Two years ago, San Francisco-based photographer Shawn Clover began to create an amazing series of images, titled 1906 + 2010: The Earthquake Blend, featuring photographs captured during the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake blended into views of what the city currently looks like.
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If you’ve ever played the video game Portal you’ll know how addicting it can be. Sort of like a first person puzzle, the game and its sequel require you to use a portal gun to create linked “portals” through space in order to get out of sticky situations. Well, photographer Jeremy Jackson had an interesting idea: why not recreate the world of Portal with a well-planned light painting exposure?

The result, which you can see above, was actually shot as a single exposure using a Canon T1i and a manual 14mm f/2.8 lens. It took 357 seconds and one mid picture aperture change to get both the portals and trees lit properly, but there’s no denying the photo does the job and, according to Jackson, was a blast to shoot.

(via DIYPhotography)

Image credits: 154/366 – The Portal is a Lie? by Jeremy Jackson and used with permission

Learning to play a game and learning to use Photoshop follow two, very different patterns. In the first you “discover” how the game is played, you fiddle with the buttons, try combinations, have eureka moments and eventually become proficient at it. Learning Photoshop, on the other hand, requires extensive tutorials and help; books are available from thin “easy-to-use” instruction books to heavy tomes many hundreds of pages long.
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NachoFoto is a new image search engine that attempts to deliver relevant results for a specific kind of query traditional search engines haven’t focused on: dynamic keywords.

These are keywords for which the resulting photographs should change over time.

For example, if someone searched for “tiger woods” this past week, they were likely looking for photographs of him at the Masters. However, traditional search engines such as Google returned exactly the same images as they did the week before. A quick Google search for “Tiger Woods” shows many images of him, but nothing specifically from this week. A NachoFoto search of the same term returns photographs ordered by freshness.

Another example would be the searches for “earthquake”. Those who search for the term “earthquake” prior to a major disaster would have greatly different expectations than those who searched for the term immediately after. As of now, Google does not offer any way to sort or filter by time in their image search.

Traditional services like Google built their reputation upon relevancy, but newer services such as Twitter have demonstrated that the ability to surface “trending” topics is important to users as well.

This new service is an interesting look at a feature image search engines should have, but unless someone acquires NachoFoto, it probably won’t stand a chance if the feature is added to existing search engines.

(via TechCrunch)