Popular Photography Magazine

Shooters with the Sigma SD1 rejoice, as your DSLR of choice will be getting the PG-31 battery grips in the near future. Newly announced, the accessory holds two dedicated BP-21 battery packs, effectively tripling the amount of time you can spend out shooting. As with most battery grips, it also has a dedicated shooting button to aid vertical photography. With a weight of 10.6 oz (300g), it'll add some serious bulk to the camera, but that's not unexpected.

A patent recently filed by Olympus presents an interesting way of bringing 3D photography to their ILC cameras — by adding a second lens to the hotshoe. As you can see from the patent illustrations above, it would sit in the camera's hotshoe mount, and provide a second lens for stereoscopic shooting. Sounds intriguing, but doesn't take much to envision some of the problems it might have.

For years, CompactFlash was the memory card of choice for serious photographers, and is still used in many DSLRs, especially at the higher level. But, SDHC has been muscling in on that territory. So, CompactFlash has announced a totally new, faster card format, dubbed XQD. As far as we can tell, XQD doesn't actually stand for anything — or if it does, the CompactFlash Association hasn't said.

Recently, Ben Lowy's book, Iraq | Perspecitves was awarded the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize by photography legend William Eggleston. Split into two parts, the book is made up of images captured in Iraq up to 2008. The first chapter was shot exclusively through blast-proof windows in armored military vehicles, and the second involved rigging a DSLR to a pair of night vision goggles.