Happy Chinese New Year from above Yunnan, China:

The intriguing reversal of footage reminds me of this beautifully sad passage from Slaughterhouse Five:

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

Ricardo Martin Brualla works at Google Seattle with my fellow Adobe alum Dan Goldman (who—small world—sat across the street at Adobe when he implemented Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5). Anyway, Ricardo recently worked some imaging magic on 360º imagery captured at the top of the Space Needle. Check out the timelapses that resulted:

[YouTube]

The smart folks responsible for HDR+ on the Pixel 2 are sharing a big dataset in order to help other developers create better high-dynamic-range imagery:

Today we’re pleased to announce the public release of an archive of image bursts to the research community. This provides a way for others to compare their methods to the results of Google’s HDR+ software running on the same input images. This dataset consists of 3,640 bursts of full-resolution raw images, made up of 28,461 individual images, along with HDR+ intermediate and final results for comparison.

[O]ur hope is that a shared dataset will enable the community to concentrate on comparing results. This approach is intrinsically more efficient than expecting researchers to configure and run competing techniques themselves, or to implement them from scratch if the code is proprietary. 

According to a recent survey, more than 40% of people under 33 prioritize “Instagrammability” when choosing their next holiday spot. Of course, a ton of the results look incredibly similar, perhaps inducing cases of vemödalen (“the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist”). They’re so repetitive, in fact, that Google researchers have built 3D timelapses from overlapping imagery.

Maybe more people need a “Camera Restricta” to “prevent shooting unoriginal photos.” Or maybe we shouldn’t sweat it, because “there are many like it, but this one is mine,” and because “in the end we shall all be dead.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Via]

“Impedance mismatch.” It’s a funny little phrase to hear in everyday conversation, but one that Winston Hendrickson—longtime VP of engineering for Photoshop and many other Adobe efforts, friend and mentor to more people than I could possibly count—liked to sprinkle into chats. He’d use it to flag things that just didn’t make sense, little disconnects in the universe.

I’ve been thinking of it ever since learning yesterday that Winston had passed away following a long illness. I still can’t believe I’m typing these words. Something in the universe feels disconnected, out of phase.

As the dozens of remembrances now flooding Facebook can tell you, Winston was a beloved dad, respected leader, and passionate photographer. After years at Apple leading teams that began the Mac OS turnaround, he’d spent more than 17 years driving development at Adobe. We worked closely together to launch Adobe Bridge, helping tie together the very first version of Creative Suite.

I was a bit surprised later when Winston came over to lead Adobe’s digital imaging teams. I hadn’t realized that on any given weekend you’d likely find him lugging a 600mm lens & big SLR to his daughters’ softball games, an auto race at Laguna Seca, or a photo walk up California’s coastline. Photography took him from Tasmania to Antarctica and beyond, shooting everything from modern dance to SWAT teams in training. (See more here & here.) Winston had that special quality that distinguishes many key leaders at Adobe—a deep and passionate connection to the work, the tools, and most importantly the fellow practitioners we felt privileged to call customers.

I haven’t seen Winston in just over a year, since the day he dropped by to help my kids and many others explore some new Adobe augmented reality tools. He was exactly as he’d always been, looking good & always ready to share a salty joke. (Whenever we’d hear self-congratulation getting a little thick over the years, we loved deflating it by invoking Pulp Fiction’s Winston Wolf: “Well, let’s not start…” I’ve gotta think he’d laugh out loud hearing that reference stuck in a eulogy.)

Therefore yesterday’s news came as a shock. “The only easy day was yesterday,” said a sign on Winston’s door. Well, yesterday wasn’t.

I’ve struggled to write any kind of worthwhile tribute, to find some Big & Meaningful Theme. Listening to colleagues’ and friends’ remembrances, though, I’ve started to think more in terms of a mosaic: we all reach back across time, pulling up whatever bunch of shining fragments we can, and we lay them together to draw the outlines of a life.

“Should you live for your résumé or your eulogy?” Winston’s life showed how one can serve both, and we’re all blessed for it. Thanks for everything, big guy, and safe travels. —J.

Captivating work from Mike Olbinski. Happy Friday.

Breathe is made up solely of storm clips from 2017…either from the spring across the central plains or from the monsoon here in the southwest. Some are favorites, some are just ones I knew would be amazing in monochrome and others I used because they fit the music so well.

[YouTube] [Via]

Bogdan Teodorescu is killin’ it once again.

[Via]

Marc Levoy has been one of the key leaders behind Google’s recent advances in computational photography, including portrait mode & HDR+. He’s also a professor emeritus at Stanford, and in this lecture series, he offers a very thorough, technical education in digital photography—for free.

