Andy Prokh of Saint Petersburg, Russia spends his days working as an economist, but its his passion for photography that has garnered him international attention on the Internet as of late. Prokh has been shooting photographs of his four year old daughter Catherine spending time with his six-year-old British shorthaired tomcat Lilu. The photographs capture the friendship the two family members have after having spent most of their lives together under one roof. Read more…
We’ve written a couple of times in the past on how you can achieve drastically different portrait looks by choosing different lens focal lengths and subject distances. Basically, your choice of glass can make a huge impact on what your subject’s face looks like… and how much they appear to weigh.
Reddit user Popocuffs wanted to demonstrate this, but instead of using a human subject, he used his cat. Read more…
You know those carnival cutouts that let you stick your face in a hole for humorous photographs? A Chinese blogger named toshiya86 had the brilliant idea of creating these cutouts for her beloved cat Guagua’s birthday. Humorous portraits resulted. Read more…
How’s this for a unique pet photograph? Angelo DeSantis of Berkeley, CA was photographing his cat Dexter with a Canon 5D Mark II when he snapped this once-in-a-lifetime shot that appears to show Dexter throwing a mouse. It pays to have a fast shutter finger.
It’s finally happened — companies are starting to realize that the two lenses on 3D cameras look a whole lot like eyes. This 3-megapixel “Felyne” camera is designed to look like a character from the video game franchise Monster Hunter, and goes on sale later this month in Japan for about $90. Something tells me we’ll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing if 3D cameras start becoming popular.
I wonder if camera makers can make these things look like they’re blinking whenever you take a picture. That’d be neat… or creepy.
What if in the future, the human eye itself could be turned into a camera by simply reading and recording the data that it sends to the brain? As crazy as it sounds, researchers have already accomplished this at a very basic level:
In 1999, researchers led by Yang Dan at University of California, Berkeley decoded neuronal firings to reproduce images seen by cats. The team used an array of electrodes embedded in the thalamus (which integrates all of the brain’s sensory input) of sharp-eyed cats. Researchers targeted 177 brain cells in the thalamus lateral geniculate nucleus area, which decodes signals from the retina. The cats were shown eight short movies, and their neuron firings were recorded. Using mathematical filters, the researchers decoded the signals to generate movies of what the cats saw and were able to reconstruct recognizable scenes and moving objects. [#]
Basically, the scientists were able to tap into the brain of a cat and display what the cat was seeing on a computer screen. Something similar was accomplished with humans a few years ago, and scientists believe that in the future we may even be able to “photograph” human dreams!
Judging from the strange novelty products coming out of Japan, there’s apparently a huge population of people there who love both photography and cats. If a picture taking cat isn’t enough to satisfy you, you can add this cat-shaped memory card reader to your collection. It reads SD cards and Memory Stick cards using slots that are exposed when you lower the cat’s tail. They’re available from Donya for ¥399, or about $5.
Did you know that flatbed scanners make fun portrait cameras as well? Just place your cat on the glass, do a quick scan, and you’ll have a strange looking portrait shot from below! Apparently this is pretty popular among cat lovers — a Flickr search for “cat scanner” returns thousands of results! This gives “cat scan” a whole new meaning!
The Necono Digital Camera is a funky cat-shaped digital camera out of Japan that might make it easier for you to take smiling baby photos. It’s a 3 megapixel camera that doesn’t have any LCD screen embedded for you to review your shots — you have to connect it to a “Monitor Ground” base that includes an LCD or transfer the images to your computer via USB. The cat has a shutter button on its butt, the camera and a self-timer LED in its eyes, and magnetic feet that allow you to stick it in random places.
Like many novelty cameras, the Necono doesn’t exactly come cheap… It’ll run you a whopping ¥15,750 ($192). At least you can be the only one among your friends to take pictures with a cat. Read more…
