crazy

Michael Zhang

Wallpaper Made Using 100,000 Facebook Photographs

What does it look like when every inch of a room's walls and ceiling are covered with photographs? German art students Joern Roeder and Jonathan Pirnay decided to find out through their project titled "fbFaces". Using a crawler that traverses the Facebook social graph, they harvested 100,000 profile pictures and used them to print out an intense wallpaper for the entire room.

Michael Zhang

The Amazing “Rooftopping” Photography of Tom Ryaboi

Thrill-seeking photographer Tom Ryaboi is one of the pioneers of "rooftopping", the practice of climbing to the tops of skyscrapers and shooting pictures off the edge. Photographers who participate in this new craze aim to visit the tops of every tall building in their city, capturing the incredible -- and adrenaline-pumping -- views that they afford.

Michael Zhang

The Man with 1000+ Instant Cameras

Hong Kong-based camera enthusiast TM Wong has 1000+ instant cameras in his collection -- possibly the world's largest collection. That's enough cameras to use a different one each day for nearly three years!

Michael Zhang

Extra Reach for Shooting the Moon

Now here's a novel way to shoot the moon: stack five separate Canon 2x extenders to boost the focal length of your 800mm lens. Supposedly (and surprisingly) this rig actually captured a decent photograph of the moon.

This was done by the folks over at BorrowLenses, who also did the crazy filter stacking thing we featured recently. When you have as much gear as they do at your disposal, you have a wider range of ways to have fun with gear experiments.

Michael Zhang

MIT Camera Uses Echos of Light to See Around Corners

The "femtosecond transient imaging system" is a camera being developed by researchers at MIT that uses high intensity light from a femtosecond laser to capture images from around corners. Once the laser beam bounces around the scene and returns to the sensor, algorithms are used to turn the time and distance information into a representation of the scene.

Michael Zhang

Homemade 900mm Super Telephoto Lens

Over at Leica User Forum, member dkpeterborough wrote a series of posts detailing how he and a fellow member of the Peterborough Photographic Society named Tony Lovell created a beastly 900mm lens. The lens uses optics salvaged from a government flight simulator projector lens, and cost only hundreds of pounds in parts (comparable lenses cost thousands).

Michael Zhang

Russian Leica Clone Converted to Digital

There was quite an outcry back in September when we shared the iCannon 4 project, where some guy gutted his Canon film SLR to use it as a shell for an iPhone 4. The frankencamera shown above is a bit cooler - it was created using a Russian Leica imitation and a Sony DSC-WX1 digital compact. Both cameras were disassembled, with the rangefinder contributing the outer shell and then Sony cam offering the inner workings. What's amazing is that the resulting camera looks like a nicely designed retro digital compact - similar to the new FujiPix X100.

Michael Zhang

35mm SLR Camera Created from Scratch

You've probably seen do-it-yourself pinhole cameras or even large format cameras created with foam core, but what about a solid metal do-it-yourself 35mm camera? That's exactly what Denis Mo decided to create, posting his step-by-step documentation to French camera forum collection-appareils.fr.

Denis had wanted to do such a project for 25 years, but it wasn't until he was almost 42 that he had the technical know-how to actually do it. Except for the shutter curtain fabric, ball bearings, and screws, all of the individual pieces that were used to create the camera were custom made.

Michael Zhang

Photog Captures Evidence that He Was Struck by Tiger Woods’ Ball

A fun story over the weekend was the crazy photograph that Mail on Sunday photographer Mark Pain captured while covering the Ryder Cup. Tiger Woods was attempting a chip shot, and launched he ball directly at Ryder, who had his camera up to his face. Without flinching, Pain snapped the above photo moments before the ball struck his camera, bounced off his chest, and landed at his feet.

Michael Zhang

52 Canon DSLR Cameras Used for Matrix-Style Surfing Shots

Surf wear maker Rip Curl recently teamed up with Timeslice Films for an ambitious project of shooting surfers in "bullet-time", the effect that many people first saw in The Matrix. They used a crazy camera array of 52 Canon 5D Mark II Rebel DSLRs in order to capture the same shot from 52 different angles, stringing them together for the final footage.

Michael Zhang

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.