The only knowledge I assume is enough facility and comfort with mathematics that you’re not afraid to see the depth-of-field formula in all its glory, and an integral sign here or there won’t send you running for the hills. Some topics will require concepts from elementary probability and statistics (like mean and variance), but I define these concepts in lecture. I also make use of matrix algebra, but only at the level of matrix multiplication. Finally, an exposure to digital signal processing or Fourier analysis will give you a better intuition for some topics, but it is not required.

[YouTube] [Via]

Cue the Keystone Kops: Kayaker-turned-photographer Raphael Boudreault-Simard cranked up the frame rate & applied a faux tilt-shift effect to drone footage. Enjoy!

[YouTube] [Via]

Whoa—the FITT360 is a trip. Let’s hope it’s more successful than neck belts.

Drew Geraci takes us on a beautiful, 1000x-closer tour of the not-so-ordinary world:

 Drew writes,

Since I was capturing motion now everything needed to be 100% completely still. This was the hard part at 1000x magnification. I must have filmed the same sequence 10 or 20 times before I got a completely still and usable shot. The slightest vibration could easily ruin the scene.

The next challenge was lightning. Capturing video via a microscope requires a ton of light and the microscope’s light is only so powerful. Each bulb only lasted for up to 3 hours at max power before they would die. I must have gone through 8 or 9 bulbs during the course of filming (and they’re not cheap bulbs!). Because of this, I needed to rig up external lightning that could help illuminate the scene. I ended up using a small Manfrotto Lykos light which did the trick.

[Vimeo] [Via]

An immense, whooshing kinetic sculpture darts over the Netherlands, brought to you by thousands of beating hearts & flapping wings:

The art of flying is a short film about “murmurations”: the mysterious flights of the Common Starling. It is still unknown how the thousands of birds are able to fly in such dense swarms without colliding. Every night the starlings gather at dusk to perform their stunning air show.

Because of the relatively warm winter of 2014/2015, the starlings stayed in the Netherlands instead of migrating southwards. This gave filmmaker Jan van IJken the opportunity to film one of the most spectacular and amazing natural phenomena on earth.

[Vimeo] [Via]

 Animator Ismael Sanz-Pena used a single image to create this mesmerizing animation. He tells Colossal,

The idea behind the film was to find the innate movement inherit in still forms. Every sculpture has movement in it, and it is the task of the animator to discover it. It was through the process of editing my imagery that I discovered that a single image would suffice to create the animation. The film was made by zooming into the image and panning row by row while making sure that different architectural motives aligned in every increment. This also gave a structure to the film.

[Vimeo] [Via]

Lovely: Erick Flores Garnelo traveled around Guadalajara, capturing & selectively un-freezing little slices of life:

[Via] [Vimeo]
 

“Being early is the same as being wrong,” says Marc Andreessen. True enough.

I have to admit that when I saw Photoshop’s “new” 360º photo-editing feature, I was a little miffed at the positioning: we shipped almost the same exact thing nine years ago. PS has now bolted on a few menu items to make access more obvious, but otherwise the tech appears largely unchanged.

I get it, though. Nine years ago, how would one create such an image (tripod, SLR, stitching package?) and where would one use it? Now the ecosystem is radically different: You can capture an image in an instant via a Theta or similar cam (or even a drone!), or you can capture one with any smartphone, and you can make them interactively explorable by millions of people via Facebook. So yeah, viewed through that lens, I get it, and I hope that orders of magnitude more people find this feature useful this time around. ⚪️💪

Speaking of tech ahead of its time (?), I hope that wearable capture devices will become practical & enable the kind of experience that Googlers Blaise Agüera y Arcas & Noah Snavely pioneered at Microsoft:

[YouTube]

Days of miracles & wonder, part 6,392…

Today, we’re excited to announce our latest AIY Project, the Vision Kit. It’s our first project that features on-device neural network acceleration, providing powerful computer vision without a cloud connection. […]

The provided software includes three TensorFlow-based neural network models for different vision applications. One based on MobileNets can recognize a thousand common objects, a second can recognize faces and their expressions and the third is a person, cat and dog detector. We’ve also included a tool to compile models for Vision Kit, so you can train and retrain models with TensorFlow on your workstation or any cloud service.

You can pre-order it here. 

Mmm—who wants techno-smores, just like mom used to make?

I can hardly believe that this little GoPro toughed it out, continuing to record even while catching on fire—but that’s indeed the story. Good stuff starts around 1:25 here:

[YouTube]

Does Google seem like exactly the kind of company that would celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Guggenheim Bilbao by commissioning a freerunner to launch off the iconic facades & carom around monumental works by Richard Serra? Why yes, yes it does. Explore the museum via Google Arts & Culture, and go behind the scenes of the short film below here.

[YouTube]

Julian Tryba scripts After Effects to produce carefully segmented, meticulously choreographed “layer lapses” that produce a “visual time dilation” that juxtaposes the same scene shot at different times of day. Here, just check it out:

You can read more about the project on PetaPixel:

Tryba visited NYC 22 times, drove 9988 miles, spent 352 hours shooting 232,000 photos with 6 cameras (5 Canon DSLRs and a Sony a7R II) and 11 different lenses, and paid $1,430 in parking fees.

