I am relatively certain that this is the first time I’ve ever seen an actual photo of an actual organ grinder and an actual monkey, outside of a cartoon and (perhaps) a movie.
It’s from a series of photos of organ grinders posted at One Way and reposted at Poemas del rio Wang. There are some really fantastic pictures, but I picked this one because it had “Hamilton” on it.
The C-Loop is a camera strap attachment that screws into the tripod mount of your camera. So, instead of having a strap that gets twisted around your hands whenever you flip the camera from landscape to portrait mode, the strap stays out of the way.
It’s $35 and available for pre-order through Kickstarter.
Although there are similar ideas that have been around for a while (see Blackrapid’s RastenR-2, for example), this one is unique in that it swivels, so you don’t need to worry about your camera-swinging slowly unscrewing your strap.
I also like that these guys have come up with some innovative stress testing, to show off how strong the product is:
(via Engadget)
The absolute cheapest camera possible is a pinhole camera. All you need is something thin with a tiny hole in it. That hole is your “lens” and you can project the picture anywhere you want.
If you’re taking pictures of something really bright, like the sun, you can just project it willy-nilly. Sometimes it even occurs naturally. Otherwise, you’ll also need a light-proof box, and some film or something to expose.
On the other hand, digital SLRs are some of the more expensive cameras you can buy. Now, thanks to Photojojo, you can spend an extra $50 on your dSLR and turn it into a crappy pinhole camera!
Yes, it’s a lens cap, but sans lens. It has a tiny pinhole in it that’s not really a pinhole — they say it’s a laser-cut hole, but covered with clear plastic, so absolutely no dust can get through into the inner workings of your camera. And it’s $50 here, Nikon or Canon.
The photos it manages look to be about what you’d expect from a cheap pinhole camera, though they are gigantic mega-pixel images. Here are a couple of images that the company provides:
See? It’s cool that they’re 2000×3000 pixels. But as actual photographs, they’re not really that, um, good.
Plus, this pinhole lens looks exactly like the kind of thing you could make at home, and save yourself $50. Perhaps you could even make it out of wood?
(via Gizmodo)
I can’t decide whether Flickr user vamapaull has the best friend ever, or the worst.
See, vamapaull’s “friend” borrowed vamapaull’s camera. The, said “friend” broke the camera, by losing the control knob.
Without coming clean, the “friend” hemmed and hawed for a couple of days, delaying the return of the camera — until the control knob could be replaced with a handmade wooden one.
Nobody was fooled. But at least vamapaull liked the replacement so much that he photographed it and put it up on Flickr, where it was picked up by MAKE and then by Gizmodo.
Perhaps this is too much insight into how my brain works, but the first thing that came to my mind was how this was kind of like giving a robot a wooden leg. Wooo, pirate robots!
The infamous BP publicity photo above, shows its response to the oil hemorrhage in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year. It seemed nearly instantaneously after it was release that people noticed it had been digitally altered.
The image on the left is the one they released, replacing the image on the right, which has some blank screens and is presumably less competent for it.
Sometimes, in this age of Photoshop and photorealistic renderings, it seems as if retouching pictures is a purely modern problem. But it’s as old as photography itself.
Here is an excellent site showing a fairly comprehensive history of photo tampering, all the way back to the 1800s.
It’s illuminating.
Personally, although a photograph may “look” real, I think it will be important to develop some critical senses when examining them. Like words, photos can show the truth, or they can show a lie.
It’s not just digital alteration, either, or techniques as simple as cropping. Simply choosing which photo to take, and which not to take, can have a powerful impact on the message that is sent.
It will be interesting, I think, over the next few decades, to see how it develops. I think the near future will see 3-D photography — which will initially be seen as “true-er” because it will be harder to fake. But eventually I think we’ll see photography judged on the same standards we judge paintings and drawings. That is, depending on not just the image represented, but the surrounding context, and how much we trust the image-maker, and on a host of other things.
Some people claim that High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos look more realistic than your standard photo. That by blending three photos — one taken slightly underexposed, one overexposed, and one in the middle — you get a more accurate picture.
Personally, I find that people go a little overboard with it, and the photo ends up looking hyper-real, more like a video game than an actual photograph.
That one comes from Flickr user Mescon. Beautiful image, but not very realistic. There are some people who use the effect within reason, and you could probably argue that HDR is less about accuracy and more of an art form, but it’s a thin line.
So I’m not entirely sure what I make of this video, which utilizes HDR. It looks neat, but I’m thinking just like with photography, it will become less about talent and more about the effect.
(via)
Tee hee! Funny guy Kevin Nguyen takes stock photographs that feature couples in apparent crises, then comes up with humorous backstories for them. Example:
Lily and Peter were supposed to have a romantic night in, but Peter and a few coworkers went out for happy hour drinks. Peter got drunk, missed dinner, and passed out on the couch.
This actually happens all the time, and Lily is pretty understanding. She’s crying about the ending of Toy Story 3, which they saw four weeks ago.
See more at Bygone Bureau.
You know, I’d heard of a Pottery Barn, but never before a pottery camera. But check out the line of ceramic ppinhole cameras crafted by Steve Irvine.
Because it’s so easy to make a pinhole camera, a lot of them look kind of slapped together. But Irvine’s are nice enough to put on a shelf.
