YouTube member MJRecession came up with the idea of placing a digital camera onto the conveyor belt a sushi restaurant in Japan to record candid portraits of the other patrons in the restaurant. It’d be interesting to see this same thing done at sushi bars around the world to see how different cultures would react.

Gav of The Slow Mo Guys made this interesting video comparing different high-speed camera frame rates. Using a Phantom HD camera, he films coffee mugs shattering on pavement at 500, 1000, 2500, 5000, and 10000 frames per second.

Here’s a neat idea for photographic experimentation: create a pinhole camera out of photographic paper by folding it into an origami box with the light-sensitive side on the inside. The hole that is used to blow the box into its shape is also used to expose the inside to the outside world. After exposing it, simply unfold it and process it using standard developer and fix.

(via DIYP)

As newspapers and magazines struggle to keep eyeballs from turning to the free world of the Web, more and more blogs are rising up to fill the niches once dominated by print. Despite the changing landscape, magazines are still able to command high advertising rates that blogs can’t match (yet). Wanting to find out whether magazines or blogs provided the best bang of each advertising buck, photographer Trey Ratcliff recently spent $26,000 placing ads in three major photography magazines, comparing the results to his online affiliate ad returns. His conclusion?

If I was consulting for one of these product companies that puts significant funds into magazine advertising, I would challenge them to try something new for six months: Try taking 50% of that money and put it into several hundred blogs, podcasts and review sites and measure the results. Cut the worst performers and find new ones.

Only one of the three magazines actually made Ratcliff money (the other two lost over ten thousand dollars) — the one that included an online ad rotation as part of the package.

Stop Advertising in Photo Magazines – Head West to the Web [Trey Ratcliff]

Thanks for sending in the tip, Troy!

This video shows a social experiment in which disposable cameras were left unattended in various public locations with a simple message: “Take a Photo”. Hidden cameras were stationed nearby to observe how people responded to the cameras, and to provide some behind-the-scenes footage to how the various photographs were captured.

Major camera makers including Olympus, Samsung and Sony have all filed patents in recent days for liquid lens technology. Unlike traditional glass lenses, liquid lenses don’t have any moving parts. Instead, liquid is used to focus light, and different voltages are applied to the liquid to change the shape of the liquid, thereby controlling the image. In the video above, techie Ben Krasnow introduces the technology, and then shows off a device he made by ripping a liquid lens out of a USB webcam.

(via Ben Krasnow via Make)

Maurice Ribble of Tech Photo Blog recently found the ingredients list for flash powder, which was used for state-of-the-art photographic lighting 150 years ago. After making some of the powder, he began to test it to see how it compares to modern day flashes (more specifically, a Canon 580EX II).

One of the tests is a simple scene that was lighted with a modern flash and then flash powder so we can compare the images. Overall I was quite impressed with the amount of light that even a small amount of flash powder makes; however, there were many disadvantages to flash powder.

If you’re interested in making your own, a simple search on Google will point you in the right direction. Be careful though — the stuff is quite dangerous.

(via TPB via DIYPhotography)

You’ve probably heard before that focal lengths between 85mm and 135mm produce the best head shots because they provide a desirable perspective in head shots, but how much of a different does the focal length actually make? Photographer Stephen Eastwood decided to find out, shooting 10 portraits of the same subject with focal lengths ranging from 19mm to 350mm.

Lens Distortion (via Orms Connect)

Image credits: Photographs by Stephen Eastwood

Jim Harmer of Improve Photography conducted an interesting experiment in which he stacked the Gary Fong Lightsphere up against an ordinary piece of tupperware:

The Gary Fong Lightsphere costs $50. For a hunk of rubber that produces only marginal improvements over the on-camera flash in my opinion, that is just way too much money. The fact is that the darn thing looks like a piece of tupperware to me. So, I got curious. Was this product doing anything that any other hunk of plastic couldn’t do?

His conclusion is that there was absolutely no difference in quality, and that you should save your money by using a makeshift diffuser.

Gary Fong Lightsphere vs. Tupperware [Improve Photography]

You’ve probably seen videos showing the rolling shutter effect turning airplane propellers into boomerangs, but what if the camera was attached to the spinning object rather than pointed at it? mguw of Helidigital decided to find out by attaching a small camera to the rotorhead of an RC helicopter, synchronizing the RPM of the rotor to the scan rate of the camera. The result is an uber-trippy video in which reality is bended through the rolling shutter effect.