September 2010

Enhance Physical Album Photos with Voice Notes

The Photo Album Story Teller is a nifty device that allows you to add voice notes to your physical photos. It works with color coded stickers that are used to identify photos. Place the sticker next to the photo, scan it with the device, and record a message. Come back later and rescan the sticker to hear the note that was recorded.

Time Lapse Videos of Food Decomposing

Time lapse photography allows us to view ordinary things in unordinary ways, whether it's the clouds passing overhead or plants shooting up out of the ground. I recently came across these two videos that I found pretty interesting. They show the decomposition of food over many days and how mold and maggots do their thing. Don't watch while eating.

Photo Loving Giantess Invades Toyko

Panasonic decided recently that it would be a good idea to put up a giant inflatable balloon of their spokesmodel, Japanese actress Haruka Ayase, to promote its new Lumix camera. Apparently passersby reacted with fear and confusion rather than enthusiasm, though we can't imagine why...

High-Tech Glasses That Can Project Photos into Your Eyeball

Here's a glimpse into what viewing photographs might be like for future generations: Brother Industries is working on a special pair of glasses called the AirScouter that can project images directly into your retina, making you see a 16-inch display that doesn't actually exist floating 3 feet in front of your face.

A Day in the Life of the MIT Community

A Day in the Life of MIT (ADITL) is a neat project in which members of the MIT community take pictures on a particular day and then pool the photographs together to provide a snapshot of what life was like on that day. ADITL 2010 happened yesterday, and hundreds of people contributed images to the collection.

Giant 20×24 Polaroid Photography Lives on Through NY Studio

Meet the 20x24 Polaroid Land Camera, a mythical beast in the world of large format photography. Polaroid's founder Edwin Land created only seven of these 235-pound cameras over thirty years ago, and only six exist today. Two of them are on display at Harvard and MIT, and only four are in use commercially. According to Forbes, buying prints created with this beast cost $3,500 a piece, while renting the thing for a day costs $1,750 and $200 for each shot. Back in June, an Andy Warhol photo shot with the camera sold for a quarter of a million bucks.

Film About 14-Year-Old Paparazzi Photog Austin Visschedyk

"Teenage Paparazzo” is a documentary film that will debut on HBO on September 27. It's about the life of Austin Visschedyk, a 14-year-old paparazzi photographer who chases celebrities for 17 hours a day, earning $500 to $1000 for each photograph sold. Hopefully Visschedyk isn't like the paparazzi in the Kate Mos LAX video we posted a while ago (though he probably is).

Creative Mirrored Portraits Shot with Symmetrical Lighting

If you have a Mac, you've probably played around with the mirror effect in Photo Booth. Photographer Bart Nagel takes mirrored photos to a new level with his new project A/symmetrical. Nagel shoots portraits with symmetrical lighting, cuts the portrait in half, mirrors each half, and puts the three photos side by side, resulting in three similar looking people that look slightly off.

Apple Dipped Its Toes in Digital Cameras

Here's a fun bit of trivia: did you know that at one time Apple (then named Apple Computer) made compact digital cameras? Launched in 1994, the Apple QuickTake was actually one of the first digital cameras available to consumers. Three models were built by Kodak and Fujifilm, and the cameras boasted a whopping 0.3 megapixels and the ability to store eight photos at this resolution. The camera had a flash, but lacked zoom, focusing, image review, and file deletion (the entire contents had to be wiped).

Beautiful Time Lapse of a Starry Night Sky

If you live in an urban area, you probably don't see the night sky very clearly due to light pollution. Luckily, there's videos like this one to remind us how beautiful the sky above is when there aren't artificial lights drowning out the stars. This is a high-definition time-lapse of the Milky Way floating across the sky.

Lensbaby Tilt Transformer Turns Nikon Lenses into Tilt Shifts for EVIL

Lensbaby unveiled a new accessory at Photokina called the Tilt Transformer, which allows you to use Nikon mount lenses on EVIL camera bodies as an instant tilt-shift lens with twice the tilt of normal TS lenses. It's currently available for Micro Four Thirds bodies, but will be available for Sony NEX cameras as well starting on October 28, 2010. The Tilt Transformer comes with the Lensbaby Composer in a $350 package, or separately for $250.

