Remember “vemödalen,” coined to capture the obscure sorrow of feeling like your “unique” photo has actually been taken by innumerable others? Well, get ready to feel it more.

Check out this collaboration between University of Washington & Google brainiacs:

You can read more details about the project on Wired.

[YouTube] [Via]

Check out this fascinating macro peek into a hive. Colossal writes,

In an attempt to better understand exactly what happens as a bee grows from an egg into an adult insect, photographer Anand Varma teamed up with the bee lab at UC Davis to film the first three weeks of a bee’s life in unprecedented detail, all condensed into a 60-second clip.

[YouTube]

“If you haven’t clicked the play button by now,” says The Verge, “you’ve made a mistake. Seriously. This video is probably the closest you’ll ever get to flying your own jetpack, so watch it now.” Amen to that.

(“Is that a baby singing?” the Micronaxx ask during the climactic sequence.)

[YouTube]

I remain in some disbelief that the Make Productions team can create animations like these strictly by manipulating still photos. Amazing.

[Vimeo 1 & 2]

Eight-armed multitouch:

Sony recently partnered with the SEA LIFE Aquarium in Auckland for a project called “The Octographer.” Working with an animal trainer, the team trained an octopus named Rambo to take pictures of visitors from inside her tank.

How she was trained:

[YouTube]

I cannot get over the visual storytelling possibilities now afforded to regular people. Teton writes,

This past December and January, Stockholm-based filmmaker Kalle Ljung shot this short while touring Antarctica with his 73-year-old-father. Using a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter, Kalle captured stunning aerial footage of the surrounding landscape.

These are the days of miracles & wonder…

[Vimeo] [Via Russell Brown]

Progress! PetaPixel writes,

The latest version of the HTC Camera app on Google Play allows the One M9 to capture DNG files with a new Raw Camera mode. These image files can then be loaded into programs like Lightroom or Photoshop and edited with much more flexibility than JPEG images.

Two major flagship smartphones offer RAW support now: the HTC One M9 and the new LG G4.

In a related vein, here’s a demo of the G4’s low-light capabilities…

…and a demo of its color handling.

[YouTube 1 & 2] [Via]

Check out the interactive hotness below. Per the Verge:

GoPro just announced that it has purchased Kolor, a French company that specializes in virtual reality software.

Kolor’s software lets users to combine multiple photographs or videos to make 360-degree panoramas and videos, or “spherical content” as the companies call it. The ability to create interactive content is something that GoPro hasn’t been able to directly offer its customers until now, even though many virtual reality content creators are using the company’s cameras.

[YouTube]

The NY Times has posted side-by-side interactive photo spheres & satellite images that show the world before & after this weekend’s terrible earthquake. What a heartbreaking tragedy.

Colossal writes, 

In this new 6-minute film, cave, adventure, and travel photographer Ryan Deboodt takes us on a breathtaking aerial tour of the world’s largest cave, Hang Son Doong, located in central Vietnam. Deboodt brought a drone and an array of cameras to help capture the cave system, the largest chamber of which is 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) long, 200 meters (660 ft) high and 150 meters (490 ft) wide.

[Vimeo]

Coming soon to Park Slope, Noe Valley, and Shallow Alto:

[YouTube]

“From subterranean to submarine,” former coal miner Ray Collins asks us to consider waves in a new way:

The coal-mining town of Bulli, south of Sydney, is not regarded as a repository of high art, nor as a vibrant and pulsing beehive of life and color, and yet there was Ray Collins. Seven years ago the idea of his new photography book, Found at Sea, would have seemed ludicrous to him; he was still working a mile down in the mines and hadn’t shot a single frame. Collins crawled out of the mines after blowing out a knee—“No shock absorbers left,” he says—and bought a camera with the payout. In the short years since, Collins has transitioned from subterranean to submarine and become arguably the most inventive water photographer in Australia.

[YouTube] [Via]

Pair a fairly beefy copter with a camera capable of ludicrously large data capture, and this is what you get:

The Phantom Flex 4K weighs 14 pounds without a lens or viewfinder attached, so it’s far too heavy to be carried by most of the popular drones used by casual photographers and filmmakers. By partnering with the drone manufacturer Intuitive Aerial, however, the team was able to put together an Aerigon that was up to the task. It’s a combination that’s a “cinematic game changer,” they write.

