At the Adobe MAX 2014 conference this past week, Adobe showed off some of the crazy technology current brewing in the company's labs. Two of them offer a glimpse at what may soon be available to photographers in Photoshop: changing the time of day (i.e. lighting) in photographs with a simple slider and removing haze from a scene automatically.
Now that Sony's QX1 -- basically a smartphone add-on that lets you use E-Mount lenses with your phone -- has arrived, it was inevitable that people would take these new interchangeable lens capabilities to comical extremes. Enter Facebook user Usperedi, who created the image above for Sony Alpha Rumors.
Here's something that will blow your mind: scientists have figured out how to extract audio from images captured with a camera. By looking at the extremely small vibrations captured by a high speed camera, researchers have been able to recreate music and speech from nothing but visual information.
Sometimes, the right shot requires a beautifully minimalistic approach that subtly tugs on the heart strings... other times, you throw the freaking kitchen sink at it and come out with something that defies adjectives. The video above falls into the latter category.
We don't typically share two time-lapses in the same day, since most people see that genre as over-saturated as it is, but today we have good reason to. The first is a landscape time-lapse so gorgeous National Geographic took notice, and this one, well this one may completely change the way you look at tilt-shift where time-lapse is concerned.
Want to see some mind-blowing research into photography (from the mid-2000s)? Check out the video above about "Dual Photography," a Stanford-developed technique that allows you to virtually swap the locations of a camera and a projector, allowing you to take pictures from the perspective of the light source instead of the camera sensor.
Ever since photography was invented in the 1800s, there have been people willing to risk life and limb to bring images to the public eye. Among the craziest examples are prisoners of war during World War II -- people who built makeshift cameras out of smuggled parts in order to capture what life was like inside their prison camps.
If you're afraid of swimming in the ocean due to a fear of the unknown below you, you might want to skip over the post. A group of divers off the coast of California got a scare recently when they had an extremely close call with large humpback whales. They almost found themselves in the mouths of the feeding whales, and multiple cameras were there to capture what happened (note: the video above contains some strong language).
Back in May, we featured the volcano photos of photographer Miles Morgan, a guy who gets so hot to lava that he's had his shoes and tripod melt. If you didn't believe that shoe melting fact then, check out the crazy photo above: it shows photographer Kawika Singson with his shoes and tripod in flames due to the intense heat of lava.
During the 2013 Moore tornado last week, a young man named Charles Gafford III stuck his cell phone through a hole in his storm shelter and captured close-up footage of the EF5 tornado as it passed by. If you thought that video was crazy, check out the footage above -- it shows what it's like to get hit directly by a massive EF4 tornado!
When the 2013 Moore tornado struck Oklahoma on May 20th, 2013, Charles Gafford III took refuge in a storm shelter. Once inside, he noticed that there was a small gap in the shelter that he could stick his smartphone through. He did, and ended up capturing the footage above that shows what it's like to have an EF5 tornado -- the strongest strength rating assigned -- pass almost directly overhead.
Want to snap a photograph of a rock climber that doesn't look like you're also pressed against the face of the rock? Just bring along a step ladder! The photographs above show how adventure photographer Corey Rich used one last year while shooting a Nikon D4 promotional video featuring free-climber Alex Honnold. He secured it perpendicular to the face of the rock and stepped out onto the end and a better view of the action.
Soviet photo equipment collector Vladislav Kern recently purchased this crazy camera contraption. Upon first glance, it might look like a 8mm motion picture camera that an ordinary tourist might use, but take a closer look (or open it up) and you'll see that the design is simply a façade. The device is actually a still camera that exposes 35mm film using a smaller lens on the right side of the body!
You may have heard that digital cameras can be made sensitive to infrared light by removing the IR filter found inside, but did you now that something similar can be done with the human eye? People who have aphakia, or the absence of the lens on the eye, have reported the ability to see ultraviolet wavelengths. Claude Monet was one such person.
This amazing photograph of sailor Alex Thomson walking on the keel of an 8-ton yacht was created with courage rather than Photoshop. It was an ad for fashion house HUGO BOSS, which has sponsored Alex Thomson Racing since 2003. The conditions for the shot had to be just right, and the skipper had to carefully keep the yacht at a 45-degree angle for up to a minute to avoid crushing Thomson and the jet ski driver.
