Here’s a neat idea I came across yesterday: tossing a coin to explore your city or town.

Since the summer of 2004, Gavin Edwards has been taking walks from his home near the World Trade Center site in NYC and using a coin to determine his destination.

Periodically, I would leave my house and flip a coin. If it was heads, I’d go left. If it was tails, I’d go right. At every intersection, I’d flip the coin again: after an hour, I’d stop and photograph whatever block I was on.

If you enjoy street photography but need some motivation, perhaps give this a shot!

48 Hours from Ground Zero (via Boing Boing)

Image credit: chance by Vinay Deep

The holiday season is upon us! In celebration of the season, we’ve compiled our first holiday gift guide! Each year, we’ll feature 20 awesome photo gifts, ranging from functional to fun. Whether you’re searching for a stocking stuffer or affordable gear for your favorite photographer, we hope our guide comes in handy. We’ve arranged our gift ideas from cheapest to most expensive. Enjoy!

Vinyl Pockets Shower Curtain – $10+

Personalize this shower curtain with photos!

Bed Bath & Beyond – Urban Outfitters

LOL Disposable Camera – $12

This single-use 35mm is sure to bring some laughter and fun to your holidays. Adds a different frame to each photo taken. Better hurry though, since only 4000 were made.
Urban Outfitters

Melannco Photo Game Board Chess/Checkers – $15

Frame photos of your favorite mates under this 2-in-1 chess and checkerboard.
Bon-Ton

PHOTO:BOX book – $20

Give the gift of inspiration! PHOTO:BOX, a collection compiled by Roberto Koch, includes 250 images from 200 brilliant international photographers, including Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, David LaChapelle, Annie Leibovitz, and more. A great coffee table addition.
Amazon

Hole-On Ex Pinhole Camera – $20

Take and make it at home: just add glue, a ruler, and a pencil.
Giant Robot Store

Bokeh Masters Kit – $25

See light in all new ways with this amazing Bokeh Masters Kit, which includes several different bokeh discs and allows you to cut your own.
Bokeh Masters Kit

Media Street eMotion Digital Photo Frame Watch – $28

Dick Tracy would be envious of this watch, which can display around 75 jpeg images.
Adorama

Keyboard Shortcut Skins for Macs – $30/laptop, $40/desktop

A cheat sheet for the visual editor, this keyboard companion skin includes shortcuts for Photoshop, Aperture (2.0), Final Cut Pro/Express, and more.
Photojojo

Polaroid PoGo Instant Mobile Printer – $35

Print your digital photos instantly, on the go!
Amazon

Russian Book Spy Camera – $35

This nifty spy cam makes for a great conversation piece, especially if your name is Bond, James Bond.
UncommonGoods

Photo Lollipops – $40

These oddball lollipops are a bit silly, but a sweet, personal gift.
ilovephotogifts

Lomography Diana F+ Medium Format Camera – $50

Filled with nostalgic longing for the gritty look of retro color film? Look no further, Diana’s back!
Giant Robot Store

BlackRapid RS-4 Strap – $54

For the active photographer, the BlackRapid line is quite the sight for sore backs. With its ergonomic and functional design, BlackRapid straps stand out from the crowd.
Outdoor Photo Gear

Swiss Gear DIANA Bag for Digital SLR Cameras – $60

Fashion and function meet in this photographer’s handbag.
Best Buy

Diana Lens + Adapter – $60

This Diana lens kit is probably the best new lens out on the market. Granted, it’s made of plastic, but it’s a great way to turn your DSLR into a high-tech lomography machine.
Photojojo

Photo Mobile Stand – $60

Regular picture frames are boring. Spice up photo presentation with this nifty photo stand.
UncommonGoods

Fisher Price Kid Tough Digital Camera – $65

Who knows, maybe your tot can get his or her first freelance gig a lot sooner.
Amazon

Gorillapod 6-Pack Combo – $90

Grab a Gorillapod pack to share with the whole family!
Joby

Fujifilm Instax Instant Camera and Film- $105

Polaroid may have phased out its line of instant cameras, but Fujifilm carries on the torch with this modern Instax model.
Photojojo

Aputure Gigtube Live View LCD Viewfinder – $190

Aputure’s innovative remote trigger is the first and only of its kind to feature live view and instant photo display.
Amazon

From PetaPixel, we wish you all warm, safe, and happy holidays!

If you haven’t heard already, earlier this month Sony unveiled the new Party-shot personal photographer.

