This beautiful video shows world champion freediverGuillaume Néry plunging into Dean’s Blue Hole, the world’s second deepest underwater sinkhole. It was filmed by Julie Gautier, a French freediving champion, using a Canon 5D Mark II. Gautier filmed the video while freediving herself, and the stunts were filmed over four afternoons.
Though the video is an artistic project and doesn’t show a single dive (reaching the bottom is likely impossible), it’s a beautiful film and one of the more unique uses of the 5D Mark II that we’ve seen.
I’ve been dying to take a look at the Canon lens coffee thermos and mug since I first wrote about it back in the beginning of March, but didn’t want to buy a set just to take a look. Luckily for me, the nice people over at canonmugs.com sent me some samples to check out and play around with. In this post I’ll be sharing some photographs and thoughts about these unique items. Read more…
Here’s an amazingly awesome idea for business cards if you’re a photographer or photo enthusiast. Brooklyn-based photographer and designer Steph Goralnick created the above business card by hand, embedding some film between two layers of heavy stock. The resulting business card looks like 35mm slide film, except the film used was a negative.
Editor’s note: We came across Duncan McNicholl’s work a while back and found it interesting, so we invited him to write a guest post regarding his project. His work has been featured by quite a few publications and websites in recent times.
Many people only experience sub-Saharan Africa through photographs. The teary-eyed child in rags is familiar to all of us as the portrait of poverty charities use to communicate a hopelessness in need of our pity and charity. I reacted very strongly to these images when I returned from Africa in 2008 after a 4 month volunteer placement in Malawi, working with Engineers Without Borders Canada. I compared the images I saw to my Malawian friends – people who embodied intelligence, resilience, and compassion – and I felt lied to. Read more…
This stop-motion video will blow you away. Students in Japan created this video of Super Mario for a school festival using only sticky notes for the animation. Putting together the 1.5 minute video required two weeks of work and about 5,000 yen (~$55). I predict this video will go viral on the Internet in the next few days.
Flickr has just announced a new feature that allows you to connect your Flickr account to your Facebook account to automatically update your Facebook friends when you upload new photographs. The above screenshot published by Flickr shows what the resulting Facebook status updates look like. To get started, visit the Sharing & Extending section of your Flickr account settings to connect your accounts in a few easy steps. For those of you who are already using the Flickr app on Facebook, Flickr recommends turning off that app and using this new feature instead.
Portuguese photographer Antonio Simoes was in South Africa to shoot the World Cup when he was robbed at gunpoint in his hotel room yesterday morning.
Two men entered his room at the Nutbush Boma Lodge at about 4am, pointed a gun at his head, and stole roughly $35,000 worth of camera equipment. Two other journalists staying in the hotel were also robbed that same morning.
Simoes, who works for Portuguese sports newspaper O Jogo, tells the Associated Press:
One of the guys pointed a hand gun at my head, and then they took all my gear — cameras, lenses, laptop. Then they told me to lie on the bed and they covered me with a blanket, pressed the gun against my head and told me to sleep.
$35,000 worth of gear… Wow. Any guesses to what he was carrying that adds up to that figure? If you’re going to be photographing in South Africa this summer, be careful.
The Spinner 360º is a new plastic camera by Lomography that lets you capture 360 degree panoramas on strips of 35mm film.
Shooting involves turning the camera on the handle, which exposes the film through a vertical slit while advancing he film at a speed that synchronizes it with what you’re capturing. You can either turn the camera by hand for longer exposure shots, or use the pullstring built into the handle.
Here are some example panoramas taken with the camera:
Eight panoramas can be captured on each roll, with the image covering even the sprocket holes. The camera is available from the Lomography store for €125.00, or about $150.
Two weeks ago we posted on the Geotaggers’ World Atlas, a project by Eric Fischer that shows heat maps of where photographs are taken in big cities, created using geolocation data from Flickr and Picasa photos.
Fischer now has a new set of maps called Locals and Tourists that distinguish between photos taken by inhabitants of the city and others who are simply passing through.
Some people interpreted the Geotaggers’ World Atlas maps to be maps of tourism. This set is an attempt to figure out if that is really true. Some cities (for example Las Vegas and Venice) do seem to be photographed almost entirely by tourists. Others seem to have many pictures taken in piaces that tourists don’t visit.
Blue points are locals (determined by whether the person has a history of photographing in that city), red points are tourists, and yellow points indicate photos for which it cannot be determined.
