Hasta La Gadget!

Remember the Gadget Lab home-made stealth camera bag? It was an old, ugly army surplus canvas bag with padding added inside to make it both camera-friendly and thief-unfriendly. Well, if the Any Bag Camera Bag Insert had existed back then, I may never have made it.

The insert is a small, strap-free bag that “turns every bag you own into a camera bag.” The minimal bag has a magnetic snap-closed flap, five small pockets around the edges and a moveable velcro divider. And that’s it. You put this inside any other bag you have and it creates a little safe haven for your camera gear.

The bag is 10.5 x 7 x 4 inches — big enough for an SLR with a long lens, or an entire Micro Four Thirds kit — and is made from waterproof waxed canvas. And when I said it was strap-free, I told a little lie. It has some tiny leather straps so you can grab it and pull it out of your rucksack, airplane carry-on or messenger bag.

How much for this versatile little sack? $59, and it’s available now.

The Any Bag Camera Bag Insert [Photojojo. Thanks, Jen!]

See Also:

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• Make It: Stealth Camera Bag
• Stealthy ThinkTank Photo-Bags Expand to Fit Everything
• Gadget Lab Reader Makes Stealth Camera and Netbook Bag
• Hands On With Lowepro's 'Stealth' Camera Bag

If the warm, soothing waves of IEEE 802.11 are beaming down on your location, there are certainly several ways to send pictures directly from your camera to the cloud, but Sony’s reportedly prototyping a camera that won’t need a single bar of WiFi to get your upload on. Our friends at gdgt cite anonymous sources that say Sony’s got a camera with a built-in 3G modem in the works, and we’re not talking about a cameraphone. While Sony’s cellphone CMOS sensors may have improved, gdgt says the prototype unit will probably be a dedicated point-and-shoot, though the publication says their moles aren’t sure it’s actually coming to market. If it does, though, here’s hoping it comes with some Whispernet so we don’t have to foot a monthly or (perish the thought) per-picture bill!

Sony working on a Cyber-shot camera with 3G cellular connectivity? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Mar 2011 20:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jonas Kroyer’s DIY Ikonette lens takes some dreamy snaps

Today’s big photographic irony is that we take our super high-tech digital cameras — machines that can capture better photos more easily than ever before — and then muss up the results with blur, filters, fake scratches and effects that make it look like we were shooting on decades-old film that had been left on top of the airport-x-ray machine.

Photographer Jonas Kroyer decided to go one better, and took a cloudy, chipped old lens from an old Zeiss Ikonette camera and modded it to fit his Nikon D300. The resulting photos are blurry, lacking in contrast, and have some weird color shifts. They are, in short, fantastic.

It wasn’t quite as simple as ripping the lens off one camera and sticking it on another. After carefully removing the lens and bellows assembly from the camera body, Jonas built a metal plate which screwed into the bottom of his SLR and provided a strip along which the bellows rails could slide.

On the back end went a Nikon lens mount, culled from a donor lens, and brass knobs were added to make the sliding focus action easier to use. Finally, a spring from a ball-pen was used to keep the lens’s own shutter open.

I like to complain about slow maximum apertures in lenses (it’s the reason I own almost no zooms), but even I am amazed that this lens has a maximum aperture of ƒ9. Yes, that’s ƒ9 wide-open. The other choices are ƒ16 and ƒ32, and all three of these diaphragm opening cast a weird square-shaped highlight onto the sensor.

But despite all this, the lens captures pictures that would make Instapaper users jealous. Despite the low resolution, the images have a startling 3-D quality to them, especially the portraits, and the black and white images remind me of the prints I used to make through crappy enlarger lenses back in the darkroom. Most of all, though, is that I’m now inspired to put some junky glass on the front of my own digicams. Garage sales, here I come.

Ikonette a DIY DSLR-lens [Jonas Kroyer. Thanks, Mikkel!]

