Well, if you’re sent by Getty Images , the standard issue kit contains: two Nikon D3ses, 24-70mm lens, 400mm lens, 500/600mm lens, 1.4x teleconverter, batteries and memory cards. And you get to haul all that up a mountain! Basically, all of this stuff, plus two of those giant cameras up there. But on top of all the layers of clothing you have to wear, and you have to stand in place for hours and hours. What a blast! [ Pocket Lint ]

In 1975, the first digital camera took 23 seconds to record a 100-line black-and-white photo onto cassette tape. Today, a Nikon D3s takes photos with 12 million pixels at 1/8000 of a second. And it can see in the dark. The conventional wisdom is that the romp-stomp-stomp of progress in digital imaging has proceeded on the mostly one-way track of ballooning pixel counts.

The point has grown cliche by now, but it’s true. Every week your submissions to Shooting Challenges blow me away. And your polar panoramas just upped that ante on every challenge to come. Honorable Mention (non-original photography) Subject: Denali, Alaska Built from 9 photos Camera: Nikon D80 Lens: AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED ISO: 100 Focal Length: 18mm (27mm /35mm equiv.) Aperture: ƒ/8 Shutter Speed: 1/250 As you can obviously tell by climate, I broke rule 2 because I’m a college student and don’t have time to go out and take photos, but I did want to test my hand at the challenge! -Isaac Chambers Second Runner Up Camera: Sony Cybershot DSC-W50 F-stop: f/5 Exposure time: 1/200 sec. ISO Speed: ISO-80 Focal length: 16mm Flash: None I leave my office right around sunset everyday and park on the top of a garage in the middle of downtown Charleston, SC.

Nikon’s S series are their flashier point-and-shoots, and the S8000 is the splashiest: Super skinny, but it’s got a 10x zoom lens, crazy crispy 3-inch, 921,000-dot display and it shoots 720p video. Plus, uh, look at it. The S8000 and the next step down, the S6000, both shoot at 14MP (I predict noiiiise) and 720p vid at 30fps, though the S6000 has less zoom (7x) crammed in a skinnier 1-inch frame. The S8000 is $300, while the S6000 is $250.

Nikon’s D300S isn’t exactly tailor made for D300 owners, but for those waiting patiently to jump into the semi-pro DSLR game, it offers up a pretty delightful array of specs. Boasting SD and CF slots, a 720p movie mode and 12.3 megapixels of sharp shooting goodness, this here cam received overwhelmingly positive reviews late last year. Strategically positioned between the full-frame D700 and the lesser-specced D90, we’re sure the D300S found its way into quite a few hearts (and under quite a few trees) between then and now. If you’ve been firing off snaps with one of these for a few months now, we’re curious to know how you’d tweak things if the power were yours. Does the “S” really add enough to the D300 package to warrant the boost in price?

Sure, a Twitter-inspired, 140-seconds-or-less film festival may sound ridiculous. But it’s given us a great interview with Rainn Wilson of The Office , and some of the films are actually pretty great. Case in point: The big winner, Chicken vs. Penguin . I actually really like this video—it’s cute and offbeat and almost startlingly professional, especially in the editing and cinematography. The winner is Marko Slavnic , a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, who will use his $100,000 winnings towards a feature film.

Space: The final frontier—for Nikon, anyway. The camera company’s relationship with NASA has just got steamier, as they’re supplying 11 D3s DSLRs and seven AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED lenses for their space photography. It’s not the first time they’ve worked together, with the Nikon Photomic FTN actually used on Apollo 15 back in 1971, but it’s nice to see that NASA’s taste in camera models has got more expensive over the years. The D3s, unveiled back in August, normally costs $5,199.95, and features a whoppingly large ISO range of 200 - 12,800 (though it can be expanded up to 102,400). NASA will be using the cameras to photograph the happenings at the International Space Station, and apparently are so happy with the D3s and NIKKOR lenses (which cost $1,830 each) that there’s no need to modify them to make them more space-friendly

Nine years ago, as a young tech reporter at Time Magazine, I co-wrote a buyer’s guide with the latest and greatest gear known to man. Today, it sounds ridiculous. • Creative’s $500 Nomad Jukebox (pictured above), was not only “sleek”—at least when compared to a CD Walkman—but “can hold as much music as 150 CDs.” • The Extiva was a $350 DVD player from Samsung with the Nuon chip, so “you can also play videogames.” Not sure which videogames we were referring to there. • Our pick for digital camera was Nikon’s twisty CoolPix 990, 3 million pixels for 1 thousand dollars. • Gateway laptop with 12.1-in. display, 550MHz chip and a year of free AOL was “a great deal” at $1300

I’ve been waiting for this damn update for months: Apple’s dropped the latest RAW compatibility update—2.7 to be precise—for Mac, which adds compatibility for these fine cameras: • Canon EOS-1D Mark IV • Canon EOS 7D • Canon PowerShot G11 • Nikon D3S • Nikon D3000S • Nikon D3000 Snag it on Software Update, of course. [ Apple

Rainn Wilson , best known for playing Dwight Schrute on The Office , shot a 140-second film using a Nikon D5000 as part of his participation in the Nikon Film Festival . He talked with us about directing, pancakes and solar-powered deer-meat grinders. Rainn is one of three judges in the inaugural Twitter-themed Nikon Festival , in which people submit 140-second videos in the hopes of winning a $100,000 prize. Here’s Rainn’s own video—not a contest entry, naturally—which he made using just an entry-level DSLR : In your 140-second film, you scatter pancakes on the ground in the shape of an eye, taunt a rocking horse, and play yourself in ping-pong. Were you worried about making a film that’s such transparent Oscar-bait? I was, I was a little bit