Whoa—songs of ice & fire:

“We probably could have done this digitally, but we actually shot all of this practically in a studio” says Alan Dye, Apple Vice President of User Interface Design, of the motion faces. “What I love about the fact that we did this is that it’s just so indicative of how the design team works. It was really about bringing together some of our various talents to create these faces. There are of course art directors, and color experts, and graphic designers, but also model makers who helped build these structures that we would eventually, you know, set on fire.”

[YouTube]

Photoshop’s venerable (oh God, how can it already be venerable?!) Content-Aware Phil is growing up nicely, as seen in this new sneak peek from my friend Meredith. I look forward to seeing whether the increased power/finesse more than offsets the apparent jump in complexity—as I expect it will.

[YouTube]

When I first bought a drone, I naively assumed that one could traverse the camera independent of body orientation. Now that’s possible, if not entirely discoverable: just swipe!

[YouTube]

Sorry if I’m laying it on a bit thick with the drone bits lately, but I find these focused, bite-sized tutorials to be a great way to learn:

Here’s the gist of the vid above:

Also, here’s a great tour of using Active Track to follow one’s vehicle (including orbiting it in a circle as it drives—amazing!).

[YouTube 1 & 2]

I haven’t been this excited about a consumer electronics product since… well, the first Mavic!

So, Pro vs. Zoom—or should you buy one at all? I found this overview from our friendly Scottish chap helpful. (Spoiler: I went Pro.)

[YouTube 1 & 2]

Rather brilliant. Check out the story on PetaPixel, and if you’re feeling amorous, place your order here (starting in September).

[YouTube]

NASA, using a digital 3D model of the Moon built from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter global elevation maps and image mosaics, produced this lovely tour of our nearby neighbor. The lighting is derived from actual Sun angles during lunar days in 2018.

The filmmakers write,

The visuals were composed like a nature documentary, with clean cuts and a mostly stationary virtual camera. The viewer follows the Sun throughout a lunar day, seeing sunrises and then sunsets over prominent features on the Moon. The sprawling ray system surrounding Copernicus crater, for example, is revealed beneath receding shadows at sunrise and later slips back into darkness as night encroaches.

[YouTube] [Via]

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past…”

Sitting in my parents’ house, surrounded by my dad’s old college books and mine, I’m struck by a certain melancholy—a mix of memory, gratitude, and loss. As it happens, Margot just told me about Insta Repeat, a feed that catalogs the repetitiousness of Instagram photography. This makes me think of “vemödalen” (“the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist”)—and just searching this blog for that term shows my current unoriginality in its use:

• Endless Instagram repetition, the musical!
• Google researchers discover time lapses by data-mining millions of photos
• “Camera Restricta” prevents shooting unoriginal photos
• Membit: “Pokémon Go for your Memories”
• “I’m not like everybody else”—except, well…

Ah well—so it goes. Until next time…

[YouTube]