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.

LensVector, a Silicon Valley startup working on novel lens technology, has received its latest round of funding from In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit venture firm that invests for the sole purpose of boosting US intelligence capability by providing the CIA with state-of-the-art information technology.

So what’s LensVector developing that CIA would want? Lenses that focus electronically with no moving parts.

Here’s a diagram by LensVector showing how their tiny autofocus lenses work compared to traditional technology:

Rather than using mechanical parts to focus a lens, LensVector uses electricity to align liquid crystals to a desired shape, which focuses light to a particular point.

Given the CIA’s interest in this technology, it must be working pretty well. Hopefully we’ll see this introduced to consumer cameras that need it (i.e. cell phones) soon.

A fun fact: another startup that received In-Q-Tel funding was Keyhole, Inc., the geospatial data visualization company that was acquired by Google in 2004. Their flagship product, Earth Viewer, was turned into Google Earth.

(via CNET)

On Monday afternoon, just hours after the 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced, Pulitzer-Prize winning photographer Kim Komenich was standing at a Wells Fargo bank in San Jose, California when he noticed the man in front of him hand the teller a note. As the teller began to empty a cash drawer, Komenich proceeded to wrap his arms around the robber in a stifling bear hug.

San Jose Mercury News reports that,

Police found Komenich and Fernandes still entwined in their awkward embrace. They quickly arrested Fernandes and his two suspected accomplices, who had remained in the customer waiting area. They were later booked on robbery charges. No gun was ever found.

Komenich, an assistant professor at San Jose State University, is no stranger to dangerous situations. In 1987, while working for the San Francisco Examiner, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Spot News Photography for his coverage of the Philippine Revolution and the fall of Ferdinand Marcos.

(via Gawker)

Real time photo sharing service TweetPhoto has raised a $2.6 million Series A investment from a group of investors led by Canaan Partners.

The San Diego-based startup is one of the closest competitors of TwitPic, the most popular photo sharing service for Twitter. As long as Twitter doesn’t compete in this space with 3rd party sites by starting its own service or acquiring one of the services, the future looks bright for TweetPhoto. Last year, TwitPic raked in $1.5 million in revenue and turned down an offer “much higher than $10“.

Although TweetPhoto still lags behind TwitPic in terms of traffic, TweetPhoto is attempting to ensure its growth and survival by spreading its eggs across multiple baskets. Unlike TwitPic, TweetPhoto has expanded to support other social networks including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Foursquare.

GigaOM also reports that the company is thinking about changing its name, and will likely do so at some point in the future.

Real time photo sharing is just getting started and, if the investors are correct, we should be seeing much more growth and innovation in this space in the near future.

Google has acquired UK-based mobile photo search startup Plink for an undisclosed amount.

The company’s sole product Plink Art is an Android application that allows you to look up information about a piece of art by simply photographing it with your phone.

The application was one of the winners of Android Developer Challenge 2, scoring a $100,000 prize for winning in the “Education/Reference” category.

Remind you anything?

Artwork recognition is one of the features offered by Google Goggles, which is what Plink’s founders will be working on at Google.

Since the Plink only has 50,000 users, this is mostly a talent acquisition to improve Google’s visual search technologies.

The announcement posted to Plink’s blog gives a glimpse into where Google would like to go with visual search:

The visual search engines of today can do some pretty cool things, but they still have a long long way to go. We’re looking forward to helping the Goggles team build a visual search engine that works not just for paintings or book covers, but for everything you see around you. There are beautiful things to be done with computer vision – it’s going to be a lot of fun!

Imagine a world where you can “Google” information about anything by aiming your cell phone at it and snapping a picture.

The season finale of the popular TV show House, which will air on May 17th, was filmed entirely with the Canon 5D Mark II. cinema5D overheard the plan last month and Greg Yaitanes, the director of the show, has confirmed it through a tweet in which we made himself open to questions.

We’ll republish some of the interesting questions and answers here, interview style:

@MVRamunno: What is the difference in how it looks on a TV screen compared to a regular camera?

Greg Yaitanes: richer. shallow focus pulls the actors faces to forground [sic]

@oamad0101: How many frames per second and why a Canon 5D Mark II?

GY: 24p and wanted it for ease of use in tight spaces.

@unikissa: Ok, seriously. Can you tell us something about the lenses you used?

GY: all the canon primes and the 24-70 and the 70-200 zoom

@sarabury: Did you have to change any of your working practices to fit in with differences between the 5D and a typical setup?

GY: some. focus was hard with these lenses but more “cine-style” lenses are being made as we speak.

@marykir: were you using CF cards for storage or some sort of mass storage mod? seems like you would need a lot of cards :)

GY: some 18gb or something like that card. gave us 22 min of footage.

@Drdiagnostic: How was the quality as compared 2 the traditional camera used in shooting?

GY: i loved it and feel it’s the future. cameras that can give you these looks

@klizma: How did you manage to stabilize the camera in tight spaces? Any special kind of brackets?

GY: no. mostly gave it a hand held feel. or on a small tripod

This is quite an endorsement for Canon, with a network giant entrusting the finale of one of its most popular shows to the 5D Mark II (which happens to be the first digital camera to take the Presidential portrait as well).

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the popularity of the show:

In 2008, House was distributed in a total of 66 countries. With an audience of over 81.8 million worldwide, it was the most watched television show on the globe and far surpassed the viewership figures of the leading TV dramas the previous two years

If you haven’t yet, check out the short film, The Last 3 Minutes, which we posted earlier today. It was filmed with the same camera.

