March 2010

Michael Zhang

Calculate Your Local Golden Hour

The golden hour in photography is the first or last hour of sunlight in a day that photographers often aim to shoot in, since the sun's position produces a soft and warm light with longer shadows. The Golden Hour Calculator is a useful website that can help you calculate the golden hour(s) for your location, telling you exactly when the sun rises and sets.

Michael Zhang

Crowdsourcing Virtual Photo Worlds

In the future, we might be able to roam around a 3D virtual representation of our world, where everything you see was automatically generated from photographs taken at the real locations.

Vision researchers at the University of Washington and Cornell University have been working on turning photographs of things in the real world into 3-dimensional representations. This research could eventually turn snapshots into virtual buildings, neighborhoods, and possibly cities.

Michael Zhang

Time-Lapse of the Milky Way over Hawaii

The White Mountain is Charles Leung's first time-lapse video, showing the stars and our galaxy sweep beautifully across the Hawaiian sky. It was shot in Mauna Kea, Hawai'i using a Canon 5D Mark II (with an assortment of lenses) at ISO6400 using 30 sec exposures and 15 sec intervals.

Michael Zhang

Canon Lens Mug Purchased in Canada

The web has been abuzz the past couple days over the collectible L-lens look-alike coffee mugs Canon was passing out at the Olympics. Everyone is asking whether they'll be available to the general public.

Michael Zhang

Judge Joe Brown Knows His Photography

Here's a portion of the Judge Joe Brown episode that aired Monday in the US. The case involved a woman who felt cheated when the wedding photographer she hired delivered poor results after using a Canon Rebel XTi, 18-55mm kit lens, and a 70-300mm. What's interesting is how Judge Joe Brown actually seems to know a thing or two about photography.

Jessica Lum

Sports Illustrated Tablet Demo Features Tons of Photos

This Sports Illustrated Tablet Demo by Jared Cocken came out a few months ago, before the announcement of the Hearst/LG/Marvell lovechild, the Skiff e-reader and Apple's iPad. With the more announcements of technology that will become available just around the corner, this demo is worth a second look.

Michael Zhang

A Gigantic Rube Goldberg Machine

Here's a video that's so creative and awesome it's sure to get your artistic juices flowing. OK Go just put up the music video to their song "This Too Shall Pass", and it's one of the coolest music videos I've ever seen. Basically the whole video shows a gigantic Rube Goldberg contraption built in a warehouse, with the timing and placement of every person and element perfectly integrated into the song.

Michael Zhang

Time-Lapse Stroll Through Tokyo

Tokyo/Glow is a creative time-lapse video by Jonathan Bensimon showing an illuminated man leaving his crosswalk sign at a street intersection and roaming the streets of Toyko.