Photog without Work Visa Enlists 7-Year-Old Daughter’s Help for Exhibition

When American photographer Alex Soth arrived in the UK earlier this year to work on a commission for the city of Brighton's photo biennial, he was told by the customs officer at the airport that he couldn't do his photography work without a work visa, and that getting caught might result in two years of jail time.

Instead of going ahead with the project anyway or calling it off, Soth decided to hand his camera over to his 7-year-old daughter Carmen. The duo strolled around Brighton for a few hours each day, with Alex directing many of Carmen's photographs while Carmen looked to check off entries on the shooting list she made (shown above).

Children with Identical-Looking Dolls

Photographer Achim Lippoth of London-based creative agency edsonwilliams recently created this series of photographs for Kid's Wear Magazine involving children with dolls that look just like them. Beautiful portraits with a hint of cute and a dash of creepy!

The First Plenoptic Camera on the Market

It looks like the wait for plenoptic cameras to hit the market is shorter than we thought when we reported earlier today on Adobe's interesting demonstration on the technology. In fact, there is no wait -- you can already purchase a plenoptic camera. German company Raytrix is the first to offer plenoptic cameras that allow you to choose focus points in post processing and capture 3D images with a single sensor.

Tilt Shift Effect Added to Famous Van Gogh Paintings

Here's a fun idea: take famous landscape paintings and add a tilt-shift effect to them! This series of images was created by Artcyclopedia using famous Van Gogh paintings. We love how the selective focus gives the paintings a new dimension.

Future Photographers May Adjust Focus During Post Processing

In the future, focusing on the wrong subject when taking a picture might be a thing of the past. At Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference this year Adobe gave a demonstration of how plenoptic lenses can be used to allow focus to be arbitrarily chosen after the image is captured during post-processing. These are microlens arrays containing hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands (Stanford researchers used a camera with 90,000 lenses) of tiny lenses that record much more information about a scene than traditional single lenses.

MIT Scientists Stuff Barcodes into Bokeh

Barcodes can be found everywhere, but using existing barcode systems with ordinary cameras require that the barodes be printed large or that the camera be placed close to the code. MIT's Bokode project is a new system that magically stuffs barcodes into bokeh, allowing ordinary cameras to be used as barcode readers from a distance. The codes are contained in little points of light that only turn into codes when viewed through an out-of-focus camera lens. You've probably seen how little bright points of light grow into larger and fainter points of light when you defocus.

Brothers Printer Ads Creatively Blend Stop Motion with Time Lapse

Here are a couple new commercials for Brothers printers that blend stop-motion and time-lapse photography in pretty interesting ways with real people. We love how the technique makes the people look like claymation figures walking around in miniature sets. The foreground is done in stop-motion while time-lapse photography provided the scenes shown in the animated paper.

It would have been crazy if they had actually printed out each individual paper of the scene on the wall.

Simple and Creative Mixing of Lego and the Real World

London filmmaker Temujin Doran created this great little video for Lego that doesn't involve any flashy effects or fancy camera techniques -- just a child-like imagination. It won a prize at the prestigious Cannes Lions advertising festival in 2010.

New Leica M9 “Titanium” Limited to 500 Pieces, Looks Great in a Bank Vault

Leica's announcements at Photokina have been pretty dull so far compared to some of the other cameras that have been unveiled. Aside from announcing a Panasonic LX5 rebranded as a Leica D-LUX 5 and a Panasonic FZ100 rebranded as a Leica V-Lux 2, they've also announcement a "Titanium" version of the M9 digital rangefinder of which only 500 pieces will be made.

How to Create Surreal Long Exposure Facebook Album Photos

Editor's note: This tutorial was inspired by Phillip Maisel's "A More Open Place" project, which we featured here last week.

I saw an article on Gizmodo the other day that was just a photo of an album over a long exposure, I'm not sure what process the creator went through but I've emulated it here.