Free Republic

Not sure but this may be my first "vanity" thread since joining in 1998. In any case, I know there's folks on here who are deeply involved in photography and know lots about camera's and digital camera's -- something of which I know about zero. I'm taking the better half on her dream vacation this summer to Alaska for her birthday. We have a small 12mp digital pocket camera, but are thinking we'd really need something better (better zoom, image stabilization for example) for some nice nature pic's. I've been reading up on different camera's from SLR to DSLR and...

TAMPA BAY, Florida (WTSP) -- A subtle, but significant tweak to Florida's rules regarding traffic signals has allowed local cities and counties to shorten yellow light intervals, resulting in millions of dollars in additional red light camera fines. The 10 News Investigators discovered the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) quietly changed the state's policy on yellow intervals in 2011, reducing the minimum below federal recommendations. The rule change was followed by engineers, both from FDOT and local municipalities, collaborating to shorten the length of yellow lights at key intersections, specifically those with red light cameras (RLCs). While yellow light times...

Camera focuses on man and woman during a game. He's on a cell phone and blows her off. She is not amused.

Anne Arundel County police said Tuesday that no criminal charges will be filed against an officer who placed a camera in a boys' restroom at Glen Burnie High School. But the officer involved in the incident, who was not identified, remains on administrative leave. In a statement, police said they had conducted an investigation in conjunction with the Anne Arundel County state's attorney's office, and "based upon the evidence, no criminal laws have been violated, and therefore the officer involved in this incident will not be criminally charged." On March 20, a student found what appeared to be a camera...

A new piece of filmmaking gear was just announced that could completely re-invent the complex process of camera stabilization. It's currently being tested and endorsed by Vincent LaForet, who's given us a little taste of what it's capable of. The product is called M�VI, created by Freefly, longtime maker of crazy camera-drone equipment and stabilizers. LaForet is presenting a short film and behind-the-scenes video to illustrate its abilities, which consists of a completely custom-made gimbal and 3-axis gyroscope that digitally stabilizes the camera (a Canon 1DC in this case). It looks to be very light and portable, a far cry...

The president, chief financial officer and top lawyer for Chicago's red light camera company resigned this week amid an escalating corruption scandal that has cost Redflex Traffic Systems Inc. its lucrative, decadelong relationship with the city. The resignations came as Redflex said it was winding down a company-funded probe into allegations of an improper relationship between the company and the former city transportation manager who oversaw its contract until 2011, a relationship first disclosed by the Tribune in October. A longtime friend of that city manager was hired by Redflex for a high-paid consulting deal. The company recently acknowledged it...

Bear surprises a camera crew filming a commercial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xoe5Vjl90-o

Acting on a tip, DEA agents went on rural property without a warrant, set up surveillance cameras, and used the evidence obtained to get a search warrant and convict the property owners for growing marijuana. And a US district court judge said that was okay. Is it? special to Drug War Chronicle by investigative journalist Clarence Walker, cwalkerinvestigate@gmail.com [7] A case that began with reports of suspicious activity in northeast Wisconsin forest land last spring may be headed for the US Supreme Court. That's because a US district court judge ruled in the case last fall that it was okay...

1 Introduction to How the Lytro Works 2 Focusing on the Problem 3 Fields of Light 4 Faking Depth Lytro cameras have a simple touch-screen interface and LCD display. Courtesy LytroTaking the perfect photograph is part art and part science. In the old days, when film was the only medium you could use, you had to make sure you had the right lens, lighting and type of film for the shot. As digital cameras took center stage, lens choice and lighting remained important. Equally as important was a familiarity with editing software. The right tools can help you adjust...

What is a good camera to buy for a reasonable price that will take pictures of people, posing, athletic events etc, that is easily postable to a website or facebook?

The Phoenix Police Department, in partnership with Arizona State University (ASU) College of Public Programs, has received a $500,000 federal grant to purchase 50 on-officer video camera systems that will be used in the Maryvale Precinct. The Department of Justice “Smart Policing” grant will allow ASU and the Police Department to jointly examine the impact of this technology on crime, public and police accountability, and satisfaction with the police. “This grant will allow us to further our department’s commitment to community-based policing while maintaining the public trust,” said Acting Police Chief Joe Yahner. “The technology that this grant will provide...

