April Fools’ Day: the beautiful (or painful) day of the year on which the Internet is teeming with fabricated stories designed to fool and humor. We used to participate in the jokes and cover the silliness, but last year we started doing a single roundup post instead to keep you up to speed on April Fools’ Day humor in the world of photography.
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April Fools’ Day 2012 has come and gone. Even though we didn’t publish any bogus stories this year, here’s a quick roundup of other photo-related sites that did. The screenshot above shows Kodak’s homepage yesterday, which advertised a new kitten printing machine. Interestingly enough, there was a serious news ticker just below it that discussed the company’s bankruptcy status.
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When a fake camera technology is unveiled, it’s normally called a “concept”. When it’s published on April 1st, however, it’s called an April Fool’s Joke (e.g. last Friday’s Canon iPad monitor). The RE-35 is another fun idea that would be absolutely awesome if it actually existed — it’s a 35mm canister that transforms any 35mm film camera into a digital one using a flexible sensor. Simply load the canister into the camera as you would with film, shoot your photos, and download them by connecting to the canister via USB.
Sure this might be an April Fool’s joke, but it’s also a pretty interesting concept demo. Perhaps this is a glimpse of how we might be operating cameras in the future.
(via Philip Bloom)
Editor’s note: This is our first press release published in accordance with the terms of our acquisition by Eastman Kodak, which was announced earlier today.
Rochester, NY, March 28 — Kodak’s Russell Hunt has earned recognition as a 2011 Channel Chief by Everything Channel’s CRN for the second consecutive year. Notably, Hunt has led the successful channel integration of two existing channel communities within Kodak. Through Hunt’s leadership efforts, Kodak expands its channel capabilities to provide customer-focused applications across a broad range of vertical industries.
We’re pleased to announced today that Eastman Kodak has agreed to acquire PetaPixel. Editorial control and content on this blog will not be affected, though, as part of the deal, Kodak-related press releases will be published along with our usual content. Kodak is attempting to diversify into photography markets outside the ones it has traditionally focused on, and we’re honored to join them in boosting their share of the photography blog market. Terms of the deal will not be announced, but inquiries may be directed to petapixel@kodak.com.
Photographer Chris Marquardt claims to have used groundbreaking research to create a mind-boggling transparent camera that’s capable of ISO 1/500, shutter speeds of 1/100000, and terapixel photos the equivalent of 3000 Canon 5D Mark IIs.
This is may be one of the most elaborate photography-related April Fools’ Day jokes we’ve seen. How do we know it’s a hoax (besides the obvious)? The camera will be released on April 1st, 2011 [see comments].
For some April Fools fun, we here at PetaPixel went through the trouble of using a new design for half a day this morning. It looks like Digital Photography Review took their joke a step further: they created a fake company with a fake website and published a fake press release.
The company, “Rokton Circular sensors”, is supposedly based in Cambridge and has “reinvented” the image sensor by making it circular. The press release published on dpreview states,
Cameras using Rokton sensors will cover a circular image fully 43mm in diameter – the same as the diagonal of a 35mm film negative, or a ‘full-frame’ digital sensor. This allows you to capture the entire image circle projected by your lens, wasting none of the light it gathers, and giving you the ultimate flexibility to crop the image any way you like after capturing that decisive moment. [...]
Rokton chief executive officer Dr. Hwee Ng said ‘We’ve noticed that the ultimate imaging device, the human eye, is kind of round, lenses are round, and the most common photographic subject in the world – the human face – is often round too. The more we thought about it the more we realized a circular sensor made perfect sense.’ [...]
‘We foresee the circular image literally revolutionizing photography. We can see a market for a range of products to match the sensor concept, from circular printer paper to picture frames. The circular image also ideally matches a huge number of popular photo uses, from DVD labels to coasters. And the best thing about circular photo frames is that you won’t have to hang them straight.’
Why do we think this whole thing is a joke? Well, first of all, dpreview is the first and only news source reporting on this supposedly revolutionary technology. Second, a simple WHOIS query shows us that the rokton.com domain name was only registered on March 31st, 2010. Hmmm…
What’s funny is that at least one photography news site seems to have believed the joke. Steve’s Digicams took the press release and published it as news:
This whole thing is almost as absurd as Kodak’s Aromatography joke we posted earlier today.
We can all breathe a sigh of relief tomorrow when this day of Internet absurdity is over.
Kodak has just announced a breakthrough technology called Aromatography, which combines the sense of smell with the visual experience of photography. Recent breakthroughs in Neuro-Optic-Nasal-Sense Imaging (often referred to as NONSense) have enabled the technology, which is also being researched by other camera corporations.
Contrary to what you might expect, the technology relies on creating an illusion rather than creating physical smells, as explained in the announcement:
Proprietary imaging algorithms create an array of pixels, undetected by the conscious mind, that trigger reactions in the synapses along optic neural processing pathways within the brain to create, the olfactory equivalent of a optical illusion. The nose does not actually detect anything, but the mind experiences the aromas as if they were real. Interestingly, our tests have found that humans have an innate need to ‘sniff’ when experiencing Aromatized images even when fully aware that nothing is actually there for their nose to detect.
To learn more about this amazing breakthrough in camera technology, check out this video interview with the inventor of Aromatography:
If you’re interested in trying out Aromatography, the official announcement has quite a few demonstration images with the technology enabled. Head on over to try it out!
(via NikonRumors)
Update: Thanks so much for all the feedback! What we heard about the new design was overwhelmingly positive, so that’s terrific!
It was so positive, in fact, that our analytics tells us that the demographics have completely flip-flopped. Thus, we’re returning to our previous design for now.
Happy April 1st!
We were looking at our traffic analytics recently when we noticed the following graph:
What shocked us was that the 13-69 demographic completely dominates our readership, while infants, toddlers, and 70+ year old men are underrepresented.
What’s more, from a different graph we found that PetaPixel sees far less female readers than male readers.
“This has to change,” we thought.
For quite some time we had no ideas on how to pander to these underrepresented demographics. Finally, we received a revelation from Wikipedia regarding the color pink. The article contains the following gems:
In Western culture, the practice of assigning pink to an individual gender began in the 1920s. From then until the 1940s, pink was considered appropriate for boys because being related to red it was the more masculine and decided color, while blue was considered appropriate for girls because it was the more delicate and dainty color, or related to the Virgin Mary.
That means men currently 70+ years old grew up when pink was a color associated with boys.
It has been suggested that females prefer pink because of a preference for reddish things like ripe fruits and healthy faces.
Amazing! One color that panders to both demographics we’d like to appeal to! (and we hear babies like the color pink too!)
If you’re a 70+ year old man, hopefully this new design strikes you with nostalgia and brings a tear to your eye. If you’re a woman of any age, hopefully this new design reminds you of bountiful harvests and gleaming complexions. If you’re not any of these things, we might change our design back when more infants, toddlers, 70+ year old men, and females of all ages read this blog more.
Infants and toddlers! This is for you!
Please let us know what you think about this new design in the comments. We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Image credit: My Evening With the Ponies by dreamcicle19772006
