Every once in a while you come across a very creative product that will help you with all your photographic projects. I consider myself to be a photography enthusiast, I like taking great shots, and in my case that only happens about 10% of the time but thats why I take so many shots. And I have about zero photoshop editing skills, but I do enjoy the shots I have but I still want them to be better.

I have been tinkering with time-lapse shots recently and about 60% of them have been a disaster, they don’t really work out the way I want them to in my head, but I’m slowly figuring it out. The Genie is a device that integrates with your camera to help it take these amazing shots, and you can set it up to move the way you want, and honestly after watching the video I want it, and it retails for $999, I honestly can’t justify the price in my case but it would cool to use.

Link:Syrp

This is one of the final hits the G12 has taken and it looks like it was the last one. Canon G12 Series is heavy duty and can take a beating, but the other day I forgot that I left it on my bike jacket and pulled the jacket out of the car. It took a nasty fall onto concrete and I thought it wouldn’t work, but it worked fine but then it kept getting worse, the screen would only work if I pressed hard and took a picture, if I didn’t press on it the picture would be distorted too. I’m honestly very annoyed that I was careless, I have had this camera for so long and it has been best all round point and shoot I have ever had, and even now that I’m getting the G15 I still wanted to keep using the G12, I might be tempted to pick up a used one just because it really is that good of a camera. My G11 went out almost the same way so its frustrating to see these cameras just sitting there and the only place that fixes them is in the US and no where else.

I’m a huge Canon fan and I have been using my Canon G12 for a few years now and it was a decent upgrade from the G11. I got the G1X which was supposed to be the top of the line monster from the G-line but it didn’t hold up to my expectations. The Macro distance was honestly disapointing, its fast but not as fast as the G12 feels so I didn’t use it as much. When I heard about the EOS M I was excited, a Camera from Canon that is the size of the point and shoot but with mountable lenses, and with an adapter you can use the Canon Lenses I have and that is what appealed to me.

After reading a few reviews they said that sometimes it took up to a minute for it to focus depending on the lens. That is a disaster, the first great mirrorless Camera from Canon and everything on paper said they got it right but if it can’t focus quickly then it would be pointless.

Now the G15 is here, and it is the perfect camera for my needs, fast focus, excellent macro, bulky and slightly smaller so its the perfect fit. A faster process so it takes better pictures, the perfect camera for my needs. Then there is the price, the G15 is $500 and the Canon EOS M is $850 and another $200 for the lens adapter to use the DSLR Lens on the Mirrorless camera. I was willing to spend $1000 for a point and shoot but it has to perform at that price, but in this instance the G15 wins on both price and performance.

Now Instagram has activated it’s live pages for Instagram accounts, for all this time I think they stuck to mobile phones for a while but since their acquisition by Facebook I thought it was a matter of time before they make a live page. I checked yesterday night and it wasn’t active, but here it is active now. So now you don’t need to have the Instagram App to see the pics, so if you are still stuck on a Blackberry you can see the pics from the Instagram website via their username so it would be “instagram.com/USERNAME” mine is at the link below.

Link: Instagram

There have been a lot of action cameras of this kind with different features, and GoPro has just leap frogged the competition with the new Hero3. They claim it to be smaller, lighter and record better quality footage than its predecessor.

GoPro claims the the Hero 3 is 30 percent smaller and 25 percent lighter than the old model. To top that off, the top-of-the-line Black Edition is capable of capturing video at up to 4K resolution—as long as you don’t mind slowing recording down to 15 fps. I honestly think the 4K speed is pointless for action use because its only 15 fps which will look very choppy, no screen can play that high a resolution yet.

There are three different versions of GoPro now, the Black, Silver and White. That being said, a faster processor in the Black camera allows it to capture lower-resolution footage at higher frame rates than in the past, and it offers 1080p60, 1440p48 and 720p120 modes for slow-mo situations. Lower-spec models are also none too shabby: the Silver packs an 11MP camera and can capture 1080p30 video, while the rather more humble White packs a simple 5MP camera. One new interesting feature is wifi in all the devices, they have heard our cries, you can now turn on and record through a remote wifi device. They all work the GoPro app because of their Wifi feature, but the Black Edition comes with a dedicated remote.

I wasn’t going to wait, I already ordered two Black Editions which will ship Mid-November and I am looking forward to getting my hands on them.

Now this is the camera for me, at last Canon can hear my thoughts.

Canon’s EOS M is finally upon us. $800 will get you the company’s first mirrorless, interchangeable-lens camera, with a 22mm prime and a sales pitch centered firmly around its video capabilities. It certainly took them long enough when all the other manufacturers were doing it, Canon finally stepped up to the plate and they are pulling out all the stops. Blurring the lines between a DSLR and a point-and-shoot, it has a lot of the Capabilities of the DSLR packed into a compact size yet you can use your DSLR lenses on it. And the specifications on this camera are nothing to joke about, Canon have done a good job and I want to add this camera to my list.

Here’s Canon EOS M feature highlights:

• 18 Megapixel CMOS (APS-C) sensor
• DIGIC 5 Image Processor
• Full HD Movie with Focus Tracking
• 3.0-inch touch screen with LCD
• Touch AF and Multi-touch Operation
• Hybrid CMOS Auto-focus for photo & video
• ISO 100–12800, expandable to 25600
• Compatible with Canon EF and EF-S lenses (Optional EOS M mount adapter is required)
• Compatible with SD/SDHC/SDXC memory cards, including new Ultra High Speed (UHS-I) cards
• Includes Canon EF-M 22mm F2 STM

Full manual exposure control when shooting video, and an available mount adapter so you can use nearly any EF or EF-S lenses. The exact type of camera that I would like, I don’t want to lug around the DSLR around my neck all the time but sometimes I want a camera that I can uses all the lenses that I have, and with all the features this mirrorless beast is very rich in video controls and options. The release date is set for October.

