awesome

Michael Zhang

Spray Can Light Makes Light Painting Fun for Graffiti Artists

Light painting is sometimes called light graffiti, but who does graffiti with flashlights? Halo is a neat light-painting tool designed by Aïssa Logerot that makes painting with light feel much more natural for people accustomed to creating... less-legal forms of art. Shaped like an aerosol can of spray paint, the tool includes interchangeable LED lights for painting in different colors and a battery inside that recharges when the can is shaken.

Michael Zhang

Zombie Attack Engagement Photos

Los Angeles-based photographer Amanda Rynda recently did an awesome engagement photo shoot with Juliana Park and Ben Lee, who wanted the photos to show them surviving a zombie attack. Needless to say, it turned out pretty epic.

Michael Zhang

Concept Ilford Film Package Doubles as a Twin-Lens Reflex Pinhole Camera

Film usually comes in pretty boring boxes, but what if you could reuse those boxes as a pinhole camera? Designer Linna Xu won the Packaging category of the 2010 Adobe Design Achievement Awards with this concept, creating these awesome boxes for Ilford medium format film that double as pinhole cameras resembling old school twin-lens reflex cameras. Each box allows users to explore the world of medium format photography without even having a medium format camera!

Michael Zhang

A Photo Gear Rube Goldberg Machine

Let's start off this week with something lighthearted and awesome. The folks at 2D Photography spent nearly six months working on building a giant Rube Goldberg machine using photo gear. Like the epic Battle at F-Stop Ridge video, it seems pretty likely that this video will soon be going viral.

Michael Zhang

Make a Giant Holga Camera Piñata

The next time you're planning a birthday party for someone who loves photography, try making a giant camera piñata using cardboard and paper-mache. You can fill it with candy and treats, or take your photo-geekness to the next level by filling it with photography-related gifts and accessories.

Michael Zhang

Lens Taken From Vintage Camera Used on Canon 5D, Makes Beautiful Photos

Reddit user Bryce Hoeper recently broke an old Zeiss Ikon Contina L he purchased for $7 from Goodwill after it took a nasty tumble down some stairs. After being bummed for a while, he stumbled upon Timur Civan's experiment with sticking a 102-year old lens on a modern DSLR, and decided to attempt the same thing. He spent a few hours taking apart the camera body to extract the lens, then super glued it to a Canon body cap that he cut a hole in, allowing the lens to be mounted to his Canon 5D Mark II.

Michael Zhang

Line Up Some DSLRs for Matrix-style Bullet Time Video

Here's an idea: find a bunch of photography-lovin' friends, borrow their DSLR cameras, and shoot your own Matrix-style bullet time videos from home! The above video shows a workshop where they were able to bring together 24 cameras for this awesome purpose.

Michael Zhang

Backwards Music Video with 600 Pillows

The music video for "My Favorite Pillow" by Rhett & Link has the same kind of awesomeness and creativity that made OK Go the kings of viral music videos. Released less than a week ago, the video already has millions of views. It's a backwards music video in which everything is playing in reverse, but the singers still manage to mouth the words correctly. There's also 600 pillows used in the video, which obviously creates instant awesomeness in itself.

Michael Zhang

Awesome Camera Flash Experiment at a Robbie Williams Concert

British musician Robbie Williams was recently featured in Nikon's "I AM NIKON" advertising campaign, with a commercial showing a fun experiment he did at a concert in 2003. He asked his audience to pull out their cameras and, on his cue, fire off the flash. The resulting scene was pretty awesome to behold. The full clip of the experiment is above.

Michael Zhang

“End Love” by OK Go Blends Stop and Slow Motion in Awesome Ways

OK Go, an LA-based rock band, makes some of the most creative music videos you'll ever see, from the treadmill video that amassed over 50 million views on YouTube to their gigantic Rube Goldberg machine one that dropped jaws around the world. Their latest video for the song "End Love" is yet another display of pure creativity, as they blend stop motion and slow motion techniques in strange and awesome new ways.

Michael Zhang

A Gigantic Rube Goldberg Machine

Here's a video that's so creative and awesome it's sure to get your artistic juices flowing. OK Go just put up the music video to their song "This Too Shall Pass", and it's one of the coolest music videos I've ever seen. Basically the whole video shows a gigantic Rube Goldberg contraption built in a warehouse, with the timing and placement of every person and element perfectly integrated into the song.

Michael Zhang

Taking Photos with Hand Gestures

SixthSense is a wearable gesture device being developed by PhD student Pranav Mistry at the MIT Media Lab that allows the wearer to interact with their environment, treating the real world as a computer display. The above video is of the demo that was given at TED that generated international attention. What we found interesting is how the device allows you to photograph with hand gestures (at 6m25s), and the ability to work with your images on any wall.

Michael Zhang

Aerial Photography with iPhone-Controlled Quadricopter

This is one of the coolest gadgets we've seen in quite some time. The Parrot AR.Drone is a quadricopter that you control visually through wifi using your iPhone or iPod touch. The quadricopter has a built in camera that displays the real time view of the drone on your screen while you control it. We're not sure if still photography or video capabilities are built in, but this could open the door to making simple aerial photography accessible to the general public.