Olympus recently filed a patent in Japan for a novel lens feature that shakes the front element in order to remove droplets of water.

Filters would obviously render the shaking feature useless on a DSLR system, but for a smaller compact camera designed to be waterproof and rugged, this feature would probably come in handy.

The patent also seems to indicate that the shaking would occur during autofocusing, so the lens would be cleared of water immediately before the camera exposes a shot.

What are your thoughts on this potential future feature?

(via Photo Rumors)

DxOMark has expanded their website to include lenses in addition to camera bodies. They’ve tested a good number of lenses from quite a few manufacturers, with each lenses tested on a large number of camera bodies. You can then compare how certain camera and lens combinations perform against one another.

Lens rankings with DxOMark Scores (via NikonRumors)

Sony recently announced an interchangeable lens camcorder, but if you can’t stand the wait until it’s released, cheap gadget dealer Brando has these Vivikai camcorders that come equipped with an 8x telescope. The Chinese company, Vivikai (no relation to Vivitar) has more photos of this Frankenstein camcorder mod on their site.

In spite of decent specs, including 12 megapixel image resolution and ISO 100, the standard definition telescoped image looks like it was taken with a toy camera. But for $100, that sounds about right.

(via Engadget)

Today, the New York Times’ Lens blog posted the end result of a global photographic project. “A Moment in Time” is an interactive collection of all the images taken May 2, 2010 at 15:00 U.T.C. by the Times’ readers all over the world. By May 4, the Times estimated they had 14,000 images, and were still accepting submissions until May 7.

After what must have been a titan task of accepting and sorting thousands of submissions, uploading, checking and rechecking captions, not without some technical glitches, the Lens Blog has a very impressive portrait of the world.

The images are roughly sorted by geographical region, as well as category, though there is no way to find one specific photo or photographer without a direct link to the picture. If you can’t find the one you took, the Lens editors say that they are still processing more images to be uploaded to the site this month.

Nevertheless, the interactive interface is pretty enjoyable to browse through. There are some interesting recurring themes in regional photographs, like a collection of images of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, or intimate photos of peoples’ bedrooms, morning coffee, and sunsets.

(via Lens)

Stephen Von Worley over at Weather Sealed just received a lens he calls “The Glass Frisbee”. In the photo above it’s placed next to a Canon 50mm f/1.4 for size comparison. It’s a $250, 195mm f/1.25 lens that’s sold to people who need it for custom uses. The description on Surplus Shed says,

We believe these will make great wide field low power telescopes, incredible binoculars especially suited for low light conditions, or astrographs. Other uses may be for building a camera, projector, HDTV projection, telephoto, finder for your huge scope, low light compact camera obscura, etc, etc.

Von Worley plans to use his for large format photography:

I bought the Frisbee for its incredible combination of 200mm focal length and f/1.3 aperture, which I’ll use to push the limits of narrow depth of field. By the laws of physics, once shoehorned onto my large-format 4×5 monorail camera, it’s the optical equivalent of a 50mm f/0.35 lens on a full-frame SLR.

Until he gets around to it, he’s using the lens as photography-nerd bling:

You can read more about it here.

Image credits: Photographs by Stephen Von Worley

If you have deep pockets, Nikon has a wonderful new $6,999.95 lens for you. They’ve just announced the new Nikon AF-S 200-400mm f/4G ED VR II, a super telephoto lens for sports, nature, and travel photographers. Nikon claims that the latest Vibration Reduction technology, VR II, provides the equivalent of an extra four stops of light, which is one stop more than the previous version of this lens released in 2003. Additional improvements include Nikon’s proprietary Nano Crystal Coat, which reduces ghosting and flaring, and Automatic Panning Detection and an Active VR Mode, which allows the lens to be used at unstable locations such as in a moving vehicle.

The old lens is still being sold for ~$6,000 online, but you can expect the price to plummet once this lens is available in late May 2010. For more information on this lens, check out the press release put out by Nikon.

Bhautik Joshi, the guy who made the Phone-O-Scope that we tweeted a while ago, has a new do-it-yourself project for those of you who enjoy this kind of hack-ish photography project.

His latest project involves building a cheap fisheye lens using a peephole lens and a soda can.

Here are some sample photographs taken with the “tin cam”:

Built using a fisheye peephole as the main lens element and a decapitated soda can as the lens body (!), this attaches directly to my SLR camera. For well under US$20, I ended up with a lens that has nearly a 180-degree field-of-view, adjustable focus, a canon EOS mount, and due to it’s stylish and sleek exterior, can generate limitless amounts of admiration ridicule confusion.

To learn how to build one of these for yourself, head on over to the tutorial through the following link:

The fisheye tin cam (via Photojojo)

Image credits: Photographs by Bhautik Joshi and used with permission