Sony is serious about this whole “catching up to Canon and Nikon” thing — the company has announced four new large sensor cameras, and each one is a doozy. The cameras, which hit store shelves in a couple of months, include the NEX-7 and NEX-5N mirrorless cameras and the A77 and A65 SLT (AKA translucent mirror) cameras.
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Nikon did launch a new Coolpix camera today — eight of them, in fact — but the rumored “Coolpix Pro” mirrorless camera was nowhere to be found. The bevy of compact cameras hits store shelves next month, and includes the P7100 — a more polished successor to the P7000 announced around this time last year, and Nikon’s answer to Canon’s G-series line of prosumer compact cameras. The 10.1MP camera features a tilting 3-inch LCD screen on the back, manual controls, 720p video, and RAW capabilities. It’ll be priced at $500.
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Eran Amir created this “stop-motion within a stop-motion” using 1,500 separate photographs and 500 volunteers. The massive amounts of work, creativity, and planning that this project must have required is mind-boggling.

(via Ze Frank via Laughing Squid)

Emotional Breakdown is a cool new web app that attempts to gauge the mood of the world every day by analyzing the photographs found on The Guardian’s 24 hours in pictures. Using facial recognition technology to find happy, sad, angry, surprised or neutral faces in the images, the app creates a colorful pie chart breaking down the emotions. From the chart above, we see that the world was mostly neutral, surprised, and happy today.

Even cooler is the fact that you can also run the tool on any other URL. Try your own photo collection to see what emotions you’ve been capturing in your images.

Emotional Breakdown (via Mashable)

CineSkates are new patent-pending wheels that attach to JOBY’s GorillaPod Focus tripod, allowing you to capture fluid, stabilized video with your DSLR without bulky or expensive equipment.
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Ever wonder how and why copyright law came about? This interesting video will bring you up to speed. It’s pretty biased against certain aspects of copyright law, but is interesting nonetheless.

(via Reddit)

Twitter, Google+, and Facebook are one step closer to becoming clones of each other (at least when it comes to photo sharing) — Twitter has rolled out photo galleries that display the 100 most recent images Tweeted by users in chronological order.

The images included in user galleries can come from Twitter, yFrog, TwitPic, Instagram and other image sharing services supported in Twitter’s details pane. [#]

To view a user’s gallery, simply visit their Twitter page and click the thumbnails on the sidebar.
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The Long Beach Police Department’s hunt for photos with “no apparent esthetic value” quickly became national news last week. Here’s a news segment in which Alyona Minkovski of RT speaks out against the erosion of photographers’ rights in the United States:

I understand that the Department of Homeland Security has a job to do, but we can’t just automatically assume that any photographer out there is a terrorist. At this rate I’m pretty sure that all the hipsters in LA will be locked up in no time.

Hopefully the publicity that these stories receive will make it easier for photo-enthusiasts to shoot in public without being harassed.

(via Fstoppers)

This comment posted (and deleted) by Reddit user WonkoTheLucid shows why photographers need to make sure their websites are secured properly:

My friends wedding photos were posted with watermarks on a photo reprint site for sale. The prices were a bit outrageous. Another friend who does web design clued me into manually entering the photo address to display a full resolution photo without a watermark. I wrote a script and downloaded 500 free high res photos. Burnt many dvd copies and mailed them to a bunch of random people who were at the wedding.

If you’re a professional photographer that lets clients review proofs online, make sure the high-res, non-watermarked versions of the photos aren’t accessible by simply changing a portion of the URL.

As a professional photographer, this really makes me angry [Reddit]

There hasn’t been much activity in the PetaPixel Store since we launched the Leica Look-Alike skins in September 2010, but today that changes — we’re pleased to announce the new Polaroid Picture Frame and Mirror! It’s an awesome picture frame for your desk that looks just like Polaroid 600 instant film, and when there isn’t a photo inside it doubles as a mirror.
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