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.
Now here’s a novel way to shoot the moon: stack five separate Canon 2x extenders to boost the focal length of your 800mm lens. Supposedly (and surprisingly) this rig actually captured a decent photograph of the moon.
This was done by the folks over at BorrowLenses, who also did the crazy filter stacking thing we featured recently. When you have as much gear as they do at your disposal, you have a wider range of ways to have fun with gear experiments. Read more…
Apparently airplanes travel a little too fast for the satellites that provide photos for Google Maps. It happened to capture this plane shooting across the sky over Hyde Park in Chicago, but separated the plane into a phantom plane and three RGB shadows. Anyone have an explanation for what caused this phenomenon?
CNN recently did a story on NYU professor Wafaa Bilal and the camera he had implanted on the back of his head. The video above gives you a glimpse into what it looks like and how the system works. Turns out it wasn’t a working camera that was permanently embedded into Bilal’s skull, but rather a baseplate to which the wired camera can be mounted magnetically.
Read our previous coverage of this bizarre project here and here.
If you think the Japanese come up with the strangest product ideas, it’s because they do. The Fuvi Chocolate camera is designed for people who want to look like they’re shooting with a chocolate bar, with dark, vanilla, and strawberry as the possible flavors. Sadly, what’s gained in looks is lost in specs — the camera only boasts a 0.3 megapixel sensor and is limited to onboard memory (i.e. it doesn’t use a memory card). If you’re a chocolate lover and need this camera on your keychain now after seeing it, it’ll be available in Japan starting in January 2011 for ¥ 2,730 (~$33).
Last week we wrote that NYU arts professor Wafaa Bilal was planning to have a camera surgically implanted on the back of his head as part of an art project. Today the Washington Post is reporting that the surgery was completed and camera successfully embedded into Bilal’s skull. Turns out it wasn’t just an elaborate hoax after all.
The photo above by Bilal shows a prototype of the camera he had implanted (that thing is massive!).
Here’s one of those “I could do that! Yeah, but you didn’t” things: a cat named Cooper recently published a book filled with his photographs, titled “Cat Cam“. Basically, a couple named Michael and Deirdre Cross decided to attach a micro camera to their cat’s collar, automatically snapping photographs every two minutes. The book has received pretty positive reviews from both critics (Good Morning America, People Magazine, etc…) and customers. Read more…
Apparently always having a camera by your side isn’t enough for some people. Wafaa Bilal, an assistant professor at NYU, is planning to have surgery in coming weeks to have a camera implanted in the back of his head. The project — titled “The 3rd I” — is being commissioned by a museum in Qatar, which will receive and broadcast a live stream of photographs taken by the camera once per minute for an entire year.
This project would probably result in better photos if the camera were implanted smack dab in the middle of his forehead instead of on the back of his head. No word on the specs of the thumbnail sized camera.
There probably isn’t a more suitable camera for halloween picture taking than “Third Eye“, a macabre pinhole camera created with a 150-year-old human skull by Wayne Martin Belger. Light enters the camera through the “third eye” on the forehead, exposing the film that’s placed in the middle of the skull. Read more…
Remember the contact sheet art we shared a while back? Photographer Karl Baden does something similar — he creates strange contact sheet self-portraits. These images were all created back in 1980. How a roll of film is exposed needs to be carefully planned out in order to know exactly where each shot will appear on the resulting contact sheet.
Each photo is a pretty normal shot of some area of Baden’s face or hands, but when combined into a contact sheet, the resulting image is quite… unique. Read more…
