Street photographer Eric Kim wanted to capture what it’s like to roam around on the streets and shoot photographs of complete strangers (without their permission), so he mounted a GoPro HD 960 video camera to the top of his Leica M9 and then walked the streets of LA. You can see some of the resulting photos over on Kim’s blog.
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!).
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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.
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This is the large format camera collection of the School of Visual Arts in NYC, one of the leading art schools in the United States. Beautiful.
(via Things Organized Neatly via Laughing Squid)
Hacker Rob Flickenger wasn’t satisfied with ordinary photographs of his ongoing Tesla coil experiments, so he decided to shoot Matrix-style “bullet time” images to capture “3D lightning”. He purchased 10 Canon A470 cameras and configured them to function as a single 70-megapixel 10-angle camera.
Why that particular camera? Partly because I found someone dumping a bunch of them on eBay for cheap, but also because they run CHDK, the infamous scriptable firmware for Canon cameras. This let me write some code to streamline the process of taking ten photos all at once, and then get them off of the cameras in a reasonable manner. By wiring all of them to the same 10-port USB hub, and using CHDK’s syncable USB remote feature, I was able to wire up a single button to make all of the cameras fire at once.
His hard work paid off, and Flickenger managed to capture some pretty unique shots of his Tesla coil in action.
Bullet time lightning [HackerFriendly.com]
Need some inspiration? The “Endless Interestingness” page by designers Mark Barcinski and Adrien Jeanjean — they have an awesome website, BTW — shows thumbnails of interesting Flickr photographs, and extends endlessly in every direction. If you see a photo you like, simply click it to open up the original Flickr page.
Thanks for the tip, Justin!
Photographer Gary Cruz is one lucky dude — not only did he get his hands on a Fujifilm X100, but he got what might be the world’s first X100 cake as well! It was given to him by his talented wife Beverly.
Image credit: x100 Cake by garycruz and used with permission
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. [#]
When Eadweard Muybridge shot the first motion picture of a galloping horse back in 1878, he used 24 individual cameras placed 27 inches apart, using trip wires to fire off each camera one thousandth of a second after the previous one. With fancy high-speed camera rentals priced at thousands of dollars a day, YouTube member Destin came up with a Muybridge-esque technique for capturing a bullet flying through the air using an ordinary DSLR: he shoots a bullet for each frame and uses a fancy trigger to capture the bullet at increasing distances, combining the resulting images into a neat super slow motion video.
(via DIYPhotography.net)
Here’s a neat photo project for you to try: find a friend who loves photography just as much as you do, and share a roll of film. After one person finishes using up a roll, rewind it and send it to the other person. That’s what photographers Lexi and Natalie did with their project Exposed Far Away.
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