Gigapixel camera (updated)

Gigapixel camera. Up to fifty GP, actually. 50,000 megapixels.
It combines many small cameras, and is about the size of a PC.
You can read the article, but basically it states the amazing facts that the camera is Very Sharp, and that it will get Smaller In The Future.

Update:
A. tipped us off for much more detailed info.



(Not a hugely informative video, admittedly.)

Little Lennon (updated)

I'll bet his teachers were very gracious about being told that from a Liverpool working-class 7-year-old.

A said:

I don't believe that he actually said that anyway.
It's not a very good approach to life. In my grandparents' time, which is the generation that endured the Great Depression and WW2, there was the emphasis on what you had to do in life - getting a job, etc., etc. If you could be happy too, great - but it wasn't the focus. This focus on personal happiness as the ultimate goal in life is what's produced today's spoiled, self-centered bratty kids.

A2 said...
Our parents generation was never interested in keeping up standards. They wanted to be happy, but the last way to be happy is to make it your objective in life.

Those are very fair points.
How do you become Happy? The search for happiness will usually lead you to search outside yourself, where you won't find it.

On the other hand, the idea that "all that matters is that you're happy" may help to defuse a lot of false goals in life.
For example, somebody living a life on small means but doing something they really care about may be happy, but their parents may see it as terrible situation not to have Status and Security, and pressure them to become a doctor or lawyer. (Bruce Springsteen tells that his parents were still pressuring him to go to college well after he was a multi-millionaire.)

Overcome Your Fear of Shooting Street Photography

[Thanks to Imaging Resource]

Overcome Your Fear of Shooting Street Photography, free ebook.

I think that dealing successfully with strangers, whether in photographing them or in other contexts, a very important ingredient, well two really, is 1) knowing that you are doing nothing wrong, and showing it in your body language. 2) Being open and friendly. This of course ties in with the first one. People who have a bad conscience about what they are doing are usually acting defensively or antagonistically. If you are open and friendly, people will come into your space without automatic suspicion.

Also, be chatty. Start talking about some aspect about the subject or photos, or your camera. People probably won't be interested, but actually the more geeky your chat is, the better, people will get bored and will conclude that you are a harmless eccentric.

New ground in mobile photo apps

Bert found these very cool photo apps (see the videos). It seems they are not for sale right now, but should be soon. One use for example is a time picture of a person in a busy street. And after taking the picture you, right on the phone, freeze the person, and just click on each to remove the other people, because the phone camera captured the background behind each over the couple seconds you "filmed", and it blends a bunch of photos into one.

I still think Apple should have called it something else than iPhone, and thus laying the ground for people seeing "smartphones" as phones. They really have little to do with a phone, the phone app is just one amongst many, and not even the best one. It's a 21st century palm computer, and way more powerful than anybody imagined in the nineties.

Duskiness

(All are clickable. The middle one especially shows much better large.)

Olympus OM-D EM-5, Olympus 45mm 1.8 at full opening. About 400 ISO.

Photos with "bokeh", or soft background blur can't generally be produced with pocket cameras, one of the few downsides to them still*. The bigger the sensor, the easier you can get nice soft background blur. The new mirrorless cameras, like Micro Four Thirds for example, have smaller sensors than traditional film (half the size of a 35mm film frame ("full frame"), linearly, one quarter area-wise), but with the right lens you can still get this effect.

*Even here, progress is made. The Sony RX100 is pocket-sized but still manages to have a sensor large enough to get some background blur if you want.