This 10+ minute clip explains how your camera’s image sensor works, where all that noise is coming from and why increasing the ISO setting can make your images look like they were taken in a dust storm.  Check it out below.

Not that I believed for a second this video was real, I still did some digging and found that Dell has confirmed that the ad is a hoax, saying in a statement:

‘Regarding the parody some are still asking us about: This video is not affiliated with Dell, but it’s great to see creative professionals get inspiration from using our products. Our Dell.com/takeyourownpath program is all about celebrating people who take their own professional path. Regarding this parody, we consider imitation to be the sincerest form of flattery.’

It’s great to see that Dell has a sense of humor and doesn’t have a problem being associated with the video.  The bonus is that a bunch of hipster filmmakers got to create a fantastically funny yet convincing video without having it pulled down. I believe thats a win/win for you and I so thanks Dell for letting it stay up!  Check out the video below.

Finally in 1826, after years of experimenting, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took the photograph below titled ‘View from the Window at Le Gras‘ at his family’s country home. Niépce produced his photo, which is a view of a courtyard and outbuildings seen from the house’s upstairs window, by exposing a bitumen-coated plate in a camera obscura that was placed on his windowsill. It has been said the exposure took around eight hours.

The valuable and precious photo has been stored at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin since 1963.

Photograph by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

You can download the third Wallpaper Pack here for FREE.

This pack contains 15 wallpapers at 640 x 960 so they will work on the iPhone 4S, 4, 3GS, 3G and 2G. You can download the two previous Wallpaper Packs below.

Wallpaper Pack 1 Download here

Wallpaper Pack 2 Download here

Pioneered by the German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin in the early 20th century, The Zeppelin was based on designs von Zeppelin had outlined  earlier in 1874 and detailed in 1893.  In 1894 his plans were reviewed by committee and on March 14, 1899 the United States granted von Zeppelin his patent.  Given the outstanding success of the Zeppelin design, the term zeppelin in casual use came to refer to all rigid airships.  Zeppelins were operated by the Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-AG (DELAG). DELAG, the first commercial airline, served scheduled flights before World War I. After the outbreak of war, the German military made extensive use of Zeppelins as bombers and scouts.

Before The Hindenburg exploded in 1937, exposing a flaw that would inevitably doom the longevity of the airship, Zeppelins were actually quite an impressive species of aeronautical engineering considering the level of technological prowess of the 1920′s.

Oobject have assembled 12 shots of these magnificent air-borne cruisers before they ever lifted off.  These photo’s are below and I’ve included a few other interesting ones I’ve found.  Be sure to also check out the hangers that housed these zeppelins, these impressive aircraft factories, and some interesting balloons.

You might think you just got a killer deal on that brand new point and shoot or DSLR you recently bought, but that’s exactly what people thought back in the good old days of 3 Megapixel Cameras and 16MB SD Cards. One day, years from now, you’ll laugh and reminisce about how you paid the outrageous price of $1,400 for that new Nikon D7000 or $129 for that 16 Megapixel Sony Cyber Shot.

But enough about things you have no control over, have you ever wondered what that old Canon or Kodak really cost you back in the good old days of Pentium Processors and tube TVs?  Here are a few ads and articles that will spark your memory.

Share your stories in the comments below about the old cameras and equipment you purchased long ago.

Up until January 2002 the largest SD card you could buy was a 128MB. Luckily SanDisk came to the rescue with their $199 256MB SD Card, thats right I said ‘MB‘ What a steal! Here is the announcement from SanDisk at CES 2002:

LAS VEGAS, NV, Jan. 9, 2002 – “SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK) today introduced the 256 megabyte (MB) SD Card, a removable, postage stamp-sized flash memory card capable of storing up to eight hours of digital music, more than 80 minutes of MPEG-4 video or more than 250 high-resolution digital images. The announcement, made at the Consumer Electronics Show, doubles the capacity of SanDisk’s highest capacity SD Cards currently shipping. SanDisk is demonstrating the new 256MB SD Card at its booth (#11511) and the SD Pavilion (#10536). It should be available “first quarter” and will be priced at a competitive $199.”

So now you may be asking yourself, “How can I get great results with my iPhone?” Well I’m here to lend a few tips and tricks (15 to be exact) that should help you take better photo’s with your iPhone.