Price: $800
Link: Amazon

The best and first photo sharing site that came out was Flickr, everyone got on it and it really was a community of it’s own. Innovative and ahead of it’s game, everyone wanted a piece of it and they were courted by the Giants, surprisingly Yahoo got it at the end, I was hoping for Google at the time as they let services develop on their own to a degree, but when Yahoo got them I thought at least thats probably better then Microsoft, but it seems time has proven me very wrong.

I have linked below the excellent Gizmodo article on this matter and this describes it perfectly:

This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

Link: Gizmodo

Flickr had so much going for it and it was community driven the first thing that yahoo did that annoyed the hell out of me was that you had to log in with your Yahoo ID to get into Flickr, why couldn’t they just keep it on their own. When Flickr was new it kept on giving us more and more features, and I was hoping when its backed by a big guy like Yahoo they would have the ability to develop cool tools faster ways to use the cool site. They were at the forefront of the mobile photography revolution, now everyone snaps pictures with their phones thanks to Apple’s high quality camera’s in the iPhones, you could see the trend from back then, but Flickr couldn’t take a major advantage of this because of Yahoo. Yahoo paid the founders a good chunk of change but for the company (Flickr) to get any funding from Yahoo they had to achieve milestones and those milestones had nothing to do with developing Flickr and more to do with it integrating into Flickr (Yahoo Login Crap). I couldn’t believe that they still don’t have a decent iOS or Android App for Flickr, they could have easily dominated Instagram, they had the community base going with excellent photographers, Flickr had and still has the social networking tools built into it that can bring it back around but now it feels like Flickr is trying to do what it does best but Yahoo is going down and taking all it’s companies with it. It hasn’t really changed much in the last few years, personally I still love it but I want more out of it. Damn you Yahoo!

Same story with Delicious, Yahoo bought them out and years later they were killed off, a simple cool site that Yahoo smothered.

At last some updates for the Canon 7D, for me the 7D has been my favorite camera/DSLR period. Its simple enough that I can use it and complex enough that it can do so much. I especially love its video recording features and I hope they have upgraded it for this time around. There are two updates one is for the Canon 70D and the other is the 7D Mark II. I hope the changes for the 7D Mark II are so much that it makes it worth it for me to upgrade. I have had my camera since Dec of 2009 and I still think its fantastic, I just want more for the video features and I hope they deliver on it. For now these are just a few rumors, I’m hoping for more news soon, come on Canon make us happy.

EOS 70D

• Digic 5
• 18mp
• 100% viewfinder with grid lines like 7D
• 19 AF Points from 7D
• Continuous AF in LiveView & Video Recording
• September Announcement

7D Mark II

• Dual Digic 5
• 100% viewfinder
• 61 Point AF from 5D Mark III
• Announced after 70D

Link: FStoppers

Every once in a while I do this, I get something that has been on my to buy list as soon as its out even though I wanted to do abit more research. It seems this I will be doing a lot of testing with these two lovely products. Usually I think of Dubai Duty Free as a rip off that I can always get things cheaper online and I am better off getting it from Amazon. But when I saw the items in front of me I had to take a look of them, then I walked off and thought that I will get them later.

• Canon G1X
• HTC One X

After a little while of thinking I thought to check the prices in Amazon and in Dubai Duty Free just to make sure and this is the simple breakdown for the HTC One X its $645 on Amazon & $681 in Dubai Duty Free, for the Canon G1X its $799 on Amazon & $815 in Dubai Duty Free. I couldn’t believe, the difference was so small, I always thought the difference would be huge but I was surprised it was so little, at that point I had to do very little thinking and the one thing that was stopping me from making a purchase was no longer there. It seems everything I purchased had a an X in it, and I have to say that I am currently very happy but my credit card took a hit with this purchase. For now my appetite for electronics has been satisfied and I will be posting a review or a decent write up on both, the camera will be first of course, I was snapping pics with it since I got it.

This was a short celebration for us Android users, honestly I was very happy to get Instagram and share a lot of things with friends and family, a real social photo sharing platform done right. But this news about Facebook buying out Instagram for $1 Billion is nothing short of shocking. All the evil works of Facebook and Zuckerberg entered my head, I feel like I’m swimming in tainted water, that Facebook can finally get its hands on me. If anytime big changes come along, some of us aren’t going to be OK with them. Now that Instagram is soon to be under Facebook’s control, many are expecting privacy woes and leaving the service for greener pastures.

Leaving Instagram is not something I would like to do at this juncture but I would like to have the option of taking all my photos with me if need be, in Android everything is Synced to My Google Plus account but just in case you feel like leaving this probably the simplest way to go about it.

This is easy. Fire up your computer, and head to Instaport. It’s a website whose sole purpose is to suck your pictures out of Instagram, and drop them into another account or save them to your computer hard drive. Follow the instructions, and you’ll end up with all your Instagram pics bundled neatly wherever you want to keep them. Fair warning — they are under some “heavy traffic” right now, so you may have to wait a bit. I got it to work on the third try, but your mileage may vary.

Then head over to Instagram to have your account deleted, keep in mind that you won’t lose your account when you do this, your Username is still yours so nobody can take it.

Link: Instagram Account Deletion