Children's author and blogger Andrew McDonald never deletes 25 photos on his camera's memory card—presumably kept in a separate folder from the standard image outputs. Flipped through on a camera viewfinder, they offer a pretty amazing personal story about the importance of that camera, the unique humanness of the owner, and, most importantly, an email address for coordinating a camera return.

Andrew's posted all the pics at his blog, but you can get the viewfinder-flip effect by checking out the animated GIF version, courtesy of Your Daily GIF Blog. Oh, and while you're adding permanent camera card fixtures, tossing in a helpful TXT file couldn't hurt, either.

Thanks to Zombie Ms. Skittles for leaving us that #tip, which anyone can do.

Software and Photoshop tricks are great, but they're a poor substitution for doing things in-camera. Over the last year we shared a variety of hacks for taking better photos, looking better in photos, and ways to get professional results without spending your rent money on camera accessories.

Create Your Own Bokeh for Beautiful Photo Effects

What's a bokeh you say? It's that oh-so-wonderful fuzziness in the background of photographs with a shallow depth of field and accompanying starry highlights. You can create you own bokeh effects with a little craftiness.

Position Your Tongue Properly to Look Good in Photos

We live in a culture of oversharing, so odds are someone, somewhere will be snapping and posting photos taken of you at various events. To help ensure you look your best, heed where you position your tongue.

Take Better Pictures by Treating Your Still Camera Like It's Video

People often lament that they "just missed it!" upon seeing they failed to capture a pivotal moment in the action. You can avoid missing the action by treating your still camera like a video camera.

Avoid Mediocre Portraits with These Tricks

You have a camera and a willing subject, but you're not sure how to break your portraits out of the flat blandness that plagues many snapshots. Avoid boring compositions with these tips.

Set Up a High Speed Photography Studio in Your Garage

Many a photography enthusiast has assumed the equipment necessary is far too expensive for quality high speed photography captures. A high speed capture studio on the cheap can be had with this handy guide.

Create Abstract Light Art by Snapping a Camera-Toss Photo

Making abstract wallpaper and gorgeous slow-exposure shots doesn't require a bunch of design apps or photography lessons. Learn how to literally toss your camera to make abstract light art.

Be A Better Photographer On Vacation

Whether you head 30 or 3000 miles away, you'll want to bring back great photos of your vacation. The New York Times posts questions and answers on how to achieve great vacation photos.

Take Better Self-Portraits

Taking a good self-portrait is both a handy skill and a way to expand your photographic repertoire. Save your next profile picture from the camera-held-at-arms-length cliche with these tips.

DIY Tennis Ball Photography Stabilization Unit

DIY web site Instructables details how to make an image stabilizing unit to supplement your steady hand using a tennis ball and a few nuts and bolts.

Shoot Better Nighttime Pictures

Daytime photo tricks don't always translate when you're trying to capture the perfect night shot. The Photography Bay web site outlines tips for taking a stellar post-sunset shot without relying on a tripod or expensive flash system.

Be More Photogenic by Forgetting About the Camera

When the camera comes out, a lot of people instinctively declare that they look awful in pictures. Learn how to be more photogenic and put your best face forward.

Breathe Like a Sniper to Take Better Photos in Low Light

Steady hands are critical to taking low light photographs. Breath like a sniper to make sure you snap the shot when your hand is least jittery.

Create a Basic Ring Flash

If the DIY Fiber Optic Ring Flash we wrote about required too many specialist parts for your taste, check out this much simpler remix. The construction is easy and done with common household items.

Use Composition Rules to Take Better Photos

Photography is a creative art, no doubt, but creative doesn't mean doing everything willy-nilly however you want. Use these basic rules of composition to give your photos an extra boost of visual appeal.

DIY Beauty Dish Enhances Your Portraits

Beauty dishes are great flash modifiers for portrait photographs, but even a cheap model will set you back at least $100. Skip it—a surprisingly effective DIY beauty dish costs less than $20.

Create Stunning High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photos

Gizmodo's John Mahoney explains how to take high dynamic range (HDR) photos so that the results of your photograph more accurately recreate what you were seeing when you snapped the shutter.

Create Studio Quality Photos Using Natural Light

You don't need a blockbuster budget to get high-quality light for your portraits. By coaxing the sun to help in your photographic endeavors, you can create stunning portraits on a tiny budget.

Make a DIY Photography Light Box with K'Nex

Lightboxes aren't just for the professionals any longer. Using them to illuminate your Craigslist and eBay listings can help make a sale, and amateur photogs can get professional-looking shots with one. Create your own using K'nex and a little know how.

