Located the Mexican state of Puebla, Popocatépetl is the second highest peak in Mexico and an active volcano — a really active volcano. It’s one of the most lively ones in the country of Mexico, with over 15 major eruptions on record since 1519 and plenty of smaller explosions through the years.
Yesterday, Popocatépetl experienced another powerful explosion as the top “popped off” to relieve the pressure within. A webcam pointed at the peak was able to capture the whole thing, and the video above shows what the explosion and resulting shockwave look like in time-lapse. Read more…
There is no shortage of landscape photographs of mountains at sunrise on the Internet, but how often do you get to see photographs captured at the same time from the mountain’s perspective? Photographer Todd Caudle (‘Cloudman‘ on 500px) was able to capture these two viewpoints simultaneously yesterday morning by shooting with both his personal camera and a live webcam located at the mountain’s summit. Read more…
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but laziness is definitely its father. Case in point, here’s an interesting tidbit of imaging history: the first webcam ever was actually invented by lazy students at Cambridge University who didn’t want to waste a trip to the nearby coffee pot if it was going to be empty when they got there. Read more…
Hong Kong-based design group Carbon has created a novelty digital camera called the One Mini, which is designed to look just like a pocket-sized version of Polaroid’s iconic SX-70 One Step instant camera. Read more…
You may think that shooting 4K video is reserved for people with deep pockets and cinematographic aspirations, but a new camera from Point Grey begs to differ. The company’s new Flea3 webcam seeks to offer that same super-high resolution in a tiny package and for a significantly smaller (though still not small) price tag than, say, a RED Epic. Read more…
Texas A&M graduate student Roman Kogan has written an interesting program that turns your webcam into scanner camera.
This program turns your webcam into a scanner camera, similar to the ones used to record photo finishes, but much, much, much slower. With it, you can create images like the ones on this page with ease and with no digital manipulation! It works by taking one pixel line at a time and arranging those slices in a line to produce the image. Thus one dimension of the image is spacial, and the other is temporal.
The Nikon Coolpix site now features an interesting tool for viewing photos, utilizing the viewer’s webcam and hand motions to flip through and zoom in and out of images. (Think: that one Spielberg film with Tom Cruise…)
The online tool, Virtual Touch Experience, is a javascript app that the user drags to their browser bookmark bar. When the bookmark is clicked while viewing compatible image sites, the images are opened for interaction in another window.
Virtual Touch Experience is a clever ad campaign designed by MRM Worldwide for Nikon’s touch screen Coolpix S70. According to the press release, it’s supposed to emulate the touch screen experience of the camera, as well as Nikon’s emphasis on the human element/touch in photography.
Though Virtual Touch Experience isn’t something you might actually integrate into routine photo viewing, (personally, my arm got really tired, and then I felt a little silly), it’s an interesting idea to make photos more interactive.
We’re curious to see if photo viewing and sorting could go the way of physical interactivity using hardware motion sensors like Nintendo Wii or Microsoft’s Project Natal someday.
