A compact camera probably isn’t the first thing someone would grab when looking to make a photo with an extremely shallow depth-of-field, since the small aperture and small sensor limit it in this regard. That might soon be different: a recently published patent application by Samsung shows that the company is looking into producing achieving shallow depth of fields with compact cameras by using a second lens to create a depth map for each photo. Read more…
You can now create instant photo books with your favorite Instagram (AKA two-minute noodle) photos using Blurb. After logging into the page with your Instagram account, your most “liked” photo is used for the cover and the rest of the pages are filled with your most recent images (they can be changed, of course). A 40-photo, 20-page book starts at $11.
Here’s a fun photo project you can try: recreate each of Calvin’s funny face photographs from Calvin and Hobbes. A version of this project done by a cute Asian boy was a popular viral photo a couple years ago. You can download the original Calvin montage here.
503.03 Works not capable of supporting a copyright claim.
Claims to copyright in the following works cannot be registered in the Copyright Office:
503.03(a) Works-not originated by a human author.
In order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human author are not registrable. Thus, a linoleum floor covering featuring a multicolored pebble design which was produced by a mechanical process in unrepeatable, random patterns, is not registrable. Similarly, a work owing its form to the forces of nature and lacking human authorship is not registrable; thus, for example, a piece of driftwood even if polished and mounted is not registrable.
Is a photograph taken by a monkey the product of human authorship? On one hand, the monkey pressed the shutter, but you also can’t argue that a human author didn’t contribute, since they had to have provided the camera in the first place (unless the monkey stole it or something…). TechDirt believes the photos are in the public domain.
In the middle of last year, Google finally gave users the option of customizing its homepage with a photograph. Microsoft’s Bing search engine, however, has featured photography ever since it launched in 2009. Fast Company has an interesting article about how the photographs are an integral part of the strategy for stealing users from Google:
You might not imagine a bunch of editors running around looking for sexy, captivating photographs all day at Microsoft, but that’s exactly the case at Bing [...] Every few weeks, the team gathers for a few hours to vote photographs up or down gathered from 14 different image providers, including the Bill Gates-owned Corbis.
Over the years, the team has started to learn what images entice users most. Event-specific photographs, for instance, tend to drive tons of traffic: images from India’s Holi festival, for “national squirrel appreciation day,” or of a solar eclipse.
Bing also sees big traffic “anytime we put animals up,” says Horstmanshof. “People just love animals.”
Ken Murphy created this time-lapse showing an entire 360-degree view overlooking San Francisco using only a single camera:
The camera (a Canon A590 with CHDK installed) snapped an image every five seconds while the motorized mount slowly rotated, making a single rotation in 90 minutes. I assembled the images into this panoramic movie, in which each “pane” is actually the same movie, slightly offset in time. The panes combine to make a single 360-degree view. [#]
Here’s another ad from Olympus’ Get a Real Camera campaign spotted by Mark Matthews in Australia. Pretty funny, though it might not be the best ad for college students who live on instant noodles (and love it).
Here’s a quick tip for making Photoshop faster: change Preferences->File Handling->Image Previews to Never Save. This keeps image preview data from being stored in the file every time you save, and gives you smaller files for uploading to the web!
What does four hours of a toddler playing look like when compressed into 2.5 minutes? Photographer Francis Vachon found out by creating this neat time-lapse video of his 9-month-old son Charles-Edward playing in the dining room. It’s a fun idea for a photo project to try if you have a toddler of your own causing chaos in your house.
You might soon be able to control Nikon DSLRs using only your emotions. A patent published recently shows that the company is looking into building biological detectors into its cameras, allowing the camera to automatically change settings and trigger the shutter based on things like heart rate and blood pressure. For example, at a sporting event, the sensors could be used to trigger the shutter when something significant happens and the photographer’s reflexes are too slow. The camera could also choose a faster shutter speed to reduce blurring if the user is nervous.
