Artist Federico Pietrella has a clever and impressive way of “printing” his photographs. After selecting one he wants to use, Pietrella recreates it by hand using nothing but a date stamp and ink. Pointillism is usually done with distinct dots, but each of Pietrella’s dots are a short row of numbers indicating the current date.
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While taking part in a contest to design an unconventional business card, artist Mikey Burton came up with the idea of using a rubber stamp. He writes,
People love getting a cool business card, but might love it more if they see the process of how it was made. For my card, my mind went to the idea of rubber stamps, however, there is not a convenient way to carry around a rubber stamp with an ink pad without making a big mess. I discussed this idea with my good friend Keith Berger, proprietor of Cranky Pressman. He told me about the Inspector Stamp, a small, metal, self-inking stamp that comes on a keychain [...]
The “classic” business card is often a ritual simply to impress the reciever. The idea with my new card is that it does away with the usual pretentiousness. With this stamp, you are able to print your condensed snippet of info onto any substrate—a beer mat, someone else’s business card, a napkin, or even someone’s hand. After all, people are more likely to lose a business card in a drunken stupor, but less likely to lose their hand.
Keeping one of these stamps on your keychain would give you a quick way of leaving your photography website URL with potential clients. You could also pair it with an instant camera for one-of-a-kind business cards! Cranky Pressman is selling them for $23 each.
Computer Arts Projects [Mikey Burton]
The USPS has unveiled a new set of stamps called “Pioneers of American Industrial Design” that honors 12 of the most influential American industrial designers of the 20th century, and one of them is Walter Dorwin Teague:
Known as the “dean of industrial design,” Walter Dorwin Teague believed that good artistic design fit both form and function into a single aesthetic package. During his career-long collaboration with Eastman Kodak Company, he designed several popular cameras, including the 1934 “Baby Brownie” (shown on the stamp). [#]
Besides designing cameras for Kodak for 30 years, Teague also worked for the likes of Boeing and Texaco, becoming one of the most prolific industrial designers in US history.
Pioneers of American Industrial Design (via Popular Photography)
The United States Postal Service admitted last week that the Statue of Liberty photo found on 3 billion newly printed stamps was in fact an image of the half-size replica (shown on left above) found in front of the New York-New York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas rather than the original in NYC. The original photo was shot by photographer Raimund Linke and was found through Getty Images.
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What if you could have a rubber stamp that had a built in camera, allowing it to instantly change the stamp design to “print” a photograph? Would it be a stamp camera or a camera stamp? Either way, we think it’s a nifty idea!
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My dad is an avid stamp collector. While he does have some US stamps in his collection, he mainly focuses on older stamps from China.
He used to purchase stamps exclusively from reputable stamp companies, but recently he’s been looking for good deals on rare stamps through eBay.
In the world of stamps, errors often cause the stamp to be worth much more than its face value since they’re highly sought after by collectors.
One such stamp is a 1962 stamp showing Tsai Lun, the inventor of paper. Right before the stamps were to begin the printing process, they discovered that the birth date had an extra character that erroneously listed the birth date as BC rather than AD. They had to correct the printing plates manually, but omitted one of them, causing a single error stamp to be printed with each batch.
Here’s a photograph of an actual error stamp compared to a “photoshopped” version showing the difference:
That single erroneous character causes this stamp to be listed among the rarest of Chinese stamps, and causes its value to be upwards of $5,000 rather than tens of dollars for the normal stamp.
Earlier this week my dad bid in an auction for one of these stamps. While he knows eBay is filled with counterfeit goods, everything seemed to point towards this stamp being legitimate. The user who had it up for auction was a top-rated eBay seller with over 1,000+ feedback ratings and a 100% positive feedback history. He also had a number of other listings for much more expensive stamps. After bidding $1,000 for this $5,000 stamp, my dad ended up winning for $400.
While he was happy about his “steal”, we both felt unease regarding whether or not the stamp was genuine. Luckily for us, the listing had a photograph of the stamp. Here’s the photo of the stamp side-by-side with a photo of a genuine error stamp:
At this point, my background in Photoshop came into play. I realized I could examine the stamps extremely closely and compare them using Photoshop. In fact, Photoshop has a feature that is perfect for this type of comparison. It’s called Auto-Align Layers. What it does is magically align multiple layers based on similar features. Here’s what I did:
Voila! The two stamps became magically aligned, allowing me to turn the top layer on and off for easy comparison. Here’s the exact same comparison after Photoshop’s auto alignment (hover your mouse over it to compare):
Minor variations in the appearance of a stamp are acceptable, since there are slight variations in the printing plates. Also, though we were initially suspicious of the difference in color, we discovered that it was probably introduced in the imaging process after finding the exact same color variation in an official stamp book.
However, what caught my eye was the single error character in the upper left hand corner. If you examine it during the comparison, you’ll see that it looks different and is shifted upwards in the eBay auction version. We suddenly realized that the same was in fact a legitimate stamp… A legitimate non-error stamp with the error character added in.
With this evidence my dad gave the seller a phone call (yeah, they responded with a number when we asked for it), and confronted them about the forgery. They feigned ignorance and stated that they didn’t know much about stamps, which was hardly believable considering they had other listings for $80,000 stamps. However, they were willing to cancel the transaction and did so immediately.
What I realized through this whole experience was how useful Photoshop can be for fields seemingly unrelated to photography or graphics. I’m sure there are still many stamp experts out there who use magnifying glasses to try and detect counterfeit or altered stamps, while Photoshop can do the same thing much more accurately and efficiently.
Viva Photoshop!
