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.
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Apparently always having a camera by your side isn’t enough for some people. Wafaa Bilal, an assistant professor at NYU, is planning to have surgery in coming weeks to have a camera implanted in the back of his head. The project — titled “The 3rd I” — is being commissioned by a museum in Qatar, which will receive and broadcast a live stream of photographs taken by the camera once per minute for an entire year.
This project would probably result in better photos if the camera were implanted smack dab in the middle of his forehead instead of on the back of his head. No word on the specs of the thumbnail sized camera.
(via The Wall Street Journal)
Over at Leica User Forum, member dkpeterborough wrote a series of posts detailing how he and a fellow member of the Peterborough Photographic Society named Tony Lovell created a beastly 900mm lens. The lens uses optics salvaged from a government flight simulator projector lens, and cost only hundreds of pounds in parts (comparable lenses cost thousands).
If you want a lens with a similar range for a similar price, but don’t have the technical know-how to make your own, check out this Opteka 800mm mirror lens on Amazon that sells for $200.
Home made 900mm lens (via Reddit)
There was quite an outcry back in September when we shared the iCannon 4 project, where some guy gutted his Canon film SLR to use it as a shell for an iPhone 4. The frankencamera shown above is a bit cooler – it was created using a Russian Leica imitation and a Sony DSC-WX1 digital compact. Both cameras were disassembled, with the rangefinder contributing the outer shell and then Sony cam offering the inner workings. What’s amazing is that the resulting camera looks like a nicely designed retro digital compact – similar to the new FujiPix X100.
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The Canon 1200mm f/5.6 L lens is a legendary optic that B&H calls “The Mother of all Telephotos“. It’s a 36 pound behemoth that costs $120,000 if you can find one for sale — only a handful of them were made at a rate of 2 per year (delivery time was 18 months). When coupled with a crop factor body (e.g. the Canon 7D) and a 2x extender, the lens is the equivalent of a 3840mm f/11. In the above video, Bryan Carnathan of The Digital Picture gives us a glimpse of the lens in action.
A couple days ago our minds were blown by a diminished reality demonstration showing objects being removed from live video feeds. Today’s mind-blowing video is a demonstration of MovieReshape, an image manipulation program by German researchers that’s going to make it much harder to believe anything our eyes see in future videos. As you can see in the demonstration above, the software allows physical characteristics of a person in a video to be manipulated by simply dragging sliders around.
It’s a pretty interesting — albeit scary — glimpse at where technology is headed.
(via f stoppers)
Content aware fill was mind-boggling enough when it came out earlier this year, but what if the same concept could be applied to video… while the camera is recording? That’s the idea behind Diminished Reality, a topic being researched by Jan Herling and Wolfgang Broll at the Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany. Basically, you select something in the scene against a uniform background, and it disappears from the resulting video. Pretty crazy.
You’ve probably seen do-it-yourself pinhole cameras or even large format cameras created with foam core, but what about a solid metal do-it-yourself 35mm camera? That’s exactly what Denis Mo decided to create, posting his step-by-step documentation to French camera forum collection-appareils.fr.
Denis had wanted to do such a project for 25 years, but it wasn’t until he was almost 42 that he had the technical know-how to actually do it. Except for the shutter curtain fabric, ball bearings, and screws, all of the individual pieces that were used to create the camera were custom made.
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A fun story over the weekend was the crazy photograph that Mail on Sunday photographer Mark Pain captured while covering the Ryder Cup. Tiger Woods was attempting a chip shot, and launched he ball directly at Ryder, who had his camera up to his face. Without flinching, Pain snapped the above photo moments before the ball struck his camera, bounced off his chest, and landed at his feet.
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Surf wear maker Rip Curl recently teamed up with Timeslice Films for an ambitious project of shooting surfers in “bullet-time“, the effect that many people first saw in The Matrix. They used a crazy camera array of 52 Canon 5D Mark II Rebel DSLRs in order to capture the same shot from 52 different angles, stringing them together for the final footage.
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