There’s a huge wave of anti-Japanese sentiment sweeping across China, with violent protests popping up all over the country in response to the ongoing dispute over islands in the East China Sea. Amidst the public anger, Japanese brands are taking a hit… literally.

A former D.C. police officer admitted Thursday to falsifying logs regarding the testing of mobile photo-radar cameras that issue speeding tickets — a move that resulted in the department having to refund more than $17,000 in traffic ticket fines. ... the 22-year department veteran was supposed to be monitoring photo-radar equipment during overtime shifts and taking test photographs once an hour with the cameras to ensure they were working properly. In 2008 and 2009, prosecutors said Mr. Cephas failed to take the once-an-hour shots on 33 occasions and covered up the mistakes by rolling back the clock on the radar...

HORICON -- The camera John Noerr found at the bottom of a small creek north of Pharaoh Lake in early July could have belonged to anyone. It wasn’t until he took the Cannon XT digital camera back to his parents’ home on Schroon Lake that he discovered the crusty, soggy memory card still worked, with the most recent picture time-stamped in June 2009. And the 581 photos it contained led the Poultney, Vt., art teacher on a three-week journey to find the camera’s owner. “I started to realize there might be enough information here to track this guy down,” Noerr...

This small mountain of gear leads to two very frightening thoughts. Firstly, there’s no ending in sight; one keeps accumulating more and more equipment in order to keep pushing the edge of what’s possible both from a compositional and artistic standpoint, as well as from an image quality standpoint. You’ve either got to have a great day job and very deep pockets, or some good recurring clients. The second thought is around obsolescence. In the film days, the camera body and lenses lasted a long time; you invested in glass, got a decent body – one that fulfilled your personal...

Monitoring a location or person with a camera or microphone has become a lot easier in recent years due to cameras having much higher resolutions while being fitted into ever smaller devices. Just about every smartphone now carries a high resolution camera capable of recording video along with a decent microphone. If you want to record someone covertly though, you still have the issue of hiding your recording devices from view. You’re also going to want to leave them recording for long periods of time without being discovered. Qwonn, a manufacture of security products, has come up with the...

By synchronizing 98 tiny cameras in a single device, electrical engineers from Duke University and the University of Arizona have developed a prototype camera that can create images with unprecedented detail. The camera's resolution is five times better than 20/20 human vision over a 120 degree horizontal field. The new camera has the potential to capture up to 50 gigapixels of data, which is 50,000 megapixels. By comparison, most consumer cameras are capable of taking photographs with sizes ranging from 8 to 40 megapixels. Pixels are individual "dots" of data – the higher the number of pixels, the better resolution...

This little beauty, along with a nice bag of goodies, came as a gift.I'm going to start learning to sleep standing in a corner, I'm running out of space for a bed.Canon AE-1 Program, 1981

More than 140 people were injured when gas-filled balloons exploded at a governing party campaign concert in the Armenian capital.

A video uploaded to the internet's YouTube service appears to show a group of Syrian soldiers loyal to President Bashar Assad burying a man who is alive, as he pleads for mercy. The soldiers accused the man of carrying a camera in order to shoot video of Assad's forces and transfer the video to television networks. The men are seen standing around a hole that has been dug in the ground. The man is inside the hole and the soldiers are pointing their guns at him. One of the soldiers tells his commander: "Yes sir, we put him there as...

Sony may be working on a full frame square format digital camera, looks like a Hasslebad! I'm not gonna ask how much this will cost, but I can dream, can't I? My Sony A-200 left the repair shop today, headed home, for the 2nd time, they didn't get it right first time. I've been without a good digital camera for about 5 weeks now, just gnashing my teeth and moaning!

The recovery of objects obscured by scattering is an important goal in imaging and has been approached by exploiting, for example, coherence properties, ballistic photons or penetrating wavelengths. Common methods use scattered light transmitted through an occluding material, although these fail if the occluder is opaque. Light is scattered not only by transmission through objects, but also by multiple reflection from diffuse surfaces in a scene. This reflected light contains information about the scene that becomes mixed by the diffuse reflections before reaching the image sensor. This mixing is difficult to decode using traditional cameras. Here we report the combination...

