Austrian village installs cameras to nab prankster sex tourists

by Scott Carmichael on

The poor villagers of Fucking are fed up. They have finally found a technical solution to prevent thieves from stealing their village signs, but now they are confronted with an entirely different problem.

Couples are making the trek to Fucking, just so they can have sex in front of the sign, and record it. Other pranksters are mooning the sign, or exposing themselves, while their friends record it. Of course, some of these video clips make their way online, which probably doesn’t promote the kind of tourism the village is looking for.

The village solution involved placing video cameras above the signs, in the hope that it will make would-be sex tourists think twice about their plans.

I’m sure this is a never ending battle for the village, and before you know it, they’ll be back in the news when people have sex, then steal both the sign and the security camera

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The Disposable Memory Project

by Kraig Becker on

Disposable cameras have become a very popular way of capturing images in the digital age. They’re cheap, take relatively decent photos, and can be found in just about every discount store the world over. But one organization has taken the disposable camera off the guest tables at every wedding, and sent them out into the world to capture images from around the globe.

The concept behind the Disposable Memory Project is simple. Pass out disposable cameras to travelers, have them take a few photos and then pass the camera along to someone else. Eventually the disposable cameras get returned, at least in theory, and the photos are published online for everyone to share. So far, the project has placed 164 cameras in 42 countries around the world. To date, 42 of those 164 cameras have been found, and 11 have been returned, carrying a record of their journey with them.

The Disposable Memory Project website has a comprehensive list of each of the cameras and the places where they’ve been released into the wild. You can use the page to see if there is one close to where you are, and if you find it, you can claim it, snap a few photos, and pass it along. Eventually, once the memory on the camera is full, you simply contact the good folks at the Disposable Memory Project and they’ll arrange to have the camera picked up, and get the images developed and posted on the web, passing the link along so you can check out your photos.

What an interesting and fun project! There are still quite a few cameras that have been found and are still bouncing around the globe, and dozens more that have yet to be discovered at all. If you want to join the fun, go find a camera that has been released in your area, and if there isn’t one, perhaps you can release a camera of your own.

Geotagging cameras create accidental maps

by Jeremy Kressmann on

One could easily spend hours browsing images on social photo-sharing sites like Flickr. From time to time I find myself on the site’s “interestingness” page, endlessly hitting the reload button and marvelling at all the beautiful photography. But one unintended consequence of all these photos has nothing to do with what they look like – it’s all the information like tags, camera type and location that’s created along with the images.

All that information has even allowed researchers to create virtual maps of the world’s most-photographed landmarks and places. According to the New Scientist, investigators at Cornell University have been analyzing the geotagged information automatically recorded by many new cameras when they take a picture. All the information has led to some interesting insight into what visitors find most interesting.

The top spots? New York tops the list as the world’s most photographed city. London however has the most photographed landmarks – sites like Trafalgar Square, Big Ben, the London Eye and the Tate Modern art gallery all top the landmark list. Coming in at fifth place? New York’s Fifth Avenue Apple Store.

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Test Driving the Olympus Stylus Tough-8000

by Grant Martin on

When we see “tough” in a product’s name, its got big shoes to fill. Travel bloggers are the sort of people who shred digital cameras, so when Olympus gave us an opportunity to test out the STYLUS Tough-8000, we jumped at the opportunity.

A truly rugged camera should be able to go with you wherever you go. Whitewater rafting in New Zealand, Skiing in Utah, Rock climbing in the Red River Gorge? No problem. It should be able to be sunk, dropped, crushed, and frozen without losing any functionality and it should be able to fit in your pocket. Pretty tall order, eh?

In steps the Olympus STYLUS Tough-8000. Olympus has designed this camera to withstand (almost) any abuse that a digital camera will ever see. It’s waterproof to 10m (33ft), drop proof from up to 6.6 ft, freeze proof to -14°F and crushproof to 220lbf. Recently, we went on a 3 day SCUBA/snorkel trip on the Great Barrier Reef, which turned out to be the perfect opportunity to take the Stylus Tough-8000 on a test drive.