[YouTube]

You’ve long been able to make images you store in Google Drive show up in Google+ Photos, but what about the other way around? Why can’t you automatically back up photos from your phone, then have them synced down to your Mac or PC via Drive? Well, now you can:

To get started, just look for the new Photos menu in Drive for Android, iOS and the web. From there you’ll be able to manage your photos and videos alongside other types of files. For example, you can now add pictures of wedding venues and cakes to the same Drive folder as your guest list and budget.

Google+ Photos will of course keep helping you store, edit and share your pics. But if you want to organize all your files, all in one place, Drive is here to help. You’ll start seeing your photos in Drive today—immediately if they’re new, and a few weeks for your entire library—so give it a try, and let us know what you think.

Check out details if you’re interested.

Gorgeous macro work from photographer Pyanek:

[YouTube]

Interesting exploration from researchers at Adobe (including Aseem Agarwala, who just joined Google) and Berkeley:

[T]rain a model that can automatically predict attractiveness of different expressions of a given person. We also train a cross-subject model that evaluates portrait attractiveness of novel subjects and show how it can be used to automatically mine attractive photos from personal photo collections. Furthermore, we show how, with a little bit ($5-worth) of extra crowdsourcing, we can substantially improve the cross-subject model by “fine-tuning” it to a new individual using active learning. Finally, we demonstrate a training app that helps people learn how to mimic their best expressions.

[YouTube]

Photographer Joe Capra loves high resolution. He writes,

“10328×7760 – A 10K Timelapse Demo” is a video I put together showcasing the extreme resolution of the PhaseOne IQ180 camera of which it was shot… Each shot is comprised of hundreds individual still images, each weighing in at a whopping 80 megapixels. Each individual raw frame measures 10328×7760 pixels. […]

You can literally get about 8-10 solid 1920×1080 shots out of a single shot. You can also get about 5-6 solid 4K shots out of a single shot.

[Vimeo] [Via Rufus Deuchler]

Good, socially awkward fun on the streets of London: 

[YouTube] [Via]

Time & money for girls covered in honey, as the B-Boys would say.

FastCo writes,

The subjects in [Blake Little’s] “Preservation” range from a 1-year-old baby to an 85-year-old woman, and everything in between, including pets.

So how much honey does it take to coat a person? Clearly, far more than what’s in that squeezable bottle in your kitchen: Little estimates he used 900 five-pound jugs of honey for the series.

[YouTube]

Eat your heart out, Danny Boyle.

February 11, 2015 marks five years in space for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which provides incredibly detailed images of the whole sun 24 hours a day. […] In honor of SDO’s fifth anniversary, NASA has released a video showcasing highlights from the last five years of sun watching. Watch the movie to see giant clouds of solar material hurled out into space, the dance of giant loops hovering in the corona, and huge sunspots growing and shrinking on the sun’s surface.

Read on, or just enjoy the show.

[YouTube] [Via]

Photographer Paul Parker traced these trippy patterns by applying After Effects’s Echo effect to footage of birds in flight.

[Vimeo] [Via]

This site promises “10 new photos every 10 days,” downloadable in high res & freely reusable in whatever ways you’d like. Enjoy.

Filmmaker & color ninja Stu Maschwitz recently visited the Bay Area Lightroom User Group for an interesting event. LR add-on maker Jeffrey Friedl writes,

Stu Maschwitz sits down to a blacked-out Lightroom catalog loaded with a couple dozen photos submitted by strangers, and one by one he unveils and processes them as the whim strikes him, providing a running commentary about his artistic reasons for doing things, or technical comments about how to achieve in Lightroom whatever look he’s going for.

The running commentary on the hows and whys provide ample little seeds that may germinate ideas when processing your own photos.

It’s not a “how-to” video, and it’s not a demonstration of the “right way” to process photos… It’s just Stu looking at a stranger’s photo and instantly deciding what that photo’s “story” is to him, and then proceeding to crop and adjust the photo so that as far as he’s concerned, it better tells that story.

