Homemade cheapo bellows for tilt-shift photography (sort of).

old American Cinematographer article on Stanley Kubrick's use of a special 50mm f/0.7 lens used on Barry Lyndon.

Blueprint paper photography?! Turns out blueprint paper develops with a little ammonia...

Found a good page at Cornell on the ISO 12233 Test Chart, along with links to two companies-- Sine Patterns and Precision Optical Instruments-- who sell test patterns in different sizes and formats.

Thinking of places to stop on my trip re: art, architectural, and photographic history. Louis Daguerre was French... where was that window where he took that picture? No, it was Joseph-Nicephore Niepce, out his studio window.

The Wikipedia Photography Timeline is pretty cool.

Google Street View has nice display and interaction of registered panoramic images. They were taken by Immersive Media and by Google using their own custom camera rig. You can tell which by figuring out the camera heght-- the van's pov is much higher. Interesting Boing Boing coverage covers a few issues, but the big qustion for everybody is:

Is this creepy or not, and why?

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PanoramaScanCam (?!)-- Mac A. Cody is working on converting a Umax flatbed scanner to a panoramic camera. When I read the proposal and saw the first sketches a few weeks ago, I thought he would never get there-- there's a lot of work involved-- but here it is! He achieved first light, and the image looks promising. I am most impressed by his (re/ab)use of a toilet tank hose clip in the registration sensor assembly.

Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904), Photographer of Fluids exhibit (2004/2005) at Musée d'Orsay.

Scientists at the U.S. DOE Ames Laboratory have developed a silver-based, mesh-like material with a negative index of refraction:

Metamaterials, also known as left-handed materials, are exotic, artificially created materials that provide optical properties not found in natural materials. Natural materials refract light, or electromagnetic radiation, to the right of the incident beam at different angles and speeds. However, metamaterials make it possible to refract light to the left, or at a negative angle. This backward-bending characteristic provides scientists the ability to control light similar to the way they use semiconductors to control electricity, which opens a wide range of potential applications.

Michael Bach's blog of Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena has quite a few: