Whoa:

As PetaPixel put it when describing an older clip,

Since each frame has to ensure the blade is in the same position as the last it therefore needs to be in sync with the rpm of the rotar blades. Shutter speed then needs to be fast enough to freeze the blade without too much motion blur within each frame.

Here the rotor has five blades, now lets say the rpm of the rotor is 300. That means, per rotation, a blade is in a specific spot on five counts. That gives us an effective rpm of 1500. 1500rpm / 60secs = 25.

Therefore shooting at 25fps will ensure the rotor blades are shot in the same position every frame. Each frame then has to be shot at a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the blade for minimal motion blur.

Tangentially related: Lance Armstrong cycling without pedaling:

[YouTube] [Via]

The show is (of course) a glorious feast for the eyes (and for various lions, serpents, and parasitic wasps; “red in tooth & claw,” man), and the tech and processes that go into making it are just as amazing:

[YouTube]

Start your day in the coldly gorgeous seas of Iceland:

Far closer to my home, here’s footage I wish I shot that captures the collapse of Skyline Boulevard…

…and the flooding of Vasona Park:

[YouTube 1 & 2]

Combining swappable lenses with a choice of battery sizes, the Moment 2.0 case for iPhone 7 (currently Kickstarting) seems really thoughtfully designed (especially the two-stage, SLR-like shutter release button). I’m eager to try it out, but it seems compelling enough that I might sign on sight-unseen. [Via Josh Haftel]

The ever-custom Casey Neistat takes us on a 360º flight as he snowboards behind a huge bespoke drone:

Elsewhere, what the hell was I doing walking my bike through hundreds of yards of flooded underpass yesterday? Clearly I should’ve been surfing, pulled along my the invisible hand of the… what, exactly? I dunno, just watch:

[Vimeo]

“Yeah, but you know me,” I told my wife: “I’d be so entranced watching this stuff, I’d stare until the lava was oozing up my disintegrating leg.” Aaanyway…

The filmmakers write,

“Hawaii – The Pace of Formation” is a window into the creation of an island. The Kilauea Volcano’s continued flow of lava into the ocean is one of the few places in the world to provide a front row seat of an island’s formation. The Big Island is literally changing before your eyes. This vast island contains 8 out of 13 different climate zones in the world, each with unique ecosystems, making the Big Island one of the most ecologically diverse places in the world. To showcase its diversity, we wanted to slow things down and let its beauty speak for itself. Enjoy!

And here’s a peek behind the scenes:

[Vimeo 1 & 2]

Polar Steps is an app that promises to make interactive & printed travel journals by leveraging the data your phone captures. It looks very cool & I’ve turned it on, but sadly it seems unable to gather data from past trips.

Meanwhile Relive is a hosted service that can auto-generate movies like this from your Strava/Garmin data + photos:  

[YouTube]

If you’d asked, “Hey man, what looks to be a beautiful, modern city that’d lend itself to great overhead timelapse photography?,” I can’t say that “Minsk!” would’ve popped off my tongue. But that’s before Artem Pryadko stepped up :

[Vimeo] [Via]

I’m suddenly having technicolor flashbacks to getting hosed on Holi by Nepalese orphans….

There’s lots of good stuff in this crazy vid from The Slow-Mo guys as they detonate 25 airbags full of colorful powder, but things largely get rocking around the 4:00 and 7:00 marks.

[YouTube]

Wow: Graphic design student Matteo Archondis labored to create this 2-minute tour of the planet using only images he snagged from Earth:

PetaPixel writes,

In all, the hyperlapse contains some 3,300 screenshots captured over the course of 2 days, and edited together in a grueling post-processing workflow that took another week after that…

“Thanks to the developer tools of Google Chrome, I was able to remove all the items that interfered with the user experience,” explains Archondis. “I also removed the labels so that the final image could be as clean and realistic as possible, so that I could concentrate on the camera movements as if it was in real life.”

[YouTube]

Recently appointed UN Goodwill Ambassador Nikolaj Coster-Waldau recently donned a Trekker backpack & walked around Greenland (his second home) to share its beauty and raise awareness about climate change. Check out the interactive 360º results.

Wow—this paper (don’t worry, I’m not going to read it either) promises to recreate face data from extremely low-res images. As Yonatan Zunger explains,

[I]t takes a pixelated image, and uses the fact that it knows it’s looking at a human face, and what human faces look like, to turn each pixel into a 4×4 grid of its best guess of which colors would have to have been there to both be consistent with a face shape and with the average color it saw.

On the right are the original pictures, at 32×32 resolution. On the left is what happens after they’re reduced down to 8×8, the sort of thing you would get when a camera is at the limit of its resolution. In the middle is what their algorithm recovered.

Hmm—do I file this one under “mobile”? I mean, technically… Check it out, or read on for details.

[Vimeo]

This promises to be rather glorious:

[YouTube]

Jorge Luengo Ruiz, whom we have to thank for pulling together yesterday’s Disney compendium, has culled nearly 50 years’ worth of Scorsese films into this supercut of a defining perspective:

I’m pleased to say that by very popular demand, you can now really enjoy the details of high-resolution images shared on Google+ by zooming in via your Web browser. This feature—previously available only via the classic Web experience—is now part of the new G+.

With large images (e.g. try these) you can start zooming in by:

• Clicking the zoom button
• Tapping the ‘Z’ key
• Using your mouse wheel (or two-finger drag)
• Double clicking on the photo
• Pinching on the photo (via touchscreen/touchpad)

Once the image is zoomed in, you can:

• Use ‘+’ key and ‘-‘ keys (plus without shift) to zoom in/out incrementally
• Use arrow keys to pan around the zoomed image

Enjoy—and “Enhance!”

Great GoPro work by Tim Humphreys:

[Via Rob Christensen]

Lovely work from Dan Marker-Moore:

A video posted by Daily Overview (@dailyoverview) on Jan 15, 2017 at 12:34pm PST

The boys & I keep watching this earworm-laden new spot pimping AirPods, wishing we could see a behind-the-scenes vid (soon, hopefully!):

https://youtu.be/CvVvwh3BRq8

[YouTube]

This looks almost too good to be real. PetaPixel notes, “The one minute and thirty second clip was shot in one continuous take along the east ridge of Switzerland’s Hübschhorn mountain.”

[YouTube] [Via]

I think you’ll enjoy David Drills’s 2-minute glimpse into the world of Gian Luigi Carminati, “a passionate and poetic 76 years old man who spent his entire life repairing cameras.”

In his small workshop in Milan, [Gian Luigi] takes care of old cameras with just a set of screwdrivers and a lot of patience.
We got the chance to spend some time with him and he was happy to share with us topics like why the analog is still better than the digital, his 50 years old long relationship with photography and how technology shaped the approach to this art.
We were deeply touched by these thoughts about photography coming from a self described ‘technician’ instead of a photographer.
With this two minutes video we had the ambition to tell his life through his memories.

Keep your eyes skyward tonight, children: We just may see Casey Neistat buzz by. 🙂

As they note, no one sells a drone capable of lifting a human, so they built their own. Here’s a peek behind the scenes:

If somehow—somehow—all this gets you thinking, “I wonder what it would look like if a Lego guy hacked his own drone to make it rideable”—well brutha, I’ve got you covered.

[YouTube]

Who knew? Thanks, Beauty of Science!

You know Photoshop’s in my blood (and vice versa), but wow, it looks like they’ve got some solid competition on their hands. Check out the new features in Affinity Photo 1.5 (including 32-bit HDR creation and editing, spherical photo editing (which has actually been in Photoshop for 8 years—though I guarantee that no one knows that), focus stacking (ditto), and more.

Do yourself a solid and enjoy the next two minutes:

The beams seek out and outline the vaults of the huge space using a custom system of 48 computer-controlled lights. Designer Adam Heslop, who helped visualize the performance, said it required the studio to develop a whole range of new techniques.

Here’s how it was done:

[Via]

Rob Whitworth has returned with another eye-popping hyperlapse of Turkey:

Experience the towering fairy chimney formations, immense subterranean cities, stone-carved mansions, and inimitable cultural energy that make Cappadocia one of the world’s most unforgettable travel destinations.

Shot in the filmmaker’s signature flow motion style, the video takes viewers on a time-distorting, gravity-defying tour of Cappadocia’s unique natural and manmade attractions, while immersed in a lyrical narrative of the region’s cultural and historical pedigree. Filmed in brilliant 4K resolution using cutting-edge hyperlapse techniques, the video presents one of Turkish Airline’s most amazing destinations as it has never been seen before.

[Vimeo]

On Mac:

The desktop app works only as a screen saver and features native Mac integration. Once installed, ‘Google Featured’ will appear as an option in the Desktop & Screen Saver preferences window… The 7.8 MB app is free and works with macOS 10.9 Mavericks and above.

And on Android:

Featured Photos can be accessed through the Google Wallpapers app launched with the Pixel. Available for all devices, an update rolling out today will add Google+ as a new source to select for your home or lock screen image. The Wallpapers picker will include attributions to allow for easy following in Google+ and allows for auto updating once a day.

[Via]

By day Googler Sriram Murali keeps spam out of your inbox; by night he captures thrilling images of the stars whirling past us—or rather, of us whirling past them:

He writes,

Lost in Light, a short film on how light pollution affects the view of the night skies. Shot mostly in California, the movie shows how the view gets progressively better as you move away from the lights. Finding locations to shoot at every level of light pollution was a challenge and getting to the darkest skies with no light pollution was a journey in itself. Here’s why I think we should care more.

The night skies remind us of our place in the Universe. Imagine if we lived under skies full of stars. That reminder we are a tiny part of this cosmos, the awe and a special connection with this remarkable world would make us much better beings – more thoughtful, inquisitive, empathetic, kind and caring. Imagine kids growing up passionate about astronomy looking for answers and how advanced humankind would be, how connected and caring we’d feel with one another, how noble and adventurous we’d be. How compassionate with fellow species on Earth and how one with Nature we’d feel. Imagine a world where happiness of the soul is more beautiful. Ah, I feel so close to inner peace. I can only wonder how my and millions of other lives would have changed.

On a related note, check out how two towns in Colorado have become a haven for star watchers.

Hats off to the clever & industrious Aric Guite:

The idea began with Aric making a list of his top 30 art directors. He combed through each of their Instagram feeds and selected one iconic photo. Using the photo as inspiration, Aric shot a second photo that complemented the subject matter. The two photos were then posted to Aric’s feed, with each art director tagged along with a caption asking to collaborate. Together, the photos create an entirely fresh and one-of-a-kind promo piece that is unique to each art director.

[Vimeo] [Via]

If you share a picture of a tree in a forest, but no one can see it, did you really share it?

Working at Google, where teams aspire to “three-comma moments” (i.e. reaching 1,000,000,000 users), it’s become overwhelmingly clear to me that all the fancy features in the world don’t mean squat if people can’t access them. And traveling in Nepal, I got a taste of just how slow & expensive connectivity can be. Anything that helps deliver content faster & more cheaply means more democratic access to ideas & inspiration.

That’s why I’ve been really excited about RAISR (“Rapid and Accurate Image Super-Resolution”). The Google Research team writes,

[It’s] a technique that incorporates machine learning in order to produce high-quality versions of low-resolution images. RAISR produces results that are comparable to or better than the currently available super-resolution methods, and does so roughly 10 to 100 times faster, allowing it to be run on a typical mobile device in real-time.

I’ve been championing this tech within the company and—because the research paper is public—encouraging friends at Facebook, Adobe, Apple, and elsewhere to check it out. Fast, affordable access is good for everyone.

It’s funny: I came here to “teach Google Photoshop” (i.e. to make computers see & create like artists), yet if I do my job right here, you’ll never spot a thing. I’ve come to prioritize access far ahead of synthesis. Funny ol’ world.

PS—Obligatory (?) Old Man Nack remark: “In my day, Genuine Fractals, blah blah…”

My old Photoshop boss Kevin used to show a chart that nicely depicted the march of tools from simple & broad (think Clone Stamp) to sharp & purposeful (Healing Brush), smartly tailored to specific needs. I love to see how computer vision is helping to extend that arc, as demonstrated here:

Adobe says SkyReplace uses deep learning to automatically figure out the boundary lines between the sky and the rest of the shot (e.g. buildings and ground). It can then not only swap out the old sky and insert a completely new one, but it can adjust the rest of the photo to take on the same look and feel as the new sky, creating a more realistic look.

The N-up UI reminds me of Photoshop’s early-90’s Variations dialog. Maybe graphically, as well as politically, everything old is new again.

[Via]

I couldn’t take it; I just couldn’t take it.

In 1984, for the first time since 1945 (when my lifelong-fan dad was 5 years old), the Cubs won their division championship & reached the postseason. I remember sitting in the living room with my dad watching Harry Caray call Rick Sutcliffe’s winning pitch on WGN. Holy Cow!!

The Cubs proceeded to take a two-games-to-none lead in the best-of-five series with the San Diego Padres. No problem! Just win one game—one of three!—and they were through to the Series. Then… then they went full-on Cub, and during that fateful game 5 my cousin Andy & I headed upstairs to play Lego boats in the tub while the team blew their lead, the series, their shot. I just couldn’t take it.

And then… this past Wednesday. You know what happened. We went insane.

I’ll be honest, though, and confess just a little melancholy. It’s not 1984, and I’m not a kid watching the game with my dad. I’m thrilled for the team, but I can still tell you more players’ names from ’84 than from ’16. I’ve long lived in California and won’t tell you I follow the game or the team as I once did. The victory is great—amazing!—but… you can’t quite go home again.

Ah, but what if you could, just a little? Thanks to some clever & lightning-fast editing, Budweiser brought back to life that iconic voice of my youth, Harry “Cub fan, Bud man” Caray. Just watch. I can’t stop.

https://youtu.be/nApTGkLd2hs

And Harry, wherever you are, thanks. This Bud’s for you.

[YouTube]

Snapchat often describes itself as being “a camera company,” and clearly Facebook (owning Instagram, and having bought MSQRD), is taking a similar path:

The new camera will be accessible by simply swiping right while you’re looking at your news feed, making it easy to quickly snap a filtered moment to share.

 TechCrunch reports that there will be filters for your face (selfie masks, overlaid graphics, and geofilters), art-themed filters, and filters that “respond to your body’s movements.” 

We’ll have to see, though: A lot of the appeal of Snapchat’s filters has been in their social context: Here today, gone today—transient fun. As I’ve often said, the genius of Instagram was in helping regular people be a bit better, and the genius of Snapchat has been in letting them not care. Posting lasting stuff to FB generally equals caring. But who knows, perhaps like Instagram FB will introduce “here today, gone today” ephemeral stories. (I’d certainly use them.) Interesting times.

[Via]

“There’s no replacement for displacement,” and what’s true in engines holds true for cameras. Polish photographer Miron Bogacki has built his own drones (see PetaPixel for details) that can loft a big DSLR and capture imagery like this:

[YouTube] [Via]

File under Moments of Zen:

Join us for a fly-through of the International Space Station. Produced by Harmonic exclusively for NASA TV UHD, the footage was shot in Ultra High Definition (4K) using a fisheye lens for extreme focus and depth of field.

[Via]

Okay, I hesitated to share this as I’m allergic corporate self-congratulation, but A) it’s some pretty amazing aerial filmmaking (including in thunderstorms!), and B) the chase of the Androids is just so weird—and get only weirder/funnier as it progresses. That detail reminds me of Khoi Vinh’s smart observation from a couple years back:

Apple fans like myself often criticize Google for doing things that Apple would never do, and Smarty Pins is a prime example of that. Aside from being an unfair criticism, it’s pointless. The fact that Google endeavors to produce silly things like this is on the whole a positive thing, I believe. It’s acting according to its own compass, which is what every company should be doing.

Props to Joey Helms & crew.

[Via Alex Osterloh]