May 2010

Jessica Lum

Sports Illustrated as an HTML5 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.

Jessica Lum

Gigantic Stop-Motion PEN Commercial

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.

Michael Zhang

Unshake Your Blurry Photographs

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).

Jessica Lum

Atari Joystick Shutter Release for Canon

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.

Michael Zhang

Tactical “Laser” Sight for Wildlife Shooting

Here's an interesting gadget that can help you with wildlife photography, or can simply make you look beastly while doing street photography. This tactical sight can help you lock your camera onto a faraway animal, making finding it much easier to find when you start looking through your massive telephoto lens. With longer focal range lenses, it can be pretty easy to lose sight of where exactly your subject is, and finding it again might require pulling your eyes away from the viewfinder. This sight can help you more accurately lock onto the subject prior to using the viewfinder.