Facebook officially filed to become a publicly traded company today and, in doing …
French artist Philippe Ramette captures surreal self-portraits in which he appears to be defying gravity. Rather than use digital trickery, Ramette -- who started his career as a sculptor -- builds metal support structures that allow him to stand or sit at impossible angles.
For a fine arts project at his university, art student Joel Brochu spent a whopping 8 months meticulously recreating a photograph using tiny nonpareils (the tiny sprinkles used on cakes and donuts). 221,184 individual sprinkles were placed on the 4-foot-wide board, which was covered with double-sided tape and a thin layer of glue. Each sprinkle was placed by hand using jewelry tweezers.
Want to see what pure dedication looks like? This music video for the song "In Your Arms" by Kina Grannis is a stop-motion animation done with a background composed of jelly beans. It's a crazy project that required 22 months, 1,357 hours, 30 people, and 288,000 jelly beans. They could have used CGI, of course, but each frame was carefully created by hand and photographed with a still camera. It's even more mind-blowing given this fact: none of it was done with a green screen.
Daily photo projects have become quite popular as of late, and a number of viral time-lapse videos feature people who take one self-portrait a day over many years. However, if you think taking a photo every day requires a crazy amount of dedication, you ain't seen nothing yet.
We’re now one step closer to being able to take photographs with our minds. Scientists at UC Berkeley have …
We’ve shared a couple stories in the past month on how human eyes are very subjective and …
Eran Amir created this “stop-motion within a stop-motion” using 1,500 separate photographs and …
What does it look like when every inch of a room's walls and ceiling are covered with photographs? German art students Joern Roeder and Jonathan Pirnay decided to find out through their project titled "fbFaces". Using a crawler that traverses the Facebook social graph, they harvested 100,000 profile pictures and used them to print out an intense wallpaper for the entire room.
Here’s yet another example of the crazy visual effects found on today’s TV shows — this time …
Having a camera that shoots 5000 frames per second is enough to capture slow motion footage of a bullet …
For their music video for the song “Bright Siren“, Japanese band …
Thrill-seeking photographer Tom Ryaboi is one of the pioneers of "rooftopping", the practice of climbing to the tops of skyscrapers and shooting pictures off the edge. Photographers who participate in this new craze aim to visit the tops of every tall building in their city, capturing the incredible -- and adrenaline-pumping -- views that they afford.
The New York Times has a powerful piece about photographer …
Apparently some people are becoming so rich through China’s economic boom that they’re …
What if you could take perfect group photographs by first shooting multiple frames and then selecting the best portions …
Photography studio StaudingerFranke created this mind-boggling image of a Polaroid OneStep Land Camera …
Hong Kong-based camera enthusiast TM Wong has 1000+ instant cameras in his collection -- possibly the world's largest collection. That's enough cameras to use a different one each day for nearly three years!
What you see in this photograph is the most flashes ever used to light a single photograph. Photographer …
If you somehow got your hands on a Fujifilm Finepix X100 already but don’t mind waiting a little longer …
All of us can now experience what it’s like to accidentally fall off a giant cliff thanks to a …
Remember Wafaa Bilal, that NYU professor that decided to have a camera implanted on the back of …
Reynaldo Dagsa, a local councilman in Manila, Philippines, was celebrating on New Year’s Eve with his family when he …
Now here's a novel way to shoot the moon: stack five separate Canon 2x extenders to boost the focal length of your 800mm lens. Supposedly (and surprisingly) this rig actually captured a decent photograph of the moon.
This was done by the folks over at BorrowLenses, who also did the crazy filter stacking thing we featured recently. When you have as much gear as they do at your disposal, you have a wider range of ways to have fun with gear experiments.
The "femtosecond transient imaging system" is a camera being developed by researchers at MIT that uses high intensity light from a femtosecond laser to capture images from around corners. Once the laser beam bounces around the scene and returns to the sensor, algorithms are used to turn the time and distance information into a representation of the scene.