Here’s a neat necklace for photo geeks — it’s a 35mm “cropper” that you can use to see what a scene would look like in a photograph. There’s even rule of thirds lines built into it. They’re handmade, crafted in Korea, and cost $49 over on Etsy. If you want an equally geeky tool without paying such a ridiculous price, you can punch the film out of a 35mm slide and use that.
The Necono Digital Camera is a funky cat-shaped digital camera out of Japan that might make it easier for you to take smiling baby photos. It’s a 3 megapixel camera that doesn’t have any LCD screen embedded for you to review your shots — you have to connect it to a “Monitor Ground” base that includes an LCD or transfer the images to your computer via USB. The cat has a shutter button on its butt, the camera and a self-timer LED in its eyes, and magnetic feet that allow you to stick it in random places.
Like many novelty cameras, the Necono doesn’t exactly come cheap… It’ll run you a whopping ¥15,750 ($192). At least you can be the only one among your friends to take pictures with a cat.
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Remember Wafaa Bilal, that NYU professor that decided to have a camera implanted on the back of his skull? Well, turns out the human body doesn’t like it when random electronic devices are fused with it, so the cost of having the camera on his nogging has been antibiotic and steroid treatments to get the body to ignore the thing. Despite the treatments, his body still decided to reject one of the three posts onto which the camera is screwed, forcing him to have the camera and one of the posts surgically removed. In the meantime he’s strapping the camera to the back of his neck, something he probably should have done since the beginning.
The moral of the story for the rest of us is that cameras belong in hands and in front of the face rather than embedded into heads.
(via Gizmodo)
Just last month we featured a video showing what life is like for a broadsword, and now here’s a video showing how it feels to be an arrow. Jeremiah Warren decided to attach a small camera with a wide angle lens to an arrow and record it being shot in various ways (straight up, at an angle, etc…). The fletches on the arrow were removed to keep it from spinning too much.
Quick! Someone invent a bullet camera!
The Third Person Point of View Camera Rig is a unique project by UTSI PhD student Jason King that aims to create a wearable camera that allows users to view life through a third-person, video-game style point of view. A camera is mounted to a backpack, which then feeds the video into the goggles of the wearer. There’s even an Instructables tutorial that teaches you how to make your own, if you’re so inclined.
Regardless of whether or not this has practical applications for life, if it’s commercialized in the future a lot of video-game addicts will finally have a way to feel more comfortable in the real world.
(via PhotoWeeklyOnline)
Reynaldo Dagsa, a local councilman in Manila, Philippines, was celebrating on New Year’s Eve with his family when he was shot in the chest and later died on the way to the hospital. His family later discovered that Dagsa had accidentally captured his killer on camera while taking a picture of his wife and daughter moments before he was shot.
The photo was handed over to police and the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which published the photo on its front page. This resulted in the identification and arrest of the assassin, a suspected car thief named Michael Gonzales whose arrest was ordered by Dagsa last year. A lookout named Rommel Oliva was also captured on camera (seen to Gonzales’ right) and is being hunted by police.
Wow. People are taking chicken head camera stabilization pretty seriously after the fact that chickens have image stabilized heads went viral recently. Research is ongoing, and people are reporting their interesting experimental findings on YouTube.
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Pardon the obnoxious watermarks, but Gadget4all is selling this funky USB speaker that looks just like a Canon 5D Mark II 7D and 24-105mm lens. It’s a 1:1 clone of the actual camera, though the camera and lens both sport “Caoon” as the brand. Audio files can be played from a computer, USB devices, or SD/MMC memory cards, and various buttons on the back of the camera have been changed to control volume and playback. If random photography novelty gifts is your thing, you can pick this one up for $83 bucks over at Gadget4all’s online store.
The size and video quality of GoPro cameras opens the door to all kinds of unique experimental footage that would be extremely difficult (or impossible) with large and bulky HD-capable cameras, whether it’s documenting the everyday life of a cat or capturing video from the edges of space with a balloon. Here’s an even wackier idea — attaching a GoPro Hero camera to the end of a broadsword with duct tape and capturing video as the sword is being swung around. The resulting footage is strange, cool, and definitely unique.
With a huge arsenal of camera gear at their disposal, the folks over at BorrowLenses can do a lot of fun and random experiments that us ordinary folk can only dream about. After first stacking lens filters and then teleconverters, they’ve gone to the next level by stacking $150,000 worth of camera gear into a Christmas tree.
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