1. Hold the phone like you would a regular camera

Use two hands to hold your iPhone just like you would with your DSLR or Point and Shoot. This extra stability will keep the camera from shaking and give you more control of your shots. Also imagine your iPhone screen as the viewfinder, like the one on your DSLR. When you see people shooting iPhone pictures they are always holding their phone out in front of them at a ridiculous angle and doing some strange straight-armed, head back, robot style movements.

2. Light, Light, Light

Light with any camera is important, but a cell phone camera has such a small image sensor it is even more important. The lower the light the more grainy your images will become. Unless you are taking photos of the sun and the sea keep the light behind you and your subject well lit. Don’t let this stop you from shooting night and dusk photo’s those, sometimes with the right angle and light you can get some amazing darker shots.

3. Experiment

None of these tips and tricks will be worth a damn if you don’t experiment and try things out. Spend a day and just go out and shoot. You will quickly learn how much light you need in certain situations, what produces blur, grain and a whole world of other problems that lead to your bad iPhone pictures.

4. Zoom in with your feet

If you want to shoot something close up actually walk up to it, get close and click. The iPhone starts losing quality even with a tiny bit of zooming and it becomes really grainy and pixelated. Because the iPhone uses a digital zoom instead of an optical zoom like your point and shoot or DSLR may have, it is basically just cropping the photo in realtime.

5. Take multiple shots

The great thing about digital photography is it allows for a lot of attempts and a lot of mistakes. Add to that benefit, the speed and ease of a camera phone and you have the opportunity to take a few shots so one of them will be good. You can just take multiple shots of the same thing and one of them will be vastly better than the others.

Be careful though, you don’t want to delete those shots you think are no good when you are out and about because often when you get home the things you thought looked rubbish on your phone screen actually turn into interesting things on your computer monitor.

6. Try different angels

The iPhone is so small and easy to use that you can get get down low and dirty with it or you can point it up and high really easily. You can move right on in to a shell or a flower and you can get it into awkward places and positions that would be more difficult to get to with a regular camera. So move it in bundles of different angles to see what you get.

7. Keep the lens clean!

All that sweat and grim on your hands will no doubt get all over your iPhone and all over the camera lens. I didn’t do this for ages and I don’t do it enough now still. Keep a cloth with you or wipe it clear with your sleeve and you may find your pictures come out much sharper and less blurry and foggy.

8. Keep clutter out

Don’t have too much going on in your photo. This is one of the reasons a lot of phone photos are still fairly good even though they are pretty grainy and not even in the same league in sharpness and quality as a DSLR camera shot. This allows you to get away with a lot. Keeping one main subject and a scene where you want all/most of it in focus are best. This is how I take almost all of my photos with my iPhone.

9. Don’t use the touch screen shutter button

Did you know with your iPhone 4/4S you can take a picture with the “+” volume button? Go on, try it out. You can also use the “+” volume button on your Apple headphones as well. By using either of these methods you reduce the chance that you are going to shake or move the camera while snapping your pictures. This is a big deal when take nighttime shots.

10. Use grid lines

If you touch “Options” on the top of the screen while in your “Camera” app it will bring up a menu that says “Grid” and “HDR.” Slide the “Grid” slider to on and you will see that a grid now shows on your screen. This is perfect for lining up shots such as a horizon or edge of a building. It also will help you use the rule of thirds to produce more interesting and artist photos.

11. Use the HDR function

HDR is a range of techniques geared toward representing more contrast in pictures. Non-HDR cameras take pictures at a single exposure level with a limited contrast range. This results in the loss of detail in bright or dark areas of a picture, depending on whether the camera had a low or high exposure setting. HDR compensates for this loss of detail by taking multiple pictures at different exposure levels and intelligently stitching them together so that we get a picture that is representative in both dark and bright areas.

As I stated above if you touch “Options” on the top of the screen while in your “Camera” app it will bring up a menu that says “Grid” and “HDR.” Slide the “HDR” slider to on and your iPhone will now take 3 photo’s at different exposures and stitch them together for a more properly exposed image. Using this doesn’t always guarantee a better pictures, so try it out and see what works for you.

12. Tap to focus

You can tap anywhere on the screen to focus (a blue square will come up on the display). This not only focuses on the area that you touch (which may already seem clear in your display), but also adjusts the exposure and white balance automatically for the main area of your image. This also works for the video camera as well.

