Heh heh—makes me wish our kids were younger & we could try this, though we had pretty good fun back in the day with just a Flip cam.

[YouTube] [Via]

Casey Neistat’s got guts for days, I’ll give him that.

They’ve upped their game photographically relative to a couple of years ago. Here’s a look behind the scenes:

[YouTube 1 & 2]

Having just replaced a faulty washing machine, I have just one question: How did we not do this!?

In a similar vein, you know what’s good fun? High-speed cameras + doomed cameras + lawnmower blades. Of the video below, PetaPixel writes, “Everything was recorded with a Phantom V4.1 camera, a home-made camera, and a Panasonic TM700 digital camera.”

[YouTube 1 & 2]

Enjoy 90 seconds of totally unexpected beauty.

The creator writes,

An inspiration for this session was a conversation with my 3year old daughter while dressing up to go out:
– Daddy, I don’t want to put this jacket on. – she moaned
– Me too, darling but it is very cold outside. – I explained
– How cold?
and I had to figure out an interesting answer which would satisfy a preschooler’s curiosity, so I told her:
– It is so cold that even soap bubbles freeze and it looks really beautiful, you know?
I saw a sparkle in her eye so I promised to make a film to show her that. She was so excited about this idea that of course she forgot that she didn’t want to put her jacket on. It wasn’t easy to capture those bubbles because only around 5-10% of them didn’t break instantly and as you can imagine it was a challenge to be patient at -15 Celsius 😉 but it was worth it because now that my daughter has seen it, winter is magic for her.

[Vimeo] [Via]

No lens, no cry—at least for certain applications:

FlatCam, invented by the Rice labs of electrical and computer engineers Richard Baraniuk and Ashok Veeraraghavan, is little more than a thin sensor chip with a mask that replaces lenses in a traditional camera. […]

“We can make curved cameras, or wallpaper that’s actually a camera. You can have a camera on your credit card or a camera in an ultrathin tablet computer.”

[YouTube] [Via John Peterson]

Ten years ago today, Adobe released the first public preview of “Project Lightroom.” It was Mac-only, ultra lightweight, wildly incomplete, and very promising. Dizzy after blazing all over Europe previewing the app to journalists, here’s how I blogged it:

First, the product isn’t finished, and that’s a good thing. Letting a preview version into the wild now lets us engage the broad photography community in a new way. It’s the nature of the beast that just about any 1.0 product will have some shortcomings and rough edges. The thing is, we’re not going to start charging for ours until you’ve had plenty of time to kick the tires & help shape the feature set.

Amazingly, the demo video from that first post is still available, so I’ve stuck it onto YouTube for the occasion:

Looking back, my antipathy towards Apple (which had just released Aperture for $499 (!) at PhotoPlus in late October) was so clear. Your 1.0 is incomplete, too, I was saying, and we’re going to contrast your chutzpah with our humility.

Yet the best thing ever to happen to Lightroom was Aperture. It got us out of our heads & got the app into users’ hands. Before Aperture shipped, Adobe had spent three+ years running in circles on a great idea, not sure how to explain it to users, establish its value, and still protect Photoshop. Then Apple wrapped the Javitz Center in a 40-foot-high banner that said, “Everything you need after the shoot.” Bang, it was game on: a matter of weeks later, Lightroom had transformed from a pile of greasy parts on the garage floor to a useful, impressive beta. We never looked back, and over the following years, I loved writing about LR kicking Aperture’s ass among pros.

Now, let’s see what the next decade brings. 🙂 [YouTube]

Kirill Neiezhmakov captured terrible beauty in Dubai on New Year’s Eve:



[YouTube] [Via]

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]