And you thought you could snap photos like that and nobody would ever know you took them?!?

Well, think again!! The CSi of the digital camera have arrived!

“It turns out that digital cameras leave a telltale fingerprint buried in the pixels of every image they capture. Now forensic scientists can use this fingerprint to tell what camera model was used to take a shot.

To capture an image, digital cameras use a light-sensitive microchip called a charge-coupled device, or CCD, made up of millions of bucket-like wells filled by electrons.

The total charge of each well depends on the amount of light that hits it. Each well is topped by a lens and a colour filter - either red, green or blue - so that a mosaic of three of them provides the information needed to generate one pixel.”

Basically, whatever you see in your digital photos are created by the camera’s proprietary software, which is unique for every camera model due to each camera’s individual specs and sensor type.

This being the reason why a certain camera model will generate distinct pixels (and unique relationships between its neighboring pixels) and this distinct attribute acts like a fingerprint allowing a forensic scientist to trace the exact make and model of the camera!

Because digital cameras have a shelf life of only 18 months, this can help to narrow down when and where it was sold and who bought it…

This photo by Peter Yang showing President Elect Barack Obama next to his Apple MacBook Pro with a PacMan on the lid is quickly becoming iconic… It is one of my personal favorite actually.

Peter Yang is one of the many masters of photography bringing inspiration into our lives.

Paulo compiled a list of 14 photography masters worth looking at and Peter is one of them of course, so enjoy!

I’m sure you’ve heard about the raging wildfires in Orange County that have destroyed over 1,000 homes…

“An image from NASA’s Aqua satellite shows the Los Angeles metropolitan area on Sunday, where smoke from fires can be seen spreading west over the Pacific Ocean. Places where the sensor detected active fires are outlined in red. Two of the blazes — the Sayre fire near Sylmar and the Freeway Complex fire — are now 40% contained, authorities said today. The Tea fire that started in Montecito is 90% contained.”

Courageous firefighters are putting their lifes on the line once again to help save as much as possible and determined to combat the blaze in Chino Hills, sending up more smoke and flames.

And once again, here is an amazing photo-gallery acting as witness of the tragedies happening in California…

More than 10 million images will soon be freely available as Google has decided to digitalize the LIFE Magazine photo archives, all of them!

“We’re excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We’re digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.”

That is truly amazing!! Absolutely amazing!!

Once you are in the archive, you’ll also notice that you can access a rich full-size, full-screen version of each image simply by clicking on the picture itself in the landing page.

If you decide you really like one of these images, high-quality framed prints can be purchased from LIFE at the click of a button.

Think of the holiday gift possibilities! It doesn’t get much easier than that.

Remember the Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project? Well, Gerard Maynard shot over 2,000 images taken in Yosemite with a D2X and a 300mm f/4 with a TC1.7 for them.

Here is his part of the job, 2,046 photos from Glacier Point stitched together.Gerard used NX2

The result? A panoramic picture over 17 gigapixels!! Zoomify allows you to zoom in closely enough to count the number of people on top of Half Dome ah!

Make sure to check the other four location point he shot from… it’s incredible how detailed these panoramics are!!