The Sprocket Rocket is a new analog camera by Lomography that the company claims is the first camera dedicated to sprocket hole photography. The sprocket holes of 35mm film are included in each panoramic exposure, giving the resulting images a unique look. Two knobs on the camera wind the film in both directions, allowing you to create multiple exposures images as well.
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We’ve seen GoPro cameras in quite a few stories as of late, with people using them for things ranging from making friends with Great White sharks to capturing amazing home videos of space. Good news if you’ve been thinking of getting one for action footage — they’ve just released the cheaper HD Hero 960. You get 960p instead of 1080p, and you lose an expansion port for external displays and batteries, but you pay $180 instead of the $300 it costs for an HD Hero.

HD HERO 960 Camera (via Engadget)

Sony just announced a new video camera that’s quite a worthy challenger to the Flip Video. The Bloggie Touch replaces the original Bloggie video camera and boasts a much sleeker design (dropping the swiveling LCD), a 3-inch touchscreen, 4 to 8 GB of internal memory, 1080p HD video recording, and 12.8 megapixel photographs. Like the Flip, it’s designed for quick and easy photos and videos on the go, and can connect to computers via a built-in USB connector.
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Turns out the leaked photos of the Canon 60D we posted a couple weeks ago were of the real thing. Canon just announced this camera this morning, and the rumored specs were spot on as well: an 18-megapixel camera with an articulating LCD screen and heavy emphasis on video recording. An in-camera video editing feature allows you to work on the 1080p H.264 footage you capture, while new “creative image filters” allow you to apply iPhone-esque effects to photographs as you capture them. For example, you can have your photos look like they were taken with a tilt-shift lens or toy camera. Expect the 60D to hit stores in September at a price of $1,100.
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Canon announced today that five upcoming models of the Canon PIXMA printers will feature a “full HD movie print” feature that allows users to print individual frames from their HD movies. The big catch is that the HD movie files have to be .MOV file format created by certain Canon cameras only. The company has yet to release sample prints using the feature.

Other notable features on some of these models include their Wi-Fi capabilities, allowing the printers to access both the Internet and local networks. Also with the Wi-Fi models, Android OS, iPhone, iPad and iPod users can usethe Canon Easy-PhotoPrint app to print camera photos directly from their phones. The wireless models start at $80.

Most of the new printers will also include access to exclusive content on Canon’s CREATIVE PARK, which is a nifty creative site with project ideas, templates, and cards, as well as cool 3D paper craft projects.

Flickr has just announced a new feature that allows you to connect your Flickr account to your Facebook account to automatically update your Facebook friends when you upload new photographs. The above screenshot published by Flickr shows what the resulting Facebook status updates look like. To get started, visit the Sharing & Extending section of your Flickr account settings to connect your accounts in a few easy steps. For those of you who are already using the Flickr app on Facebook, Flickr recommends turning off that app and using this new feature instead.

If you’ve ever tried photographing a dog or cat, you probably know how difficult it can be to take a sharp photo while it’s looking at you. My friend’s dog (a pomeranian) is actually scared of my camera, and shies away when the DSLR is pointed at him.

FujiFilm’s new Finepix Z700 aims to make pet photographs easier by being the first camera to offer facial recognition for dogs and cats, and can automatically snap photographs for you when the pet is looking at the camera.

However, the technology is still pretty young, and has a ways to go before it rivals human facial recognition, which itself is ocassionally buggy.

For example, the camera has difficulty detecting pets that don’t stay still, and though it can detect up to 10 pet faces at once, it can’t handle a mix of dogs and cats. The subjects need to be either all dogs, or all cats.

Furthermore, some breeds of dogs (and maybe cats too?) can have pretty strange looking faces. The camera can’t handle those. FujiFilm even has a dedicated webpage listing the breeds of dogs and cats that the feature can usually detect, and includes sample images:

As you can see, you need to have a fairly… generic looking dog or cat if you want to detect its face.

Pets that cannot be easily detected include those that have: dark patches around the eyes or nose, too dark of a color, wrinkled/long/thin faces, or hair covering the eyes.

We’re guessing something like this will stump the camera:

Perhaps we should have titled this post, “Facial Recognition for Cute and Generic Looking Dogs and Cats”.

(via PC World)

Image credit: Castle Combe by Karen Roe

fotojournal is a new photoblogging service by Canadian company Robot Republic geared towards professional photographers, allowing them to showcase their work in a blog format.

They just had their launch party a couple days ago, and the pay-as-you-go service will soon be fully open to the public (they’re currently in invite-only private beta). No word on what their pricing model is.

The site is well designed, and allows you to display your photographs in various templates without requiring HTML knowledge. Among the templates is one that features your photographs at a large Big Picture-esque resolution:

The photo hosting and sharing space is chock-full of competition, but fotojournal might be able to find a niche with its clean design and flexible format.