It's a given in bird and critter photography that closer is always better but a big lens will work too.This is a Sigma 400mm f5.6 in Minolta A mount. In this pic it's on my Minolta Maxxum XTsi but it also fits my Sony. On the Sony it is equivalent to 600mm.This lens was made in the mid 80s but can pass for new, not a blemish on it anywhere.

Kodak, the company that invented the first digital camera back in 1975, announced today that it is pulling out of the camera market entirely. The phasing out of digital cameras, pocket video cameras, and digital picture frames will likely happen by the end of June. Instead, the company will be focusing on licensing out its patents and brand name (much like Polaroid does), and on inkjet photo printing. Although Kodak wasn’t a big player in the digital camera space, it was once a dominant camera maker in the days of film. The original Kodak Brownie helped popularize consumer photography and...

Shocking news: Kodak, the company that invented the first digital camera back in 1975, announced today that it is pulling out of the camera market entirely. The phasing out of digital cameras, pocket video cameras, and digital picture frames will likely happen by the end of June. Instead, the company will be focusing on licensing out its patents and brand name

Nikon has unveiled a new superzoom compact camera called the P510 that offers a ridiculous 42x optical zoom — the highest zoom ratio ever seen in such a camera. In 35mm terms, the lens goes from a 24mm on the wide-angle side to a 1000mm on the telephoto end. The 16.1MP camera also boasts a 3-inch LCD screen, 1080p video recording, GPS, 5fps continuous shooting, and ISO 3200. It’ll hit store shelves later this month with a price tag of $430.

It appears that, bushy haired Chris Rock doesn’t like Newt Gingrich; or at least being asked questions about him. Maybe it was the fact that it was 4AM? As part of the Sundance festivities Rock was at a late night event at Tao when he was unexpectedly hit with a bunch of political questions. The New York Post reports, “A guy walked up to Chris and his entourage and said, ‘Hey, could I get a photo of you with my girlfriend? When rock turned around there was a video camera in his face, and someone asking him about Newt Gingrich....

It just occured to me that although I've been enjoying this site for a long time I've never passed on the link.This site has owners manuals for many older cameras and flashes.It's free to download but the site is supported by donations, so kick in a couple of bucks.If you've ever tried to hunt down an old manual the value of this collection is obvious.SUPPORT FREE REPUBLIC BEFORE YOU SEND MONEY TO ANYONE!!!

Kevin Hayes feels like the luckiest man alive. Three years ago, the 43-year-old Melbourne man was in Canberra and lost the $5000 Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR camera his wife bought him for his birthday, and he had all but given up hope of getting it back when he found out about the website stolencamerafinder.com M The site helped him track the lost or stolen camera to a man who works at a Sydney tattoo parlour a few weeks ago and NSW Police have since collected it. Hayes expects to have his camera back any day now, and NSW...

Here are some developments in the ongoing Olympus scandal: investors and a former director are currently calling for fired CEO Michael Woodford to be brought back to clean house and right the ship. At the same time, The New York Times is reporting that Japanese investigators are still trying to understand a $4.9 billion hole in Olympus’ financial records, and believe that over half of that amount were paid to organized crime groups in Japan. More specifically, the company is accused of being linked to Yamaguchi-Gumi, the country’s most infamous yazuka organization.

Reporting from Washington— On the evening of April 5, a pilot settled into a leather captain's chair at Creech Air Force Base in southern Nevada and took the controls of a Predator drone flying over one of the most violent areas of southwestern Afghanistan. Minutes later, his radio crackled. A firefight had broken out. Taliban insurgents had ambushed about two dozen Marines patrolling a bitterly contested road. The Air Force captain angled his joystick and the drone veered toward the fighting taking place half a world away, where it was already morning. He powered up two Hellfire missiles under its...

