Just in case you've always been wondering what it would look like to record footage with a camera attached to a spinning electric drill, French product designer Oscar Lhermitte did just that. The resulting footage is quite trippy, and would be a pretty unique way of capturing abstract photographs -- as long as you don't mind the risk of disintegrating your camera.
This looks like a screenshot of a satirical article by The Onion, but it's actually an actual story over on the Salt Lake Tribune. Turns out Utah is the latest state to introduce Florida-esque legislation that would make it a crime to photograph or videotape agricultural operations without permission from owners. Like in Florida, the bill's intent is to stop activist groups such as PETA from capturing covert imagery that allegedly show animal abuse.
Photoshop CS6 will have a new Iris Blur tool that lets you quickly add blur to an image that fakes a shallow depth of field. It's a one tool-process that eschews the traditional methods of using masks, layers or depth maps.
Adam Dachis over at Lifehacker offers a simple method for correcting underexposed photo with any image editor that supports layers, inversion, and Overlay blending mode. Simply create a duplicate later, invert it, set the blending mode to Overlay, and then adjust the opacity to suit your taste. While it's certainly not a pro photography trick -- other techniques including adjusting the curves and levels may be better -- it's a quick and easy tip that may be good to know.
When Los Angeles resident Hector Siliezar visited the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza with his family in 2009, he used his iPhone to snap some photos of a pyramid called El Castillo. After snagging a lightning strike in the third shot, Siliezar was surprised to see that he had also captured what appeared to be a beam of light shooting up from the pyramid towards the heavens. Jonathon Hill, a researcher who works with NASA's mars imagery, tells MSNBC that it's probably the result of an iPhone …
Instant is a newly launched Mac application that brings an Instagram-esque, Polaroid-faking app to your desktop. It allows you to turn any digital photograph into a Polaroid picture look-alike, and offers 28 different filters for giving your images vintage looks (8 of which are designed to look like Polaroid films). You can even add classic Polaroid frames to images and jot notes onto them. The app costs $7 and is available from the Mac App Store.
CNN published an opinion piece yesterday by photojournalist Nick Stern, who has some pretty harsh things to say about the spread of Instagram-style "fake images" in the news: …
Here's an interesting video tutorial by Destin of Smarter Every Day that shows how you can capture amazing photos of guns being fired and their muzzle flashes. Here's the "basic" idea: he uses a piezoelectric transducer to convert acoustical energy into an electrical pulse, which he sends through a pulse generator. The pulse from the pulse generator is used to trigger a flash and an high-speed exposure. This allows him to photograph guns at the moment they're fired in the same way many people …
