Back when our boys were little, we’d plunge them under our bed covers (which in relative terms seemed like a titanic, undulating mass) in a ridiculous game called “KindaDEEP!” I was reminded of it by this wonderfully weird short film by Charlotte Arene:
[Vimeo]
Aryeh Nirenberg showed Earth’s rotation relative to the Milky Way through “A timelapse of the Milky Way… using an equatorial tracking mount over a period of around 3 hours.”
Eric Brummel created a similar piece at Font’s Point in the Anza-Borrego Desert:
While I wait for my Insta360 One R to arrive, I’m tiding myself over with content like this. I can’t wait to try shooting crazy-looking FPV-style shots without the chaos & risk of making high-speed moves, though I do worry about how this rig might interfere with the drone’s GPS receiver. I guess we’ll see!
[YouTube]
Quick, interesting animation:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B7PGR45oDFg/
In a recent experiment, Prague-based photographer Dan Vojtech decided to try out different focal lengths on the same portrait photo of himself and log the effects it had on it. The difference between 20mm and 200mm are unbelievable. So next time someone says that the camera adds 10 pounds, they’re not entirely wrong – it all depends on the equipment used.
Interestingly, a couple of years back some Adobe & Google researchers unveiled work on “Perspective-Aware Manipulation of Portrait Photos”:
[YouTube] [Via Peyman Milanfar]
From what I’ve tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire…
Wild that this can be captured on what David Lynch might call “your f***ing telephone“; wild too that it’s shared as vertical video (by Apple, which after 10+ years can’t be bothered to make iMovie handle this aspect ratio decently!)
TL;DR: If this works, I’ll be pleasantly shocked.
I left Adobe in early 2014 part due to a mix of fear & excitement about what Google was doing with AI & photography. Normal people generally just want help selecting the best images, making them look good, and maybe creating an album/book/movie from them. Accordingly, in 2013 Google+ launched automatic filtering that attempted to show just one’s best images, along with Auto Enhancement of every image & “Auto Awesomes” (animations, collages, etc.) derived from them. I couldn’t get any of this going at Adobe, and it seemed that Google was on the march (just having bought Nik Software, too), so over I went.
Unfortunately it’s really hard to know what precisely constitutes a “good” image (think shifting emotional valences vs. technical qualities). For consumers one can de-dupe somewhat (showing just one or two images from a burst) and try to screen out really blurry, badly lit images. Even so, even consumers distrust this kind of filtering & always want to look behind the curtain to ensure that the computer hasn’t missed something. Therefore when G+ Photos transitioned into just Google Photos, the feature was dropped & no one said boo. Automatic curation is still used to suggest things like books & albums, but as you may have seen when it’s applied to your own images, results can be hit or miss.
So will pros trust such tech to help them sort through hundreds of similar images? Well… maybe? Canon’s prepping a subscription-based plug-in for the job:
The plugin is powered by the Canon Computer Vision AI engine and uses technical models to select photos based on a number of criteria: sharpness, noise, exposure, contrast, closed eyes, and red eyes. These “technical models” have customizable settings to give you some ability to control the process.
Here it is in action:
[YouTube]
Motion designer Christian Stang combined 400,000 images of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko to produce this sci-fi-yet-real short film:
Man, how great is it that after 35 years in the game (!!), Russell hasn’t lost a bit of his madcap energy. He’s bringing back The Russell Brown Show & starting out in nighttime Tokyo:
The clip above is fun, but the really meaty bits are in the associated tutorials he’s posting to his site; enjoy!
[YouTube]