Seeing as the Voyager-1 spacecraft has been in the news recently, here’s the story of a very special photograph that it took 23 years ago known as “The Pale Blue Dot”.
In 1990, 13 years after Voyager-1 left Earth on its mission to visit two of the gas giants and their moons of our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, one last command was sent to the spacecraft as suggested by Carl Sagan who was then part of the Voyager-1‘s imaging team. That instruction was to turn back around and take one last photo of our solar system before continuing on its epic journey away from the Sun and the planets.
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Check out this DSLR Paparazzi lamp, created by Spanish design studio Monoculo Design Studio. It’s a wooden hanging lamp that’s shaped like a gigantic Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 camera lens.
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Behold, the coolest photography-related toy we’ve seen so far this year: War Journalist: Battlefield Hero. It’s a 1/6-scale Toymaster-brand action figure that lets kids play make believe with their very own conflict photographer!
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For their project 24×360, Patrick Rochon, Timecode Lab, and Eric Paré combined a 360-degree “bullet time” rig with light painting and produced some pretty sweet results. The short teaser above shows some of the pieces they created.
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Filmmaker Ian Gamester created this video of moments collected over the course of several years, inspired by artist David Hockney’s photocollages, his famous “joiners.”
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You wouldn’t think the world of instant film could learn much from the world of beer — and on most counts you’d be right — but in this particular case, a little bit of Coors inspiration may have played a role in The Impossible Projects new line of COOL Polaroid films. The specialty instant film, part of The Impossible Project’s Spring 2012 line, are kept in a temperature-sensitive package. In order to maintain its shelf life, the packaging will warn you when you’re storing it in too warm an environment by displaying the message “Keep Me Cool.”
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Here’s a super cool trick: instead of buying a special macro lens for your smart phone, simply use a drop of water! Carefully place a drop of water over your lens, carefully invert the phone, and voila — instant macro shots with the cheapest lens you’ll ever own. Alex Wild over at Scientific American has more details on the technique and some great sample shots taken with it.
Transform Your iPhone Into a Microscope: Just Add Water (via Gizmodo)
After seeing the LEGO large format camera we featured last year, Norway-based photographer Carl-Frederic Salicath set out to create his own LEGO camera. Rather than go with large format, he decided to build a more complicated Rolleiflex-style twin-lens reflex camera that uses 120 film. Aside from LEGOs, he also used some matte ground glass, a mirror, and lenses taken from a binocular.
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A week ago we published a tongue-in-cheek post on how to improve the quality of your Canon kit lens by painting a red ring around it. While that wasn’t intended to be taken seriously, we were pointed to a Korean workshop named Park in Style that actually takes custom lens body work quite seriously. What you see above is a Canon 18-55mm kit lens that they disassembled, painted, and then reassembled to look like a Canon L lens!
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Evan Sharboneau over at Photo Extremist shot this crazy photograph of “a room filled with an obnoxious amount of money”. It wasn’t shot with a truckload of cash, nor was it created using CGI. Instead, Sharboneau used $871 in cash — a total of just 29 separate bills. He spent 4 hours photographing the room 170 times with the money placed in different locations in each frame, and then spent 5 hours merging all the photographs together in Photoshop. You can find Sharboneu’s video tutorial on this cloning technique here, and a tutorial we published a while back here.
A Room Filled with an Obnoxious Amount of Money [Photo Extremist]
Image credit: Photograph by Evan Sharboneau