Jonas Pfiel's "Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera" sports 36 cameras and contains firmware that stitches their output together to form a global panorama; you throw it into the air and at the top of its arc, it takes a snap and processes it.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Despite all the advances in digital photography, most people are still plagued by the problem of blurry photos, a problem compounded by the use of cameras embedded in cell phones due to their small size. Problems of blurring generally can be divided into two types. The first is problems with focusing, which can usually be avoided if the camera operator will simply wait for the automatic focusing feature of their camera to do its job. The second type is much more difficult to solve as it involves camera movement while the image is being shot. It’s this second...

A former Atlanta woman on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit against the Atlanta Police Department, contending an officer illegally seized her camera after she took pictures of officers kicking a man who was handcuffed and laying on the ground. The suit said Felecia Anderson, 24, who lived in the West End on Oct. 14, 2009, saw members of APD's now-disbanded Red Dog unit raiding her neighbor's house. When she also saw officers kicking and dragging a man, she went home and got her camera, the suit said. As Anderson filmed the incident as she stood on the sidewalk, officers ordered...

SNIPPET: "Dan Folk (21), an Israeli who was invited to the event in which over 100 students took part, ended up getting a business card and memento from Ahmadinejad. "It was at his hotel in Manhattan, we got there and had to wait in the security check line for nearly an hour," said the student, adding, "we gave them our cell phones and any kind of camera we were carrying. During the security check I showed them my Israeli driver's license and the Iranian security officer smiled at me." Folk said he had mixed feelings over the question of whether...

Scientists are a step closer to constructing a digital version of the human visual system. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed an algorithm that can be applied to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) imagery to show a moving image a person is seeing. Neuroscientists have been using fMRI to study the human visual system for years, which involves measuring changes in blood oxygen levels in the brain. This works fine for studying how we see static images, but it falls short when it comes to moving imagery. Individual neuronal activity occurs over a much faster time scale,...

Most of the junque at the thrift shop today was either terminal or overpriced. I'll let it sit until they get tired of looking at it!I found this little guy way back in the showcase, it works!Pony 135 Production: 1950-1954 Film format: 135, 24x35mm frames Shutter: Kodak Flash 200 1/25 - 1/200 (M sync only) Lens: Kodak Anaston 51mm f/4.5 - f/22 Can't lose for 3 bucks!

Ok, summary for those of you who don't want to or can't watch the video: eight-year New Mexico veteran cop Burt Lopez took a chick out to some private property for a quick triple-x throw-down. They thought they were only being watched by a chihuahua, but the whole thing was caught on tape and the rest, as they say in my country, is history. And for the rest of his life, Burt Lopez will be peeling stickers off his car that read "To Protect and Service". And all acts of cop sex shall henceforth be known as getting Burt Lopezed....

A Concord man giving away lemonade at a farmer's market was threatened with wiretapping charges last Saturday when he refused to stop filming a police officer and a fellow vendor. Garret Ean didn't have a permit to sell lemonade, which drew the ire of the president of the Concord Farmer's Market. Ean filmed the confrontation, and continued to film when a Concord cop showed up and threatened to arrest him for wiretapping. Photojournalist Carlos Miller (who we interviewed for the November issue of Reason about the war on photography) has the story: The man, whom Ean identified as Steve Blasdell,...

A congressman from Ohio had cops grab the cameras of constituents during a town hall meeting. Steve Chabot, a Republican, had cell phones and cameras confiscated in order to “prevent an embarrassing Youtube video from making the rounds,” according to Carlos Miller, who runs a blog documenting efforts by the state to stifle the First Amendment rights of photographers. Police said the cameras were taken “to protect the constituents.” A local television station, however, was allowed to videotape the meeting and the brazen move by Chabot and the cops.

In 2013, the European Space Agency will launch the Gaia spacecraft. Its billion-pixel imaging sensor will be among the largest digital cameras ever to exist, and over the course of its mission, it's estimated that Gaia will detect 15,000 new alien planets. Gaia's gigantic sensor is comprised of 106 separate CCD detectors, mosaiced together to form a monster camera over three feet wide. The resulting imaging system is so powerful that it will be able to precisely measure the width of a hair from over 600 miles away, and from here on Earth, it could spot a dime on the...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. government has sued a former NASA astronaut to recover a camera used to explore the moon's surface during the 1971 Apollo 14 mission after seeing it slated for sale in a New York auction. The lawsuit, filed in Miami federal court on Wednesday, accuses Edgar Mitchell of illegally possessing the camera and attempting to sell it for profit. In March, NASA learned that the British auction house Bonhams was planning to sell the camera at an upcoming Space History Sale, according to the suit. The item was labeled "Movie Camera from the Lunar Surface"...

