Here’s another curious photography-related novelty item for those of you looking to fill your house with them (i.e. those of you who purchased the lens shaped vacuum cleaner and lens-shaped humidifier that we featured recently): it’s a lens shaped pepper mill.
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Check out this brilliant marketing idea: to promote its professional sling-style camera backpacks, Kata designed a carnival/arcade-style game called Shootout. It’s live contest that has been held in various store locations and trade shows around the world. Basically, participants engage a virtual cowboy photographer in a duel. Once the timer starts, one must swing their camera bag around, “unholster it”, and snap a photo of the screen. If the time captured in your photo is less than the time achieved by Mr. Cowboy Photog (and faster than other participants), you win a pretty pricey camera bag.
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There’s an iPhone camera app generating quite a bit of buzz, and it’s not Instagram or Camera+. The new rising star is Manga-Camera, a fun app that’s been downloaded like hotcakes in recent days (okay, we made up that expression). It has been downloaded over a million times in just the past week, and is currently the number one most popular app in the Japanese App Store.
The app is similar to Instagram filters, except instead of making your photos look like they were taken with a retro or toy camera, it makes them look like they were drawn by a Japanese manga artist.
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Want to see what you would look like as an outlaw from the 1800s? With Mugshot Yourself, you can!
It’s a simple web app that takes your portrait and combines it with the face of an actual New York City criminal from 1864. You can provide a photo using your webcam, by uploading one, or by selecting a Facebook profile picture.
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Yesterday we were whimsically wondering what life would be like if we could Photoshop away some of life’s more unpleasant moments, and today we’ve stumbled onto a different approach in the form of the Retouch Mirror. The mirror, which will cost you about $85 from Atypyk, is a fun bathroom accessory for photographers who want to make their morning routine feel more like a post-processing session. If you don’t want to drop $85, you can always convert your existing mirror into a Retouch Mirror using these Photoshop magnets.
The Retouch Mirror (via Gizmodo)
“Darkroom Escape” is a simple flash game in which you’re stuck in the darkroom of a photo studio and must escape using only the items in the room. The idea is pretty simple, but the difficulty is pretty ridiculous. If you can figure everything out without looking up the answers, you’re either a savant or someone with way to much free time. You can play full screen here or watch a walkthrough video with the solution here.
(via GamesHandbook via Photoblog.hk)
Looking for a weekend project? Try you hand at creating an anthotype, or an image created using photosensitive material from plants. Grind up some plant matter to harvest the juices, paint the juices onto some paper, place a negative over the paper, and then leave the image out under the sun. When it’s done exposing, scan the image to preserve it and place the print in a dark place, since light will slowly cause the image to disappear. Photojojo has a step-by-step tutorial on the process here.
DIY: Create Photographs Using Plant Matter! [Photojojo]
If you’ve always wanted to be an astronaut photographer shooting images of Earth from a window of the International Space Station, Stratocam is an app for you. Created by Paul Rademacher, it allows you to snap your own photographs inside Google Maps’ satellite view of our planet. You can also view and rate other people’s photos, and browse the highest rated images from around the world.
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Street View Stereographic is a fun little web app that creates a “little planet” (i.e. stereographic projection) using the photos from any Google Street View location you provide it.
Street View Stereographic [Github]
It looks like Microsoft is finally putting its war chest and brilliant minds to good use: the company has released a new free app for Windows Phone users called Face Swap. The app uses face detection to let you quickly switch the faces of subjects in your photos. Simply shake the phone and faces will be swapped! The resulting face swap photos can be saved or shared on social networking websites. Hopefully they turn this into a web app soon.
