Lomography just announced this new Diana Deluxe Kit, which allows you to buy a complete collection of Diana toy camera goodies for a discounted price. Like many of the things we feature here on this blog, we think this looks a little too nice to use. You should just keep it framed and hang it up on your wall!

One of the big advantages of digital photography is that EXIF data is embedded into your images, allowing you to easily learn when and how (and more recently where) a particular photograph was captured. If you still enjoy shooting film, then a solution is to jot down notes about your photography while you’re shooting. The “Field Notebook” is a nifty little notebook published by Etsy user fabriKateShop you can use to record “EXIF data” by hand — especially useful for when you’re taking a film photography course. You can find them for about $12 each over on Etsy.

fabriKate Shop (via Photojojo)

Those epic photographs of stars and galaxies that you see on sites like NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day don’t actually look like that straight out of the camera. Instead, a good deal of post-processing magic goes into each photograph. How much magic? Countless black and white photographs shot with different cameras are carefully weaved together, and color is added to enhance the final image. The video above gives a quick and interesting two minute tour of how they post-processed one particular photo in Photoshop.

(via PhotoWeeklyOnline)

Designer Kelly Angood created this cardboard pinhole camera that looks exactly like a Hasselblad medium format camera. The design is screen printed onto the cardboard, and the camera accepts 120 film. See sample photographs shot with this camera over on Angood’s website.

Pinhole Hasselblad (via Make)

Update: Angood published a PDF with templates and instructions for those of you who want to make your own.

So we know DSLR cameras can survive plunges down cliffs (but not being trapped in a burning car), but what about being dropped onto pavement while traveling at high speeds? Shahrizan Jeffri Aziz was covering the Tour de Langkawi on a motorcycle when the unthinkable happened: his Nikon D3S and 300mm f/2.8 lens flew out of his hands and “spread all over the road”.

Miraculously the camera still functioned perfectly and, after having its “flesh wounds” covered up with duct tape, was soon back in action.

(via Nikon Rumors)

There are plenty of iPhone apps that mimic the look of vintage analog photography, but what about retro video game photography? “8-Bit Pocket Camera” is a new app that is designed to mimic the style of the Game Boy Camera, which became pretty popular on playgrounds in the late 90s. In addition to the 8-bit photos, the user interface will surely cause some serious nostalgia. You can pick up the app for $1 over in the iTunes App Store.

Devin Graham shot this beautiful surfing footage using a Canon 7D and a couple lenses (70-200mm and 100-400mm) with a 2x teleconverter, so much of the footage was shot at 800mm. The slow motion is actually “faked” (here’s another faked 7D video) using software:

To get the “super slow motion”, after I filmed at 60fps, I through it into the program “After Effects”. I used an effect that comes with the program called “Time Warp”. This allowed me to make the 60fps, to 1000fps. The way this works is the computer processes/adds frames in between the frames that are already in existence. It took several days for the computer to process the clips into the super slow motion that appears as well, so it does take a lot out of the computer, as far as processing goes.

Using After Effects or Twixtor to create fake slow mo is becoming a pretty popular technique. Beats shelling out big bucks to rent a high speed camera for many purposes.

(via Gizmodo)

Customer: Why are my 8×10 prints being cut off?
Salesperson: Well, your camera shoots in 2:3 aspect ratio which is a different proportion of rectangle. The 8×10 print is 4:5.
Customer: I want my prints in full size.
Salesperson: You have three options. A) We stretch the image. B) We crop the image, or C) we can put white strips on the sides but that won’t be very pleasing.
Customer: Can’t I just put what I have on my camera on the paper?
Salesperson: You know how when you watch a HD video and they put black bars around the screen? It’s that exact same concept.
Customer: You’re not doing your job properly, can I speak with your manager?
Salesperson: No problem! :)

Thanks for the submission, Dennis!

YouTube user haakvi was taking pictures of a small lake near Oslo, Norway with his Nikon D90 when he noticed something interesting about the lake’s reflections. This video shows an interesting way to shoot the reflections — you could do the same thing with photographs, but then you wouldn’t have the “twist”.

With its photography-related businesses struggling and no end in sight to its stock’s free fall, Kodak is turning to patent infringement lawsuits as a way to generate revenue. The company is currently in a patent dispute with Apple (iPhone) and RIM (Blackberry) over a patent it holds for previewing image on camera phones, and hopes to generate over $1 billion in royalty revenues if it comes out victorious. Previously Kodak had used this same patent to win nearly $1 billion from Samsung and LG.

Of the $7.2 billion in revenues Kodak generated in 2010, $838 million was from patent royalties. Somehow this doesn’t seem like a sustainable strategy for the company to stop being “Apple in reverse”.

(via Bloomberg)

Image credit: Fight Night Punch Test by djclear904