I recently stumbled across the ‘Genius of Photography’ documentary that was originally made and shown on the BBC, whilst browsing on youtube. This excellent six part series tracks the development of photography over the last 170 years and looks at the important images that advanced the art.

If you are interested in the history of photography, as well as seeing the background to some of the most important and iconic photographs over the year then the series is well worth watching.

Above is just the first part of the first episode, to watch the others just click on the video and you’ll be taken to youtube where you’ll see the others in the series.

I’ve been thinking for a while about getting into some time lapse photography. I’ve noticed over the last year or so it is getting very popular.

Below are a couple of great time lapse videos i’ve come across. Sit back and enjoy.

This colation from New York was put together by Josh Owens of mindrelic. I love the way he moves the camera during the shooting to accentuate the feeling of movement in the end video.

NYC – Mindrelic Timelapse from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

This one was made by Kevin Meredith (aka lomokev). He’s usually more at home shooting with lomo lca film cameras but this shows he’s just as good with a new fangled DSLR.

I think the time might have come for me to invest in a decent remote that can take shots at specific intervals so I can do some experimenting with time lapse myself.

I find it interesting from time to time to take a look on the bestellers on Amazon to see what the most popular dslr cameras are. It always seemed to me in the past that Nikon used to top these lists but it seems things are changing.

I’ve definitely noticed over the last few months that Canon seem to be topping the list. They have made quite a few additions to their range of DSLRs over the last few months and this seems to be paying dividends for them. Here is the breakdown of the top 5 DSLR cameras:

1. Canon EOS Rebel T2i
2. Canon EOS Rebel T1i
3. Nikon D5000
4. Nikon D3000
5. Nikon D90

We’d be keen to hear you thoughts on this list. Olympus, Pentax and Sony are really catching up the big two by producing some really great cameras for reasonable prices. Do you think they’ll break in to the top five anytime soon?

Reader Poll Results

We”ve been running a poll on the site for a few weeks now to see what brand of cameras our readers use. Here are the results:

1st Canon (41%)

2nd Nikon (39%)

3rd Olympus (7%)

4th Pentax (6%)

5th Sony (4%)

6th Other (3%)

Well, if our readers are anything to go by then the top selling DSLRs are Canon, closely followed by Nikon which seems to back up the Amazon lists. We’ll keep our survey running to see how this changes over time.

Tokina have just announced that they are about to launch their 11-16mm f2.8 AT-X Pro DX lens with a Sony Alph mount. Until now this has only been available for Canon and Nikon users. The new Sony Mount 11-16mm went on sale in Japan yesterday (Feb 24th 2010) with a global roll out expected to follow shortly.

Tokina 11-16 Lens

As we mentioned in our review of the Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 this lens takes a bit of getting used to however when you learn to play by its rules it produces some stunning photographs. Check out our full review here.