File this under “awesome ways to show off your photos”. Lomographer zakguy had a year’s worth of Instax Mini instant photos on his hands and no way to display them, so he created a custom coffee table using his favorite shots!
I arranged my favorite shots into a pattern based on overall photo color. It isn’t perfect, but it makes for a really fun real life Lomowall, but on a coffee table. From there we carefully taped down the photos squarely to the table with double sided tape to hold them all in place. Once they were all in place, I went to a local hardware store (Lowe’s) and had them cut a piece of thick plexiglass to cover the table top exactly. I attached some adhesive rubber bumpers to each of the 4 corners and placed it on top of the photos, and that was it. [#]
It’s a neat DIY project that you can do yourself if you have a suitable coffee table and a collection of prints you want to display.
“The Untitled Project” by photographer Matt Siber features urban scenes with all traces of text stripped away and reconstructed in a separate frame. Siber shot the original images in North America, Europe, and China over the past nine years. Read more…
Robots might not be able to convey emotions or tell stories through photographs, but one thing they’re theoretically better than humans at is calculating proportions in a scene, and that’s exactly what one robot at India’s IIT Hydrabad has been taught to do. Computer scientist Raghudeep Gadde programmed a humanoid robot with a head-mounted camera to perfectly obey the rule of thirds and the golden ratio. New Scientist writes,
The robot is also programmed to assess the quality of its photos by rating focus, lighting and colour. The researchers taught it what makes a great photo by analysing the top and bottom 10 per cent of 60,000 images from a website hosting a photography contest, as rated by humans.
Armed with this knowledge, the robot can take photos when told to, then determine their quality. If the image scores below a certain quality threshold, the robot automatically makes another attempt. It improves on the first shot by working out the photo’s deviation from the guidelines and making the appropriate correction to its camera’s orientation.
It’s definitely a step up from Lewis, a wedding photography robot built in the early 2000s that was taught to recognize faces.
OpenPhoto is a new “open” alternative to Flickr being built by programmer Jaisen Mathai — an engineer who quit his job at Yahoo (Flickr’s owner) back in May 2011. Instead of storing images using company servers, this new service will allow users to connect their own online storage accounts to store their data within arms reach. This would be like using Flickr to share your images while having the photos themselves be stored in a location that you control (e.g. Amazon S3, Dropbox, etc…).
Mathai is planning to have an open source version of the software that anyone can install on their own servers, and also a hosted version of the software, much like WordPress.org and WordPress.com for blogging. He’s currently raising money for the project through Kickstarter, and plans to launch the hosted version of the service by September.
Editor’s note: The guest author of this DIY tutorial, Vadim Gordin, is also selling DIY kits and ready-made Lens Loop slings for $15 and $25, respectively. You can find the project over on Kickstarter.
Here’s a DIY camera strap I came up with 2 years ago and have been steadily revising as I use it while traveling and shooting all over the country. The design is simpler, more comfortable, and more attractive than any of the other commercially available slings. I hope that by sharing my design here, I can generate interest in my project and help DIYers make a great camera sling on their first try. Read more…
Photographer Dana Neibert made this unique iPad case using an old 8×10 film holder. It doesn’t look like the most comfortable way to carry your iPad around, but it’s a pretty creative idea.
Image credit: Photograph by Dana Neibert and used with permission
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!). Read more…
A while back we suggested that for a photo project (perhaps on a rainy day) you can collect things of a certain color in your house, arrange them neatly, and then take a picture. An even easier place to do this might be your local supermarket. Designer Marco Ugolini and photographer Pedro Motta teamed up for a project titled Per Color that features baskets of color shot in a Brazilian supermarket. Read more…
Argentinian photographer Irina Werning’s “Back to the Future” series of photographs features people reenacting photographs of themselves taken decades ago, and has made Werning a well-known photographer after going viral on the Internet over the past year.
I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else’s house, I start sniffing for them. Most of us are fascinated by their retro look but to me, it’s imagining how people would feel and look like if they were to reenact them today… A few months ago, I decided to actually do this. So, with my camera, I started inviting people to go back to their future. [#]
NPR created the behind-the-scenes video above in which Werning talks about her interesting project.
