Apparently inspired by the f-stop watch we posted on recently, theres a new widget for Android phones that puts an aperture clock on your home screen. Unlike the wrist watch, the widget actually adjusts the “aperture” depending on what time it is, though it refreshes every half hour to save battery life. The bad news is that this dash of geekery comes at a price — the app costs $1.05 over at AppBrain. Someone make a free version please.
FindTheBest is the latest startup founded by Kevin O’Connor, the guy who started the online ad company DoubleClick and sold it to Google for over $3 billion. It’s a human-powered comparison engine consisting of “comparison apps” in which various things of the same category are compared side by side with comparison points specific to that category. For example, the camera lenses comparison app allows you to browse lenses from a number of manufacturers, filtering and ordering them by things such as focal length, minimum aperture, and weight.
The site needs to gain a lot more traction before other photography-related apps turn up (e.g. tripods, photo labs, etc…), but the site could potentially be very useful for browsing camera gear and other photography-related categories in the future.
New York City photographer Sally Davies purchased a McDonalds Happy Meal on April 10th of this year and left it out uncovered on her coffee table to prove wrong a friend who said it would rot after only a few days. After about two weeks of photographing the food, Davies realized that absolutely nothing was happening, so she began taking pictures once a week. After 180 days Davies shot the 27th photograph, with the meal looking almost identical to when she first bought it. The 1st and 27th photograph taken half a year apart are shown above.
Thanks to Davies, we now know that if your project involves making a time-lapse of food decomposing, you probably don’t want to go with McDonalds. You can also stock up on Happy Meals if you’re wary of a zombie apocalypse.
Next time you shoot a fireworks display, try combining the individual photos you capture into a collage of fireworks explosions afterward. Jesse Garcia created the above image with 50 different photographs.
Tip: Try creating shapes with the fireworks (e.g. hearts, words, etc…)
A couple days ago our minds were blown by a diminished reality demonstration showing objects being removed from live video feeds. Today’s mind-blowing video is a demonstration of MovieReshape, an image manipulation program by German researchers that’s going to make it much harder to believe anything our eyes see in future videos. As you can see in the demonstration above, the software allows physical characteristics of a person in a video to be manipulated by simply dragging sliders around.
It’s a pretty interesting — albeit scary — glimpse at where technology is headed.
Last night my pastor emailed me telling me that he had accidentally deleted an entire folder of photographs off his Sony compact camera, and that Sony’s technical support informed him that it would cost $200-300 for them to recover the photos. After I got a hold of the memory card, I checked some of the recovery programs I’ve used in the past, but discovered that they now require paid licenses to actual do recovery (though analysis is free). I then stumbled across PhotoRec, a free and open source command-line application that’s bundled with TestDisk, something I’ve successfully used to regain access to inaccessible external hard drives.
In this post I’m going to show you how you can use PhotoRec to recover your photos if you’ve accidentally deleted them or formatted your memory card. Read more…
Foodscapes is a series by photographer Carl Warner in which he creates beautiful surreal landscapes using various foods. Warner starts by visualizing and sketching his ideas, which are then built on a large table in his studio with the help of his team. Large blocks of polystyrene are carved and covered with ingredients in order to make the hills seen in his photos, while shallow tanks are used to create lakes, rivers, and seas. Photographs for three different layers (foreground, middle ground, and background) are captured separately and then combined in post. Read more…
If you shoot often, then you probably go through the hassles of sticking your memory card in a card reader and battery in a battery charger often as well. While these tasks don’t take much time in themselves, doing them day after day can cause them to become quite tedious. Canon’s Cross Media Station is designed to make these things a breeze, allowing you to do both by simply placing your camera (or two, or three) on the device, which looks like a slick scanner. Read more…
If you’ve never been on a budget and blow money like a vuvuzela at a football game, don’t bother reading any further. If you like saving money and are on a budget, then please continue reading.
I buy used equipment constantly. It’s more a way of life than a just a financial decision. While I like being able to get things cheaper and refuse to pay full price for almost anything, I wouldn’t call myself cheap. Overly frugal maybe, but not cheap (but don’t ask my wife). All that said, getting a good deal on used equipment isn’t rocket science. Read more…
