May 2010

"Running on Empty" by Ross Ching is a neat time-lapse video inspired by Matt Logue's empty L.A. project, which we featured last year. Rather than individual photographs in which ordinarily busy LA streets are artificially devoid of any cars and people, the video takes it a step further by stringing together such photographs to create an eerie (yet soothing and beautiful) glimpse into an LA in which streetlights blink above "I am Legend"-esque roads. I wonder how long post-processing took...

According to  Hoya founder Shigeru Yamanaka's grandson, Yutaka Yamanaka, Hoya's acquisition of Pentax may not have been the best business move. The younger Yamanaka said the $1 billion acquisition in 2007 was made mostly to expand Hoya's involvement in medical optics, but turned out to be "overpriced." Yamanaka, a Hoya shareholder, went so far as to say it was one of Hoya's business "failures" which led to financial turbulence over the last three years until Pentax turned profitable.

You've probably seen head-mounted cameras that capture point-of-view photos or videos before, but EyeSeeCam takes the POV concept to a new level. It's a unique gaze-driven camera that focuses on whatever your eyes are looking at, making it the first camera system that records what your eyes are actually looking at.

Here's a funny twist on the popular "most interesting man in the world" beer commercials by Dos Equis -- Luc Welch over in the photo.net forums has posted some facts about "the most interesting photographer in the world": …

Flickr user Plan_9 wanted both a Canon tattoo and a wristband tattoo, so he decided to get a Canon L Lens red ring around his wrist. The next step might be to include some aperture and focal length information on his knuckles. If you decide to get a similar tattoo, you'd better be pretty set on sticking with Canon.

"NES Stop Motion" is an amazing stop motion video by YouTube user bornforthis43 that took over 120 hours to produce. Each scene was created using paper and ordinary household objects, and over 7,000 photographs went into making this 3 minute long stop-motion video. The result is a video that should deliver a healthy dose of nostalgia to people who enjoyed gaming on the NES back in the 80s and 90s.

Earlier this month, the Daily Mail published some photos taken at a Dalston polling station during the British General Election by Emily James of Just Do It.

The Geotaggers' World Atlas is an interesting series of images by Eric Fischer that shows city maps overlaid with points indicating that a photograph was taken there. The location data was obtained from Flickr and Picasa, and the resulting images are heat maps of popular photography locations.

Here's a useful tool you might want to bookmark: findexif.com. It has a super simple web interface in which you simply paste a URL to a photograph in order to display the EXIF data embedded in the image. It should work for any photograph that hasn't had the EXIF stripped out for some reason, and can be a great way for you to learn how certain images were made. Here's an example page showing the EXIF data of a photograph I made a while back.

Get up and go is a short 2 minute video by Stefan Werc that gives you a unique perspective of Tokyo at night. The time-lapse shots range from epic shots of the skyline, to creative shots from moving vehicles. The stills that went into this time-lapse were shot using the Canon 7D. Great work Stefan!

Accordion Obscura is a sculpture by Andrew Lewicki that mashes together an accordion keyboard and the front of a 4x5 large format camera, joined together with the part they share -- bellows. The result is a strange piece of equipment that would certainly cause weird looks if the thing were actually used on the street, though making the setup usable is a whole nother story.

Here's a unique way to keep your photographs close at hand (literally): USB flash drive cufflinks. Removing the lid on each cufflink reveals at 2GB flash drive, for 4 gigs of total storage. They're available in gunmetal and gold finishes, and can be customized with an engraving. Sadly, these novelty items are usually absurdly expensive, and these cufflinks are no exception -- the pair costs a whopping $195.

A while ago my friend discovered Microsoft's Bing Cashback program, which provides instant savings for "qualified" purchases. What's neat is that any eBay purchase made with "Buy It Now" and paid using PayPal qualifies for the savings. After he discovered this, my friend bought Canon 5Ds in bulk on eBay and sold them on craigslist for a profit.

The Mark III Hythe Machine Gun Camera was a camera designed to mimic the American-made Lewis machine gun, and was used by the British air force during World War I to train their aerial gunners in air-to-air combat. The reason was that 120 film was much cheaper than live .303 ammunition, and that the resulting photographs would inform the evaluators of how accurate the pilot was during the combat simulation. To train the gunners in changing magazines, the gun camera included a fully functional …

One major hitch when capturing video with a DSLR is that there aren't many convenient or affordable options for stabilization tailored to DSLR gear. Jonathan Berqvist recruited the expertise of his father to create a wooden shoulder rig, but most people have to pay upwards of $300 to get a setup.

