“Around the World in 2000 Pictures” is a neat project by Alex Profit — the same guy that did “Around the World in 80 Seconds” — in which he takes us on a tour of major world cities (Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, St. Petersbourg, Shanghai, Tokyo, New York and London) through 2000 photographs in stop-motion. He completed the entire project in just 24 days shooting a Canon 5D Mark II. We love the way he uses photographs to transition from one city to another seamlessly.
If you’ve been thinking of trying your hand at lunar photography, tomorrow night might present the perfect opportunity to do so. It’s when the Moon will be the closest it has been to the Earth in 18 years, making it 14% larger and 30% brighter than when the full Moon is furthest away. Miss this opportunity, and you won’t see a Moon like this until about 2029 — who knows what we’ll be shooting with by then!
Make just published this short but informative tutorial on how to turn your DSLR into a pinhole camera by punching a hole in a body cap. If you have a spare body cap lying around (how often do you use those things anyway?) this can be a fun way to experiment with your camera.
If you somehow got your hands on a Fujifilm Finepix X100 already but don’t mind waiting a little longer to use one, you can double or triple the money you paid by selling it to desperate buyers on eBay. Fujifilm was already experiencing extremely high demand and possible shortages, but then the tragic earthquake in Japan completely halted production of the camera after Fujifilm’s factory 20 miles from Sendai was damaged.
There are a few of the cameras being sold on eBay right now, with one auction for a used X100 — with a scratched LCD screen, no less — at $2,300 already with nearly 3 days remaining. This is for a camera that will be selling for $1,200 new when it’s available.
“Space Program” is a project by artist Tom Sachs featuring 1:1 models of various space related objects, including an Apollo lunar module, a mission control unit, space suits, and handmade space suits. He also included the above NASA Hasselblad camera as part of the exhibition. Note the stylish wooden crank.
Did you know that some of Kodak’s early DSLR cameras had built-in games? Before Canon and Nikon started making homegrown DSLRs, they actually started by partnering with Kodak in combing their camera bodies with Kodak sensors and electronics. For some strange awesome reason, the firmware developers decided to add games to a number of the models. The Pong game shown in the video above is found on the Kodak DCS 560. Too bad neither Canon nor Nikon continued this awesome feature once they started developing their own cameras.
If Doctor Octopus were to design a DIY flash accessory, it might look a little something like this. German microbiologist Marcell Nikolausz has been experimenting with using fiber optics to split a single flash unit’s light into multiple light sources. Optical fibers are threaded through Gorillapod-style Loc-Line channels, allowing flexible and stable positioning of the light sources. Each individual light source can be controlled using various modifiers (e.g. diffusers, gels, etc..), changing their quality and intensity.
For some sample photographs taken with this contraption, check out this set of photos. You can also learn more about Nikolausz’s experimentation on his blog.
After seeing 3D light painting done with an iPad, classmates Jinhwan Kim and Cameron Zotter decided to take the experiment a step further. Instead of simply “painting” in a single direction, they spelled out letters by waving an iPod Touch across six different rows for each long exposure photograph.
If only there was an iPhone app that would allow you to paint any image in the air by simply waving your screen around while the onboard sensors synchronize what’s shown on the screen with the phone’s current position. That would be the bee’s knees.
A huge story last year was when a painter named Rick Norsigian came across 65 glass negatives at a garage sale, purchasing them for $45. He then had them examined by experts, who told him that they were previously undiscovered Ansel Adams photographs worth at least $200 million. Just as the find was being heralded as one of the greatest in art history, Ansel Adams’ relatives and Publishing Rights Trust expressed skepticism that they were in fact Adams’. It then came to light that the photos might actually belong to a man named Earl Brooks who once lived in the same city as Norsigian (Fresno, California). Read more…
Here’s an interesting snippet from an article published today by David Pogue of the New York Times that describes a trick one photographer uses to overcome the megapixel myth:
A few years back, one of his clients, a stock-photo company, rejected his submissions because they didn’t meet the company’s minimum-resolution requirements. All photos had to be, for example, 10 megapixels or higher.
Tom knew that his five-megapixel photos (or whatever they were) would print perfectly well; he knew that the megapixel myth was at play. But he couldn’t convince the stock agency that its megapixel requirement was based on mythology.
So he took a photo file from a buddy who owned a fancy high-end Canon SLR, pasted in his low-res photo, and dragged it out bigger, so that it filled the full area of the higher-resolution photo. (Why did he start with his buddy’s file? So that the metadata—the invisible information about the photographic settings embedded in every digital photo—would indicate to the stock agency that the picture was taken with that high-end camera.)
Not only was the stock agency fooled, but to this day, many of its customers have used Tom’s phony high-megapixel photos in professional publications. They’ve all been delighted by the quality.
It would be interesting to find out how widespread this kind of fakery is in the photo industry.
