Director Mikhail Parkhomenko's latest project creates an impossible-looking shot that was completed in a single uninterrupted take without using any computer generated-imagery (CGI) using a combination of a drone and a 360-degree camera.
Polaroid is back. Days after teasing a major return to its instant photography roots, Polaroid has just launched Polaroid Originals, a brand new brand dedicated to analog instant photos. Along with the new brand comes a new OneStep 2 camera and the debut of a new film type called i-Type.
Polaroid has a huge announcement scheduled for next week. The company's website now features a teaser for a September 13th reveal, and it sounds like Polaroid is going to make a splash by going back to its instant photography roots.
The Impossible Project made a splash in the world of instant photography last month by announcing the I-1, the first new instant camera for the film format popularized by Polaroid decades ago.
In the spring of 2014, I started a long-term photography project focused on Syrian refugee children. I traveled through Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon and photographed children who fled Syria since the war started.
Video effects specialist Robert McIntosh was recently featured by Vimeo for this 2-minute video showing an unusual continuous shot captured with a camera drone.
It "seems impossible flying through signs, benches and fences from the street to the coast to reveal a perfectly lit Los Angeles all without a single cut," McIntosh says. "And it was made with the cheapest of gear as well."
Want an inside look at how The Impossible Project makes its instant film? The folks over at Highsnobiety recently paid a visit to the company's factory in Enschede, which it purchased from Polaroid and rebooted. The 3-minute video above shows various steps of the instant film creation process, from development, to assembly, to boxing it up for shipping.
Impossible launched its first lines of instant film in 2010 after acquiring Polaroid manufacturing machines and leasing an old Polaroid production plant. Although its efforts did bring "Polaroid pictures" back from the dead, its initial offerings suffered from poor image quality and slow development times.
There will soon be a great leap forward, though. Impossible is announcing today that it is launching Generation 2.0 film that promises to be better in speed, sharpness, and tonality.
To pay homage to the return of beloved instant film, Mercedes-Benz has created a four and a half minute mini-documentary that takes an inside look at the inspiration behind bringing it back, the machinery used to make it, and even a look at how the analogue sorcery works.
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if journalist Esther Honig has proven anything with her fascinating Photoshop project Before & After, it's that whoever 'they' are (it turns out, Margaret Wolfe Hungerford) is right.
Last week, Lomography announced their first instant film camera: the Lomo'Instant (a quirky name to match a quirky camera). And rather than outright launching the product, or even just announcing a shipping date, they chose to introduce the new camera through a Kickstarter campaign.
This isn't Lomography's first attempt at crowdfunding. They did the same thing when launching their Petzval Lens and their Smartphone Film Scanner last year. Given the trend, we're likely to see more of their future launches taking the form of Kickstarter campaigns as well. But why?
What do Polaroids and Hot Pockets have in common? 99.9% of the time nothing. But, thanks to Berlin-based fashion and portrait photographer, Oliver Blohm, there’s that .1% remaining. To create that .1%, he has literally developed a way in which to combine Polaroid film with a microwave to create some very... unique photographs.
Oleg Oprisco is a photographer based in Ukraine whose magical, dreamlike photographs have been shared far and wide on the Internet. In an age where realistic photo manipulations are the secret sauce behind impossible images, Oprisco's work stands out for one simple mind-blowing fact: they aren't artificial digital manipulations.
When The Impossible Project announced its Impossible Instant Lab back in September 2012, it turned to Kickstarter to raise $250,000 to fund the project. After the Internet got wind of the smartphone-to-instant-photo printing device, the fundraising campaign blew past its goal and ended up with a total of $559,232 from 2,509 supporters.
Today the company announced that the Impossible Instant Lab will be hitting store shelves on August 29th, 2013 for a retail price of $299.
The Economist has published an article on photographic film's "transition from the mass market to the artisanal," writing that the future is bleak for film as we know it:
Consumers and professionals ditched film first. Then health-care services, which used it for X-rays, shifted to digital scans. The final blow came with the film industry's switch to digital projection. IHS iSuppli [...] estimates filmmakers consumed 2.5m miles [...] of film each year for the distribution of prints at its height. That was just a few years ago. By 2012 this plunged by two-thirds. In 2015 it will be next to nothing.
After Polaroid film died off, the The Impossible Project spent years rebooting the factories and breathing new life into old lines of instant film. However, the white-bordered film isn't the only thing Impossible has brought back from the dead. The company has also recreated Polaroid fashion from decades ago, launching the Polaroid Classic Factory Jacket.
ReutersTV shared this video today in which its Social Media Editor Anthony De Rosa meets up with The Impossible Project VP Dave Bias to talk about the company and what it's up to. Bias gives a demo of the new Impossible Instant Lab -- similar to what we shared from Photokina -- showing how it takes iPhone pixels and "melts them back down into chemistry".
San Diego-based photographer Tim Mantoani, the guy who shot giant Polaroid photos of famous photographers holding their works, recently got his hands on Lot #1 of The Impossible Project's new 8x10 instant film. To test it out, Mantoani busted out his large format camera and 8x10 processor, and then visited a local surf shop to create a multi-shot panorama.
If you liked the the “impossible shot” from the film Contact that we shared earlier this week, …
This has to do with filmmaking rather than photography, but check out this jaw-dropping shot from the 1997 movie …
You wouldn't think the world of instant film could learn much from the world of beer -- and on most counts you'd be right -- but in this particular case, a little bit of Coors inspiration may have played a role in The Impossible Projects new line of COOL Polaroid films. The specialty instant film, part of The Impossible Project's Spring 2012 line, are kept in a temperature-sensitive package. In order to maintain its shelf life, the packaging will warn you when you're storing it in too warm an environment by displaying the message "Keep Me Cool."
Here's an awesome TED lecture in which digital artist Erik Johansson discusses creating realistic "photographs" of impossible scenes.
Erik Johansson creates realistic photos of impossible scenes -- capturing ideas, not moments. In this witty how-to, the Photoshop wizard describes the principles he uses to make these fantastical scenarios come to life, while keeping them visually plausible.
After Polaroid stopped manufacturing instant film in 2008 — breaking the hearts of Polaroid lovers around the world — …
If you’re the proud owner of a Polaroid 600 camera (and have deep pockets), this news will be music …
Meet the 20x24 Polaroid Land Camera, a mythical beast in the world of large format photography. Polaroid's founder Edwin Land created only seven of these 235-pound cameras over thirty years ago, and only six exist today. Two of them are on display at Harvard and MIT, and only four are in use commercially. According to Forbes, buying prints created with this beast cost $3,500 a piece, while renting the thing for a day costs $1,750 and $200 for each shot. Back in June, an Andy Warhol photo shot with the camera sold for a quarter of a million bucks.
Li Wei is a Beijing-based artist that creates jaw-dropping scenes using mirrors, metal wires, scaffolding, and acrobatics. Check out his website here.
Time to dust off your old Polaroid cameras. The Impossible Project has just …