Amazingly, it still works (and looks) exactly like it did when it came out of the box. This recent trip brough, situations that allowed us to test each of the manufacturer’s claims. Mind you — Gadling bloggers would never do anything like test the waterproof claims by submerging it in a pint of Victoria Bitter (the biere familiaris of Australians, not Fosters as an oil can chugging Paul Hogan may lead one to believe.) Nevertheless, each test performed swimmingly.The first thought when taking the Stylus Tough out of the box was that it doesn’t look like a waterproof, super tough camera. Waterproof cameras are supposed to be bulky and bubbly, protected by an excessive amount of Lexan and rubber seals. The stylus looks like any other small point and shoot camera — it’s small and light, no bigger than a pack of cigarettes, albeit slightly heavier at 6.4 oz. The body of this unit was glossy black and gunmetal, but Olympus offers 2 other colors. The camera feels really solid, the case is almost all metal and none of the buttons have any unnecessary wiggle. The back has a huge 2.7″ LCD alongside a pretty standard mode selector knob and 4-way navigation buttons.

The menu system of the camera is incredibly intuitive; playing with exposure settings and macro modes right out of the box was simple. The camera sports a 12 Megapixel CCD and a 3.6x optical zoom. Image clarity is excellent — its not a SLR, but takes good enough images so that only the most discerning individuals would be able to tell.

What about underwater? Taking the Stylus Tough out to the Great Barrier Reef brought out spectacular performance. There are no special modes to activate or switches to flip, you just jump in and start snapping pictures. When taking movies in water, the camera recognizes its environment and switches into a special movie mode that helps equalize out colors. The camera also has an integrated manometer, which tells you your altitude above the waves or your depth below.

Topside, the image quality is everything you would expect from a good point and shoot camera. The auto shoot mode on the camera does a great job adjusting the flash and exposure settings to get the best picture possible. We found ourselves in that “auto” mode ~95% of the time because the camera is undoubtedly better at judging the proper settings. The only times the auto mode struggles are in low light situations; switching over to the scenes menu and picking candlelight mode reconciled those problems.

The Stylus Tough-8000 has three macro modes, and it manages macro shots quite well, even underwater. There is a macro and a “super-macro” mode for close shots, but our favorite mode was the “super-Macro LED”. The camera has a small (but very bright) LED near the lens that helps illuminate your entire macro shot. This mode worked great underwater, particularly in low light situations, where we snapped this picture of a Southern Reef Squid.

As light travelers, one drawback we noticed was in the data link. The connector on the side, known as a multi-terminal connector looks a lot like a mini-USB port. Don’t be fooled though, its not. It’s fully compatible with USB, but your mini-USB plug will not fit. Although the connector supports both USB out and A/V out in one plug, the inconvenience of having to carry around one more cable may outweigh the convenience of having one port.

But look at the bright side. you have a camera that can accompany you on all of your expeditions and can handle getting rained on, dropped, and frozen (and maybe even dropped in beer.) If you like to do things that cameras typically don’t like to do, this is the camera for you.

The Stylus tough-8000 isn’t the cheapest camera out there, but it’s undoubtedly worth the price if you find yourself destroying digital cameras on a regular basis like we do. Right now, it can be found online for about $350.

Samsung makes Memoirs with Helena Christensen

by Annie Scott on

As of yesterday, the new Samsung Memoir is available through T-Mobile for $249.

The Samsung Memoir has an 8-megapixel camera, along with Xenon flash, CMOS auto focus and a 16x digital zoom. That’s pretty impressive. Secretly, that’s almost as good as the regular camera I use. It would be really handy if my phone were my regular camera. I long for the day when we kiss the USB cord goodbye — and I’d love not to have two similar-but-different things in my purse.

Anyway, as you can see, Samsung has Helena Christensen on board with the phone. She took a bunch of pictures with it in New York and Barcelona, and you can see them here, and you know what? Turns out this model can take a picture! Well done, Helena!

Hit up T-Mobile if you’re interested in the phone — oh, and it also has a music player, a full Web browser, a GPS navigation system and one of the most advanced touch screen phones in the world. Suck it, iPhone.