One of the many thank you notes Leah Dieterich has on her “thank you note a day” blog, thxthxthx.

(via KEH Blog)

Image credit: Photograph by Leah Dieterich and used with permission

Remember Wafaa Bilal, that NYU professor that decided to have a camera implanted on the back of his skull? Well, turns out the human body doesn’t like it when random electronic devices are fused with it, so the cost of having the camera on his nogging has been antibiotic and steroid treatments to get the body to ignore the thing. Despite the treatments, his body still decided to reject one of the three posts onto which the camera is screwed, forcing him to have the camera and one of the posts surgically removed. In the meantime he’s strapping the camera to the back of his neck, something he probably should have done since the beginning.

The moral of the story for the rest of us is that cameras belong in hands and in front of the face rather than embedded into heads.

(via Gizmodo)

You might have framed photographs up in your home, but what about using an entire wall to show off your pictures? Photographer Lyanne Wylde turned her hallway into a photo wall by putting up wallpaper with frames and slowly filling in the frames with her own photographs. You can buy the wallpaper, titled “Frames“, yourself from Graham & Brown for $45 a roll and start your own wall!

Frames Wallpaper (via Photojojo)

Image credit: 304 366 – My treasure #1 by Ly and used with permission

Nikon announced the high-end compact P300 today to compete against the likes of Canon’s popular S95 and Olympus’ XZ-1. First, the good things — the 12 megapixel camera has a sweet f/1.8 24-100mm equivalent lens that should perform quite nicely in low light situations (especially with an ISO that can be boosted up to 3200). It can also record HD video at 1080p and 30fps, and has a 3-inch LCD that’s easy on the eyes.

On the flip side, Nikon decided for some reason to leave RAW shooting out, making this an extremely expensive, high-quality JPEG shooter, something that isn’t going to satisfy more serious photographers who want a smaller compact that still allows serious post-production work. You can find some comparison tables showing this camera stacked up against competition over on CNET and on Nikon Rumors. It’ll be available in March 2011 for $330.

External hard drives are a convenient way to store your digital photographs, but they have finite lifetimes and eventually fail. Failing drives have a number of distinctive sounds that can warn you and give you some time to start a data-exodus to a healthier hard drive. Datacent, a data recovery company, has a useful page on which you can listen to some of the most common “bad drive sounds”. These are categorized by manufacturer, and include things like stuck spindles, disk heads crashing, accessing bad sectors, and bad bearings. If your drive makes any of these sounds while your photographs are still accessible, begin evasive maneuversimmediately!

Hard drive sounds (via Boing Boing)

Image credit: Drive Destruction 11 by Nedster78

For Christmas, I received a Canon 60D. I’m definitely still learning how to use it, but I’m excited to have it. The first big problem I encountered, besides the need for more regular exercise so I can lift the beast, is that I am going to lose the camera lens cap. I take this cover off the lens and leave it everywhere. I had the camera for about 4 days before I was considering checking the price on replacing it. Lucky for me, I came up with a better idea while I still knew where it was. Instead of waiting until I lost it, I made it a little pouch that slides onto my camera strap.
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Sigma isn’t planning to let EVIL cameras have all the large-sensor fun. They’ve decided to stuff their new DP2x compact camera with a Foveon X3 sensor — similar to the ones found in the Sigma SD15 and SD1 DSLR cameras (about 12 times larger than traditional compact camera sensors). The camera is capable of capturing 14 megapixels worth of data with its stack of three sensors, generating 4.7 megapixel photographs. It also shoots RAW, lacks HD recording (video clips are a paltry 320×240), has a non-zoomable 24.2mm f/2.8 lens, has ISO 100 to 3200, and has a 2.5-inch LCD screen. The company has yet to announce how big of a hole the DP2x will chew in our wallets, or when it’ll be available.

What would a calendar look like if the world was run by photography geeks? Photographer David Schloss woke up one morning with the idea of creating such a calendar, with days being incremented by 1/3 f/stops, and the year being ISO 2000. He’s also selling them as t-shirts for $15 a pop over on Mac Create.

The Photographer’s Calendar T-Shirt (via Pixiq)

A day after Carl Zeiss announced they would be joining the Micro Four Thirds format, Sony is striking back by announcing that they will be releasing specifications for its E-mount, allowing lens makers to develop third-party lenses for the NEX line of mirrorless cameras and camcorders. What’s more, Carl Zeiss, Cosina, Sigma and Tamron have already committed to manufacturing lenses for the format.

It’ll be interesting to see how this growing war between mirrorless camera formats plays out.

Image credit: SONY NEX-5 by DORONKO

What would it look like if you tripped and with a Pentax Spotmatic F camera in hand, and it somehow smashed neatly into its most basic components? Artist Todd McLellan gives us an idea by taking one apart, neatly arranging it on a table, and photographing it in a style similar to Carl Kleiner’s IKEA baking book shots.
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