Check out some hotness from Microsoft Research:

According to PetaPixel,

A new Automatic Image Completion feature is similar to Adobe’s Content Aware Fill, except Microsoft’s version is geared toward filling in the missing sections that are often found in stitched panoramas. This creates (albeit artificially) a nice clean look without having to crop your panorama and throw out details.

There’s also a new video-to-panorama feature that lets you take frames from a video and stitch those together to create a motion panoramic image that shows a subject multiple times as they travel through the frame.

[YouTube]

I really enjoyed this short, gripping peek into the city circa “Escape From New York”:

An original short documentary featuring stories from one of the most dangerous years on record for New York City.

Featuring Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, performance artist and former Warhol Factory fixture Penny Arcade, actress Johnnie Mae, Harlem street-style legend Dapper Dan, auto body shop owner Nick Rosello, and trucking union rep Wayne Walsh.

It’s featured on a blog dedicated to that blighted period, created by the makers of A Most Violent Year.

[YouTube] [Via]

Julie Gautier captured amazing footage showing free diver Guillaume Néry carried by swift currents through Tiputa pass:

(If you stick around to the end, you won’t actually get to see the seemingly comatose guy start doing the robot. I shouldn’t have promised poor Margot that.)

[Vimeo] [Via]

Props to Max Shishkin for splicing together shots from dozens of films (see list on Vimeo) to create this lovely montage featuring Dylan Thomas read by Anthony Hopkins:

[Via]

Enormously patient photographer Darren Pearson spent a year journeying around California to create his latest film:

Each of the 1,000 frames in it is a separate light-painted photograph that was captured in various locations across California. […]

“I’ve spent many nights in the middle of nowhere with coyotes howling in the distance while I look like some idiot at a rave waving around an LED,” he says.

[YouTube]

Seattle’s Stimulant teamed up with Microsoft to offer a novel way to explore Seattle landmarks via Photosynth technology:

This giant interactive photo wall also looks interesting:

The SkyPad’s 20’ x 8’ high-definition touchscreen helps you explore the Needle’s past, present and future like never before. Make your mark on the global guest book or upload your Needle memories to share with the world.

[Vimeo 1 & 2] [Via Dave Cohen]

Richie Johnston lit steel wool on fire, then played the resulting footage in reverse to create lovely, hypnotic effects:

[Vimeo] [Via]

My old Adobe friend Sylvain Paris & some university collaborators have proposed a nice-looking approach to fixing mixed lighting.

“Unfortunately,” they write, “many scenes contain multiple light sources such as an indoor scene with a window, or when a flash is used in a tungsten-lit room.” In the proposed solution, “Users scribble on a few regions that should have the same color, indicate one or more regions of neutral color (i.e., white or gray), and select regions where the current color looks correct.” Check out the project PDF for more details.

Source image:

User scribbles:

Output image

[Via John Schlag]

If Busby Berkley dropped acid, he might make “Fear & Delight”:

PetaPixel writes,

Photographer and film director Naren Wilks created this mind-bending music video by arranging DSLRs around a circular green screen room. When the perspectives of the cameras are combined and synchronized, a “rotationally symmetric, kaleidoscopic world” is created. The song is “Fear & Delight” from the album Puppet Loosely Strung by The Correspondents.

As you’d expect, the making-of is really interesting, especially given the tiny team involved:

[YouTube]

[YouTube] [Via]

Here is a fun compilation from The Nerdwriter—because everything’s better in slow mo, right?

[YouTube] [Via]

I’d love to hear your thoughts, requests, rants, raves, etc. on Snapseed, Auto Awesome Movies & Stories, photos.google.com, and more.

People were so kind & full of excitement when I announced my move from Adobe to this team, and I know you haven’t yet gotten to see a lot of results. Stay tuned, though: I’m so excited for what this new year will bring—and I’d love to have your help in shaping it.

Rephotography is, per Wikipedia, “the act of repeat photography of the same site, with a time lag between the two images; a ‘then and now’ view of a particular area.”

