For their new "Purple Pedals" campaign, Yahoo has dispatched a handful of GPS-enabled bicycles equipped with cameraphones that automatically shoot and upload photos to Flickr to riders in cities all over the world, from San Francisco to New York and soon, to Singapore, Denmark and the U.K.. The bikes come with solar panels which power the camera, and special software that uses the phone's accelerometer to snap photos every 60 seconds automatically when the bike is in motion. I was one of the lucky folks to get my hands on one of these bikes, and I've been riding it all over San Diego for over a week now. Let's take a look at how the bike works, how it was made, and how you can turn your handlebars into a tripod and photo-map your neighbourhood in similar fashion.

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Many people adore the look of photographs taken with older cameras. The millions of plastic bodied cheap lens bearing cameras that flooded the consumer photography market starting around the mid-20th century had flaws that have come to be a hallmark of their time. The dark vignettes, over saturated colours, and often blown highlights have a certain undeniably flawed appeal to many. Why scrounge the flea markets looking for a camera or waste the money on trendy new (but just as poorly constructed) expensive knockoffs?

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As any photography hobbyist knows, shelling out for expensive gear can put a hurt on your pocketbook. We've covered how to create a cheap DIY softbox here before, but if you're looking for something more durable than a cardboard box check out the Instructables tutorial by user sdhigbee on how to turn a $23 outlay into a reasonable clone of a $140 umbrella softbox. If you need to photograph small objects, check out another previous tip on how to make your own homemade light tent.

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Web site Light Doodles teaches you how to draw in a photograph using light. What the heck's a light doodle? See an example in the included image, and hit the site for a video of how that was drawn.

Light doodling or light drawing can be described as the simple act of capturing the trace of a narrow moving source of light using long exposure photography, long being defined as seconds or minutes. The moving light source will then appear in the finished picture as more then what actually exists and is truely a representation of time as well as space and movement.

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Wired's How-To Wiki demonstrates how to exploit the iPhone's unusual shutter to take distorted photographs. The trick? Just twist your camera as you're taking a picture.

The reason? The iPhone uses a CMOS sensor, which more or less "wipes" the shutter across the sensor like a scanner rather than the circular aperture of a traditional camera. The iPhone's CMOS scanner seems to be a bit slower than, say, the CMOS sensor on your Canon camera. Therefore, as the camera is recording the image, any changes over that small but significant amount of time are recorded.

Taking a psychedelic photo is actually just as easy as it sounds (works better in bright sunlight), but read on for a quick video demonstration.

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Photography enthusiast blog Photojojo details how to mount your point-and-shoot camera on your bicycle for fun and creative shooting. The supplies are cheap (under $10), and putting it all together is a breeze. When you're done, you could use it to snap photos at intervals for a time-lapse or shoot some video like Photojojo did above. If your camera doesn't support time-lapse (or you just want to really soup it up), check out how to turn your point-and-shoot into a super-camera with CHDK.

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Web-based photo editor Dumpr adds quick effects to photos like the Lifehacker Rubik's Cube included here, created in under 10 seconds. Upload photos to Dumpr from your computer, or grab them from Flickr or any photo URL. The real timesaver Dumpr provides is the quick link panel beside each picture it renders, which lets you quickly inject your edited photos into Facebook, Blogger, Wordpress, and more. If you're looking for a more robust online editor to crop, resize, and apply filters, check out previously posted Wiredness.

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One of the most creative uses of Flickr video support is the "stabilised video collage," a beautiful way to capture a scene in a multi-frame moving portrait, as shown. Out of respect for the producer's copyright, we didn't embed the actual video example in this post, just a reduced thumbnail—so go here to see it in action. Then check out a how-to video on making your own collage, which involves combining two videos into one frame using Motion for Mac. Neat!

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Windows only: The free Picasa2Flickr plug-in uploads photos from image-editing application Picasa to photo-sharing web application Flickr at the press of a button. We've mentioned Picasa2Flickr once before, but when Picasa changed its plug-in structure a while back, it broke Picasa2Flickr. This new and improved version actually just sends your selected photos straight to Flickr Uploadr 3.0, Flickr's default tool for uploading photos. There were always good workarounds for perfecting your Picasa to Flickr workflow, but it doesn't get much better than Picasa2Flickr.

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Windows/Mac/Linux: Freeware application Phantasmagoria adds effects to your digital photos through a slick, simple-to-use interface. The program provides an impressive range of effects and can upload the results to photo-sharing site Flickr or easily share your results over Twitter. You can snap and annotate screenshots, and take webcam photos and go straight to adding effects, similar to OS X's Photo Booth. Phantasmagoria is freeware, cross-platform, requires Java. Check out the sample page for a closer look at Phantasmagoria in action.

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