Take Great Panoramic Pictures with Any Camera

Panoramic software has come a long way toward making panoramic images child's work. Great software or not, there's no substitution for good source material. Take better panoramic pictures with these tips

Take Better Pictures by Studying Studio Layouts

Whether you're interested in learning more about lighting to add to your photography skill set or you're just curious how proper studio lighting works, this handy guide will provide some photo-enhancing insight.

DIY Tilt-Shift Photography Lens

Tilt-shift lenses create a great miniature effect on photographs of everyday things. The problem? These specialized lenses are insanely expensive (think $1,000 range). This video from Make demonstrates how to make a DIY tilt-shift lens on the cheap.

Take Awesome Sunset Photographs

Sunsets are one of nature's more spectacular displays, and a good one is worth preserving with a photograph. Take pictures that will capture the perfect dusk moment with these photography tips.

Create a Flash Diffuser Using An Empty Cigarette Packet

The right flash can make or break your shot. Unfortunately, not all built-in flashes are created equal. DIY web site Instructables demonstrates how to create a worthy on-the-spot flash diffuser using an empty cigarette packet.

Make a DIY Macro Lens from Old Binoculars

A high-end macro lens for your camera can easily run upwards of a thousand dollars, but you can make a super-simple macro lens for a few bucks out of old binoculars.

Have a favorite photography-related hack from 2009 that wasn't featured here? Let's hear about it in the comments.

Under a proposed deal, Google would digitize those pictures of "Manhattan buildings that were originally shot for tax purposes," and show them off in Google Maps. Seems neat, but it would be even neater if Google Maps were somehow integrated into the Phantom City iPhone app, because then there'd be even cooler iPhone-powered trips through history ahead. [NY Times]

See if you can figure out what they are before you read the description.

And of course, check out their full gallery here: [Popular Science]

It really does look nice, like an Xbox 360 Elite with military-ish decals all over it. For most of you it's not worth trading in your current Xbox 360 for, but if you're new to the game, or you just want to upgrade from a 20GB drive to the massive 250GB drive contained (and only available) here, it's not a bad deal.

In other words, the secret is composition, composition, composition. The one real advantage the iPhone 3GS has in this regard against past iPhones is that you can change the focal point, which lets you alter the shot in subtle ways, which is one of his tips. Also, he suggests trying some different camera apps—he likes Photo fx and CameraKit, though I'm partial to CameraBag.

Here's a couple of other awesome photos he's taken, but you can see way more at his very excellent photo blog, which gives you a view of Japan that maybe you haven't seen. [Sasurau, BoingBoing]

With just the iPhone's 2-megapixel camera, Chase was able to capture—over the course of a year—some pretty interesting sights. Many of the photos aren't high resolution quality works that you'd expect from a pro, and a lot of them look like Polaroids you dug up from a shoebox in the attic, buried from the '70s, but they all serve a point.

We all have cameras with us, so if you're looking to better your photography, even if it's just with the camera you have attached to your phone, Chase's book may give you some inspiration—if not on composition and style, then just on the fact that you can take decent enough photos with your phone.

It also helps if you use Chase's iPhone App Best Camera, which does a little bit of processing/editing right on the phone. Reader Bryan also tells us Chase used some of these editing enhancements for the photos in the book, just to spice them up a bit. [Amazon]

We've seen comparisons like this before and as we move into terabytes of digital storage they're less and less useful (and interesting). But the move to the cloud is pretty intriguing: Facebook photos, Hulu videos, YouTube, all that stuff is pretty much unlimited and will continue to grow. And as a Netflix devotee, I'm glad to see a chart of exactly how thoroughly it's kicking Blockbuster's ass. [Mozy]

Their tips for shooting with a lower-end DSLR without carrying gear like a tripod can be boiled down to cranking up your camera's ISO—your camera's light sensitivity—but not too much. Like ISO 400 for older entry-level cameras, up to ISO 800 on newer ones like the D90. Then minimizing camera shake using the breathless technique—squeeze the shutter at the moment you've exhaled all the breath in your lungs, kind of like a sniper. It helps even more if you've got your elbows tucked at your sides.

Or you can cheat against not having a tripod by setting your camera down on something so it's immobilized—jackets are good for this—and setting a slightly longer exposure time to let in more light. (A fast lens, say F/2.8 or faster, helps.) There's also this cheap, disposable stabilizer that fits in your pocket. You'll get a cleaner image that way, with a lot more light in cityscapes (like Times Square). Oh, and shooting after it rains is great since the water reflection increases the amount of light flooding into your camera. But above all, you need to know what your camera setup is capable of doing.

