Here’s a neat birthday card idea for the Polaroid or photography lovers in your life: make a hand-drawn Polaroid camera spit out a real instant photo! Kayla Davis received this card from her friend Chrissie for her 19th birthday.
Do I have the most awesome friend or what? My friend Chrissie made me this birthday card. It’s one of the coolest cards I’ve ever gotten!
If you’re ambitious, try taking it to the next level by making the card a “pop-up” card that has a 3D camera. That would be something.
Pacific Star is a photography project by Colin Rich in which he sends programmed cameras up to epic heights using homemade weather balloons. This is an interesting step-by-step look into what went into the second launch. After purchasing two Canon compact cameras on eBay, Rich programmed them to take 3 photos every 3 minutes, and shoot a minute of video every fourth minute. The cameras were then insulated in styrofoam, and sent up to 125,000 feet before the balloon burst. With the help of a parachute, the cameras descended for 35 minutes and landed about 15-20 miles away.
We’ve seen photos and videos of cameras launched before, but this one is interesting, informational, and well made.
Here’s a “duh” idea that might not have crossed your mind: you can use your iPad as a portable light table by displaying a blank page on the browser. Might be useful for those of you who are thinking of doing some printing in your bathroom or something.
Of course, you can use a cellphone too for things like 35mm negatives, but an iPad is much more similar to a portable light table. This idea is courtesy of photographer Dalton Rooney, whose free WordPress theme for photogs we featured a while back.
Sylights (short for “Share Your Lights”) is a new website that makes it easy for you to create and share lighting diagrams.
Created by Paris-based photographers Pierre-Jean Quilleré and Olivier Lance, the service is quite minimalistic, with the main pages being a diagram editor and a browse section to check out other photographers’ diagrams. Here’s an example diagram created on the service:
The site is designed quite well, and the editor is actually easy and fun to use. You simply right-click to add elements to the canvas, and then drag, resize, and rotate them as needed. The editor uses HTML5 and CSS3, so it should work fine on devices made by companies run by CEOs who hate Flash.
If you want to try out the editor, we made a test account so you don’t have to create a new one. Use the email address “test@petapixel.com” and the password “password”.
Update: Turns out you actually don’t need an account to create or browse diagrams. Oops. You can use the test account we made to… see what it’s like to have an account?
Nintendo just unveiled the 3DS yesterday, an upcoming portable game console that has a 3D screen built in. The screen does not require special glasses, and has an slider on the side to adjust the 3D effect. What’s neat is that there’s also two forward-facing cameras spaced a couple inches apart that allow you to take 3D photographs and video. The combination lets you snap a 3D photo or record a video and see it in 3D on the screen moments later. While 3D cameras have already been available for a while now (i.e. the Fujifilm FinePix Real 3D W1), the fact that the DS line has sold nearly 130 million units means that the 3DS will be introducing 3D photography to millions of people.
The cameras are reportedly only VGA resolution (640×480 or 0.3 megapixels), but this is a big first step in 3D photography becoming mainstream.
Thom Hogan is the writer and photographer behind bythom.com, a website that provides extensive information about Nikon gear. He has written over 30 books on computers and photography.
PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Thom Hogan: I’ve always had a weird half-and-half personality: half science/technology, half art. To some degree, that may have been what led me into an undergraduate degree in telecommunications (filmmaking and television production). It let me play with technology and art simultaneously ;~). But I’ve always taken a circuitous route to where I’m going. I went from architecture to music to filmmaking to television to statistics to management to Silicon Valley, with stops at many magazines along the way. The only thing that was constant was that I wrote about what I was doing and what I knew, I taught it to others, and I often photographed alongside that writing. When I dumped my high tech career in the 90’s to run Backpacker magazine, it was the start of emphasizing just those two constants: writing and photography. When I decided to leave Backpacker and Rodale, it happened to coincide with the mass migration from film to digital in photography, and my long tech career, which included designing some early digital cameras, suddenly came back into play. Read more…
Five years after acquiring the photo sharing service Flickr, Yahoo has finally obtained ownership of the domain name Flicker.com.
One of the common characteristics of Web 2.0 companies is the use of misspelled words in their name, since the correctly spelled words are typically too pricey for a bootstrapped web startup to purchase early on.
Flickr was one such company, settling for the now ubiquitous name after being unable to purchase Flicker.com.
As you might expect, the enormous popularity of Flickr has led to an absurd amount of traffic for Flicker.com, as people often type in the domain name either as a typo or being ignorant of the “correct” spelling”. Read more…
Apple has just announced the new Mac mini, which has been redesigned with a sleeker, unibody enclosure that’s 1.4 inches tall (down from 2 inches). The new Mini also includes a built in SD-card slot to make transferring photos from your camera easier, though a CompactFlash slot would have been great for a wider range of photo-enthusiasts. The new HDMI output allows the Mini to be connected to an HDTV, while graphics performance is supposedly doubled due to the new NVIDIA GeForce 320M chip.
Pricing starts at $699, and you’ll receive a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a 320GB hard drive.
On May 16, Coast Guard investigator Paul Shultz was walking along a Key West, Florida marina when he came across a red Nikon L18. Although the underwater housing surrounding the camera was battered from what appeared to be a long period at sea, the camera was in tip top shape.
After finding nothing in the photos and videos on the memory card that pointed to the owner, Shultz turned to the Internet, posting the photos to Scubaboard.com. Within days, it was determined from clues in the photos that they were taken in Aruba, about 1,100 miles from where the camera was found. Read more…
Both camera-shaped soaps are made with moisturizing shea butter with a cotton candy scent added. The mini-pack costs $4, while the larger one sells for $4.50.
If you have links to other camera-shaped soaps, please share with us in the comments!
