Okay, yes, my inner cynic says that for-profit art schools churn out more “professional photographers” in a year than such jobs exist in the whole country, and that million-view videos online generally pay their creators just a couple of grand at best. Still, there’s more value in a visual education than just getting a job, and I like the spirit of this narrative (as would Max Fischer):

https://youtu.be/5_LFmQ6eH1I 


[YouTube] [Via Justin Oliver]

Got vertigo? Hate dicey adventures? Dislike fresh perspectives on NYC? Then you’ll likely want to avoid this story of urban exploration from the NYT:

[Vimeo]

The new app captures sound & depth that you can see and hear in virtual reality.

TechCrunch writes,

Cardboard Camera pulls off a bit of trickery to simulate depth within your photos (making near things look near, and far things look far), and then sends slightly different photos to each eye — thereby simulating the appearance of a 3D environment.

It’s not actually 3D, of course — you won’t be able to move around within it. But it’s quite a bit cooler than a flat, static image. Add in Cardboard Camera’s ability to attach sound from the environment to each VR Photo, and it actually starts to feel pretty darn immersive.

Hopefully your turkey-cooking bore no resemblance to this monster, filmed at 2500fps and 1000fps with the Phantom Flex and Phantom Flex 4K. Now the creators just need to add bees.

[YouTube] [Via Scott Valentine]

A meditation on leaving:

Happy Thanksgiving,
J. 

[Vimeo]

Cripes—I remember when we lifted the 30,000-pixel/2GB file size limit in Photoshop. Of this monster undertaking DP Review writes,

Researches from German university Ruhr-Universitat Bochum spent half a decade creating the largest astronomical image created to date, a 46-gigapixel image of the Milky Way, which is now available via an interactive online viewer. The image is made up of 46 billion pixels, and the file weighs in at a hefty 194GB in size… 22,000 Full HD TV screens would be required to display it at its full resolution.

Check out the not-so-easy-to-navigate interface here. [Via Steve Mansfield]

Dios. Friggin. Mío.

On November 15, 2015 Théo Sanson walked nearly 500 meters on a slackline rigged from The Rectory to Castleton Tower in Castle Valley, Utah – likely a new world record. Rigging the line is perhaps as significant a feat as walking it.

Behold:

[Vimeo] [Via]

Because selfie-related activities somehow weren’t dangerous enough already, a Russian gym is teaching people how to use a selfie stick as a weapon:

Their logo is kinda great:

Time for the Russian government to update their Safe Selfies campaign to warn muggers:

[YouTube]

“We will be mosquitoes, flying with an eagle or a condor,” said wingsuited weirdo Yves Rossy of his flight with Vince Reffet and an oh-my-God that’s actually an Airbus A380.

Fun details:

Airbus’ flagship aircraft producing 70,000lbs of thrust from each engine, versus a mere 88 lbs per Jetman engine. The total weight of the plane is 560,000 kg (1.2 million lbs), compared with 150kg ( 331 lbs) per human jet.

If that’s up your alley, check out jetmen going all foo fighter with a B-17:

[YouTube]

This quick illustration shows why digital camera often produce somewhat surreal images when trying to capture fast-moving objects like airplane propellers: 

In the video below, Kenneth Lu shoots a propeller “through a Canon 5D Mk II while varying the shutter speed from 1/30 sec to 1/4000 sec and back.”

[YouTube] [Via]

Gourds, GoPros, and thousand-plus-degree chemical reactions? Now it’s a party:

[YouTube]

Rob Whitworth & team take us on a thrilling high- (and low-) speed zoom through the ancient & iconic city:

PetaPixel notes,

Whitworth spent about 6 weeks shooting the project with his team, with a couple of those weeks spent waiting for the weather to improve. About 295 hours were spent on location for recon and shooting, and 278 were spent afterward in post-production — there were about 71,000 RAW files after shooting was complete, so Whitworth had 3.8 terabytes of data to work through.

Here’s a look behind the scenes at the setup of just one shot:

[YouTube]

Vice has rounded up an interesting set of 7 Hidden Art Secrets That Were Uncovered With Technology.

Check out the rest of the article to read about clever analytical devices like this contraption:

[YouTube] [Via Katrin Eismann]

Check this out:

We’re enabling veterans everywhere to virtually march alongside 20,000 of their fellow servicemen and women in New York City. Google veterans and volunteers are using Google Cardboard to host a virtual Veterans Day march online and in VA hospitals across the country—so that every veteran has the chance to be celebrated and experience the country’s gratitude for their service.

I can’t wait to see the results.

Thank you, veterans, for your service.