As the name suggests, this is a new camera dock that automatically tilts, pans, composes, detects faces, and takes candid photographs of people at parties. Pretty interesting, huh?

When I first heard about this new “personal photographer”, I immediately started thinking about its potential uses. Basically, you have an immobile robot that can take candid photos through facial recognition that you can place anywhere.

Wouldn’t candid street photography be an interesting application of this new technology?

You would place the camera and robotic dock anywhere on the street at any height, stand by it for a while as people walk near it, and then harvest the candid photographs taken afterwards.

Though you wouldn’t have creative control over the photographs you end up with, this would still be a neat experiment. I can already imagine people making Flickr sets or groups around this very idea.

In fact, I’m going to make one right now, before the thing is even shipped in September. Here it is: Party-shot Street Shots. If you end up buying this $150 dock come September and take some automatic candid street photos with it, be sure to join the group and add them to the pool!

There’s no word on whether it will be customizable or programmable, allowing you to specify conditions for the automatic photography. If Sony is smart, they’ll open up the system to hackers and people who want to customize the Party-shot’s operation.

Let me know what you think about the Party-shot’s potential street photography application. Also, if you can think of any other interesting applications of the Party-shot, let’s discuss it in the comments of this post!

In this post I’ll briefly explain how to take photographs like this one.

Just like my previous post on shooting sprinklers, this isn’t exactly the most practical of tutorials. Sorry.

All you need is a small point and shoot camera with an attached wrist-strap. For the examples in this post, I used a Sony DSC-P200:

You’ll need to be able to control the shutter speed of the camera. Most point-and-shoots should have some way for you to do this. Take a look at your instruction manual if you’re not sure how to. For my point-and-shoot, I can control the shutter speed by shooting in manual mode:

Choose how long you want the shutter to stay open for. I set shutter speed at 30 seconds for the examples in this post, which is the maximum the camera allows.

Once you’ve chosen your shutter speed, find a dark place (you’ll probably want to do this at night), press the shutter, hold the camera by the strap, and start swinging your camera around like a madman. Make sure your strap is sturdy so that your camera won’t accidentally fly off of it.

Afterwards, you might have overexposed your image if you kept the shutter open too long with too much light.

A little Photoshopping can help you get the look you want:

Things to experiment with for interesting results:

• Location
• Shutter speed
• Color of the lights around you
• How you swing the camera

Good luck!

Felt like experimenting a little today, and started out shooting low depth of field photographs of flying insects. One thing led to another, and before I knew it I was taking photographs of water balloons popping (Don’t ask me how). Here’s what I used:

• String – To hang the water balloon from
• Binder clip – To fasten the water balloon to the string
• Canon 40D – You just need a camera where you can control shutter speed. 6.5 frames per second doesn’t hurt either.
• Tripod – To free up my hands
• Remote shutter release – So I could stand away from the camera
• Water balloons

A flash may or may not be necessary depending on your lighting conditions. Since I was outdoors during the day (didn’t want to pop water balloons indoors), I ended up not needing the flash that I brought along.

Now, I also needed something to pop the balloons with. Using a knife or a needle might work, but I chose to use a pneumatic air rifle so I could pop the balloons from behind my camera.

I shot in manual mode, since I didn’t want exposure to vary from picture to picture.

I set aperture to somewhere between f/4.5 and f/5.6 for enough depth of field to keep much of the water sphere sharp, while blurring the background enough to have it not be distracting. For shutter speed, I tried to stay above 1/2000 of a second to freeze the water, though I sometimes had to drop down to around 1/1000 to expose correctly when clouds passed overhead. This produced a little more motion blur, as you’ll see in a bit. To properly expose at these settings without using the flash, I had to push my ISO up to 800 or 1600. I also set my lens to manual focus and my drive mode to high-speed continuous shooting (6.5 fps).

Now after adjusting everything properly (i.e. making sure exposure and focus were correct), I picked up the remote with my left hand, and the air gun with my right. As I continuously snapped photos at 6.5 shots per second with my left hand, I aimed at the balloon and pulled the trigger with my right.

Aside from this basic technique, everything else was left to chance. At least one or two frames from each attempt was decent, and using a binder clip saved me time by allowing me to just clip the balloon up each time rather than tie it.

Here are some of the photos I ended up with:

There you have it. Photographs of water balloons popping. As a side note, you can also do some other pretty interesting stuff with the same setup (though this photo would have been a lot neater if it was a little boy or girl blowing):