Google Photos uses “deep learning” to help you find your images—but what does that entail, really? Spend five minutes with smart peeps & learn interesting things. (I find the erroneous barbell-arm thing pretty charming.)
[YouTube] [Via David Lieb]
Monthly Archives: September 2015
Photography: Fire-breathing in bullet time
Mitch Martinez arrayed 48 DSLRs, a RED Epic, and a Panasonic GH4 to capture a pair of fire artists practicing their craft. I love the CGI-free results, though I wish he’d found a way to vary the capture times just slightly in order to preserve a touch of motion while shifting perspective.
A quick time lapse of the rig being assembled:
Celebrating Honda’s history of amazing ads
The beautiful Paper ad I blogged on Sunday is just the latest installment in Honda’s rich creative history. It’s worth taking a look back at some terrific ads from the last decade—and these are just the ones I’ve blogged!
Beautiful animation for a good cause
Snapseed gets a more powerful Healing Brush, more
Do you live in a world where every blemish, random bird, stray pedestrian, and telephone wire is perfectly round? Me neither!
Therefore I think you’ll really like Snapseed’s new ability to heal arbitrary-shaped regions. Just tap the filter selector, tap Healing, and then paint away the bits you’d like to omit. And of course these operations are, like everything else in the new Snapseed, non-destructive, meaning that you can go back and re-edit them and/or copy/paste them among images.
The update (2.0.4) should now be live on the App Store & Play Store. It also squashes some bugs & adds support for Traditional Chinese (Hong Kong) and Canadian French.
Here’s an animation of healing in action:
Honda’s epic new hand-drawn animation
Another year, another example of Honda creating some of the most interesting ads in the game.
PetaPixel shows a number of stills from the ad & writes,
Honda recently enlisted [animator Adam] Pesapane’s services to create the ad above, titled “Paper.” It runs just 2 minutes, but it took 4 months of work to create!
The hands you see in the ad are real people who were placing roughly 3,000 unique illustrations in front of the camera, allowing the animation to be created one frame at a time.
Here’s a peek behind the scenes:
Photo essay: “The Mind-Bending Bus Stops Of The Former Soviet Union”
Christopher Herwig finds weird, austere beauty on the steppes:
Photographer Christopher Herwig has been hunting bus stops in remote corners of the former Soviet Union since he stumbled upon them while biking to St. Petersburg in 2002. He has covered more than 30,000 km by car, bus and taxi in 13 countries discovering and documenting these strange works of art created behind the Iron Curtain. From the shores of the Black Sea to the endless Kazakh steppe, the bus stops show the range of public art from the Soviet era and give a rare glimpse into the creative minds of the time. Herwig’s series attracted considerable media interest around the world, and now with the project complete, the full collection will be presented in Soviet Bus Stops as a deluxe, limited edition, hard cover photo book. The book represents the most comprehensive and diverse collection of Soviet bus stop design ever assembled.
Photography: A beautiful infrared drone film
Brooklyn Aerials shot “Nostalgia” using a RED Epic Dragon Monochrome with the Freefly ALTA drone. The results are lovely:
And here’s a glimpse behind the scenes:
“Camera Restricta” prevents shooting unoriginal photos
Got a case of vemödalen (“the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist”)? Or perhaps you’ve just wanted a camera that sounds like a Geiger counter while blurting “NEIN” at you in big red letters?
Philipp Schmitt’s Camera Restricta concept wants to help. PetaPixel explains,
“Camera Restricta introduces new limitations to prevent an overflow of digital imagery,” he says. “As a byproduct, these limitations also bring about new sensations like the thrill of being the first or last person to photograph a certain place.”
[Vimeo]
Help refugees & Google will match your gift
Googler Rita Masoud (who fled Afghanistan with her family) writes,
To double the impact of your contribution, we’ll match the first €5 million (~$5.5 million) in donations globally, until together we raise €10 million (~$11 million) for relief efforts.
Your donation will be distributed to four nonprofits providing aid to refugees and migrants: Doctors Without Borders, International Rescue Committee, Save the Children, and UN High Commissioner for Refugees. These nonprofits are helping deliver essential assistance—including shelter, food and water, and medical care—and looking after the security and rights of people in need.
Visit google.com/refugeerelief to make your donation. Thank you for giving.
I feel very privileged to work alongside the folks who are making this happen.