There's a super rare Nikkor 6mm f/2.8 fisheye lens for sale on eBay. How much does f/2.8, 6mm, and a 220° field of view cost? A mere $34,020.

Did you know pressing the "Set" button on your T2i/550D while reviewing photos plays them back as a time-lapse video? Well, no... because it doesn't. It's too bad this video tutorial is just a well-made fake, but now you have fun way to prank your T2i/550D friends! …

A few years ago New Zealand-based Flickr photog fettucininz was looking for an easier way to position his flash for table top photography, when he found that his old desk lamp had just the right screw thread for mounting his flash. The resulting setup is ultra flexible and super cheap (it's free, after all). If you have an old balanced-arm desk lamp lying around, see if you can repurpose the thing as a nifty flash stand.

Adobe Photoshop does miracles for wrinkly skin, and it's now available in a cream! If that's not enough, you can also check out Photoshop Toothpaste.

Dermandar is a free flash-based web app that will automatically and seamlessly stitch photos together to form a panoramic photo. The resulting panorama can be viewed as a side-to-side scrolling image, or in "3D" mode, which is an interactive display that can be rotated, zoomed, and has a more obvious axis of rotation. Some of the most interesting images available for public view in the Dermandar gallery are actually 360-degree views.

In the Harry Potter series, a Pensieve is a magical stone that allows people to store and replay memories. While photography helps us store moments, there's obviously quite a bit of life that slips through the cracks. The Revue by Vicon is a wearable camera that passively takes photographs through the day to document your life.

Stereo Portrait Project, by Alex Fry and Jamie Nimmo, is a 3D photography exhibition documenting Australian creatives. Their version 1.0 rig used two Nikon D90 DSLR cameras attached to a custom camera rig, separated by a distance that is intended to emulate human eyes.

Gail Mooney and her daughter Erin Kelly are about to embark on a three month documentary project around the world using Canon DSLRs, and the above photograph shows the kit they're bringing along. Check out this blog post to see everything they're bringing. What's amazing is that everything here fits inside two backpacks. Whoa.

Streetmuseum is a new (and free) augmented reality iPhone app created by the Museum of London that allows you to browse historical photographs in various parts of the city.

Nikon has a couple neat interactive tools that make it easy to explore and compare lenses. Their lens simulator lets you see what resulting photographs might look like with any lens and camera combination, while their new lens positioning map displays the NIKKOR lineup on a grid with aperture and focal length as the two axes.

It looks like Imagelogr, a new search engine for images, has gotten off on the wrong foot. Only weeks old, the service has sparked quite a response from photographers after it became clear that the service was offering copyrighted photographs for download without any links or attribution.

Here's an oldie but goodie that I'm guessing many of you haven't seen before. It's an episode from Deke McClelland's video podcast dekepod in which McClelland shares 101 simple Photoshop tips at a blazing fast pace. What's interesting is that it's probably not as difficult to follow along as you might think, even though it averages to a tip every three seconds. This might be one of the closest things to learning like Neo does in the Matrix.

Here's a new Sony Alpha concept DSLR camera that features a slanted LCD to keep your face away from the screen, similar to the Sony a352 concept camera that we featured last month. Unlike that one, which had a solar and rounded design, this one has a lot of edges and sharp angles, like what you might see in futuristic concept cars.

Mugtug Darkroom is a new browser-based photo editor that uses HTML5 rather than Flash. It was presented at the Google I/O web developer conference yesterday to show off what's possible with HTML5, the proposed next version of HTML that's gaining steam.

TED has some of the most interesting talks you'll find on the web, with topics ranging from how diet can prevent cancer to demonstrations of amazing new photo technology. They also have a great collection of talks by photographers, and we've compiled a list of 14 of them here. These short talks are eye-opening, jaw-dropping, and often quite moving.

Pentax has just released five full resolution photographs taken with their new medium format DSLR, the Pentax 645D. These 40 megapixel photos are 7264x5440, and weigh in at around 17 megabytes each. The sample shot website also has EXIF data, though most of the page is in Japanese. There's still no word on when (if ever) the 645D will be released outside Japan.