Those are some barebone basics for a kind of shooting everybody wants to get right—what's your favorite night photography tip? [Photography Bay and Flickr]

As you can see in the gallery, the effect they achieved looks almost exactly like the real thing on your computer. screen. I have to admit that I'm going to try doing a few of these, with really weird settings. [Dialy Nifty—Thanks Kumiko!]

First Place — Born on Bord
Second Place — Gutman Jake
Third Place — Mind's Eye Creativ

It's the world's oldest camera, and it's on display at the "The Invention of Photography and the Earliest Photographs" exhibition in Macau.

On display alongside this great great granddaddy of photography are 250 additional pieces of photography history, as well as 180 photos from the same era. It was a simpler, more innocent time, completely free of the megapixel pissing matches that grip the industry today. [Xinhuanet via Engadget]

You can find a lot of good source images here, but please don't use the more gory or NSFW ones. I won't include them in the gallery, so don't waste your time. Also, don't send in images you haven't edited. People have been doing that a lot lately and I'm not going to include non-Photoshopped entries.

Anyhow, send your best work to me at contests@gizmodo.com with "Famous Photos" in the subject. Name your files FirstnameLastname.jpg with the name you want used as credit, and save your files as JPGs, PNGs or GIFs. Send them in by next Tuesday morning and I'll post the top three winners and best of the rest in our Gallery of Champions.

Ward is a photographer of pets for Fat Orange Cat Studios. The photos are ok. But she's got some good advice over there:

I also almost always shoot in burst mode, usually in slow burst at 2 to 3 frames per second.

I end up doing a lot of gymnastics during a shoot. I'm crouching, kneeling, on my back, on my side, waking up sore the next morning.

I sort of treat my still camera as a video camera. Even if I'm not actively shooting, and even if the subject is not doing something "capture-worthy," I continue tracking through the viewfinder and recomposing. Because soon enough they will do something capture-worthy, and I'll be ready to press the shutter the second it happens.

Treats, ham, roast beef, squeaky toys, patience. With dogs, I like making meowing sounds. Seems to get their attention every time, and as a bonus, they give the quizzical head tilt. It's a little trickier with cats because if you make an attention-making noise more than even once, they will ignore you thereafter.

Damn cats.

I am reminded, reading all of this, of how insane pet owners are, and how a the professional pet photographer is an unsung hero of portraiture. Their subjects are only somewhat less difficult than what Annie Leibovitz has to deal with when photographing rock and movie stars.

There is the greater question of why people don't just buy nice DSLRs and take photos of their own pets. But I suppose all the tricks and tips in here—far greater in number and substance than you'd assume a list could be for mere humans—are the answer. [NYT]

If you can't get enough of your Obamas and Bidens and Emanuels and presidential dogs, look no further. If not, look at little further.

Also, if you've got one of those digital picture frames with Flickr support, you can probably hook up your frame to directly feed photos from the White House stream and pretend you're some kind of secret agent or witch, being able to see their every move. [Flickr]

Compared to the iPhone, the tipster found the Pre's screen a little more easily scratched and its back a little more resilient (though easily fingerprinted). The tipster also states that the Pre is in mass production right now, which would be necessary if the rumors about an imminent launch are true. The photos show that the Pre definitely has a smaller footprint than the iPhone, though we know it's thicker to accommodate the slide-out QWERTY. [PreThinking]

We want you to take photos of card skimmers you stumble across while getting cash. To spot these crime-ridden machines, here are a few things to look for:
• Ill-fitted card slots
• More than one mirror (some actually may have two mirrors)
• Suspicious lighting
• Unusual ATM error messages
• Difficulty inserting or removing your ATM card.
• If there are other ATMs around, compare them side-to-side, if one of them looks unusual, it's time to pull out your cameras.

Take photos of them in—camouflaged (or not) on the ATM—and then e-mail them to us at tips@gizmodo.com with the subject line "Card Skimmer Beatdown." Please don't forget to contact the authorities/bank managers before you leave. In the war between card skimmers and Gizmodo readers, it's time to fight back.

The Things iPhoto Thinks Are Faces group already has 86 screen captures in its pool, which I'm sure is going to grow. And by the looks of it, iPhoto is as keen on seeing faces in mountains, piles of rocks and at the bottom of an empty glass as the most superstitious astrological devotee. Or Virgin-Mary-in-Toast spotter.

[Things iPhoto Thinks Are Faces - Flickr, gallery credits: ruudvaneijk, maczydeco, edu Mac nation, Daragh, iafroman, bgmb42, bgmb42-1, bgmb42-2, bgmb42-3 - Thanks, Jimbo!]