(via Canon 5D tips)

As more and more people are ditching compact cameras for their camera-equipped phones, it’s clear these hybrid devices will be playing a big role in casual imaging in the years to come. One of the leaders in this space is the Apple iPhone, which boasts countless applications that improve and customize the photography that can be done with it.

Some recent events have shed a little light into the direction Apple may be headed.

The first clue is a recent job posting on Apple’s website with the job title “Performance QA Engineer, iPad Media”:

The Media Systems team is looking for a software quality engineer with a strong technical background to test still, video and audio capture and playback frameworks. Build on your QA experience and knowledge of digital camera technology (still and video) to develop and maintain testing frameworks for both capture and playback pipelines.

Given that the iPad does not currently offer any kind of photo or video capture, this suggests that camera(s) may appear in the next iPad.

Furthermore, Electronista is reporting that sensor corp OmniVision may play a role in future Apple devices:

OmniVision executives today gave JP Morgan analyst Paul Coster hints that they may have deals for cameras in next-generation Apple devices. After a discussion, Coster understood that ‘top-tier smart phone companies’ would move from three-megapixel cameras to five in the second half of the year. He added that OmniVision was “well-positioned” to provide camera sensors for both the new iPhone and even the next iPad, which in its initial form doesn’t have any cameras.

At the beginning of the year, we reported that OmniVision had developed a 14.6 megapixel sensor for cell phones that is also capable of high-definition video recording.

The iPad is a bit to big to be a carry-around point-and-shoot replacement, so any camera that appears on it might be more geared towards video chatting, while we might see the quality of iPhone photography skyrocket in the near future.

Image credit: iPad Girl by ajstarks

In an announcement on the Google Photos Blog today, Google announced that the maximum number of albums allowed for a Picasa account has been increased from 1,000 to 10,000.

While this is “good news” for everyone who uses the service, I wonder what percentage of users this actually benefits. Some statistics on Picasa usage would have been an interesting and illuminating addition to the announcement:

We want Picasa Web Albums to be a place you can share and store all your digital photos, regardless of how many you have. We recently made extra storage really affordable, but until now, Picasa Web accounts have been limited to a maximum of 1,000 albums. We heard that you needed more room, and because we want you to keep sharing your photos and posting them to Buzz, we’ve worked hard to now raise this limit to 10,000 albums.

Expect Google to continue beefing up Picasa in 2010 in order to seriously challenge Flickr for a bigger slice of the photo sharing pie.

After nearly 5 years as the Community Manager at Flickr, Heather Champ has announced she is leaving to start an online community consultancy called Fertile Medium with her husband Derek Powazek (whom she also started JPG Magazine with).

After working as a web designer for 11 years, she joined Flickr in May of 2005, a couple months after the photo sharing service was acquired by Yahoo.

Through her tenure there, where she regularly featured photograph on the company blog, she saw the company grow to become one of the largest photo sharing services on the web, replacing Yahoo’s own photo sharing service, Yahoo! Photos. She was also responsible for the Flickr Community Guidelines, a document that many services have model their guidelines after.

The announcement of her upcoming departure came in a post published on her blog today, titled Je ne regrette rien (“no regrets” in French), in which she also reflects on her time at Flickr:

In the end, Flickr is very much about every member who has ever uploaded a photo or video, left a comment, or faved something. You are the heart of Flickr and you’ve enriched my life in ways. More importantly, you’ve enriched the web through glimpses of your life that you’ve chosen to share.

Champ was extremely influential in shaping the direction of the Flickr community and, if the comments left on her blog post are any indication, will be deeply missed there.

(via ReadWriteWeb)

Image credit: Heather Champ, CES 2006 by Thomas Hawk

For some April Fools fun, we here at PetaPixel went through the trouble of using a new design for half a day this morning. It looks like Digital Photography Review took their joke a step further: they created a fake company with a fake website and published a fake press release.

The company, “Rokton Circular sensors“, is supposedly based in Cambridge and has “reinvented” the image sensor by making it circular. The press release published on dpreview states,

Cameras using Rokton sensors will cover a circular image fully 43mm in diameter – the same as the diagonal of a 35mm film negative, or a ‘full-frame’ digital sensor. This allows you to capture the entire image circle projected by your lens, wasting none of the light it gathers, and giving you the ultimate flexibility to crop the image any way you like after capturing that decisive moment. [...]

Rokton chief executive officer Dr. Hwee Ng said ‘We’ve noticed that the ultimate imaging device, the human eye, is kind of round, lenses are round, and the most common photographic subject in the world – the human face – is often round too. The more we thought about it the more we realized a circular sensor made perfect sense.’ [...]

‘We foresee the circular image literally revolutionizing photography. We can see a market for a range of products to match the sensor concept, from circular printer paper to picture frames. The circular image also ideally matches a huge number of popular photo uses, from DVD labels to coasters. And the best thing about circular photo frames is that you won’t have to hang them straight.’

Why do we think this whole thing is a joke? Well, first of all, dpreview is the first and only news source reporting on this supposedly revolutionary technology. Second, a simple WHOIS query shows us that the rokton.com domain name was only registered on March 31st, 2010. Hmmm…

What’s funny is that at least one photography news site seems to have believed the joke. Steve’s Digicams took the press release and published it as news:

This whole thing is almost as absurd as Kodak’s Aromatography joke we posted earlier today.

We can all breathe a sigh of relief tomorrow when this day of Internet absurdity is over.