Earlier this month we reported on 48 Hour Magazine, a new project that aims to put together each magazine in only 48 hours from start to finish. The team of editors include Heather Champ and Derek Powazek, the founding editors of JPG Magazine.

Today at Google I/O, Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonell showcased this demo of the HTML5 version of the magazine. Last December, SI released a mockup video of how their online version would look as an app, but this version is based on the web and can be viewed with laptop and tablet browsers. It looks like a print magazine layout, with fantastic spreads, photos, and fonts, but it also has a lot of unique multimedia features that are incorporated into the design.

Group Story is a new photo service that's centered around building photo books collaboratively with other people who photographed the same event. For example, the parents of a soccer team could pool photographs together and create a photo book documenting the soccer season.

We found and shared a pretty useful tip a while ago that involved organizing loose cables with binder clips. I switched to a new desk recently, and found myself with the messy cable problem: …

Here's a concept design of the "Nikon D4x" by San Francisco-based industrial designer Marc Levinson.

Garrett Murray over at Maniacal Rage has a funny project called CS4 Crash Reports. He comes up with the strangest things to send to Adobe when his Photoshop CS4 crashes and asks him to describe the problem that occurred.

Recent surveys found that many image users in the United States and UK are ignorant when it comes to knowing when it's okay to use an image, and how images may be used. 22% of those surveyed admitted that they used photographs found on photo sharing websites for commercial purposes. In response to these findings, Getty has launched stockphotorights, a website that answers many of the common questions people have about image use and copyright. They also have a blog documenting cases of image …

Olympus' most recent E-PL1 commercial, PEN Giant, is stop-motion with a big picture -- or big pictures, literally. A total of 355 prints were made on billboards and shot again, all produced with the Olympus PEN.

Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner was selected and announced below.

The SteadePod is a fancy new camera stabilizer that aims to replace heavy and burdensome tripods for casual, walk-around use. "Fancy" is relative, since this gadget is pretty much a glorified string "tripod" that you can make yourself for about $1. You simply extend the string, step on it, pull up, and use the string tension to stabilize your camera.

"Skateboardanimation" is a creative video by Tilles Singer that combines digital photographs, magazine cutouts, and recorded sound effects to show little paper people skateboarding across handmade landscapes. It's about a minute long, and should be just enough to give you your daily dose of creativity.

3D photography hasn't arrived in the consumer DSLR world yet, and existing setups require combining two DSLR cameras. What would a 3D-capable DSLR system look like? …

Unshake is a free program available for all operating systems that takes your blurry photographs and attempts to make them clearer. While it's not miraculous or perfect, it does in fact help in making photographs more usable, especially at lower resolutions (i.e. for the web).

Just a reminder: the season finale of the popular TV show House, which was filmed entirely with the Canon 5D Mark II, will be airing tonight. The fact that the show turned to the HDSLR was one of the big stories last month, after the show's director Greg Yaitanes made the announcement on Twitter and had a Q&A session via the service.

Self-described creative technologist Thiago Avancini hacked this Atari 2600 joystick into a shutter release cable -- complete with an autofocus control for his Canon T2i. The controller is considerably larger than the average cable release or remote control, but it's a pretty nifty.

At just 3 years old, young photographer Ruby Ellenby captured the attention of her hometown last month with her first solo exhibition in San Francisco. Tonight, Ruby's story was featured on NBC Nightly News. The piece offers a mini behind-the-scenes peek at how Ruby goes about shooting, and some of her fans share their thoughts. Cute!

Sony recently announced an interchangeable lens camcorder, but if you can't stand the wait until it's released, cheap gadget dealer Brando has these Vivikai camcorders that come equipped with an 8x telescope. The Chinese company, Vivikai (no relation to Vivitar) has more photos of this Frankenstein camcorder mod on their site.

Kodak made the surprising announcement today that their Chief Marketing Officer Jeffrey Hayzlett is resigning on May 28th to "pursue personal projects." …

The Strobella is a small shoot-through umbrella that you mount to your flash unit using a velcro elastic band. The website states that it "doesn’t just softens the shadows but can reduces them significantly." Hmm...