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Michael Zhang

Camera Comics: Awesome Comic Books from the 1940s

Between July 1944 and 1946, the U.S. Camera Publishing Company published a comic book titled "Camera Comics" in an attempt to get kids interested in the growing hobby of photography. Covers showed pilots pointing huge cameras out of planes and baddies getting whacked with cameras.

Michael Zhang

The World Shot Through a Light Bulb

Flickr user Henrique Feliciano Silva made this neat photograph by hollowing out a light bulb, filling it with water, hanging it upside down on his balcony, and shooting his neighborhood through it with a shallow depth of field.

Michael Zhang

Beautiful Heat Maps of Flickr Photographs and Twitter Tweets

Last year map geek Eric Fischer created heat maps showing where Flickr photos are taken in large cities and comparing tourist vs. local hotspots. Now he's back again with beautiful maps showing geotagged Flickr photos and Twitter Tweets, and the maps aren't limited to cities -- there's maps for continents (see North America above) and even the whole world! The orange dots show photos, the blue ones indicate Tweets, and a white one means both were found in that location.

Michael Zhang

A Photo Gear Rube Goldberg Machine

Let's start off this week with something lighthearted and awesome. The folks at 2D Photography spent nearly six months working on building a giant Rube Goldberg machine using photo gear. Like the epic Battle at F-Stop Ridge video, it seems pretty likely that this video will soon be going viral.

Michael Zhang

Disposable Camera Captures Its Own Trip Across the United States

Five years ago, web designer Matthew McVickar decided to give one lucky disposable camera a free vacation, sending it through the mail from Cape Cod, Massachusetts to Honolulu, Hawaii with the instructions "Take a photo before you pass it on!". When he got the camera back, there were seven photographs taken by various workers in the United States Postal Service that show the cameras journey (and the inner workings of the USPS!).

Michael Zhang

Photographer Identified Just Hours After NYT Shares Mysterious Nazi Album

Earlier this week the New York Times was lent a mysterious photo album that contained 214 photos of Nazi Germany, including images taken just feet away from Hitler. There was no indication of who the photographer was, so the Lens blog decided to publish some of the photos and crowdsource the task of solving the mystery.

Michael Zhang

HDR Photo of Endeavour Liftoff by NASA

Here's a good example of when HDR photography is useful: NASA created this image of the Space Shuttle Endeavour lifting off for the final time by combining six separate photographs.

Each image was taken at a different exposure setting, then composited to balance the brightness of the rocket engine output with the regular daylight levels at which the orbiter can be seen. The processing software digitally removes pure black or pure white pixels from one image and replaces them with the most detailed pixel option from the five other images. This technique can help visualize debris falling during a launch or support research involving intense light sources like rocket engines, plasma experiments and hypersonic vehicle engines. [#]