Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve been (impatiently) waiting for Sony to update its NEX line of digital cameras since the NEX-3 was discontinued earlier this year, and it looks like a worthy successor has finally been named. Announced today, the NEX-C3 appears identical to the model leaked in April, and uses the same format APS-C image sensor as its predecessor, bumping resolution to 16.2 megapixels in a camera body smaller than the NEX-5. Sony says the new entry-level cam is designed to fill the gap between point-and-shoot and DSLR cameras, and is the smallest body to pack an APS-C sensor, offering DSLR-level image quality — the same 16.2 MP chip is also included in its new full-size Alpha A35, which replaces the A33. Both cameras can shoot at up to 5.5 fps (the A35 adds a 7 fps mode at 8.4 megapixels), and include 3-inch LCDs, with the NEX keeping its hallmark tilt display, and the A35 adding Sony’s Translucent Mirror live-view mode, and an electronic viewfinder. We have plenty more to share, including a new lens and flash, along with pricing and availability for all, so jump past the break for the juicy details.

Continue reading Sony announces NEX-C3 and Alpha A35 cameras, new macro lens

Sony announces NEX-C3 and Alpha A35 cameras, new macro lens originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Camera Lens Cap Holder eliminates distracting dangle

I have seen a bunch of different “solutions” to the problem of lost lens caps, but none of them really worked. Worse, they usually leave the plastic cap dangling which is both annoying and can potentially ruin your photo if it gets in the way.

My current solution is not to use a cap at all, relying on the camera’s hard case to protect the lens when not in use. If this Kickstarter project is successful, though, I may switch to the Camera Lens Cap Holder instead.

The holder is simple. It threads onto your camera strap like a belt buckle and adds a simple disk of plastic, secured at both side for dangle-free positioning. Then, when you need somewhere to put your cap, you just clip it on as if you were clipping it to the lens.

Each holder can work with three or four different sizes of cap. This is done by putting two circles of plastic on each side of the holder. To get access to the send side, you just slip the holder off the strap and reverse it. This is easier with quick-release straps.

It’s so simple I have a feeling the inventor, Mark Stevenson, is going to have a success on his hands. To get one of the first production run, you’ll need to pledge $15 to the Kickstarter project. That’s cheaper than a couple of replacement lens caps.

Camera Lens Cap Holder [Kickstarter]

See Also:

• $72 Retractable Lens Cap for the Olympus XZ1
• Home-Made Protection: Rear Lens-Cap Pad for Stackable Storage …
• DIY Lens Cap Saver Is Ingeniously Inventive
• White-Balance Lens Cap. Possibly Pointless?
• Pinwide: Wide-Angle Pinhole Lens for Micro Four Thirds Cameras …

Alan Sailer’s incredible high-speed photos are taken with a death-dealing home-made flash. Photo: Alan Sailer

Alan Sailer is a photographer. He fires things very fast at other things, and then uses a homemade high-speed flash to capture some quite stunning images. Here’s how he got famous:

Was a very, very obscure photographer working in his garage shooting stuff with a pellet rifle and photographing the results with a home built flash.

Then in early 2009, someone linked one of my pictures to a social networking site. My boss came by one day and told me my site was getting a huge number of views. Emails from magazines, newspapers and even Good Morning America started clogging my FlickrMail box.

It was very stressful.

Stressful indeed. Thankfully, things settled down a bit for Alan and now he continues to add to the almost 1,000 high-speed photos on his Flickr photostream.

Why build a special flash? Because even with a flash duration of just 1/40,000th of a second, a typical flashgun isn’t fast enough to capture a speeding bullet, which will travel a blur-inducing third of an inch in that time. An air-gap microflash, however, lights up for just 1/1,000,000th of a second, fast enough to freeze pretty much anything.

The makings of a high-speed air-gap flash are detailed over at the Hobby Robotocs blog, although the author — Maurice Ribble — warns against making one thanks to the dangerous high voltages (35,000v) involved. He is fairly emphatic about this: “Do not build one! If you go against my advice and do build one, I am not responsible for any injury, death, or any other problems it causes,” he says.

The general principle, though, is that you load up a capacitor with 35,000 volts and then dump the electricity into a tiny glass tube which houses two wires with a gap between them. The resulting spark causes an incredibly short burst of light, perfect for capturing the moment that a lime tears through a hunk of raw meat.

Almost as inventive as the flash is Alan’s choice of subject matter. These include bullets hitting Christmas bulbs filled with water or jello, limes hitting, well, everything, and the amazing picture above, of a junk-store ceramic figurine with jello for a brain.

Alan Sailer’s Photostream [Flickr via BoingBoing]

High Speed Air-gap Flash [Hobby Robotics]

See Also:

• Low-Tech Geekery Makes Beautiful High-Speed Photography
• Super Slow-Motion Camera Catches a Wave
• Casio EX-F1 Is a Speed-Demon Snapper
• Lightning Reveals Its Power in Slow Motion

Japanese camera company Pentax today launched a very cool new add on to their digital SLR cameras which wil have camera enthusiasts and star gazers alike excited. The new product is a GPS unit which along with giving basic location data to automatically geo tag your snaps, also contains a tracking system for “celestial bodies”.

The new piece of camera kit easily mounts onto the hotshoe of any of the Pentax SLR cameras and records various location data onto captured images including: the latitude, longitude, altitude, universal time coordinated (UTC) and direction of the shooting. The user can then later use programs such as Google Earth to pull up the exact spot the photo was shot from.

The very cool “Astrotracer” function is a particularly interesting inovation which automatically follows stars, planets or other objects in the sky capturing clear images even on long exposures. The system works by calculating the movement of the stars using latitude obtained from GPS data and the cameras alignment obtained from its magnetic acceleration sensors. The image sensor then shifts automatically tracking the movement in real time. UFO hunting just got a lot easier!!

Location based technology and geo-tagging is becoming very popular and with sites such as foursquare we could see this kind of technology being linked in to a number of new platforms. It won’t be long before photo sharing sites team up with location based sites to take full advantage of the new technology.

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It’s a cool idea: your brain doesn’t necessarily catalog whether something lasted one second or five seconds. But a camera is precise. The 72 photos from this week’s Shooting Challenge were each exposed for exactly one second. More »