Photographer Brendan Taylor is currently working on an ambitious frankencamera project. He’s trying to transfer the innards of a working Sony NEX 5N mirrorless camera into the body of a non-functional Nikon Nikkormat EL 35mm manual SLR.
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Jill Conley was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 31. Only six months into her marriage, she and her husband had to go through the horrors of chemo, radiation, a double mastectomy and a problematic reconstruction before she finally entered remission. Now 35, she has been diagnosed with incurable stage 4 bone cancer.
Photographer Sue Bryce was moved after hearing of Conley’s story, and offered Jill and her friends a trip to Paris. Bryce’s idea was to use her photographic talents to uplift Conley and cancer patients around the world. The documentary above, titled “The Light That Shines,” shows the beautiful work that resulted from that trip and the time the two women spent together (Warning: the video contains some strong images). Read more…
The tech world has been buzzing over the past couple of days about Vine, Twitter’s new app that lets you share 6-second video loops through an Instagram-style service. If you’ve been out of the loop and need a primer on what the difference between Facebook’s Instagram and Twitter’s Vine is, the above web comic by Willa’s World will bring you up to speed.
Instagram Vs. Vine [Willa's World via Laughing Squid]
P.S. Another big story surrounding Vine today is that the service is dealing with the problem of being flooded with inappropriate content. This comes less than one week after 500px’s mobile app was yanked from the Apple App Store for making nudity available to users.
It’s ironic to the point of being tragic to think that one of the pioneers of digital camera technology was Kodak. Now bankrupt and licensing off their brand to mysterious companies, it’s easy to forget that it was Kodak that hit many of the initial milestones where digital imaging is concerned.
One of those milestones was the Kodak Tactical Camera, one of the first digital cameras ever made and very likely the oldest practical (read: semi-portable) digital camera in existence today. According to a fascinating article in the Democrat and Chronicle, however, we almost just lost this piece of camera history to a dumpster. Read more…
Capitol Hill 60 Minute Photo closed its doors at the end of last year. Given the transformation photography has gone through over the past decade, it hardly came as a surprise. At its core, the success, survival, and eventual demise of 60 Minute Photo is just another familiar story of a business fighting against the moving current of technology. It’s closure, however, reveals something important, something personal. It represents a shift in how we create and preserve our memories and a deepening of the divide between customer and proprietor.
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What do you get when you combine 368 5MP cellphone cameras into a mosaic and add some other super-secret parts? You get the DARPA-funded Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System (or ARGUS-IS), and this puppy can see your house from, well, wherever it darn well pleases.
Altogether, ARGUS-IS is a 1.8 Gigapixel drone-mounted surveillance system that took 30 months and $18.5M to become a reality. The video above is a clip from a new PBS documentary titled “Rise of the Drones“. It offers a fascinating peek at what the drone cam is capable of. Read more…
My first roll processed and scanned from my new Lomography BelAir X 6-12 puts me in the position to share some notes about the camera that you won’t find elsewhere.
The Lomography BelAir X 6-12 is a new folding medium format camera. It can take pictures in three formats: 6×6, 6×9 and 6×12. Apart from the folding mechanism, the camera is made of plastic. Even the two included wide angle lenses (wide and really wide) are plastic. Each lens comes with its own viewfinder. They are 58mm and 90mm.
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Today is Data Privacy Day, and all of the major social websites have come out to play. Facebook is launching an “Ask Our Chief Privacy Officer” form, Google explained its approach to government requests for information in a blog post, and Twitter launched an entire website dedicated to transparency in all things data privacy related.
That last one is particularly interesting to us, because that website includes detailed copyright notice stats, putting copyright infringement on Twitter into raw numbers. Oh, and did we mention, copyright notices are by far the most common requests submitted to Twitter — over three-and-a-half times more frequent than government info requests. Read more…
Turning a retro satchel bag into a real photographer’s bag is quite easy. All you need is an old camera bag (e.g. a LowePro one) with velcro inserts, scissors, super glue, sticky velcro stripes and, of course, time.
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Could memory cards and hard drives one day store massive numbers of digital photographs on DNA rather than chips and platters? Possibly, and scientists are trying to make that happen.
Last year, we reported that a group of researchers had successfully stored 700 terabytes of data on a single gram of DNA. The data being stored that time was a book written by one of the geneticists. Now, a new research effort has succeeded in storing something that’s a bit more relevant to this blog: a photograph.
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