If you’ve been following the news over the past week, you probably know that the Space Shuttle Endeavour spent October 11-14 rolling through the streets of Los Angeles, going from the Los Angeles International Airport to its new home at the California Science Center. News crews and large camera-wielding crowds were constantly by the shuttle’s side, documenting its progress.
For those of you who weren’t lucky enough to personally witness the neat sight of the giant shuttle moving through the city, check out the beautifully-made time-lapse video above that shows the four-day journey in under three minutes. Read more…
Look around on the web, and you’ll find plenty of photographs of Google’s colorful offices in Mountain View (AKA the Googleplex) and around the world. Finding images shot from inside the company’s tightly-guarded data centers is much harder, since only a handful of employees are allowed to roam the spaces where the “web lives.” However, Google recently invited photographer Connie Zhou inside a number of its high-tech data centers. Gorgeous photographs resulted — images that show incredible scale, mind-numbing repetition, and quirky colors. Read more…
Turkey-based photography enthusiast Isil Karanfil created this beautiful image showing an entire sunset in a single photograph. Karanfil fixed her Nikon D60 in its view of the seascape, and then shot a single photograph every hour for seven hours between 3pm and 9pm as the day turned into night. She then took the resulting photographs, sliced them up, and combined them together using Photoshop for the image seen above, which she titles, “Sun Lapse”. Read more…
The short 4-minute-long video above is probably the most inspiring thing you’ll see today. It’s the story of Jaleel King, a man who became wheelchair-bound at the age of 8 after being shot in the back by an angry neighbor. The blast from the sawed-off shotgun almost killed him, but he fought through that challenge — and every other challenge that has presented itself since. Read more…
Tom Lacoste is a 23-year-old self-taught photographer based out of Bordeaux in Southern France. While most people do light painting using flashlights, sparklers, and perhaps flaming steel wool if they’re adventurous enough, Lacoste chooses to photograph flames. Large flames. Read more…
People sometimes use the expression “slow as a glacier” to describe something so stagnant that even the speeds of snails and molasses would feel inadequately fast in comparison. The fastest glaciers ever measured move at tens of meters per day, while the slowest ones may budge only have a meter over the course of a year. Most of the time, the movement is too slow for the human eye to see.
Luckily for us, there’s something called time-lapse photography. Back in 2004, PBS aired a NOVA episode titled Descent into the Ice, which followed photographers and adventurers as they ventured deep into the heart of a glacier found on Mont Blanc. One of the things they did was set up cameras to capture the movement of glaciers over extremely long periods of time. The video above shows 5 months of movement seen under a glacier moving 2 feet per day. Read more…
While attending Photokina 2012 in Cologne, Germany last week to talk about the C300 for Canon, filmmaker Philip Bloom decided to create a short film documenting the event (the world’s largest photo trade show). However, instead of pointing his camera at the shiny new cameras like everyone else was doing, he decided to capture portraits of the camera-obsessed attendees. The video above, titled “Camera Geeks”, is what resulted.
On the technical side of things, he was shooting with the Canon 1D-X with the Canon 50mm f/1.2 L lens. Everything was shot at 50p and then conformed to 23.976 frames per second. Some of the flickering you see is due to the bright screens found throughout the halls. The footage was also graded in Colorista II and had some faux film grain added in post. You can see some still photo portraits created through the course of this project over on Flickr.
Fujifilm is a camera company that’s going all-in on the idea of “retro design”. We’re not complaining. Its new XF1 compact camera brings the sleek design of X-Series’ cameras to the world of “point-and-shoots”, featuring a minimalist aluminum body that’s covered with faux-leather. The camera feels very nice and solid in the hand. It’s not as compact as other point-and-shoots (the Canon S110 is around 30% smaller and 20% lighter), so I’d say it’s purse-sized rather than pocket-sized. What it lacks in portability, however, it makes up for in beauty and brawn. Read more…
You’ve probably seen time-lapse videos shot looking out the side of an airplane through a passenger window, but have you ever seen one from the pilot’s point of view? If not, check out the beautiful video above. It was created by pilot Jakub Vlk, who brought his Canon 600D to work and captured photographs across seven days. The video shows Vlk taxiing to the runway, taking off, floating up into the clouds, flying around, and landing. Read more…
Did you know that Rolleiflex is still producing its high-end analog twin-lens reflex cameras? Apparently there’s enough photographers out there buying them for there to be a small, niche market, because Rollei is planning to show off a new model at Photokina 2012 next week.
The FX-N is a 6×6 medium format TLR camera that is an updated version of the Rolleiflex FX, a camera that costs over $5,000. The only difference it has with its predecessor (or sibling) is that it features a new Heidosmat 80mm f/2.8 viewfinder lens and a Rollei S-Apogon 80mm f/2.8 main lens that offer a shorter minimum focusing distance of 55 centimeters. Read more…
