Imagine you snap out of unconsciousness and realize you’ve been in a pretty serious accident. You have no memory of what happened, but luckily you were wearing a motorcycle camera that was filming your ride. That’s exactly what happened to a guy in Kashmir recently. The 51 second video above sent chills down his spine when he first watched it after the accident. The footage became the memory he lost in an accident in which he miraculously only suffered a broken leg. Don’t worry, the video isn’t graphic — just jaw-dropping.
Canon is showing off all sorts of crazy hardware at Canon Expo 2010 over in NYC. One of them is an omnidirectional camera (shown above) that shoots a 360° photograph in a single exposure. It creates the seamless panoramas using a 50 megapixel CMOS sensor and an aspheric mirror.
Note that this is a 360 degree panorama on a single plane, as if you used a tripod and turned it in every direction. I wonder how long it will be until there’s a camera that can literally shoot in every direction (i.e. up and down) to create a spherical panorama with single exposures. Maybe we’ll have spherical sensors and cameras in the future that somehow levitate and beam photos wirelessly?
This crazy self-portrait was taken using the tiny reflection in the tip of a ballpoint pen. Russian photographer Alexey Arkhipov modified a Canon PowerShot S1 IS, adding a custom (and cheap) lens setup to achieve this super-macro shot. Head on over to his blog post if you’d like to learn how it was done and how to do this yourself (you might have to use Google Translate).
