January 2011

Michael Zhang

An Epic Way to Show Off Your Favorite Polaroid Photographs

Creating plexiglass clones of your Polaroid photos is a classy way of showing them off, but Lori Andrews' (aka the 10 cent designer) has an equally awesome method: she picked 154 of her favorite Polaroid pics and had them neatly framed under glass for her kitchen.

Michael Zhang

Floating Light Words with Custom Bokeh

Kaleb Wentzel-Fisher had the brilliant idea of using custom bokeh to spell out words in his videos, and spent a good amount of time developing and perfecting the idea. The above video, titled "Light Works", is a demonstration of this technique in action. The results are pretty awesome.

Michael Zhang

Shooting Leo the Lion for the MGM Logo

You know that roaring lion in the logo shown before MGM movies? That's Leo the Lion, and the behind-the-scenes photograph shown above provides an interesting glimpse into how they shot him. He must have been a pretty well-trained lion to have the discipline to stand on boxes, face a camera, roar into a microphone, and not attack the crew.

Michael Zhang

Wireless Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens Concept Camera

You've probably heard of EVIL cameras already, but how about WVIL? The Wireless Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens is a concept camera design by Seattle-based design firm Artefactgroup. What's novel about the design is that the imaging sensor is situated in the back of the lens rather than in the camera body, allowing the lens to be detached and used apart from the body wirelessly.

Michael Zhang

Polaroid and Lady Gaga Launch New Instant Camera, Glasses, and Printer

Looks like the blogosphere was right in December of last year when it guessed that a teaser put out by Polaroid was for a new instant camera launch at CES 2011. The company -- along with Creative Director Lady Gaga -- officially unveiled the camera today in Las Vegas, and also showed off a new printer and a bizarre pair of glasses as well.

Michael Zhang

Plexiglass Prints of Polaroid Photos

Polaroid instant photographs are fun to make and look at, but displaying them (or selling them) in a nice and formal way can be difficult. Grant Hamilton came up with a fantastic way of selling his Polaroid prints -- he makes high resolution scans of the photographs, prints them on Fuji Crystal Archive Polyester, and then encapsulates the print in Plexiglas. The resulting 1:1 scale shiny photo-clones are thick enough to stand on their own, and are a great way to show off your best Polaroid photos.

Michael Zhang

Faking 1000FPS with Final Cut Studio and a Canon 60D

We've featured a couple beautiful examples of fake slow-motion video created using Twixtor shot with the Canon 7D and 550D. If you don't want to shell out $300 just for Twixtor, you can do something somewhat similar using only Final Cut Studio. The above footage was shot at 60fps using a Canon 60D and created entirely with Final Cut Studio. Yes, yes, we know the wheels look strange, but it's still a neat effect and might produce interesting results with the right kind of footage.

Michael Zhang

How UPS Deliveries Actually Work

The stories are often the same -- you spend some time saving up money for the perfect piece of gear that you've spent hours reading reviews about and comparing. You finally order it, and spend some days checking the tracking information every few minutes to see if your package is still traveling according to schedule.

Michael Zhang

Casio TRYX Brings Swiveling Screens to a New Dimension

Yesterday we got a sneak peek at a strange multi-dimensionally swiveling Casio TRYX camera, and today it was officially unveiled at CES 2011. The TRYX is a 12.1 megapixel camera that shoots 1080p HD video at 30fps or 240fps slow-motion video at 432 x 320. The unique thing about the camera is that the 3-inch touchscreen LCD can both bust out of its "frame" and also swivel, allowing the frame to be used as a stand and for the screen to point in all kinds of random directions.