Having your laptop and photographs stolen usually isn’t a good thing, but for photographer Melanie Willhide, it actually helped her career move forward.
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Aberrations, distortions, corrupt images; all of these are things we typically try to avoid in the world of digital photography. But the Glitché app does the exact opposite. Instead of trying to remove digital imperfections from your photos, the app piles specific distortions on, and in the process turns your pristine pics into “works of digital art” … at least that’s what they’re calling them. Read more…

When Los Angeles resident Hector Siliezar visited the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza with his family in 2009, he used his iPhone to snap some photos of a pyramid called El Castillo. After snagging a lightning strike in the third shot, Siliezar was surprised to see that he had also captured what appeared to be a beam of light shooting up from the pyramid towards the heavens. Jonathon Hill, a researcher who works with NASA’s mars imagery, tells MSNBC that it’s probably the result of an iPhone glitch:

He says the “light beam” in the Mayan temple photo is a classic case of [image artifacts and equipment errors] — a distortion in an image that arises from the way cameras bounce around incoming light.

It is no mere coincidence, Hill said, that “of the three images, the ‘light beam’ only occurs in the image with a lightning bolt in the background. The intensity of the lightning flash likely caused the camera’s CCD sensor to behave in an unusual way, either causing an entire column of pixels to offset their values or causing an internal reflection (off the) camera lens that was recorded by the sensor.” In either case, extra brightness would have been added to the pixels in that column in addition to the light hitting them directly from the scene.

In an interview with Earthfiles, Siliezar notes that none of the people present actually saw any beam of light when the image was captured, which supports Hill’s explanation that it was simply a camera glitch.

(via Earthfiles via MSNBC via Gizmodo)

Image credit: Photograph by Hector Siliezar

If you saw any of these images on the back of your digital camera after snapping a photograph, you’d probably want to get the camera checked out. Phillip Stearns, on the other hand, feels a sense of accomplishment. The Brooklyn-based shutterbug has a project called Year of the Glitch in which he publishes electronic glitches as art.

Year of the Glitch is a 366 day project aimed at exploring various manifestations of glitches (intentional and unintentional) produced by electronic systems.

Each day will bring a new image, video or sound file from a range of sources: prepared digital cameras, video capture devices, electronic displays, scanners, manipulated or corrupted files, skipping CDs, disrupted digital transmissions, etc.

The images in this post were created by cameras ranging from a Olympus C-840L compact camera to a Canon Digital Rebel DSLR.
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Some of you might know that popular photo sharing service Flickr was originally a set of tools built for a massively multiplayer online game called Game Neverending. In November of 2009 we also reported that Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, had left Flickr and was returning to his original project, Game Neverending.

With a group of former Flickr employees, Butterfield started a small company called Tiny Speck, which just unveiled Glitch, a massively multiplayer game played through a browser. Here’s a trailer they’ve released:

It’s called Glitch because in the far-distant and totally-perfect future, the world starts becoming less and less probable, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and there occurs what comes to be called the “glitch” — a grave danger of disemprobablization.

This results in a time-traveling effort at saving the future, going back into the minds of eleven great giants walking sacred paths on a barren asteroid who sing and think and hum the world into existence and … you know what? You’ll probably just have to wait and play the game :)

Here’s a side by side comparison between an old screenshot of Game Neverending (left) and a new screenshot of Glitch (right):

We’re not sure how a game like this spawned Flickr, but it doesn’t seem as though Glitch will have anything to do with photography. Perhaps the tools were originally used for in-game images and graphics rather than photographs…

Glitch will be free of charge and available by the end of the year.

(via Thomas Hawk)