This amazing photograph of sailor Alex Thomson walking on the keel of an 8-ton yacht was created with courage rather than Photoshop. It was an ad for fashion house HUGO BOSS, which has sponsored Alex Thomson Racing since 2003. The conditions for the shot had to be just right, and the skipper had to carefully keep the yacht at a 45-degree angle for up to a minute to avoid crushing Thomson and the jet ski driver.
Read more…
Daily photo projects have become quite popular as of late, and a number of viral time-lapse videos feature people who take one self-portrait a day over many years. However, if you think taking a photo every day requires a crazy amount of dedication, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
For an entire year, from April 11, 1980 through April 11, 1981, legendary performance artist Tehching Hsieh punched a time clock and took a self-portrait every hour (i.e. 24 times a day) on the hour. At the end of the year, he ended up with 8,760 photos and combined them into a time-lapse video showing the passing of a year (and the growth of his hair). Now that’s crazy!
Thanks for sending in the tip, Lloyd!
A couple days ago 60 Minutes aired a piece on Alex Honnold, a climber who scales insane cliffs with only a pair of climbing shoes and some chalk. To capture footage of Honnold doing a death-defying climb, they attached GoPro cameras to various points on the cliff and had photographers hanging nearby with Canon 5D Mark II DSLRs. The result is an amazing glimpse into an activity that only a handful of people on earth would even think about attempting.
Read more…
According to the smart folks over at MIT, this video shows footage that was captured at an unbelievable one trillion frames per second. It appears to show some kind of light pulse traveling through some kind of object. Here’s a confusing explanation found on the project’s website:
We use a pico-second accurate detector (single pixel). Another option is a special camera called a streak camera that behaves like an oscilloscope with corresponding trigger and deflection of beams. A light pulse enters the instrument through a narrow slit along one direction. It is then deflected in the perpendicular direction so that photons that arrive first hit the detector at a different position compared to photons that arrive later. The resulting image forms a “streak” of light. Streak cameras are often used in chemistry or biology to observe milimeter sized objects but rarely for free space imaging.
In November 2010, we reported that MIT scientists were working on a camera that would be able to see around corners using echos of light. Well, this is that camera. Insane.
