When Hamburg, Germany-based photographer Florian Bison first saw a video of parkour, he was mesmerized by the concept and curious as to how he could integrate it into a photography project. That’s when he came up with the Double Gravity series, a mixture of real and parkour/camera created gravity. The video above offers a behind-the-scenes look at how he created the final product, which was shot using a Nikon D700 with a Nikkor 24-70mm F/2.8 lens and a Pocket Wizard triggered Profoto B2 with two Profoto heads.
Clockwise from top left: Jay Lee's original photograph, a screenshot of Google Image Search results, and a screenshot of Candice Schwager's website showing the image being used
After discovering that multiple websites had used one of his photos without permission, photographer Jay Lee began sending out DMCA takedown notifications to web hosts in an attempt to protect his copyright. One of the websites was owned by a woman named Candice Schwager, who had 14 of her sites temporarily taken offline as a result of the takedown request. Turns out Schwager is involved in both helping represent special needs children and helping a man named Louis Guthrie get elected as County Sheriff. This is where the story gets weird. Read more…
If you think 14fps on a high end DSLR is fast, check out this video by Mike’s Electric Stuff. In it, he does an extreme teardown of a cheap Panasonic Lumix compact camera and spends 30 minutes exploring and explaining the various components. At about 18 minutes in, he hooks up a signal generator to the shutter mechanism to see how fast the shutter can flap. He’s able to take it up to around 70 flaps per second before the shutter begins to stutter. The limiting factor in FPS isn’t the mechanical components of a camera, but how fast the sensor and memory card can capture and store data.
Hovering somewhere between “novel idea” and “pointlessly stupid,” InstaCRT is a new iOS app that bills itself as “the world’s first real camera filter.” Photographs processed through the app are given a CRT monitor look that doesn’t involve any digital fakery. Instead, your photo is actually sent to the creators’ machine located in Stockholm, Sweden, where it’s displayed on a tiny CRT monitor and then photographed by a DSLR. The new photo is then beamed back to your phone in less than a minute. Read more…
Since November 2011 I’d been thinking about an astrophotography project: take a photo of the moon each day from full moon to full moon, then combine it into a seamless movie that looks as if someone had moved the sun around the moon for one minute. I found similar videos, but most were simulations done in software, or photographic ones that weren’t very smooth. Seemed simple enough, mostly because I didn’t see the complications that would come along with this project caused by… physics.
My plan involved setting the same exposure each night starting with the full moon, and let the moon’s dark side gradually move across its face while the lit side stayed about the same brightness. Adjust the photos’ angles to match each other, throw all of them into Final Cut Pro X and add cross dissolve transitions between them, and I’d get a smooth movie showing every phase of the moon. Read more…
Two choices make the exhibit unique: First, Kruithof posted signs around her neighborhood in search of an editor who could look at the photos in a very honest way, someone who had literally never taken snapped a photo in their life. And second, Kruithof decided to put the photos on the ceiling. When viewers enter the exhibit they are handed a mirror, in this way they can take in the entire exhibit or “frame” individual pieces of it using their mirrors. Read more…
It’s strange to think that cartography laws could somehow affect the functionality of your camera overseas, but a recent article on Ogle Earth points out that just such a thing has been going on with GPS-enabled cameras as far back as 2010. The whole “investigation” into the matter began with the release of the Panasonic TS4 earlier this year. For some reason the press release cautioned that the GPS in the camera “may not work in China or in the border regions of countries neighboring China.”
But after doing some digging they discovered that these restrictions are not limited to the TS4, nor are they even limited to Panasonic. In fact, many major manufacturers go to great lengths to conceal or toss away the location data captured by GPS-enabled cameras when you’re taking photos in the People’s Republic of China. Read more…
It happens every time you press the shutter. Tiny circuits spring into action and furiously record the information from every sensor pixel onto your memory card. But pixel information is not all that is recorded. With every shutter press, your camera records dozens of interesting details about how the photo was taken. These details are tucked away deep inside the labyrinth of code that comprises your photo file. Photo editing softwares, such as Photoshop or Lightroom, can unlock some of this data for viewing later. But they normally only scratch the surface of the available information by displaying only the most commonly used Exif tags.
To mine the deepest depths of your Exif data, you may want to try a utility called Exiftool. This utility is known for its ability to squeeze every last drop of information from your Exif data. Don’t expect a slick, graphical interface, though. Although there are more user friendly softwares which incorporate the Exiftool engine, we’re going to demonstrate Exiftool where it is at its minimalist best – at the command line. Read more…
This amazing image has been going viral on the Internet, usually accompanied with the caption:
A man in Japan effectively used the solar eclipse to propose to his girlfriend.
Sadly — sorry to burst your bubble — it’s not an actual photograph, but a composite image created by combining three photographs with the iOS app Image Blender. Japanese website wacameapp has published a behind-the-scenes look at how the image was created.
