cool

Michael Zhang

Give Your Room a Beautiful Skyline View Using an Ordinary Printer

After moving into their new dorm room, Caleb Ungewitter and his roommate Kyle decided that their walls looked too empty, so they decided to decorate it with a photo. Not just any photo, mind you, but a gigantic do-it-yourself print of a beautiful city skyline. Using a free program called The Rasterbator, they converted the photograph into 152 separate frames, which they printed out themselves and attached to the wall in a grid.

Michael Zhang

Large Objects Shot as Miniatures Using a Giant Coin and Tilt-Shift Effects

Norwegian design studio Skrekkøgle -- the one that printed a photo with a cremated dog -- has a creative project called "Big Money" in which they made a giant 20:1 replica of a 50 cent Euro coin. They then placed the coin next to large objects and photographed them together, making the objects look like tiny toy replicas.

Michael Zhang

Amazing Optical Illusion Shows That Our Eyes Are Horrible Light Meters

Here's a mind-bending video in which someone created the famous checker shadow illusion in real life. The optical illusion takes advantage of the way our brains process lighting and shadows.

As with many so-called illusions, this effect really demonstrates the success rather than the failure of the visual system. The visual system is not very good at being a physical light meter, but that is not its purpose. The important task is to break the image information down into meaningful components, and thereby perceive the nature of the objects in view. [#]

Interesting huh? Our eyes aren't very good as a light meters, since they're easily deceived by context.

Michael Zhang

Beautiful Heat Maps of Flickr Photographs and Twitter Tweets

Last year map geek Eric Fischer created heat maps showing where Flickr photos are taken in large cities and comparing tourist vs. local hotspots. Now he's back again with beautiful maps showing geotagged Flickr photos and Twitter Tweets, and the maps aren't limited to cities -- there's maps for continents (see North America above) and even the whole world! The orange dots show photos, the blue ones indicate Tweets, and a white one means both were found in that location.

Michael Zhang

Disposable Camera Captures Its Own Trip Across the United States

Five years ago, web designer Matthew McVickar decided to give one lucky disposable camera a free vacation, sending it through the mail from Cape Cod, Massachusetts to Honolulu, Hawaii with the instructions "Take a photo before you pass it on!". When he got the camera back, there were seven photographs taken by various workers in the United States Postal Service that show the cameras journey (and the inner workings of the USPS!).

Michael Zhang

Photographer Identified Just Hours After NYT Shares Mysterious Nazi Album

Earlier this week the New York Times was lent a mysterious photo album that contained 214 photos of Nazi Germany, including images taken just feet away from Hitler. There was no indication of who the photographer was, so the Lens blog decided to publish some of the photos and crowdsource the task of solving the mystery.