On my last thrift shop expedition I found this Pentax K1000. It is probably from about 1976.It was clean, the shutter worked fine but the meter was dead.When I got home and opened it up I found that a leaky battery had dissolved the lead from the battery box.The battery box contact is stainless steel and the wire had been crimped in place. It wasn't possible to open the crimp, it's too small to work with.There is a product made for repairing the defroster grids on car windows, it's a conductive paint product. I used it to repair the wire...

I've been putting this rig together for a while now, one piece at a time. It's all just about new in condition.The Minolta Maxxum XTSi was released in 1998, the 3200i flash is from a few years earlier.This is one of the toys I lusted after when it came out but couldn't afford, the body alone was 600 bucks in 1998.Minolta digital cameras appeared not long after this, rhen the line was bought by Sony. If I put this camera next to my Sony Alpha digital the XTSi, although smaller, shows a lot of the same design trends, likely from...

Tachyon GunCam™ – the entire collection bundle, or a la carte – consists of a variety of mounts that will secure the Tachyon OPS and OPS HD cameras to almost any handgun, rifle, or shotgun. Tachyon’s Picatinny Rail mount can easily be mounted to any gun that is equipped with a Picatinny rail. For guns without rails, such as rifles and shotguns, they offer attachable rails designed specifically for each type of gun. They even have a rail mount designed for scopes. The Tachyon OPS camera’s patented symmetrical mounting design allows them, in their mounts, to rotate four ways and...

Will Foreman has beaten the speed cameras. Five times and counting before three different judges, the Prince George’s County business owner has used a computer and a calculation to cast reasonable doubt on the reliability of the soulless traffic enforcers. After a judge threw out two of his tickets Wednesday, Mr. Foreman said he is confident he has exposed systemic inaccuracies in the systems that generate millions of dollars a year for town, city and county governments. He wasn’t the only one to employ the defense Wednesday. Two other men were found not guilty of speeding offenses before a Hyattsville...

I finished another project tonight. This Minolta X9 has been sitting in a project drawer until I got time to mess with it. A capacitor triggers the shutter and also regulates shutter speed. Blown capacitors are common on the X9s, Minolta seems to havw bought a big batch of bad ones.. The new capacitor shouldn't have that problem.It's a simple soldering job for young hands and young eyes, which I don't have! I finally figured out a workaround and got her done! The X9 is a later generation than my XG-M, lots more plastic but it has some nice features...

We have reaction just in to our newsroom... from a seattle man arrested after refusing to show his i-d to security agents at the airport ... and filming the incident. just about an hour ago... an Albuquerque jury cleared Phil Mocek of all charges. "It's been a long time - I feel good that we had police and tsa on record saying that you don't have to show id to fly and that you can use a camera at the airport." Phil Mocek faced charges including disorderly conduct, and concealing his identity... following the 2009 incident. the defense argued Mocek...

I am a parent of a 6th grader who wants to take photographs of kids playing indoor basketball and volleyball. I am looking for a camera which will take indoor shots with good white balance and freeze action for these sports. I do not want to go to a DSLR with humongous lens. I do not need professional quality, but also don't want blurry snapshots. I haven't found any point and shoot cameras which will do this; can anyone recommend something perhaps between that and a DSLR? I think that the shutter speed needs to be about 1/300th; what would...

Michael Allison, a 41-year-old backyard mechanic from southeastern Illinois, faces up to 75 years in prison for an act most people don’t realize is a crime: recording public officials. Allison lives in Bridgeport, Illinois, and often spends time at his mother’s house in Robinson, one county to the north. Both towns have abandoned property (or “eyesore”) ordinances prohibiting the parking of inoperable or unregistered vehicles on private property except in enclosed garages. These rules place a substantial burden on hobbyists like Allison; to obey the law he must either build a garage—which he says isn’t an option, given his property...