After wisely (IMHO) pivoting away from consumer imaging (where the only time most people want to refocus an image is if they’ve screwed up), Lytro is breaking out the big guns with a multi-$100k capture device, the Immerge:

Lytro Immerge is the world’s first professional Light Field solution for cinematic VR, providing lifelike presence for live action VR through Six Degrees of Freedom. It is built from the ground up to seamlessly blend live action and computer graphics (CG) using Light Field data. With configurable capture and playback solutions, it supports a range of new immersive storytelling needs.

Engadget explains,

Basically, think of this giant sphere as a large VR sensor. There are five different layers, and each layer is packed with a ring of 360-degree cameras and sensors. “One of the layers represents somewhere between three and four times the data and resolution of any VR camera that exists today”… [This] allows for accurate horizontal and vertical parallax, which is needed to realistically incorporate CGI elements in the video and have them appear as part of the natural environment.

I can’t wait to see & navigate what it captures.

[Vimeo]

Can a 17-year-old, 2-megapixel Canon DSLR hold its own against the company’s latest 50-megapixel bad boy? Well yeah, kinda! (Just not so much at night.) Jim Goldstein took a D2000 & 5DS to Yosemite & produced an entertaining comparison. Check it out:

Check out PetaPixel for some stills. [YouTube]

Photographer Markus Brunetti has spent years relentlessly honing the craft of capturing, compositing, and printing giant (up to 10’) representations of Europe’s cathedrals. Khoi Vinh writes,

Brunetti creates stunning photographs of European cathedrals from countless source images that he takes and painstakingly composites into photographic equivalents of elevation drawings. The results are intricately unreal; perspective is dramatically flattened, light is almost impossibly even, and all signs of human activity are removed—in effect, Brunetti reconstructs the original architectural ideal that motivated each structure.

Enjoy:

[YouTube]

Be advised, photogs.

The DroneDefender may be our first look at the perfect anti-drone technology. The device, which looks like a modern rifle with an antenna mechanism attached to the front — because that’s basically what it is — uses targeted radio waves to force drones out of the sky. The nondestructive tech “utilizes a non-kinetic solution to defend airspace up to 400m against UAS, such as quadcopters and hexacopters, without compromising safety or risking collateral damage.”

[YouTube] [Via]

I… this makes me giddy, in a more-than-a-little-pukey way:

Haven’t had enough? Try a BASE jump off the Burj Khalifa pinnacle:

[YouTube 1 & 2] [Via RC Concepcion]

“I was so inspired by the recent release of the Apollo Archives,” Tom Kucy tells PetaPixel, “that I decided these would be interesting to be seen in motion as if straight out of a science fiction movie. I used Adobe After Effects and Photoshop to bring some of the best photos (1960’s) to life.” I love the meditative effect:

In a totally different vein, but using the same assets, is this rather hyperkinetic stop motion piece:


 [Vimeo 1 & 2]

• “Kipp Teague of the Project Apollo Archives has been working since 1999,” reports FastCo, “to digitize the film (his is a private endeavor, not a NASA-sponsored initiative) and has recently released over 8,000 high-resolution, unprocessed photographs to a Flickr album.”
• Meanwhile Yale has made 170,000 Library of Congress photos(shot 1935 to 1945) available via their Photogrammar site. According to the project site, “The Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) produced some of the most iconic images of the Great Depression and World War II and included photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein who shaped the visual culture of the era both in its moment and in American memory. Unit photographers were sent across the country. The negatives were sent to Washington, DC. The growing collection came to be known as ‘The File.’ With the United State’s entry into WWII, the unit moved into the Office of War Information and the collection became known as the FSA-OWI File.” [Via]

Now I’m dying to see a little 3D-printed Russell Brown go for a similar spin:

[YouTube] [Via]

“There’s no replacement for displacement,” and there’s no substitute for physical optical stabilization (as featured on the iPhone 6s Plus but not the regular 6s). Check out side-by-side results recorded at 4k res:

Yet another reason there’s zero chance I’d consider choosing the smaller device. Zero.


[YouTube]

Mitch Martinez arrayed 48 DSLRs, a RED Epic, and a Panasonic GH4 to capture a pair of fire artists practicing their craft. I love the CGI-free results, though I wish he’d found a way to vary the capture times just slightly in order to preserve a touch of motion while shifting perspective.

