Want to travel the world through photographs? Wander is a new free app that can help you do that. It connects you with strangers around the world through photo-based conversation threads. Create a profile, and the app will suggest guides for you. Once you’ve established a connection with a “photo penpal”, you share lives for a week through photo-based missions, allowing you to glimpse into what life is like for a person. Once the week is over, you’re given a new guide to provide you with a whole new experience.
Wander (via Mashable)
It looks like Microsoft is finally putting its war chest and brilliant minds to good use: the company has released a new free app for Windows Phone users called Face Swap. The app uses face detection to let you quickly switch the faces of subjects in your photos. Simply shake the phone and faces will be swapped! The resulting face swap photos can be saved or shared on social networking websites. Hopefully they turn this into a web app soon.
Face Swap (via Engadget)
Here’s a fun idea for a weekend project: take pictures of smoke, think about what they look like, and then add color during post-processing to transform them. Photographer Geoff Jansen noticed that one of his smoke photos looked like a rose, so he added some red and green and ended up with the photo seen above. It’s the second creative rose shot we’ve featured today.
Image credit: Smoke-11 by geoffjansenphoto and used with permission
Sony’s NEX-7 mirrorless camera has been extremely difficult to find due to manufacturing being disrupted by the flooding in Thailand earlier this year. As a result of the shortage, the camera is selling for absurd prices on eBay — people are buying the camera for over $3,700 new. If you managed to snag one of the cameras while they were available, you might want to auction it off now before supply is restored. You’ll be able to buy three of them then for the current price of one!
(via sonyalpharumors)
Black-suited investigators raided and searched 20 different sites today over Olympus’ ongoing accounting scandal. Among the sites searched were the company’s headquarters, the office buildings of subsidiary companies, and the homes of executives involved in the fraud. The company is also looking to raise cash by issuing $1.3 billion in new shares. Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Samsung, and Hoya have been named as companies who are potentially interested in snapping up a piece of Olympus.
Olympus offices, homes raided in accounting scandal [Reuters]
Photographer Anthony Chang created this amazing image of a liquid rose without any computer-generated trickery. He hung a glass rose upside down and snapped photos while pouring food coloring onto it.
This photo is a composite… If you couldn’t guess. The green stem and leaves are made up of 6 photos and the flower itself is made up of 11 different photos, so its a 17 shot composite. Another note to mention is the fact that this photo was taken upside down and I just rotated it so the water looks like its flying upwards. Well this was a fun and messy shoot, also an expensive one hahaha what with the $80 glass rose, I was pretty worried that it would fall and break on me during the shoot but luckily it didn’t.
Here’s a photo showing what his setup looked like.
(via Flickr via My Modern Metropolis)
Image credit: 317/365 A Splash of Rose [Explore] by Yugus and used with permission
Back in September we featured a project called This Was Found that promotes art by leaving framed prints out and about in the UK. Now, printing company Jondo is taking it to the next level with a project called Art Heist. They’ve left 26 gigantic, museum-quality 40x60inch canvases in various secret locations around Los Angeles. Find one, and you’re free to take it home. Just make sure you have a good way of bringing home the massive photo!
Read more…
Olympus has something big up its sleeve. In an interview with Impressjapan, manager Mr. Ogawa revealed that the company is working on a new mirrorless camera that features an “epoch-making” viewfinder — presumably one that’s even more advanced than the hybrid viewfinder found on the Fujifilm X100. The upcoming viewfinder sounds like it’ll also be some kind of fusion between electronic and optical. There’s not much that’s know about the technology at the moment, but we should be hearing more about it very soon.
(via 43 Rumors via TechRadar)
Image credit: Viewfinder by Nils Geylen
Colin Mika and Brandon Vedder of All Cut Up Films created this amazing time-lapse video of Los Angeles by photographing the city through a “snow globe”. They captured 4000 images with a custom rig, which consisted of a Canon 5D Mark II, a homemade tilt-shift lens, a light bulb filled with water, and paper cutouts for shaped bokeh.
(via DIYPhotography)
EXIF data embedded in an image file can shed quite a bit of information about a photo, including how it was created and the owner of the copyright. It’s useful, but can be easily stripped away. A new consortium led by three organizations (IPTC, 4A’s, and ANA) is pushing to make metadata permanent. It recently published an Embedded Metadata Manifesto, which states,
Ownership metadata is the only way to save digital content from being considered orphaned work. Removal of such metadata impacts on the ability to assert ownership rights and is therefore forbidden by law in many countries.
[...] Properly selected and applied metadata fields add value to media assets. For most collections of digital media content descriptive metadata is essential for retrieval and for understanding. Removing this valuable information devalues the asset.
Do you want to live in a world where it’s illegal to remove or tamper with a photograph’s EXIF data?
(via NPPA via PopPhoto)