Some interesting examples:

• “FILMography is an ongoing art project by Canadian photographer Christopher Moloney that matches scenes from movies with their real-life, present-day locations. He has recreated film scenes in New York City, Los Angeles, Toronto, Chicago, San Antonio, Orlando, Rome, Naples, Ischia and Ho Chi Minh City.”
• Dear Photograph is Taylor Jones’s comparative effort.
• Project rePhoto is an iOS & Android app that facilitates creating these compositions (see video below), though no one seems to have taken notice.
• Damien Hypolite printed out screenshots from Assassin’s Creed, then held them up against modern Paris. [Via]
• Nearby, Pierre Folk has created interesting juxtapositions in documenting an abandoned Parisian railway.

[YouTube]

Good to know: according to PetaPixel, if you subscribe through Amazon instead of Adobe, you’ll get $30 to spend on Amazon:

Adobe CC’s Photography Program gives you access to the latest versions of both Photoshop CC and Lightroom for $10 a month. You’ll need to purchase the 12-month plan and pay $120 over a year for the $30 in Amazon credit.

This deal will only run through the end of 2014, and you’ll receive a promo code for $30 via email by February 14th, 2015 (there’s a delay in case you ask for a full refund within the first month).

• German photographer Juergen Novotny has created CameraSelfies, a “series features photos of various cameras ‘looking at themselves’ in front of contemporary wallpapers that capture the cameras’ personalities.” [Via]
• To promote its NX Mini camera with flip-around screen, Samsung’s new ads “imagine a few famous self-portrait paintings as a result of selfies captured with the company’s camera.” [Via]

If you’ve been backing up photos & videos via Google+, check out g.co/YearInPhotos to see the Year in Photos we’ve made you. Here’s mine:

We’d love to hear your feedback about the movies. If you’re not yet using Auto Backup, here’s how to get started. And if for some reason you didn’t get a video but should have (i.e. you’ve uploaded plenty of shots this year), please shoot me a note (john dot nack at gmail) so we can try to get things sorted out. Thanks!

[YouTube]

Check out this fascinating project:

Recently, the Smithsonian stopped by the White House to take a 3D portrait of President Obama, in what will be the highest resolution digital model of a head of state. Take a look at the process, and the 3D rendering created from this technology.

[YouTube] [Via Alex Powell]

“Reasonable people can argue about the success of Google+ as a social network, but there can be little doubt that Google+ Photos has always been one of the most interesting and innovative aspects of the service.” —Frederic Lardinois

“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” — Me. 🙂

Bring on 2015,
J. 

Congrats to my teammates on launching a great new feature. Now when you back up your videos using Google+, we’ll point out ones we can enhance, then provide an immediate side-by-side preview:

Tim St. Clair writes,

I’m excited to announce that now, with one click, you can enhance the lighting, color, stability, and (coming soon) speech in your videos. Here’s how it works:

• Use Auto Backup to securely store the videos you shoot.
• Google+ will automatically analyze picture and audio quality. For best results make sure you have Auto Enhance turned on.
• When we think we can make improvements, desktop Web users will see a banner asking whether you’d like to preview enhancements.
• The preview will show an instant side-by-side comparison so you can choose to apply changes or stick with the original.

In addition to the videos that Google+ suggests enhancing, you can choose to apply Auto Enhance to any videos you’d like:

• In Google+ on Mac, Windows, and Chrome OS, open a video, then choose More->Auto Enhance.
• In the Google+ Photos app on Android, open a video, tap the overflow menu, and then tap Auto Enhance.

[YouTube]

After you enjoy this gorgeous, “Oh God, oh don’t do that!” thrill ride with master cyclist Danny MacAskill, go behind the scenes with director Stu Thompson to see how the film crew made things work.

[YouTube] [Via my mom, shockingly enough]

Interesting work from my old Adobe friends & their collaborators:

Our method automatically enforces consistent appearance of images that share content even without requiring any user input. When the user does make changes to selected images, these changes automatically propagate to other images in the collection, while still maintaining as much consistency as possible.

