The folks behind Moment lenses have launched a new contest & (tiny) festival celebrating travel photography. The vid below is a bit (or a lot) twee-hipster for my old-man tastes, but I thought the whole thing was interesting enough to share:
It’s not high art (never is!), but I had a little fun combining Mavic & iPhone footage with classic War riffs to create this look at our son Henry bombing around the wonderful Victoria’s Cellars Vineyard in a ’52 lowrider Bel Air. (Not pictured: my sudden stop as I realized I was about to fly sideways into some telephone wires.)
Particularly as the uncle of a little dude who uses a wheelchair, this news makes me very happy & proud:
Google announced this morning via blog post that it has partnered with the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation to give away 100,000 Home Mini units to people living with paralysis. The news is designed to mark the 29th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which was signed into law on this day in 1990.
There’s a form on Google’s site for people who qualify and their caregivers. Interested parties must live in the United States to receive a unit.
In this fantastic short titled Spatial Bodies, actual footage of the Osaka skyline is morphed into a physics-defying world of architecture where apartment buildings twist and curve like vines, suspended in the sky without regard for gravity. The film was created by AUJIK, a collaborative of artists and filmmakers that refers to itself as a “mysterious nature/tech cult.”
It removes issues like halos and artifacts at the edges and horizon, allows you to adjust depth of field, tone, exposure and color after the new sky has been dropped in, correctly detects the horizon line and the orientation of the sky to replace, and intelligently “relights” the rest of your photo to match the new sky you just dropped in “so they appear they were taken during the same conditions.”
Check out the article link to see some pretty compelling-looking examples.
Google product teams aspire to “three-comma moments” (i.e. reaching 1,000,000,000 users); congrats to Photos for reaching joining this rarefied club!
Aiming to extend Photos magic to even more people around the world, the team has introduced Gallery Go, a super lightweight app designed for offline use, especially on entry-level phones.
Gallery Go is a new app from Google designed to let people with unreliable internet connections organize and edit their photos. Like Google’s regular Photos app it uses machine learning to organize your photos. You can also use it to auto-enhance your pictures and apply filters. The difference is that Gallery Go is designed to work offline, and takes up just 10MB of space on your phone.