[YouTube] [Via]

Light painter (and umlaut addict) Anssi Määttä got frisky with in-camera effects: “Made using real lights on location (see the reflections and flares). No 3D strokes, stop-motion etc.” Check out the results:

[Vimeo]

Dig it, fellow aviation nerds:

Drone footage gave a rare bird’s-eye-view of one of Russia’s plane museums earlier in February, capturing amazing shots of the Central Air Force Museum located just 40 kilometres (24 miles) outside Moscow’s central hub.

[YouTube] [Via Bruce Bullis]

From Sandro Bocci:

“…Meanwhile…” shows the world of marine animals like corals and starfish at high magnification and during long time span through the timelapse. The music almost alien and disturbing has been joined to the images that stimulate mental associations to create a contrast, stimulate synesthesia and feelings do not necessarily harmonics and assonant.

[Vimeo] [Via]

You know what’s wrong with the sound of all this? Nothing. Can’t wait to see what my old cronies have been cooking up.

Per PetaPixel, the forthcoming update promises to stitch panoramas while keeping the resulting images raw; merge images to HDR; and offer:

[A]dvanced black-and-white conversions, presets, facial recognition for quickly finding and sorting photos by people, a powerful healing brush, a photo straightening tool that can work even without a horizon line, video slideshows, web galleries, online sharing, and photo book creation.

Drop your phone into the simple viewer hardware, then move the device to navigate. According to PetaPixel,

The new View-Master is a cheap and simple device that lets users go on “field trips,” visiting “famous places, landmarks, nature, planets and more” through 360-degree virtual reality photospheres. […]

The new View-Master will be available in the fall of 2015 for $30 for a viewer and a sample experience reel. Additional experience reels will cost $15 for a pack of 4 themed reels.

[YouTube]

Google’s Steve Seitz & researchers at the University of Washington have devised a rather cool way to put your photos into context—much like the rephotography projects I posted last month.

Given a reference photograph to be uncropped, our approach selects, reprojects, and composites a subset of Internet imagery into a larger image around the reference using the underlying scene geometry. 

What do you think? Is this a capability you’d like to pair with your own travel imagery?

[YouTube]

Guillaume Panariello & Thomas Rames took a rather fascinating approach to shooting the video for Unconditional Rebel by Siska:

This is a real video, a slow motion video, a sequence map with a traveling in front of 80 extras placed on 80 meters along a little road, lost in an industrial area. Filmed at 1000 frames/second with a camera (Phantom 4k) from a car driven at 50km/h, the shooting took 5 seconds for a 3’30 video: a living and dreamlike mural.

“5 seconds of camera roll, on the 23rd take, after 11 hours of positioning and choreographing extras, who need to eat …” quips my colleague John Schlag, a longtime VFX industry vet.

[Vimeo] [Via Claude Knaus]

This new Mac app looks surprisingly complete in its first public beta form:

According to PetaPixel,

Tools that come in the box include Frequency Separation editing, live blend modes, and inpainting (i.e. Photoshop’s Content Aware Fill). Affinity Photo supports 16-bits per channel editing, a full history of reversible edits, ICC color profiling, LAB color, end-to-end CMYK, and Photoshop PSD and 64-bit plug-in support.

When the program leaves beta testing and officially launches, it will be available through the Mac App Store for $50 with no subscription charges and free updates for two years.

You can download a copy in exchange for your email address.

What do you think of it?

I eat this stuff up with a spoon. From Tony Zhou’s excellent Every Frame A Painting series:

One of the many pleasures of Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive” (2011) is that the shots feel both tightly composed and weirdly unpredictable. Even though most of the images follow a simple quadrant system, Refn puts plenty of subtle touches within the frame. Let’s take a look.

[Vimeo]

I’d love to know exactly how Francois Beaurain created these hypnotic loops featuring animated clones dancing Busby Berkeley-style through Liberia’s capital, Monrovia.

I’m reminded of Michel Gondry’s brilliant old videos for The White Stripes & especially Kylie Minogue:

[YouTube] [Via]

I can’t wait to show this to my kids. Per PetaPixel,

Scientific photographer Neil Bromhall… collected the acorn one September, built an underground set for it, and captured one photo every 2 hours with his Nikon D300 and 55mm f/2.8 macro lens.

[YouTube]