaways semi-regularly.

As grad school became busier, I had less time to do photography, and posts became less frequent on PetaPixel as well. A big turning point came when Jessica Lum, a high school friend of mine, joined PetaPixel as co-editor in November 2009. Sharing the load really helped, and posting has been consistent since then.

Our mission statement is “to inform, educate, and inspire in all things related to photography.” We shifted more towards informing and inspiring in the past few months as my research became busier, but in the future we hope to diversify the content a bit more so that PetaPixel isn’t limited to being simply a news blog on photography.

Starting next week, PetaPixel is going to be my full time job. I can’t really say I’ve quit my job for blogging, since I’ve never had one, but instead of finding some software engineering position somewhere I’m going to be doing this. Coincidentally, I’m leaving Berkeley as Jessica is arriving — she’s entering the Graduate School of Journalism this fall.

For those who are interested, I’ll share some statistics. This is the 663rd post on PetaPixel, and we’ve received 6,079 comments from our awesome readers so far. We currently have about 5,600+ subscribers through RSS and email, 52,000+ Twitter followers, 3,300+ Facebook fans, and 2,100+ Flickr group members. In the past year we’ve received over 3.4 million pageviews from 1.9 million unique visitors, and are currently serving over 1 million pageviews per month.

Thanks to all of you who read this blog and make things interesting by commenting and connecting with us in various ways.

So much has happened in the past year, and I’m definitely looking forward to all that’s in store for us in year two!

When Sean Stiegemeier saw the photos and videos that were emerging on the web from the eruptions at Eyjafjallajökull last month, it prompted him to fly over and shoot his own footage:

So I saw all of these mediocre pictures of that volcano in Iceland nobody can pronounce the name of, so I figured I should go and do better. But the flights to get over took forever as expected (somewhat). 4 days after leaving I finally made it, but the weather was terrible for another 4. Just before leaving it got pretty good for about a day and a half and this is what I managed to get.

The resulting video is stunningly beautiful, especially with background music by Jónsi (lead singer of Icelandic band Sigur Rós). Oh, and by the way, it was filmed with a Canon 5D Mark II.

Thanks for the tip, @eugenephoto!

The tech war is on between Apple and Adobe, and it’s starting to sound political. What’s fairly interesting is how Adobe’s been running “We [heart] Apple” as well as “We [heart] Choice” ads, suggesting that this tech war is all about word choice — or perhaps the word, “choice.”

The lack of Flash on Apple mobile devices has been a growing issue, especially since the release of the iPad. Apple’s omission left a lot of creatives, including photographers, scrambling to find a substitute for Flash-based sites.

A few weeks ago, Steve Jobs published his thoughts behind Apple’s movement away from Flash capabilities in mobile products.

Today, Adobe’s co-founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock  responded in an open letter that was published in newspaper ads and on its website, titling it “Our Thoughts on Open Markets.” The letter launched alongside a new section on Adobe’s site called “Freedom of Choice.”Adobe also published a page titled “The truth about Flash,” which responds point-by-point to most of Jobs’ arguments.

Jobs had ended his letter with a stab at Adobe, saying:

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Adobe responded:

We believe that Apple, by taking the opposite approach, has taken a step that could undermine this next chapter of the web — the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time.

In the end, we believe the question is really this: Who controls the World Wide Web? And we believe the answer is: nobody — and everybody, but certainly not a single company.

So far this seems to be a war of words; Apple and Adobe are fighting over ownership of what “open,” really means and what the future of the Internet (and your portfolio) will look like.

Let us know where you stand on the issue in the comments.

The crazy awesome folks over at Google’s London office recently created a photo-mosaic of the company’s logo… by hand. Using 884 individually printed 4×6 photographs, they 5.5 hours assembling the piece, and used a camera to snap a photograph every 7 seconds. The resulting timelapse video shows the whole thing in a little over a minute.

(via Mashable)

Here’s an interesting gadget that can help you with wildlife photography, or can simply make you look beastly while doing street photography. This tactical sight can help you lock your camera onto a faraway animal, making finding it much easier to find when you start looking through your massive telephoto lens. With longer focal range lenses, it can be pretty easy to lose sight of where exactly your subject is, and finding it again might require pulling your eyes away from the viewfinder. This sight can help you more accurately lock onto the subject prior to using the viewfinder.

After poking around a bit, it looks like this is actually a Phantom Tactical Sight for rifles that has been rebranded and repurposed for photography:

The sight can project a point, circle point, circle cross, or cross onto the screen (it’s not a laser pointer), and has two colors (green or red) and three intensities. This gadget will set your back about $45. Happy shooting!

Wildlife Photography with Tactical Four Reticle Sight (via Wired)

Canon announced today that it has produced a whopping 40 million EOS-series SLR cameras since the series was first introduced in 1987. What’s even more amazing is that half of those are digital, as they’ve also passed the 20 million mark for DSLRs. The company passed the 10 million mark in 1997, the 20m mark in 2003, and the 30m mark in 2007. Needless to say, SLR photography has gotten more and more popular in recent years. Congratulations Canon!

Gosh, and we though having HD video on a cell phone was enough. Sharp has just announced the world’s first 3D HD camera designed for cell phones and point-and-shoot cameras. This thing is capable of filming 3D footage at 720p, and will see mass production starting in 2010.

Before long we’ll be picture and video messaging one another in 3D. Hopefully it won’t require special glasses.

New York City graffiti artist Poster Boy, Henry Matyjewicz, is famed for his rearrangement of subway advertisements into bizarre satirical collages. But as of late, the 28-year-old has been mired in legal troubles, ending in an 11 month sentence for missing a hearing.

Matyjewicz was arrested late last year and charged with the felony and misdemeanor counts for his graffiti. He plead guilty, managed to dodge the felony count, and instead received 210 hours of community service and three years of probation. He completed his service, but was soon rearrested for making more graffiti, as well as jumping a turnstile at a subway.

Initially, the district attorney’s office tried to overturn the original plea deal that exempted Matyjewicz from jail time for his repeat offense. However, the judge, Justice Michael Gary, eventually agreed to uphold the deal because he’d neglected to inform Matyjewicz that further offenses would not be so easily excused.

It would seem that Matyjewicz was home free, except for one mistake — he missed his hearing date. An arrest warrant was issued, and though the artist appeared a day late, saying that he’d forgotten to come in, he was taken into custody over last weekend.

On Monday, Justice Gary sentenced Matyjewicz to 11 months for what Gary says was a violation of the plea deal. The New York Post suggests that Gary’s judgment might be vindictive, since he couldn’t penalize Matyjewicz for his repeat offense.

Here are some examples of Poster Boy’s work:

(via Animal New York)