Hyperlapse photography involves shooting a series of photographs over large distances and then stringing the photos together into a time-lapse video that zooms the viewer through the locations. Creating a real hyperlapse involves quite a bit of work, so the folks over at Teehan+Lax Labs decided to go virtual by turning to Google Street View to source the necessary photos.
The gorgeous hyperlapse video above was created entirely using Google Street View photos, and shows the locations visited by the Street View camera van in a way that’s very different from what you see through your browser. Read more…
Check out this one-of-a-kind music video for the song “Could Be Me” by the band Gunnar and The Grizzly Boys. The video is titled “Redneck Country Band Ambushes Google Street View Car!,” and appears to be a music video shot entirely through the cameras of Google’s Street View cars. Read more…
Back in October, Google took several Trekker Street View backpacks into the Grand Canyon to capture the majestic beauty of the national park for those who can’t actually go there. Several months have gone by since that point, but finally, the cubicle-bound and financially unable among us can now visit the Grand Canyon from the comfort of our own desktops. Read more…
Being out on the roads is dangerous, be you a donkey in Botswana, a deer in New York, or a Google Street View driver. Things don’t get newsworthy, however, until one of the first two meets up with the third. Read more…
The debate rages on: should appropriated Google Street View photographs be considered art? There are quite a few artists and photographers out there who think it should be. Photographer Michael Wolf was awarded Honorable Mention for his curated screenshots at the World Press Photo 2011. Photographer Aaron Hobson takes screenshots and turns them into gorgeous panoramic photos. Jon Rafman’s screenshots were picked for an exhibition at London’s Saatchi Gallery.
If you’ve always wanted to go scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef but haven’t had a chance to, this might be one of the next best things: Google has added gorgeous underwater panoramic photographs to Street View, allowing to swim around at the world’s largest coral system as if it were a street in your neighborhood. Read more…
Google’s Street View imagery features plenty of photographs of people, but they’re often distorted and almost always feature blurred faces. Street Ghosts is a project by artist Paolo Cirio that reintroduces these distinctive portraits back into the real world. After choosing a particular photo containing a person in Street View, Cirio prints it out as a life-sized print on thin paper, cuts out the person, and then uses wheat-paste to affix the giant person photo onto the exact location where the photo appeared in the virtual world. Read more…
Ascii Street View is a web app by programmer Peter Nitsch that converts Google Street View panorama photos into ASCII art in real time. Load up the app and type in your address to see your location displayed as colorful characters. There’s also a “green” option that produces images that are reminiscent of The Matrix.
At first, [Rafman] would spend eight to 12 hours at a time traversing the globe from his desktop. “It was destroying my body,” he says. But when the images he’d collected went viral online, he began to take submissions from other users, too. Some had collected images of prostitutes at work, others presented car accidents, even dead bodies left by the side of the road – and, presumably, ignored by Google’s drivers. Many of the images in the exhibition have now been wiped from the web: the perps lined up against a wall by the São Paolo police are gone from Google Maps. A man sitting with his legs splayed strangely around a lamppost in Toronto has been blurred into obscurity.
Rafman’s images, by contrast, are almost entirely untreated. He even leaves the Google Street View navigation tool in the top-left corner of each photograph. “The work is connected to the history of street photography,” he explains, “but also to the 20th-century ready-made movement. So leaving those artefacts in the image is extremely important. In the bottom-left corner of each picture is a link that says, ‘Report a problem’.
Google Street View is interesting from a photographical perspective because it is, essentially, the largest compilation of 360-degree images in existence. Photographer Michael Wolf even used it to get a different perspective on over-photographed Paris. The best photos on Street View, however, weren’t actually taken in the street. They come from endeavors like Google’s World Wonders project, which takes you on 360-degree tours of famous and often inaccessible locations. Read more…
