December 2011

Michael Zhang

Messiness at 1/6 Scale: Barbie Trashes Her Dreamhouse

Barbie Trashes Her Dreamhouse is a photo series by photo instructor Carrie M. Becker that shows what Barbie's dollhouse would look like if she was a compulsive hoarder and complete slob. The scenes ares 1/6th scale models, the objects are either repurposed Barbie toys or made by hand. Becker used a Nikon D40 with the on-camera flash.

Michael Zhang

Shocking: North Korea Doctored Photo of Kim Jong-il’s Funeral

News photo agencies EPA, AFP, and Reuters have all issued kill orders for a photo of Kim Jong-il's funeral procession released by the Korean Central News Agency, the state news agency of North Korea. The photo (above at bottom) raised red flags after a comparison with a Kyodo News photo taken just seconds earlier revealed that a number of people had vanished from the scene. The New York Times writes,

A side-by-side comparison of the full images does point to a possibly banal explanation: totalitarian aesthetics. With the men straggling around the sidelines, a certain martial perfection is lost. Without the men, the tight black bands of the crowd on either side look railroad straight.

Perhaps it was a simple matter of one person gilding the lily.

Michael Zhang

Diptychs of Clouds and Cloud Watchers

Before We Begin is a project by photographer Christopher Jonassen (whose frying pan photos we featured here) that consists of diptychs showing clouds and cloud watchers. The images capture peaceful "moments of reflection between thought and action."

Michael Zhang

Dreamlike Photo Manipulations of Earth and the Starry Night Sky

For his project titled "Unrealistic Scenes", photographer Nathan Spotts composited his own landscape photographs with digital artwork of planets floating in the starry night sky.

I've always been captivated by the beauty of our world, and often dream of the things that lay just beyond what we can see. I wanted to create images of scenes that are not-quite real, but that almost could be.

Michael Zhang

Siri Ported to the Canon 5D Mark II?

A Swedish hacker and robotics student named Björn Mabrö is claiming that he has successfully developed a custom firmware for the Canon 5D Mark II that adds Apple's Siri voice assistant to the DSLR. Mabrö claims that the hack allows the camera to respond to 124 different voice commands that control everything from the shutter to changing values in settings.

Michael Zhang

The Nature of Truth, Art, and Propaganda in Photography

Here's an interesting video in which acclaimed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (the guy who directed The Fog of War) talks about the issue of truth in photography, and how he thinks we've forgotten that there's a connection between photos to the physical world.

Michael Zhang

Magical Photos of Insects Shot Using Ordinary Household Objects

The photographs in Nadav Bagim's project "WonderLand" might look like paintings or computer generated images, but they're actually real photographs captured at home using ordinary objects and creative artificial lighting. His tools and props include things like vegetables, plastic bags, flowers, and leaves, and he captures the images using a Canon 60D and 100mm f/2.8 macro lens. Getting his "subjects" into the positions and poses he wants requires countless hours of patient encouraging.

Michael Zhang

Olympus LCD Screen Patent Appears to Show Medium Format Digital Camera

Olympus recently filed a patent in Japan for a vari-angle LCD screen. While that's not exactly groundbreaking, the illustrations in the patent appears to show some kind of medium format digital camera. What's more, it looks nearly identical to the Samsung digital medium format prototypes that emerged earlier this year.