Chilean visual artist Felipe Baeza is doing some pretty interesting work with Matrix-style camera rigs. Instead of bullet time videos, Baeza uses his rig to create 3D portraits of subjects that can then be displayed in augmented reality or through a 3D model viewer.
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Want to focus your camera simply by looking at a particular area of the viewfinder? If you’re a Sony shooter, you might be enjoying that feature as early as next year. The company is reportedly working on building Eye Tracking autofocus into its cameras, with the initial version arriving in a flagship camera sometime in 2014.
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What are the most popular photo subjects in each location of your city? Is there any easy way of finding out? Those are questions UC Berkeley researcher Alexander Dunkel is trying to answer, and he has his sights set on Flickr as a possible solution. By combining the location geotags and context tags attached to many (or most) of the service’s photos, Dunkel is able to create tag cloud-style maps of any location that reveals the tags that dominate each location.
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3D technology is consistently improving. And even though Samsung may have pioneered single lens 3D technology, Panasonic have put together an impressive rig that can shoot 3D panoramas.

The array is part of a project called Dive Into World Heritage 3D, in which Panasonic went and captured seven world heritage sites so that people could experience them even if they can’t afford to travel there.
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Facebook summoned a group of tech journalists to its Menlo Park headquarters this morning to unveil the latest products its legions of programmers have been hard at work building. The major announcement was a new search engine called “Graph Search,” which will allow users to run extremely powerful search queries on the social networks database of 1 billion members, 1 trillion social connections, and 240 billion photos.
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Want to create a long exposure photo but don’t have a camera that can keep its shutter open for extended periods of time? Mansour Moufid of Elite Raspberries is working on a script called “Hipshot” that can take ordinary video footage and convert it into a faked long exposure still photo. He writes,

Long-exposure photography is a technique to capture dynamic scenes, which produces a contrast between its static and moving elements. Those parts of the scene which were in motion will appear blurred, creating a nice effect.

[Above] is a long-exposure shot of a stream I took recently. It is technically not a long-exposure photograph, but a simulation; this image was actually generated from a video recording taken with an old iPod, which was then processed in software into a single image. (Forgive the poor quality, I don’t own a good camera. Nonetheless, this image demonstrates the desired effect.)

You can check out the technical details of how the Python script works here. If you want to try it out for yourself, you can download Hipshot over on Google Code.

Simulate long-exposure photography with OpenCV [Elite Raspberries]

Google has been working some time now on a camera-equipped device that’s worn over (or above) the eye. Olympus has something similar going on, but instead of a full-fledged camera, their device only serves as an external viewfinder for a separate digital camera.
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We were just able to get some hands-on time with the new Fujifilm X100s immediately after the company’s press conference. In addition to blazin’ fast autofocus speed, the company has also introduced a couple of new features that manual-focusing photographers will love.

One is something many photographers are already familiar with (and have been clamoring for): focus peaking. The second hasn’t been received with as much fanfare, but is actually quite fantastic. It’s split image focusing — something rangefinder users will appreciate very much.
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Motion image photography is a new name for an old concept: pulling stills from video. In fact, famed headshot photographer Peter Hurley took a stab at it last year, pinning the 5K Red Epic against his Hasselblad to see if he could recreate his work in video. The issue there, even ignoring price, was that the sheer size of the Red Epic makes it far too bulky for anything but studio work.

Well, in this short documentary/experiment, photographer Abraham Joffe and a few of his esteemed photographic friends set out to see if technology had finally shrunken down and advanced to the point where the terms photographer and videographer could essentially become one and the same. Their tool of choice was Canon’s new 1D C, and their results were phenomenal. (Warning: the video contains a tiny bit of nudity).
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When consumer electronic products have photographs leaked to the world prior to their official announcements, they’re often blurry shots that appear to have been taken with a quick snap of a smartphone camera by some not-so-loyal employee or factory worker. Blackberry maker RIM wants to help companies who value privacy plug up these leaks, and has created a smartphone feature that is meant to make snapping stealthy shots a much more difficult thing to do.
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