Get vertigo a go-go as this drone pilot goes spinning in infinity:

Orbital drone movements are the ones with power to convert two-dimensional images into dancing focal layers escaping out of the frame. We wanted to further explore the technique, with high altitude long orbits, along with ones very close to the ground, we call them “Orbital drone-lapses”. These shots are a mix of automatic and manual flights. 

“The shots were done using both automatic and manual flights over the Folegandros island in Greece,” notes PetaPixel.

[Vimeo]

I see echoes of The Upside Down in these beautiful macro videos (and still images) showing chemical processes unfolding:

When a piece of metal salt is dropped in the solution of sodium silicate, a membrane of insoluble metal silicate is formed. Due to the osmotic pressure, water enters the membrane and breaks it, generating more insoluble membranes. This cycle repeats and the salt grows into all kinds of interesting forms. This film recorded the osmotic growth of 6 salts inside sodium silicate solution. The growth is so life-like, no wonder Stéphane Leduc thought it might have something to do with the mechanism life over 100 years ago.

[Vimeo 1 and 2]

Mike Krainin & Ce Liu go into detail about how optical flow techniques are helping Google Street View produce panoramas that are not only freer of artifacts, but easier for machines to read (producing a better understanding of business names, hours, etc.):

I wonder whether these techniques might be useful to pano-stitching in apps like Photoshop & Lightroom. I’ve passed the info their way.

[YouTube]

Happy Thursday.

On extremely rare days cold air is trapped in the canyon and topped by a layer of warm air, which in combination with moisture and condensation, form the phenomenon referred to as the full cloud inversion. In what resembles something between ocean waves and fast clouds, Grand Canyon is completely obscured by fog, making the visitors feel as if they are walking on clouds.

[Via Bryan Lamkin]

Heh—I’ve seen stuff like this done before, but props to Max Lanman for taking lifestyle marketing somewhere new. I love that the eBay link is http://bit.ly/luxuryisastateofmind, and that the car is now commanding a bid of $150,000!

[YouTube]

I am delighted to share this news:

DxO plans to continue development of the Nik Collection. The current version will remain available for free on DxO’s dedicated website, while a new “Nik Collection 2018 Edition” is planned for mid-next year.

“The Nik Collection gives photographers tools to create photos they absolutely love,” said Aravind Krishnaswamy, an Engineering Director with Google. “We’re thrilled to have DxO, a company dedicated to high-quality photography solutions, acquire and continue to develop it.”

DxO is already integrating Nik tech into their apps:

The new version of our flagship software DxO OpticsPro, which is available as of now under its new name DxO PhotoLab, is the first embodiment of this thrilling acquisition with built-in U Point technology (video).

Having known them as Photoshop developers, I was always a big fan of the Nik crew & their tech. (In fact, their acquisition by Google was instrumental in making me consider working here.) I wanted to acquire them at Adobe, and I was always afraid that Apple would do so & put U Point into Aperture! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The desktop plug-ins, however, were never a great fit for Google’s mobile/cloud photo strategy, and other than Analog Efex, none had been improved since 2011 (more than a year before Google acquired them). I know that Aravind Krishnaswamy (badass photog, Photoshop vet, eng manager for Google Photos) and other went many extra miles to find a good new home for the Nik Collection, and I’m really excited to see what DxO can do with it. On behalf of photographers everywhere, thanks guys!

“Wearable camera” is a relative term, but props to the brave souls who schlepped up to within 500 miles of the North Pole:

Last summer, our team threw on the Google Trekker and explored the park’s incredible terrain—it was the furthest north Street View has ever gone. Wilderness and extreme isolation characterize this area, where fewer than 50 people visit each year. The park’s name itself translates to “the top of the world” in Inuktitut, the local indigenous language.

Check out the 360º images they captured. 

[YouTube]

Levon Bliss combines thousands of captures to create each of his “microscuplture” portraits of insects. Check out this brief overview:

If that’s up your alley, check out his TED talk as well—not to mention this year’s winners of Nikon’s Small World photography contest. For those not interested in having terrifying nightmares, I’ll thoughtfully omit the giant close-up of a tapeworm head. 🙂

Photographer Levon Biss was looking for a new, extraordinary subject when one afternoon he and his young son popped a ground beetle under a microscope and discovered the wondrous world of insects. Applying his knowledge of photography to subjects just five millimeters long, Biss created a process for shooting insects in unbelievable microscopic detail. He shares the resulting portraits — each comprised of 8- to 10,000 individual shots — and a story about how inspiration can come from the most unlikely places.