13. Use AE/AF Lock

Launch the camera app and get your subject in the frame. Tap the object/person you want to focus on and hold your finger on the screen for a few seconds and then release your finger after the blue focus square pulsates. The square will disappear and AE/AF Lock will appear at the bottom of the screen. The times I find this feature most helpful is when taking photos of moving objects like people, cars or animals. Anytime a subject is moving the camera wants to refocus, even if it’s just a head turn. I’ve lost a countless number of shots because of this. Now I just trigger the AE/AF lock and snap away!

14. Color

Color can be a powerful allie when shooting photos. Shooting a sky with just a red umbrella in the frame or a women with a bright blue dress on in a sea of people wearing black and really make your subject pop. So look for scenarios where one particular color stands out from the rest, you’ll be amazed at how artistic your photo will looks.

15. Get one or more photo editing apps

You don’t always need to edit a photo after you shoot it, but sometimes it makes for a more artistic and aesthetic image. A few great apps I recommend for the iPhone are PhotoShop Express (free), Luminance ($0.99), SnapSpeed ($4.99) and Photo Forge 2 ($2.99).

I hope these tips and tricks help you to shoot better photos with your iPhone. Once you get the hang of a few basic principles you’ll be well on your way to having more fun and taking better pictures. Here are a few of my favorite pictures I’ve taken with my iPhone 3G, 4 and 4S.

You can download the second Wallpaper Pack here for FREE.

This pack contains 15 wallpapers at 640 x 960 so they will work on the iPhone 4S, 4, 3GS, 3G and 2G. You can download my previous Wallpaper Pack 1 here as well. Stay tuned for future Wallpaper Packs.

A lot of people assume photographers just run their photos through some kind of filter, and admittedly some do.  For me,  taking the time to perfect individual photos really shows in the final product, so I would like to take you through some basic steps in the process of editing a photo and explain what all goes on.

Most photographers use one or more of these three robust programs Adobe Light Room, Adobe Photoshop and Apple’s Aperture 3.  I personally use Adobe Photoshop for heavy pre-editing such as removing people and objects if needed and layers, then import the image into Aperture 3 for the overall image adjustments.  For me, Aperture 3 is also a terrific image database.  The photograph below is the one I’ll be taking us through and has only been editing using Aperture 3.

(Final Image Edited in Aperture 3)

(Original RAW Image)

This is the original RAW image.  Using a RAW image lets you make adjustments to specific image data such as exposure, hue and sharpness after the picture has already been taken.  This is something you simply cannot do with film.  Being able to adjust the exposure in this way opposed to adjusting it to a .JPEG that has been already been compressed is very different.  It’s similar to adjusting the volume of  a song in which you can see all the individual tracks and fine tune them opposed to trying to adjust them on a compressed .MP3 file.  If your camera lets you, always shoot in RAW.

(Step 1)

The first thing I wanted to do was to do was to bring out all of the detail in the grass, fence, men’s vests and beads on the brides dress and really make them pop.  To do this I use the “definition” brush in Aperture 3 and paint definition on to all of these parts.  Look closely at the fence and grass, there is much more detail and contrast.

(Step 2)

The second thing I wanted to do was to bring up the brightness of the whole image and get rid of the clipping in the overexposed clouds.  The reason I bring the brightness up is because later I am going to bring out the mid-highlights and blacks. Without increasing the overall image brightness the image will actually get darker.  You can see in the image where the clouds are over exposed and the white is clipping.

(the blue and white are the parts of the clouds that are overexposed and clipping)

(Step 3)

The third thing I did was to get rid some color by reducing the images overall saturation.  Notice how much less green the grass is.  This is really where the image starts looking more like a “photoshoot” than just a picture anyone could have taken with a point and shoot.

(Step 4)

The fourth step I’ve taken is to now bring out the low & mid-highlights in the entire image.  This will really make all the mid-tones and definition we brushed earlier into the picture pop.  For me this is really the most important step and where the image starts to come to life.

(Step 5)

Finally, I bring out just the black tones by adjusting the “black point” to really make the black vests and the shadows of their eyes jump out of the picture.  Then I add a little vignette which really makes your eyes focus on the subjects.

So thats it.  This was a pretty basic edit but I hope you all learned a few things and can use these tips the next time you edit your own photos.  Editing photos takes a lot of time, patience, talent and an artistic eye but with some practice can be accomplished.  Feel free to leave comments or questions on specific techniques.

They did it a little different back then but I assure you they partied just as hard. These are classic so spend some time and really soak in the little differences between then and now.