Photography

The other day I was playing a game of catch with someone and I was thinking: “Hey, there really needs to be a camera on this ball.” Actually, that never thought that, and I wasn’t playing catch, but I still think putting a camera on a ball is a good idea.

This is what the TosPom does. You throw the ball, you catch it, and it uses face detection technology to take a picture. I suppose there is no better time to snap a pic then that smile you get when you actually catch a ball. Okay, you’re not a bad catch like me, but you get the point.

I have no idea how the technology works. I mean, there is a YouTube video that shows the TosPom taking a perfect face picture every time it is caught. There must be some sort of gyroscope or something that keeps the camera lens always pointing up.

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I’m always very skeptical when I hear any company saying that their particular gadget is the “world’s (insert est-adjective here)”. Case in point, the latest announcement from Sony is boasting that their latest handycam, the HDR-TG1, is the world’s smallest.

The measurements are at 1.3 x 4.7 x 2.5 inches, and it weighs in at ten ounces. Somehow, the company is able to fit in a full touchscreen at 2.7 inches, as well as MS Pro Duo and Pro Duo Mark 2 cards.

Other features include a 10x Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar optical zoom lens, a BIONZ processing engine, 5.1 Dolby Digital audio recording, as well as a 4 GB worth of memory.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that it shoots video with 1080i capability. It can also do stills at 4 Megapixels.

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Considering that Mother’s Day is about a month away, it might be a good idea to at least think about what to give that woman who bore you for nine months. You could give her the latest gadget, but if you’re mother is anything like mine, she is not too familiar with the latest in technology.

Yet I can’t think of a better gift to give your mother than the Digital Foci Pocket Album. What better gift for any mother but pictures of her children, or perhaps grandchildren?

The Digital Foci Pocket Album allows you to download up to 74 photos on 8MB of internal memory. It works by using a user-friendly Photo Viewer Software that can convert JPEG to BMP images from the computer to the Pocket Album.

In other words, you can go ahead and set up the Pocket Album with all the pictures that mom would want on her keychain, or you can let her do it. If it were me, I would put the pictures on Pocket Album, and then show her how to change them if she wanted to. You should also show her how to charge it, considering it only has 9 hours of battery life.

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I’m sure we were not prepared for the digital era of photos. Don’t get me wrong, I think it is great that all of us have cheap digital cameras that allow us to download our greatest pics into our computer, but most of us still have piles of old photos that really need to be made digital. That sounds like more than just a weekend project.

The solution is here with the USB Photo Scanner. This device uses a 5 Megapixel CMOS sensor to scan photos in just minutes. Sure, you could do that on a scanner, but that would take a lot more time as the USB Photo Scanner does it a lot faster.

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The photo you’re seeing here isn’t a bed on a beach with a portable wall. What you’re seeing is someone’s favorite memory blown up into wallpaper.

Personally, I think it is about time someone offered a service that can convert an average digital photo into wallpaper. The company, Myfotowall can print a digital photo up to a maximum of 1600%, or sixteen times larger. The quality is only as good as the quality of the original photograph, but that is no surprise.

The wallpaper produced by Myfotowall is UV cured, which means they are “lightfast for up to three years”. In other words, it will be three years before the photo will start fading.

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You’ve all heard the expression “you can never be too rich or too thin”. Yet, a recent story about someone losing their MacBook Air because they may have thrown it out with their recycling has caused me to rethink the validity of this particular statement.

Take for example the ModoPocket MicroTripod for sale over at Think Geek. It’s tiny, sure, and it’s lightweight and easily portable. But is it so tiny and thin that you could spend the money on it and then misplace it because you’re not completely organized? It’s only 6mm thick when folded! I could lose it from opening the product box to look at it!! However, it would take up virtually NO space in your existing camera bag and it would come in quite handy for those shots that you can’t get without one.

The Think Geek description for this tiny titan of the tripod:
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Every once in a while, someone makes a great gadget by simply taking a lot of other great gadgets and puts them all together like wet bits of clay. Today’s example would be the Digital Photo Frame Webcam from WinWin Industry, a Hong Kong Company.

As you can see, someone in the WinWin industry has created a win-win situation by combining what looks to be an alarm clock, digital picture frame, and webcam all in one unit.

We’ll start with the webcam. When attached to the PC, your friends and loved ones can see you. As for the 1.5 inch digital frame, that’s so you can see your friends and loved ones, even if they are just still shots.

The photo viewer has 8MB worth of memory, which is capable of storing up to 70 pictures. You can use it to make some slideshows, and the whole thing is detachable from the base so you can carry the viewer around in your pocket if you like. According to the features, it uses two built-in rechargeable batteries for operation.

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In case you missed it, Polaroid announces the end of the Instant Film about a week ago. All I could think about was how a chic photo era has come to a close, and how that guy in Memento will be forever lost. In case you haven’t seen Memento, it is an awesome film about Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), a detective with short-term memory loss that has to remind himself of his case with Polaroids.

Hopefully, Leonard has gone with digital photos by now. Yet if he liked the nostalgic effect of the Polaroid Instant film, he could always go with this concept digital frame.

All Leonard would have to do is put his memory card in a slot on the bottom of the frame, and navigate with the touch screen to view his memories. He could do the Standard mode to see his memories one at a time, or enjoy a fading slideshow with the Classic mode.

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