A few weeks ago, Brooklyn resident Katie O’Beirne did a weekend project in which she left a disposable camera on a Prospect Park bench with a note asking passer-bys to snap a photograph. After getting the film developed and finding some cool photos, O’Beirne decided to continue with the project, leaving disposable cameras in a number of other spots around NYC. The resulting photographs can be seen on a Tumblr page she set up called “new york shots“. Read more…
‘Life In A Day‘ is a historic crowdsourced documentary film that shows what the world was like on a single day: July 24, 2010. People in 140 countries around the world captured snippets from their lives on that day and submitted 80,000 video clips to YouTube. Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald and executive producer Ridley Scott then edited those 4,500 hours of footage into a 95 minute long feature film. After debuting at Sundance and being streamed on YouTube earlier this year, the film is now free to watch. Enjoy.
Instagram is changing not just the way photos can be shared, but how music videos can be made. UK indie rock band The Vaccines recently created a website that asked fans to snap photographs of themselves while at music festivals and then tag them with “#VACCINESVIDEO”. After receiving nearly 3,000 submissions, the band used them to create the music video for their song “Wetsuit”. Aside from a few video clips, everything you see in the video was submitted through Instagram.
P.S. Building upon this idea: what if a band were to ask fans to snap photos during a live performance of a song, and then combine the photos afterward using the timestamps of the photos to sync them with the song? That would be crazy.
Google Street View is neat in that it allows you to step into far away places through street-level photographs, but it’s missing the fourth dimension: time. WhatWasThere is an awesome project that aims to combine the element of time with a photographic map of the world. The map includes both modern day and historical imagery, and users can contribute their photographs by tagging them with a date and a time. The site even lets you switch to Google’s Street View and overlay historical photos onto their present day images!
Want to play role in the legendary agency Magnum Photos? Well, now you can as a “Magnum Tagger”. The cooperative is having a tough time keeping their large archive of historical photographs organized and easily searchable. Of the 500,000 images they’ve uploaded to the web, about 200,000 have little or no associated metadata. Magnum has decided to tackle this problem by crowdsourcing it, asking for volunteers to sift through the photographs and add useful information. For the trial run they’re looking for 50 volunteers, which shouldn’t be hard to find given the hundreds of thousands of followers they have on sites like Twitter and Facebook.
There’s an old beat up Leica MP-36 being sold by a reputable seller on eBay (8533 feedback score with 99.4% positive) for the staggering price of $104,000. What’s strange is that the details provided in the listing are quite sparse. The page includes a few photographs and the description,
The camera comes with matching black paint Summicron 2/5cm no.1474879, first version with black bayonet mount, a matching black paint Leicavit MP. The camera was the property of famous photographer
Perhaps some crowdsourced investigation can shed some light on this unique listing. Any idea what’s so special about this camera and/or who the “famous photographer” mentioned is? Check out the listing here.
Update: Apparently the camera belonged to Leif Engberg. Kudos to Nutzibe
Update: Wow. Looks like the camera actually sold for $104K… Gizmodo jumped on the story here.
life.turns. is a creative crowd-sourced stop-motion project by photo sharing service Blipfoto. By dividing the motion of a human walking into eight simple frames, they invited contributors to submit photos of people in one of the eight poses. 1025 photos were submitted in 40 days. After putting the submissions in sequence and aligning them, what resulted was a stop-motion video of thousands of people in 21 different countries walking. Read more…