See Also:

• Review: The World Through a Fisheye Lens
• Plungercam: DIY Tilt-Shift Lens
• DIY iPhone Macro Lens Carousel
• DIY Fisheye Made From Broken Lens
• DVD Lens Makes Great Cellphone Macro Hack

The 1954 Leica M3 and the 2011 Fujifilm X100. Photo: Nokton / Flickr

We called the hot-and-almost-here Fujifilm X100 Leica-like, but if you didn’t believe use, take a look at these photos from Flickr user Nokton. They show the classic Leica M3 and the new Fujifilm hybrid rangefinder together, and they could have been separated at birth.

Well, not quite at birth: the M3 was born back in 1954, while the X100 isn’t even close to its first birthday. But it’s clear that, as Nokton says, the new camera has some Leica DNA. In fact, I had to double check the first time I saw the side-by-side shot to see which was which.

Under his real name of Pieter Franken, Nokton has also reviewed the X100, and he pronounces it as good, with high ISO performance at the level of the Nikon D700, a good, fast lens and a great viewfinder (this is arguably the main point of the camera, with its instant switch between optical and electronic modes).

It also has, somewhat amusingly, a much quieter shutter than the current Leica M9. Up until the Leica started putting metal shutters into its M-series cameras, they were known as the quietest cameras around.

Even the top-plates are similar. Photo Nokton / Flickr

What the X100 isn’t is a true rangefinder. To manually focus you will use the electronic viewfinder and have it magnify a section of the image for you. This is slower than using a real rangefinder, and Pieter says that the focus ring on the lens is also rather slow, with a lot of movement required to shift the focus a small amount.

A shame, but only to be expected. After all, the Leica M9 costs as much as a small car, whereas the X100 is a relatively reasonable $1,200. And I still can’t wait to try one.

Leica M3 versus Finepix X100 [Nokton / Flickr]

First Impressions of the Finepix X100 from a rangefinder shooter [Steve Huff Photo]

See Also:

• Leica M9: 18 Megapixels, Full-Frame Sensor
• $29000 Titanium Leica M9 Will Sadly Never Take a Picture
• X100
• Hot Fujifilm X100 Gets U.S Price, Full Specs
• Fujifilm Posts New Details of X100 Hybrid Viewfinder
• More Details of Fujifilm's Retro-Tastic X100 Revealed

Ole Wolf’s ring flash adapter uses 150 optic fibers to channel the camera’s own light

I know what you’re thinking. “That idiot Sorrel is writing about another DIY ring-flash?” The answer is “yes,” but I guarantee this is both the coolest ring flash you have ever seen, and also the only one that looks like a kind of cyberpunk schoolgirl, complete with fiber-optic pigtails.

The project was carried out by Ole Wolf, who painstakingly put together this rather precise setup. It uses 150 fiber optic cables, fused together at one end separated into a ring at the other. The ring is made from acrylic, and has 150 tiny holes drilled in it in concentric circles, which are themselves offset to give a more even light.

Fiber optics are designed to transmit light, and therefore are way more efficient than even the best commercial ring flash adapters. And because the cables come in a relatively small bundle, the light from your camera’s built in flash is plenty.

Wolf’s design is simple but effective, and manages to convey almost all of the flash’s light to the subject. It has another advantage, too: because the light is coming from the built in strobe, it is measured and controlled by the camera’s brain. Wolf suspects that slight inefficiencies in the adapter might cause a “miscalculation of the target flash intensity,” but as far as I know, DSLRs calculate the flash exposure on the fly, with pre-flashes and clever tricks. this should mean you get perfect exposures.

So there you go: yet another DIY ring flash. But it’s cool, right? Also, it should work just fine without fusing the fibers together at one end, so next time you see an old fiber optic lamp at a yard-sale, snap it up. Now you know just what to do with it.

DIY Ring Flash with a 150-Element Optical Fiber Whip [Blazing Angles via Hack-a-Day]

See Also:

• $40 Ring-Flash Adapter Cheaper Than Home-Made
• Lomo Ring Flash: Cheap and Fun
• Raid the Kitchen to Build a DIY Ring Flash
• LED Of The Rings: The $60 Macro 'Flash'