Here’s an update on photographer Dennis Manarchy‘s Vanishing Cultures project, which we featured at the beginning of the year. Manarchy has just released the new video above that sheds some light on how the idea came about and how everything came together. After building the world’s biggest film camera, Manarchy has been using the “largest-format camera” to document 50 different cultures all across the United States in an epic 20,000-mile road trip. The resulting portraits will be displayed in an equally epic exhibition titled “The Vanishing Cultures: An American Portrait.” Read more…
Back in September, we shared the first photos snapped by the world’s largest and most powerful digital camera: the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera located on a mountaintop in Chile. Reuters recently paid a visit to the massive astro-camera and the scientists behind it, and created the short 2-minute piece above that offers a closer look at the unique piece of camera equipment. Read more…
Last week the U.S. Department of Energy gave a green light to a project that aims to build the largest digital camera this planet has ever seen. The camera, built by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, will cost around $170 million, be roughly the size of a small car, and be able to capture 3.2-gigapixel photographs using a giant sensor composed of 189 CCD sensors.
Sporting an 8.4-meter-diameter primary mirror, the LSST will be a large, wide-field ground-based telescope designed to provide time-lapse 3-D maps of the universe with unprecedented depth and detail. Of particular interest for cosmology and fundamental physics, these maps can be used to locate the mysterious dark matter [...]
[...] Each night, the LSST will take more than 800 wide-field 15-second exposures, each covering 49 times more sky area than the moon. It will photograph the entire visible sky twice a week. [#]
The lens/telescope will be quite a beast as well — it packs “enough resolving power to distinguish [...] a pair of car headlights seen at a distance of 400 miles.”
What you see above is the inside of the world’s largest pinhole camera measuring 45x160x80 feet. It’s an abandoned airplane hangar in Irvine, California that was converted over the course of two months into a gigantic pinhole camera. 24,000 square feet of plastic, 1,300 gallons of foam filler, 1.52 miles of tape, and 40 cans of spray paint went into darkening the hangar. Read more…