A quick time lapse of the rig being assembled:


 [Vimeo 1 & 2] [Via]

Christopher Herwig finds weird, austere beauty on the steppes:

Photographer Christopher Herwig has been hunting bus stops in remote corners of the former Soviet Union since he stumbled upon them while biking to St. Petersburg in 2002. He has covered more than 30,000 km by car, bus and taxi in 13 countries discovering and documenting these strange works of art created behind the Iron Curtain. From the shores of the Black Sea to the endless Kazakh steppe, the bus stops show the range of public art from the Soviet era and give a rare glimpse into the creative minds of the time. Herwig’s series attracted considerable media interest around the world, and now with the project complete, the full collection will be presented in Soviet Bus Stops as a deluxe, limited edition, hard cover photo book. The book represents the most comprehensive and diverse collection of Soviet bus stop design ever assembled.

[Vimeo] [Via]

Brooklyn Aerials shot “Nostalgia” using a RED Epic Dragon Monochrome with the Freefly ALTA drone. The results are lovely:

And here’s a glimpse behind the scenes:

[Vimeo 1 & 2] [Via]

Got a case of vemödalen (“the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist”)? Or perhaps you’ve just wanted a camera that sounds like a Geiger counter while blurting “NEIN” at you in big red letters?

Philipp Schmitt’s Camera Restricta concept wants to help. PetaPixel explains,

“Camera Restricta introduces new limitations to prevent an overflow of digital imagery,” he says. “As a byproduct, these limitations also bring about new sensations like the thrill of being the first or last person to photograph a certain place.”

[Vimeo]

Adios, bothersome fences, reflections, etc. That’s presuming that normal users would be sufficiently motivated to move their devices during capture. Time will hopefully tell.

The video accompanying our SIGGRAPH 2015 paper ” A Computational Approach for Obstruction-Free Photography”. We present a unified computational approach for taking photos through reflecting or occluding elements such as windows and fences. Rather than capturing a single image, we instruct the user to take a short image sequence while slightly moving the camera. Differences that often exist in the relative position of the background and the obstructing elements from the camera allow us to separate them based on their motions, and to recover the desired background scene as if the visual obstructions were not there. We show results on controlled experiments and many real and practical scenarios, including shooting through reflections, fences, and raindrop-covered windows.

[YouTube]

I had a ball sitting down with my ex-Photoshop/current Google Photos friend Aravind Krishnaswamy to chat with Andy Ihnatko, Russell Ivanovic, and Yasmine Evjen for this week’s Material Podcast. We talked about computer vision, the future of memory keeping, my wife hypothetically getting bum-rushed by a lady from the Clinique counter, and much more. (Oh, and the jury’s still out on whether there were snakes in the wall. You’ll see.)

Grab the MP3 here.

Did I just see… this?

DC presents Robbie “Maddo” Maddison’s “Pipe Dream,” giving the world a chance to witness history being made as Maddo rides his dirt bike on the powerful and iconic waves of Tahiti. From his helmet to motocross boots, Maddo was dressed for FMX when he took his dirt bike into the unchartered saltwater terrain of the Pacific Ocean in French Polynesia.

So how was it done? See the making-of:

[YouTube 1 & 2]

Henry Jun Wah Lee has captured some amazing lenticular cloud formations, brilliant colors, and volcano-spawned plumes.

Now I’m all pumped to watch The Mountain throw enormous crap through the air tomorrow.

[YouTube] [Via]

Back in 2003 we blew a lot of minds by showing Photoshop’s Match Color feature sucking up the color palette of one photo or painting, then depositing it onto another. This kind of thing kept getting love as it evolved (see 2010 demo), eventually matching lighting among images. As far as I know no one has ended up using such functionality in practice (and yes, Match Color is still sitting in Photoshop on your hard drive right now), but it’s still cool.

Now the tech has taken another leap forward. Per PetaPixel,

In a newly published research paper titled “A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style,” scientists at the University of Tubingen in Germany describe how their deep neural network can create new artistic images when provided with a random photo and a painting to learn style from.

“Here we introduce an artificial system based on a Deep Neural Network that creates artistic images of high perceptual quality,” the paper says. “The system uses neural representations to separate and recombine content and style of arbitrary images, providing a neural algorithm for the creation of artistic images.”

Check out many more examples via the article.

Props to Bjorn Jonsson for assembling NASA photos into this animation:

The time covered is 09:35 to 13:35 (closest approach occurred near 11:50). Pluto’s atmosphere is included and should be fairly realistic from about 10 seconds into the animation and to the end. Earlier it is largely just guesswork that can be improved in the future once all data has been downlinked from the spacecraft. Light from Pluto’s satellite Charon illuminates Pluto’s night side but is exaggerated here, in reality it would be only barely visible or not visible at all.

[Vimeo] [Via]

Russell Brown, get on this!

[Vimeo]