Turns out having a tripod mount and stand combo is what many iPhone 4 owners have been yearning for — a Kickstarter funding project for a new mount raised more than ten times what the creators planned to raise. Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost originally intended to raise $10,000 over the course of a month to manufacture the Glif, a new tripod mount and stand for the iPhone 4, but ended up collecting over $135,000 from more than 5,000 backers who want such an accessory. You can find out more on the Glif website, or pre-order your own by contributing $20 to the project on the Kickstarter page.

(via Boing Boing)

Here’s something to add to your list of “random but awesome things to shoot if you ever get your hands on a Phantom camera”: popcorn popping. The exploding kernel above was shot at 6200 frames per second with a Phantom v12 and played back at 25fps.

(via Laughing Squid)

If you have a laptop that doesn’t have memory card slots built in, then you probably know how annoying it is to have to plug in a card reader every time you transfer photos. The new MR-C25 Series of memory card readers by Elecom tries to solve this problem by making the USB card reader sit flush against the side of your laptop, meaning they can stay attached to your laptop when you stow it away. They also have a 180 degree rotating body that allows you to access other ports that might be blocked. It’ll start selling sometime this month, but no word on how much it will cost.

Elecom MR-C25 (via Wired)

Here’s a pretty interesting 45-minute interview with Pete Souza, which was done via a live web chat at the end of October. Souza is responsible for the behind-the-scenes photographs posted regularly to the official White House Flickr stream. He talks about everything from how photos are selected to crawling around on the floor of the Oval Office to get the perfect shot.

(via Blurberati Blog)

We’re giving away two (2) copies of Perfect Photo Suite 5.5 by onOne Software, a set of seven photography plugins that normally costs $500. The seven plugins work for Photoshop, Lightroom, and Aperture, and five of them also work as standalone applications. To see the list of plugins included in the suite, visit this page.

To enter this giveaway, all you need to do is:

Tell us the top item on your Christmas wishlist

There are two ways to enter, and doing both methods will give you 2 entries in the contest, and thus double the chance the win!

1. Leave your response as a comment on this post
2. Tweet your response, and include the following link to this post anywhere in the tweet: http://j.mp/pponone

   As long as the link appears in the tweet, you’ll be automatically entered in the contest.

This contest will end Thursday, November 4th, 2010. We’ll randomly pick the winners using random.org and update this post. Good luck!

Update on November 4th: We’re experiencing some issues with the software that we use to pick giveaway winners. We hope to have it fixed soon and have the winners announced by this weekend. Sorry for the delay!

Update on November 8th: We’re still trying to fix the Twitter entry collection software to pick the winners. Sorry again for the delay, but once we fix it we will select and contact the two winners immediately.

Update on November 15th: Our software is working again. Thanks to everyone who participated in this giveaway, and sorry for the delay! We received 257 comment entries and 92 tweet entries for 349 entries total. The two randomly selected winners are…

#332: Andrew Humbley (@HQ_GadgetBoy)

An iPad is high on my Xmas list

#140: Jennifer

A vacation to anywhere.

Congratulations! Please email editor@petapixel.com to claim your prize! (We’ll be emailing you as well).

Thanks to everyone who participated in this giveaway.

A big thanks to onOne Software for providing the prize for this giveaway!

Back in September we featured a creative technique that used an iPad to “light paint” 3D objects and text. Now there’s an app called Holographium that allows anyone to light paint words with an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. All you do is provide some text, start taking a long exposure photo, and then drag your iPad (or whatever iDevice) through the photo while the app slowly displays the various slices of the text. The resulting photograph will show the text spelled out in 3D and floating in the air.
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The British Journal of Photography is reporting today that Geoffrey Crawley — the world-renowned photographer who debunked the Cottingley Fairies hoax in the 1980′s — has died. The hoax began in 1917 when two cousins named Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths (aged 16 and 10, respectively) claimed to have discovered fairies and, after borrowing a camera, produced photos to prove it. The controversial photographs captured the world’s attention for decades and even deceived Sir Arthur Conan Doyle before finally being debunked by Crawley in a series of articles published in the early ’80s. In 1983 the cousins admitted that the photos were faked using cardboard cutouts.

It’s interesting seeing how little it took to fool people with photographs in the early days of photography.
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Here’s another beautiful example of what Twixtor, the $300 frame-rate conversion software, can do for footage captured with ordinary cameras. This one was shot with the entry level Canon 550D (i.e. T2i), a Canon 18-55mm kit lens, and a Sigma 70-300. Though motion approximation can present issues such as warping, this kind of software is a good alternative for people who want slow motion but can’t afford to rent ($2,500/day) or buy ($118,000) a Phantom camera.

More Super Slow Motion [Water] – 550D (via f stoppers)

Fernando Ramírez Martínez (snipfer on Flickr) created this awesomely geeky medium format camera using Lego pieces.

We started sorting bricks out and after a couple of afternoons working on the camera obscura we managed to get some shots out of the thing. It was built using Lego pieces, duct tape, black cardboard and some glue. The camera shoots 6×6 and the “lens” sports a focal length of 150mm with an aperture of 1:300. All measurements approximate.

In the front there is the shutter and the pinhole. In the back, the gear on the left is the film advance. The white gear on the right has a clutched axis that prevents the film spool from moving freely. The “suspension” does not allow the film advance to turn backwards.

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