Apparently babies can’t resist a good checkboard pattern. ShutterBuddy is a camera attachment that surrounds your camera or lens with a checkerboard pattern, causing babies to stare uncontrollably at your camera (whether in fear or fascination, we have no idea). You can order your own for $15 through the ShutterBuddy website, or you can spend some time creating a do-it-yourself version by printing out or drawing your own checkboard pattern.
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We wrote about Snapsort at the beginning of this year, when it was still a newly-launched, bare-bones website for comparing digital cameras. Though it was spartan, the service was useful for comparing the specs of cameras and seeing how they stack up against each other.

The service has gotten even more useful in the past few days, with a massively updated website taking the place of the first version. In addition to the sweet new design, the service now offers much more than simple comparisons. New features include detailed camera pages, customized advice (i.e. by budget), and a learning section filled with bookmarkable material. You can even compare cameras that haven’t hit the market yet.

If you’re currently in the market for a digital camera, you’ll definitely want to give this page a peek.

If you’re a geek (as most of you apparently are) and prefer doing stuff through command line rather than a GUI, Google has just introduced a new command-line utility that allows you to access various Google services.

GoogleCL is an application written in Python that lets you do things like upload a whole folder of photographs to your Picasa account with a simple command like this:

google picasa create --title "My album" ~/Photos/vacation/*.jpg

This would grab all of the JPG photographs in your vacation directory and upload them to a new album called “My album”.

Here are the possible commands for Picasa:

create: Create an album. create –title “Summer Vacation 2009″ –tags Vermont ~/photos/vacation2009/*
delete: Delete photos or albums. delete –title “Stupid album”
get: Download photos. get –title “My Album” /path/to/download/folder
list: List photos or albums. list title,url-direct –query “A tag”
post: Add photos to an album. post –title Summer Vacation 2008″ ~/old_photos/*.jpg
tag: Tag photos. tag –title “Album I forgot to tag” –tags oops

The utility isn’t limited to Picasa, of course. You can also manage Blogger, Calendar, Contacts, Docs, and YouTube data.

To get started head on over to the GoogleCL Google Code project to download the tarball. There’s also a manual and a page of example commands.

Pick&Zip is a simple web application that lets you easily download Facebook photographs with a few clicks.

You can download photos tagged with your name, your own albums, photos tagged with friends’ names, or your friends’ albums. After selecting the photographs you’d like, you can download them as a ZIP or PDF file.

I just tried it out, and the service works pretty well, allowing you to pull photos at the highest resolution Facebook stores (720px) quickly to your computer without having to click and download individual photos.

Something that’s slightly annoying is that you can’t seem to download all possible photos with one click, but must “select all” on each individual page. The app is pretty useful, nonetheless.

If you need to fix some red-eyes in a photo, but don’t have an image editor handy, Red iGone is a quick and easy way to get the eyes corrected. It’s a simple web-based application that requires only that you select the eyes to be corrected. After that, all you need to do is download the fixed photo.

Here’s an example photograph that we ran through the app:

We were pretty surprised at how well the adjustment worked. It’s a great app for when you only want to fix red eyes and nothing else. PicTreat also offers web-based red-eye reduction, but it touches up the rest of the photo as well.

Here’s a useful tool you might want to bookmark: findexif.com. It has a super simple web interface in which you simply paste a URL to a photograph in order to display the EXIF data embedded in the image. It should work for any photograph that hasn’t had the EXIF stripped out for some reason, and can be a great way for you to learn how certain images were made. Here’s an example page showing the EXIF data of a photograph I made a while back.

Update: Jeffery’s Exif viewer is another neat web-based tool for showing EXIF data. Thanks @Getcolormanaged!

Nikon has a couple neat interactive tools that make it easy to explore and compare lenses. Their lens simulator lets you see what resulting photographs might look like with any lens and camera combination, while their new lens positioning map displays the NIKKOR lineup on a grid with aperture and focal length as the two axes.

Once you’ve found lenses or combinations you like, you can save them for future reference.

(via Digital Journal of Photography)

Unshake is a free program available for all operating systems that takes your blurry photographs and attempts to make them clearer. While it’s not miraculous or perfect, it does in fact help in making photographs more usable, especially at lower resolutions (i.e. for the web).

Here’s a before-and-after example using a quick snapshot I took this past weekend with an outdated point-and-shoot camera:

If you have problems using the program on a Mac, try opening the Unshake.jar file directly at the last step. Larger photographs might also take much longer to “unshake”, while lower-res (i.e. 500px wide) photos were completed very quickly.

Unshake (via Lifehacker)

Flickr has its own URL shortening system to make links suitable for things like Twitter. However, for some strange reason, the short URLs to photographs aren’t readily available on the photo pages themselves.

There are some services out there that allow you to quickly generate flic.kr URLs, but I decided to quickly write my own, and called it shortenr.

The service is extremely simple. Simply enter a long Flickr URL to have it shortened, or a short flic.kr URL to have it expanded. It’s also available as a bookmarklet to shorten URLs while you’re on the Flickr photo pages themselves: simply drag this link into your bookmarks: shortenr

If you’d like to see additional features added to this simple app, leave a comment. Hopefully some of you will find this useful.

Here’s the latest innovation from Pentax: a puppet body for your lens cap! The “Cameraman” is a handmade puppet body that comes with a 52mm lens cap showing a smiley face. It costs ¥2,914, or about $32, and is only available for a limited amount of time.

There’s also about 100 different designs you can choose from, though we think it’d be cool if they offered a blank doll for you to draw your own design. It’d be like the Munny for cameras.

This is the same company that allows you to customize the colors of its entry level DSLR, the K-x.

Looks like Pentax is trying to differentiate itself from the competition with creativity and adding a “fun factor” to entry level photography.

(via Engadget)