Thankfully last year was peppered with news of the end of many of the worlds tyrants and dictators including Kim Jong-Il. With all the associated media attention on North Korea, an award-winning British photographer Charlie Crane has found his work documenting this closed off country thrust into the spotlight.

Lytro is a company that is hoping to revolutionise photography. Making use of something called light fields, this magic technology captures every ray of light from a scene which means that you can then play around with the image to focus it later, I think it’s best explained if you see it for yourself.

Some snapshots from the last few weeks including A Bathing Ape Pirate Pop Up Store, Spectrum’s 10th Birthday, 10 O’Clock Live!

The Boston Globe does it again with some absolutely beautiful photos depicting some of the celebrations for Chinese New Year 2011. I’ve included a few of my personal favourites for your pleasure.

Mango have managed to recruit Scarlett Johansson to model their latest offerings and these lovely photos are the results of that colloboration.

(Thanks, Halcyon Realms)

Life has a habit of getting in the way and as a result I’ve been unable to furnish my love here on the interwebz. So although only a token gesture, above you’ll see a glimpse of my life as seen through the lens of my mobile phone.

I finally started reading Arcade Mania after it had been sitting on my book shelf for a few months, of particular fascination for me was the section about Print Club, Purinto Kurabu or Puri Kura for short. Tremendously popular in Japan, these photo sticker booths allow for photos to be digitally customised and then printed out to be collected into albums. Out of curiosity I wondered whether or not I might find such a machine in London.

Luckily for me, I wasn’t disappointed. A few searches on Google led me to the information that there was a store in Chinatown that possessed a few machines including a natively Japanese machine. After acquiring this information my next dilemma was finding someone to join me in my flight of fancy.

I didn’t have to wait for long before my desire to find someone coincided with a trip to London by a few friends from my University who were here to see Gackt in concert. Fortunately when broaching the idea to them, they were unanimously excited about joining my search.

I found the address I had written down earlier for the Chinatown Market store on Charing Cross, there was a small photo sticker booth downstairs but I remembered some advice about heading up the escalator to the booths upstairs. There we were told that the most popular machine was unsurprisingly the most expensive at £12 for a shoot. Since there were five of us however this wasn’t particularly expensive after sharing the costs.

The attendant explained how the booth worked, that it would count down before taking a photo and at the end of the session it would let us choose our favourites and that we were then to head over to the back of the machine to add our individual digital flourishes before printing out our pictures.

It turned out to be a whole lot more fun that I had expected it to be and highly recommend visiting if you’re vaguely interested and are in London any time soon. Anyway that’s all for now folks!

I came across an article on Wired about the trend of Japanese municipalities to decorate their manhole covers. Photographer, Remo Camerota has compiled his collection of these covers into a book. I think I may have lost the plot as I’m posting a story about man hole covers…

(Click an image for a larger view!)

(Thanks, Danny Choo)

Tokyoluv shares with us this great video of skating around Tokyo, the rest of the website features gorgeous photography and is well worth having a look at.