September 2010

Google Wants to Speed Up the Web by Killing the JPEG

Google unveiled a new image format today called WebP that it hopes will make the web faster by cutting files sizes of images without affecting quality. According to a blog post they published earlier today, photos and images account for 65% of the bytes transmitted by websites. In their tests done using 1 million randomly selected images from the web, re-encoding images as WebP resulted in an average file size reduction of 39%. Here's a gallery with image and file size comparisons.

Facebook Increases Maximum Photo Size to 2048px, Adds Lightbox

Just earlier this year Facebook upped their maximum photo size to 720px, an increase of 20%. Today, they've announced that the maximum size is increasing to 2048px, about eight times larger than the previous maximum size. A download link will be included with photos allowing people to download the high resolution versions.

Cute Hand-Stitched Felt Camera Cases

Hine Mizushima creates unique camera cases for point-and-shoots and sells them through her Etsy store. Each felt case is unique and hand-stitched by Mizushima, and looks like a toy camera. Check out this Flickr set for all the different designs that have been created in the past.

The Dark Side of Wildlife Filmmaking

Update on 12/18/21: This video has been removed by ABC Nightline.

Remember the controversy last year surrounding the use of a captive wolf in an award-winning wildlife photograph? Turns out this kind of deception might be common practice in the world of wildlife filmmaking.

Canon 5D Mark II Used for Iron Man 2

Back in 2009 there were rumors that the upcoming Iron Man 2 would make use of Canon's 5D Mark II DSLR for certain scenes, and now details are emerging as to how exactly the the camera was used.

Cinematographer Matthew Libatique used 5D Mark II DSLRs to shoot parts of the Monaco Grand Prix scene in the movie in which Tony Stark is attacked by Ivan Vanko (AKA Whiplash) at the historic race. 5D Mark IIs were mounted to all four sides of a moving vehicle to capture moving background plate footage that was later combined with race car footage shot in Hollywood.

Sony Pellicle Mirror DSLR Sensors Overheat, Limiting Video

Sony has issued an "important notice" that shooting HD video for semi-long periods of time with the A33 and A55 may cause the sensor to overheat, shutting off the camera. How long the camera lasts depends on ambient temperature and image stabilization is enabled. If it's 30° C (~86° F) the A55 can only go 6 minutes with IS turned on.

DropMocks Makes Sharing Photos Quick and Stupidly Easy

DropMocks is a new photo sharing service designed to help you share photographs online as quickly and easily as possible. Created with HTML 5, the service has a minimalistic homepage that invites you to drag and drop photos into the browser. It then adds those photos into a simple gallery, and provides you with a short URL you can share. It's a bit like file hosting service DropBox, except for photos and done through the browser.

Nikon D3100 Continuous Autofocus Tests

One of the features that Nikon emphasized when they announced the D3100 was HD video with continuous autofocus, the first of its kind in DSLRs. Sure it sounded great on paper, but how well does it work in the real world? Here are a couple videos showing the D3100's continuous autofocus in action, created by Oscar Cheng.

Interview with Heather Champ

Heather Champ is cofounder of Fertile Medium, an online community consultancy. She was formerly the Director of Community at Flickr and the co-founder of JPG Magazine, which she started with her husband Derek Powazek. Visit her website here.

PetaPixel: Can you tell us about yourself and your background?

Heather Champ: Living in San Francisco, I’m roughly 2,439 miles and worlds away from Ottawa, the city of my birth. There’s very little of my accent left, though there will be a moment when I can see the wheels turning in someone’s brain and that follows with “are you Canadian?” I have a studio fine arts degree and have hopped and skipped my way through a variety of careers that have built upon that creative foundation.

Post-Processing a Cute Kitten Portrait

My friend recently had two stray kittens randomly walk up to her doorstep. I was called over to see them, and carried my 5D and 24-70mm along. There wasn't much light to work with, and I didn't bring a flash, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO for any chance of capturing a sharp image of the energetic kittens. I haven't done a walkthrough post for quite some time (opting to post guest posts instead), but here's a quick walkthrough of how I post-processed one particular image of a kitten. I used Adobe Camera Raw (comes with Photoshop CS4) with my adjustments, but you'll have the same settings in Lightroom, Aperture, etc...

Family Science Project Sends Video Camera to the Edges of Space

Luke Geissbuhler and his kids decided they wanted to send an HD video camera high into the stratosphere, so they spent eight months researching and testing for their project before finally launching their Go Pro Hero HD-laden balloon from Newburgh, New York. The balloon rose for 70 minutes to a height of 100,000 feet (19 miles) above the Earth before popping.

Faking Slow Motion Through Dance

Who needs an uber-expensive Phantom camera or fancy slow-mo software when you can fake the effect with dance? This doesn't have anything to do with photo gear or software, but we found it interesting since we've been sharing a lot of slow motion work lately. These are music videos for songs from retired MMA-fighter Genki Sudo's album "World Order". The name of the dance group is "World Order" as well.

Beautiful IKEA Baking Recipe Ingredient Photos by Carl Kleiner

IKEA recently created a baking cookbook titled "Hembakat är Bäst" (Homemade is Best) and hired photographer Carl Kleiner to provide images for the recipes. Kleiner shot beautiful photographs of the recipes' ingredients, neatly arranged in geometric patterns by Evelina Bratell.