And they take good pictures, too! When I heard of it, I wondered how he got the pinhole tiny enough for good shots, but it looks like he’s got a metal “lens” for his cameras. Good idea. Here’s an example shot from the above camera — it took 90 minutes to expose:
(Thanks Colin!)
Going to admit it: I’m a bit of a Mad Men junkie. Amy and I are solid fans. I even bought a vintage suit and dressed up to have a party for the Season 4 premiere.
So I’m going to eat up the Rolling Stone story (even if they kind of botched the Photoshoppery on the cover). Best of all was flipping through the behind-the-scenes photos they have in their online slideshow. They’re printed in grainy black-and-white for a vintage feel, and they often just show “Oh, a Mad Men moment, but with cameras over their shoulders.”
But there are a couple of really fun anachronisms — like Ken Cosgrove and Harry Crane checking out a Mac laptop, above. I love the awed expression on actor Rich Sommer’s face. That’s precisely what Harry Crane would look like if a 2010 laptop suddenly appeared in his office.
Here’s another one, of Don Draper and his iPhone:
Thankfully, there’s a video out there that will help answer this burning question:
(I know this has been all over the blogs the past couple of days, but it was a tweet from NewspaperVideo.com that finally got me watching.)
The Denver Post’s photo blog — they call it “plog” — has a great set up of colour slides taken from 1939-43:
These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations. The photographs are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color.
I’m not sure if there’s an order to them, but many of the rural photos are posted first, and a lot of the war-related photos are near the end. It’s interesting to see the transition from farm to factory.
There are too many that I like to single out here — some of the images are striking, others, only arresting.
Although they aren’t necessarily the best photographs, in terms of composition or artistry, in the set, there’s something about the following two that resonated with me nonetheless:
Headlines posted in street-corner window of newspaper office (Brockton Enterprise). Brockton, Massachusetts, December 1940. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
Having delved into the history of the newspaper I work at, myself, I knew that papers posted headlines on a “breaking news” basis in their windows, but it’s still kind of interesting to think about. Here they are, giving away snippets of their product for free — the essential information, all up there for any passerby to read — while still hoping that the main product will sell enough copies to make it worthwhile.
You could think of the window as a primitive version of the website — or, more like a Twitter feed, with headlines and 140 characters of info.
I wonder if there’s any good books out there that take a look at this practice. I’d especially be interested in cities with multiple newspapers, especially if their offices were nearby, and how they handled the window competition.
Also, as an aside, how long do you think that “Rising Sun” logo for the barbershop next door is going to last, say, in about a year?
Shasta dam under construction. California, June 1942. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Russell Lee. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
What I love about this one is the sheer scale of the enterprise. This was truly the era of massive public works projects.
Actually, the whole process of sending photographers around to document all of this was a public works project, too. There’s debate over how much all of this economic stimulus did to end the Depression, but it’s inarguable that it left a positive legacy for us today.
Maybe, along with the construction and infrastructure stimulus, we should be sending people around with 3-D cameras to document ordinary people in the early 21st century. In the grand scheme of things, we’re not talking about a break-the-budget endeavour, and it sure would be cool to have.
For some technical reason, it cannot work the other way around, but if you’re a Nikon user from way back who would love to try out a Canon body but are stuck with a gajillion dollars in pricey Nikon-only lenses, you can now buy a $300 adapter that will fit F-mount lenses on EOS-bodies.
The adapter, by Novoflex, even preserves your ability to set the aperture, which is cool.
Read more about it at Wired or at Photography Bay.
If you thought that being an artist would protect you from having a computer do your work, think again:
Yes, that’s right — eschewing the view screen, a computer in this point-and-shoot camera calculates what makes a good photograph using some kind of algorithm and rates it for you.
FastCo Design says it’s really not that difficult:
Consider this: Much of what makes a picture artistic could actually be programmed into a camera. Diagonal compositions, color contrasts, foreground/background? All of these are pretty simple things for a computer to vet.
I’ll add to that, the golden photographic rule of thumb, the Rule of Thirds, is really just an approximation of a derivation of the Fibonacci sequence which has been simplified to make it easier for humans to understand. Computers would have the advantage.
Designer Andrew Kupresanin, who came up with the camera prototype, called the Nadia, says that it makes use of the Acquine engine.
Now, for debate: Is this more about computers getting smarter? Or humans getting dumber?
Wired has a fantastic — and lengthy — gallery of cloud pictures. The twist? They’re all taken from space. Look at that anvil cloud, above, for example. Wow.
But some of the best pictures come from the really wide view that you can get from way up high. Patterns that aren’t visible from the ground are crystal clear from space. Look at this, for example:
Those are two of the Great Lakes, with clouds streaming off them as water evaporates and condenses in the air. Amazing.
You also have to check out the pictures of von Kármán vortex streets and gravity-wave clouds.
Well, this is pretty cool — someone has taken video of a helicopter, but they’ve got a fast enough shutter speed (or frame rate) that the helicopter blades appear to not move at all.
I’m often distracted in movies and television shows when wheels and the like appear to be rotating backwards, but this is a neat effect:
There’s a bit of discussion over at That Video Site, determining how fast the blades are spinning, and what the fps of the camera might be. It’s totally feasible.
(via @ultraculture)
