I love the dudes at MIT. You basically have to. While I spend weekends replaying Half-Life 2 (the relation to MIT not escaping me), they’re doing crazy things like sending Canon point-and-shoots into shallow space for less than a good iPod. Seriously. That gorgeous photo there? That’s space. That’s earth. That only cost them $150.
For full details on it (involving the use of a beer-cooler, a prepaid cellphone, a hot-air balloon, and the hack firmware for their Canon), check out the post at Wired (where I found this), or go straight to their project page.
Sandisk has gone official with its new lines of high-performance memory cards. At the top of the pack (if not at the top of the world) is the new Extreme Pro line. Available only in CompactFlash, the Extreme Pro line sports maximum write speeds of up to 90 megabytes per second (that’s 600x, for those of you used to the older terms). It’s also the not only UDMA, but it’s the newer UDMA 6 spec (which means it’s actually faster than your hard drive, very likely). As if to reinforce that these are, indeed, just for pros, they come in three sizes starting at 16 GB and working up to 64 GB.
And, lastly, we have the Extreme line in its SDHC flavor. Now extending up to a rather impressive 32 GB in capacity, these new SDHC’s feature 30 MB/s maximum write speed (200x), and, if Sandisk is using its classes properly, the note that it’s Class 10 should intimate that the slowest it’ll go is 10 MB/s. The SDHCs are available in four capacities.
The king of the show (of course) is the M9, sporting a Kodak-designed 18 megapixel full-frame sensor (which solves one problem of its predecessor, which made wide primes behave notably less wide thanks to a crop factor). The sensor once again lacks an anti-aliasing filter, which I hear resulted in insanely sharp photos from the M8s and which meshes well with all expected physics as well. This time Leica has seen fit to put the cut-off filters back over the sensor, removing the sometimes criticized need for a gamut of such filters for your lenses. Bravo, Leica. Combined with the body tweaks done on the M8.2 to solve a few problems with the day-to-day, in-the-warfield use, Leica’s getting its M series very much to a nice zenith for the digital age. Mind you, I think you still have to take the baseplate off to switch memory cards, but there’ll always be trade-offs for 
The other camera, a compact body with a 12.2 megapixel APS-C sensor and a fixed 24mm f2.8 lens (kinda like Sigma’s DP2), brings the clasic M series aesthetic to the compact market, while simultaneously creating a new price tier for digital compacts. It features an available grip, and a built-in flash (which is quite cute and cylindrical), full-manual controls (including aperture and shutter dials), RAW, etc.
Tonsho has announced a new service for photographers that we think some of our customers, most particularly you younger or newer ones looking to eke out a living in something like senior portraits, weddings, or any other ‘consumer’ level client-driven branch, might appreciate.
Do you like adventure? Danger? Sexy broads in slit-thigh red dresses and rough-and-tumble men with swank hair and a tendency to accessorize with gun holsters? Boy we do too, so it’s sad that none of that is what we’re talking about.
Every now and then I forget just how long a history photography has of pushing the very limits of physics. And then, today, I was reminded once again of this as I read an article about modifying a Carl Zeiss 50mm f0.7 (yup, 0.7, 2 stops faster than 1.4) for Stanley Kubrick to use on a video camera. While cool enough to hear about at all, reading about how it was made to work is also pretty darn cool.
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