Bruce Berry (not Neil Young’s late roadie) created some beautiful time lapse imagery from images captured aboard the International Space Station:

On Vimeo he writes,

All footage has been edited, color graded, denoised, deflickered, stabilized by myself. Some of the 4K video clips were shot at 24frames/sec reflecting the actual speed of the space station over the earth. Shots taken at wider angels were speed up a bit to match the flow of the video.

Some interesting facts about the ISS: The ISS maintains an orbit above the earth with an altitude of between 330 and 435 km (205 and 270 miles). The ISS completes 15.54 orbits per day around the earth and travels at a speed of 27,600 km/h; 17,100 mph).

The yellow line that you see over the earth is Airgolw/Nightglow. Airglow/Nightglow is a layer of nighttime light emissions caused by chemical reactions high in Earth’s atmosphere. A variety of reactions involving oxygen, sodium, ozone, and nitrogen result in the production of a very faint amount of light (Keck A and Miller S et al. 2013).

I love the choice of music & wondered whether it comes from Dunkirk. Close: that somewhat anxious tock-tock undertone is indeed a Hans Zimmer jam, but from 20 years earlier (The Thin Red Line).

[YouTube]

I’m bemused/amused to see this once-obscure (to non-speakers of Japanese) term now getting verbed in an Apple ad that’s racked up nearly 20 million views since Friday. (“This is the strangest life I’ve ever known…”)

[YouTube] [Via]

Holy crap! Now my stuff looks positively lethargic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, but what the heck, strap in & enjoy:

DIY Photography writes,

Johnny Schaer (Johnny FPV) is a pro drone racer. His drones are designed to be light, quick, nimble, fly upside down and through all kinds of crazy flightpaths that DJI’s drones could never achieve. And when somebody with the skill of Johnny turns on the camera, that’s when you get results like the video above.

To shoot the footage, Johnny used a drone built around the AstroX X5 Freestyle Frame (JohnnyFPV edition, obviously) frame with a GoPro Hero 7. It has no GPS, no gimbal, no stabilisation, no collision avoidance, none of those safety features that make more commercial drones predictable and easy to fly. 

[YouTube]

“Enhance!” The latest changes in Camera Raw & Lightroom promise to improve the foundational step in raw processing:

The composite red, green, and blue value of every pixel in a digital photo is created through a process is called demosaicing.

Enhance Details uses an extensively trained convolutional neural net (CNN) to optimize for maximum image quality. We trained a neural network to demosaic raw images using problematic examples […] As a result, Enhance Details will deliver stunning results including higher resolution and more accurate rendering of edges and details, with fewer artifacts like false colors and moiré patterns. […]

We calculate that Enhance Details can give you up to 30% higher resolution on both Bayer and X-Trans raw files using Siemens Star resolution charts.

Hmm—I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the resolution claim, at least based on the results shown (which depict an appreciable but not earth-shattering change). Having said that, I haven’t put the tech to the test, but I look forward to doing so.

For more info check out the related help doc plus some deep nerdery on how it all works.

Almost looks deceivingly pleasant & prosperous in these lovely aerials:

Pyongyang is by far the weirdest and strangest place I have ever been to. At the same time it’s also one of the the most interesting and intriguing places and unlike anywere else I have ever been to. You go there with 100 questions and you return with 1000!

[YouTube] [Via]

Bring on the night.

[For a much deeper comparison, see my earlier post.]

[YouTube]

Heh—I love the fun that Cuban fashion brand Clandestina is having with the Chrome “no internet” dino. Here he dodges palm trees, pineapples, and old Chevys before finally colliding with his nemesis, connectivity (“3G”). 

[YouTube]

I am, as the kids would say, there for this documentary:

The film is comprised entirely of archival footage and audio:

Miller and his team collaborated with NASA and the National Archives (NARA) to locate all of the existing footage from the Apollo 11 mission. In the course of sourcing all of the known imagery, NARA staff members made a discovery that changed the course of the project — an unprocessed collection of 65mm footage, never before seen by the public. Unbeknownst to even the NARA archivists, the reels contained wide format scenes of the Saturn V launch, the inside of the Launch Control Center and post-mission activities aboard the USS Hornet aircraft carrier.

The find resulted in the project evolving from one of only filmmaking to one of also film curation and historic preservation. The resulting transfer — from which the documentary was cut — is the highest resolution, highest quality digital collection of Apollo 11 footage in existence.

I also loved this music video made using mission audio & imagery:

[YouTube 1 & 2] [Via]

Kind of a neat little app that uses iPhone depth data to segment images & create double exposures:

Terrific work from Tarsicio Sañudo, who according to PetaPixel “shot thousands of RAW photos with his DJI Mavic 2 Pro over the course of two months.” He mentions using After Effects for post-capture stabilization.

[YouTube] [Via]