[Vimeo] [Via Daniel Schwarz]

Check out a beautiful rendering courtesy of Selmesfilms

Aurora australis and aurora borealis (northern lights) as viewed from the International Space Station. Auroras are caused by charged particles entering the atmosphere from above causing ionisation and excitation of atmospheric constituents as they collide with the earth’s magnetic field.

This video was compiled using time lapse footage shot from the International Space Station obtained courtesy of the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Centre.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpvtTlZMt7Y

[YouTube] [Via]

Zilla van den Born is kinda my hero.

I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media, and that we create an online world which reality can no longer meet. My goal was to prove how common and easy it is to distort reality. Everybody knows that pictures of models are manipulated. But we often overlook the fact that we manipulate reality also in our own lives.

PetaPixel has the story.

Here’s where she revealed the ruse to family & friends:

[Vimeo]

Christophe Thockler combined “8,500 stop-motion photos, 400 printed photos burning, 10 liters of gasoline, & 1kg of [explosive] powder” to create this flaming stop-motion music video:

[Vimeo] [Via]

In the words of Liz Lemon reverting to childlike craving, “I want to go to there.”

PetaPixel notes,

[A[ll of the video you see was filmed with a DJI Phantom 2, GoPro Hero 4 Silver and Zenmuse H3-3D gimbal.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about these shots though is that they’ve not been graded, enhanced or stabilized (other than the gimbal of course) in any way. The GoPro was left on ‘auto everything” for every shot and it did an absolutely stunning job,” writes Lee.

[YouTube]

Animating this miniature world without CGI took 35 people over 5 weeks, plus 85 single-shot takes to get it perfect:

As always, I find the behind-the-scenes story fascinating:

The film was shot through a small camera mounted on the model train in a single, 60-second take. All external movements are mechanical, not animated or done in post-production. All the different transitions that were hand operated had to be incredibly coordinated. It was a well-orchestrated effort to ensure that the 9 people who did several jobs at once were able to either fold things up before, or tilt things over and rotate things to ensure the one perfect take.

[YouTube 1 & 2] [Via]

That’s the fear, anyway. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows coins “vemödalen”:

vemödalen – n. the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist—the same sunset, the same waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye—which can turn a unique subject into something hollow and pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself.

Beautifully written & illustrated by John Koenig.

[YouTube] [Via]

Constructed from more than 17,000 images taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, this 7-minute video covers two weeks in October:

Creator James Tyrwhitt-Drake writes,

The surface of the sun from October 14th to 30th, 2014, showing sunspot AR 2192, the largest sunspot of the last two solar cycles (22 years). During this time sunspot AR 2191 produced six X-class and four M-class solar flares. The animation shows the sun in the ultraviolet 304 ångström wavelength, and plays at a rate of 52.5 minutes per second. It is composed of more than 17,000 images, 72 GB of data produced by the solar dynamics observatory + HelioViewer. This animation has be rendered in 4K, and resized to the Youtube maximum resolution of 3840×2160. The animation has been rotated 180 degrees so that south is “up”. The audio is the ‘heartbeat’ of the sun, processed from SOHO HMI data by Alexander G. Kosovichev.

[YouTube] [Via]

Spartan & gorgeous:

Whether the civil war in Central Africa or the problem districts of Caracas—countless stories are being told with the Leica M system. The LFI loan pool also contributes towards this: Leica cameras are being lent continuously to photographers around the world, so that they can produce very special stories. Discover the world of Leica M photography with exciting reportages and haunting picture series, news, films and the complete M Magazine. 

[Vimeo] [Via]

Why hello, Utrecht tower:

[YouTube] [Via]

DSLR doubters, my colleague Brian Matiash is ready to show you a new path: 

I’m really excited to announce the release of my very first self-published eBook called Moving to Mirrorless. A little over a year ago, I began my transition of moving away from my dSLR camera equipment and onto the Sony mirrorless ecosystem. When I shared my progress, I got TONS of questions from people who were curious about the process. After spending a great amount of time using this camera system all around the world and in all sorts of environments, I knew it was a great time to share my story. So, I thought it’d be a perfect opportunity to write an eBook about it and give it away for free! 🙂 

Here’s the download link.