[Vimeo] [Via Peyman Milanfar]

“A humble thing, but thine own,” Vin Scully used to say, and I’m happy to note that one of the photography-related features I helped shepherd through during my time on enterprise social has launched.

Photographers told us that the new Web UI for Google+, while welcome for offering features like zoom & photo sphere support, made it harder to see the context on photos & to have conversations around them. That’s now changed, providing a better balance between image & context. G+ tech lead Leo Deegan writes,

Over the next few days, we’ll be rolling out a new version of the photo lightbox on Google+ Web. The new lightbox, which appears for photos that are part of single-photo posts (not yet for multi-photo posts), places a greater emphasis on the photo caption and comments.

There are a couple of reasons why I’m happy about this new lightbox. First, the EXIF data (found in the “Show information” menu item) brings back the display of the photo date; the previous lightbox displayed the post date. And second, clicking on the back arrow brings you to the post no matter how you arrive at the lightbox (people who found their way to a lightbox without being able to get to the post know what I’m talking about).

This looks clever & promising:

What may appeal to most people here is the use of the OverCapture built into the GoPro app… It allows you to manually select an area of the film, following your subject, to pick out the best angles and export it as a normal, non-360° 1080p video.

This means that you can shoot a 360 video and turn it into something like this:

[YouTube]

Remember when the yellow first-down line was the height of game-time badassery? Details here are scant, but this looks like a trip:

PetaPixel writes,

The system would require a number of high-resolution cameras mounted in various places around the stadium. Each camera is connected to a network and controlled by software. Afterward, the video viewpoints are fed into an image processing engine that turns it into high-resolution 3D spatial data.

[YouTube]

Tommy played piano like a kid out in the rain
then he lost his leg in Dallas he was dancin’ with a train 

Man, I thought that my flying a drone off the back of a boat on the Mississippi was risky—but that seems laughably sane compared to Paul Nurkkala flying his drone flying onto, next to, inside, and under a moving freight train.

If you can’t take the queasy-making camera moves, jump to 3:20 to go underneath & 3:30 to go inside:

PetaPixel writes,

Nurkkala specializes in flying camera drones through a first-person point-of-view using a live feed through goggles. His custom-assembled drone was equipped with a GoPro HERO5 Session action camera, which is light enough to keep the craft fast and nimble.

“I recognize that this isn’t the most ‘flowy’ video or anything, but all of the things were all in the same flight, so I wanted to show that off,” Nurkkala writes.

Madness.

[YouTube]

Groovy:

Starting today you’re invited to explore a global map of crowdsourced photos in Google Earth

To get started, open the Google Earth app on Android and iOS, or go to Google Earth in your Chrome browser on desktop. Open the main menu and turn on the Photos toggle. As you explore the world and zoom in, relevant photos from each location will appear. Click on any thumbnail to see a full-screen version of the photo, and then flip through related photos.

[Via]

Look at how far the cameras & rigs have come in the 10 years since Google Street View debuted…

…and take a deeper look at what’s rolling out next:

[YouTube 1 & 2]

Scientists at UW Madison observed the eclipse through the eye of one of the world’s most advanced weather satellites, GOES-16. The eclipse images from the satellite were taken at a rate of one every five minutes, then stitched together:

[Via]

Elsewhere, Liem Bahneman loaded four cameras (three stills, including a Ricoh Theta 360, plus a GoPro) onto a high-altitude and shot what the total solar eclipse looks like from the edge of space. PetaPixel writes,

The 9-minute video above is what one camera recorded over Central Oregon. […] He launched the balloon shortly before totality pass over the state. As you’ll see in the video, the cameras were able to capture the shadow of the moon creeping across the land and plunging everything into darkness for minutes during totality. At around 5 and 7 minutes, you can hear the sounds of jets flying over the mountains below.

How exactly Rob Whitworth pulls off these vertiginous shots (drones, lifts, hidden cameras?), I couldn’t tell you, but it’s a fun breakneck tour no matter what:

Probably the world’s first cathedral flow motion. Something of a passion project for me getting to shoot my home town and capture it in it’s best light. Constructed in 1096 Norwich Cathedral dominates the Norwich skyline to this day. Was super cool getting to explore all the secret areas whilst working on the video.

[Via]

Google partnered with UC Berkeley and The Astronomical Society of the Pacific to create the Megamovie. Here’s how it all went down:

Over 1,300 citizen scientists spread out across the path of totality with their cameras ready to photograph the sun’s corona during the few minutes that it would be visible, creating an open-source dataset that can be studied by scientists for years to come. Learn about their efforts, and catch a glimpse of totality, in this video. Spoiler alert: for about two minutes, it gets pretty dark out.

Check out the results: 

This is a small preview of the larger dataset, which will be made public shortly. It will allow for improved movies like this and will provide opportunities for the scientific community to study the sun for years to come.

[YouTube 1 & 2] [Via]