Aging isn't a topic our youth-obsessed culture takes to very well. Using everything from makeup to digital manipulation in Photoshop, many try to hold the signs of aging at bay for as long as possible.
Want to see how our planet "breathes"? Data visualization guru and cartographer John Nelson recently downloaded twelve cloud-free satellite photograph mosaics of Earth showing what our planet looks like in each month of the year. He then combined them into animated GIFs that show the steady pulse of seasons.
There are many ways to create GIFs of all sorts of things. Some tutorials on making more complex GIFs (like this one) we've even shared with you. But what if you just want to create a quick selfie GIF? Something you could record on your computer's webcam? Well, the new webapp "Face to GIF" has you covered.
We humans have done quite a lot in the span of a thousand years. We've discovered new lands by sail boat, sent men to the moon, and successfully managed to ruin the economy-class flying experience as we know it. So now that it's 2013 -- the obvious move would be to beam an animated GIF to a distant solar system, right?
Here's an interesting concept! Jiho Jang, a student, has come up with Polaroid-like instant camera, dubbed GIFTY, that captures short clips and prints them out. According to Jang, it was put together as part of his college thesis.
Wait -- printing out a video? What's next? A GIF with sound? The concept involves first capturing a small clip (the camera prototype includes a timer). Thereafter, the camera will print each frame, at which point in time you can tear each frame apart to create the flip-book. By the looks of it, the concept includes a page holder of some sort, so you don't easily lose frames. So there you have it, a GIF on-the-go. Sound not included.
Over the course of your comings and goings on the internet, you've probably spotted at least a few of those mind-bending GIFs that loop perspectives rather than a snippet of time.
Well, it turns out that making them yourself isn't that difficult, just as long as you have a 3D camera and some time at your disposal. And in the how-to video above, The Creators Project enlists the help of half the Mr. GIF team, Mark Portillo, to show you just how easy it is.
Animated GIFs are often created with a sequence of photographs, but UK-based artist INSA puts an interesting twist on the concept by mixing the concept with graffiti and time-lapsing. For his GIF-iti projects, he paints large-scale street art pieces on various walls and surfaces (e.g. the side of a truck) over a number of days. Once each version of the piece is complete, it's saved as a photographed with a camera fixed in a certain location.
After the series of graffiti pieces is completed, the photographs are strung together into unique animated GIFs.
In what many are seeing as a bid to take over some of Twitter app Vine's newly created video loop market, video company Vimeo has bought up the popular iOS app Echograph. Echograph, in case you're not familiar with it, is an application that allows you to create animated GIFs, loops and cinemagraphs.
If you got on Twitter yesterday, you probably noticed an abundance of strange, .gif-like video loops. These are the result of 'Vine,' Twitter's stand-alone video clip sharing app that is being called something akin to the "Instagram of Video" by more than a few online sources.
GIF images may not be as suitable as formats such as JPG and PNG for displaying photographs online, but the format can now boast of one thing its rivals can't: Word of the Year honors. The Oxford American Dictionary announced today that 'GIF' has been selected as its Word of the Year 2012.
RRRRRRRROLL_gif is a project by a group of friends in Japan that comes together to create two cinemagraphs each week. The images feature people and objects rotating around a single axis.
The future of consumer photography could very well be with new sensors, or more compact interchangeable lens cameras, or …
PBS art series Off Book created this short video that presents a brief history of the animated GIF.
The New York Public Library has a massive collection of over 40,000 vintage stereographs (two photos taken from slightly different points of view). To properly share them with the world in 3D, the library has launched a new tool called the Stereogranimator. It lets you convert an old stereograph into either an animated 3D GIF (which uses "wiggle stereoscopy") or an anaglyph (the kind that requires special glasses).