90-Year-Old Pocket Kodak Lens and a Homemade Bellows

Remember the 102-year-old lens experiment we shared a week ago? Daire Quinlan did something similar -- he combined his grandfather's 6x9 Pocket Kodak lens from 1920 (90 years ago) with homemade bellows to create his own tilt-shift lens to play with. Unlike Timur Civan, who used his 102-year-old lens on a 5D Mark II, Quinlan used his frankenlens with a Nikon film camera.

Turn Wooden Spools into Photo Holders

At times mounted photos can be a bit tricky in regards to how to display them if you do not want to use a frame. Leaning them against the wall or propping them up next to another object doesn't always work. One simple way to display your mounted photos is by creating custom photo holders using vintage wooden spools. The end product is practical, unexpected and pleasing to the eye. The process for creating these is simple.

Cross-Stitched Polaroid Dark Slide Cards

Check out these super-special Polaroid-themed greeting cards by Heather Champ. They're made using two dark slides from expired Polaroid 600 film:

The five colour bars (celebrating the new PX 70 packaging) create a negative space heart surrounded by the idea of a instant film frame.

Once the front dark slide is cross-stitched, the front and back are dry mounted with rubber cement to folded white card stock. The inside is blank. The card is accompanied by a matching blank white envelope.

Try making these yourself as a do-it-yourself project. If arts and crafts isn't your thing, you can buy them for a special Polaroid-lover in your life for $25 from Heather's Etsy store.

SD Card-Laden Paper Airplanes to Be Dropped from the Edge of Space

Viral marketing agency The Viral Factory is helping Samsung with an experiment in which they're planning to drop 100 SD cards attached to paper airplanes from 21 miles above the Earth in the stratosphere. Instructions will be printed on the paper airplane informing anyone who finds one of the experiment and what they can do to participate. Finders are encouraged to shoot with the cards and then upload anything taken to the Project Space Planes website.

The claim that the planes will "carry the messages across the world" is a bit farfetched, but supposedly the planes could potentially travel hundreds of miles depending on the wind conditions. The experiment is planned for mid-October.

Black and White HDR Time Lapse Shot with a Sony A700

Andrew Rees shot this beautiful black and white time lapse in Cardiff, Wales using a Sony A700 DSLR. He shot 700 pairs of photos (a total of 1400 shots) with 2.5 seconds in between pairs, and combined the resulting HDR photographs into a 12fps time lapse video.

Enhance Physical Album Photos with Voice Notes

The Photo Album Story Teller is a nifty device that allows you to add voice notes to your physical photos. It works with color coded stickers that are used to identify photos. Place the sticker next to the photo, scan it with the device, and record a message. Come back later and rescan the sticker to hear the note that was recorded.

Time Lapse Videos of Food Decomposing

Time lapse photography allows us to view ordinary things in unordinary ways, whether it's the clouds passing overhead or plants shooting up out of the ground. I recently came across these two videos that I found pretty interesting. They show the decomposition of food over many days and how mold and maggots do their thing. Don't watch while eating.

Photo Loving Giantess Invades Toyko

Panasonic decided recently that it would be a good idea to put up a giant inflatable balloon of their spokesmodel, Japanese actress Haruka Ayase, to promote its new Lumix camera. Apparently passersby reacted with fear and confusion rather than enthusiasm, though we can't imagine why...

High-Tech Glasses That Can Project Photos into Your Eyeball

Here's a glimpse into what viewing photographs might be like for future generations: Brother Industries is working on a special pair of glasses called the AirScouter that can project images directly into your retina, making you see a 16-inch display that doesn't actually exist floating 3 feet in front of your face.

A Day in the Life of the MIT Community

A Day in the Life of MIT (ADITL) is a neat project in which members of the MIT community take pictures on a particular day and then pool the photographs together to provide a snapshot of what life was like on that day. ADITL 2010 happened yesterday, and hundreds of people contributed images to the collection.

Giant 20×24 Polaroid Photography Lives on Through NY Studio

Meet the 20x24 Polaroid Land Camera, a mythical beast in the world of large format photography. Polaroid's founder Edwin Land created only seven of these 235-pound cameras over thirty years ago, and only six exist today. Two of them are on display at Harvard and MIT, and only four are in use commercially. According to Forbes, buying prints created with this beast cost $3,500 a piece, while renting the thing for a day costs $1,750 and $200 for each shot. Back in June, an Andy Warhol photo shot with the camera sold for a quarter of a million bucks.

Film About 14-Year-Old Paparazzi Photog Austin Visschedyk

"Teenage Paparazzo” is a documentary film that will debut on HBO on September 27. It's about the life of Austin Visschedyk, a 14-year-old paparazzi photographer who chases celebrities for 17 hours a day, earning $500 to $1000 for each photograph sold. Hopefully Visschedyk isn't like the paparazzi in the Kate Mos LAX video we posted a while ago (though he probably is).

Creative Mirrored Portraits Shot with Symmetrical Lighting

If you have a Mac, you've probably played around with the mirror effect in Photo Booth. Photographer Bart Nagel takes mirrored photos to a new level with his new project A/symmetrical. Nagel shoots portraits with symmetrical lighting, cuts the portrait in half, mirrors each half, and puts the three photos side by side, resulting in three similar looking people that look slightly off.