Wow.

If you were in my shoes, how would you leverage this tech within Google Photos? Knowing that the system can automatically backup your lifetime’s worth of moments, then automatically synthesize things like movies & stories, what would you have it create on your behalf?

PetaPixel notes,

The system is far more intelligent than a simple tagging system. It not only picks up on the details, like a color or object, but also understands the scene in context. In other words: it can not only understanding that a photo has ‘snow’ and ‘trees’ in it, the program could tell you that, “the snow is falling in front of the line of trees.”

The program automatically captioned this: “Two pizzas sitting on top of a stove top oven”

“Eh, it’s 12 minutes long—but maybe I’ll just watch it for a sec…” No, you won’t: you’ll watch the whole damn thing & love it. Therefore I won’t blow any of the fun surprises (including the use of one of my favorite songs ever).

[YouTube] [Via]

Kids react to the stone-age monstrosity that is a, how do you say, “film camera.” (“I hope there’s like a YouTube tutorial video for this.”)

“When did real cameras come out?”

[YouTube] [Via]

A gigapixel per second! That’s what this bad boy captures. Per PetaPixel:

The camera, whose footage is designed to work seamlessly with Samsung’s own Gear VR headset, packs quite a punch inside its considerably small form factor. Along the outside of the device, there is an array of 16 Full-HD cameras, each of which have an ultra-wide-angle lens attached.

[YouTube]

I find Karen X. Cheng’s ultra simple technique almost ridiculously charming—especially with the Daft Punk soundtrack!:

[YouTube] [Via]

Dig Brian Emerick’s impressionistic take:

I want to share with you the San Francisco I experience on a daily basis — the one not too often shown in movies or television. I want to show you the spirit of this amazing city. I shot everything at 60 fps on my Canon 7D and slowed it down in post using FCP X. I color graded it with VSCO using Aperture.

[Vimeo] [Via Ying Ying Liu]

Fake tilt-shift photography got so played out a couple of years back, but after a little break it’s fun to experience the Middle East through the lens of Joerg Daiber. Here you can see Jordan…

…and Israel. (Dig that rockin’ klezmer!)

[YouTube 1 & 2] [Via]

Gorgeous work from Chris Bryan:

All images where shot using The Phantom Flex, Phantom Miro M-320S and the new Phantom 4K Flex with Arri Ultra prime lenses and Chris Bryan Films custom underwater housings. 

[Vimeo]

The urgent, unsettled score gives this look at LA a fresh flavor. Gavin Heffernan writes,

Since we’re only 452 days away from the 20th anniversary of one my favorite movies HEAT, I set it to one of the soundtrack songs, an incredible piece of music by Elliot Goldenthal. The cityscapes of HEAT inspired me to make movies long ago, so it was a special treat looking down on LA from some similar angles to the classic Michael Mann film.

[Vimeo] [Via]

Fernando Livschitz (who’s previously treated us to fanciful, photo-realistic takes on Bueno Aires & NYC), has fun making traffic go bananas:

[Vimeo] [Via]

Google’s Picasa (one of the apps for which I’m now responsible) offers a rather magical time-lapse feature called Face Movies. Select a range of photos (e.g. by clicking the automatic face cluster for a person appearing in your library), then choose Create->Movie->From Faces in Selection. You’ll instantly get something like this:

I whipped one up featuring my son Henry, immediately getting my wife’s delight & requests for more.

Heh—here’s a fun bit of storytelling through… well, you’ll see. PetaPixel provides the set up:

One of the most useful features built into the DJI drones is something called ‘Return to Home.’ If the drone gets out of range of your controller, instead of dropping out of the sky, it automatically uses GPS data to zoom back to the launch point.

Cool right? Only one problem… what if there’s a massive cliff face in the way?

Enjoy!

Bonus drone goodness courtesy of PP, this time involving Nerds of the French Forest:

[YouTube 1 & 2]