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]

Adobe has posted an Aperture importer. PetaPixel writes,

Once you’re up and running in Lightroom, just click on File -> Plug-In Extras -> Import from Aperture Library (or iPhoto Library), select the location of your Aperture Library, select a folder you’d like to import into, and click Import. Both originals and altered versions of the photos in your library will be imported automatically.

You can click on Options to customize the import, but basic info that will be carried over includes: Flags, Star Ratings, Keywords, GPS Data, Rejects, Hidden Files, Color Labels, Stacks, and Face Tags. Those last three will be imported as keywords.

 Julian Tryba has a unique take on the time lapse—one that gets more interesting as the movie below plays out:

Traditional time-lapses are constrained by the idea that there is a single universal clock. In the spirit of Einstein’s relativity theory, layer-lapses assign distinct clocks to any number of objects or regions in a scene. Each of these clocks may start at any point in time, and tick at any rate. The result is a visual time dilation effect known as layer-lapse.

He provides quite a few making-of details, including info on the software used:

Lightroom – “I use Lightroom to perform 90% of my color grading on photos, similar to many other time-lapse photographers.”
Premiere Pro – “The video editing program I use for compiling all the clips.”
LRTimelapse- “LRTimelapse is used for exporting holy grail sequences, and removing flicker.”
Photoshop – “I barely used any Photoshop but it can be more effective/faster for masking out objects and then importing the masks into After Effects. I also use some still frames in the layer-lapses so I might Photoshop a picture to get all the cars and people out so that I have a clean image of a scene.”

[Vimeo] [Via]

Beautifully shot & edited, set to Tove Lo’s “Stay High”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6z33QXHoVI

[YouTube] [Via my aerial conspirator Bruce Bullis]

Here’s a unique perspective on the UAE’s Liwa Oasis—the largest oasis in the Arabian peninsula.”

Google’s Najeeb Jarrar explains,

To bring this stunning desert to Street View, we fashioned the Trekker to rest on a camel, which gathered imagery as it walked. Using camels for the collection allowed us to collect authentic imagery and minimize our disruption of this fragile environment.

We hope this collection gives you a glimpse of what it may be like to travel the desert as caravan merchants have for the past 3000 years. Should you make the journey here in person, who knows—you may meet some new friends. To see more, visit our Street View gallery.

[YouTube]

A rather bizarre site called Future Self captures a picture of you via Webcam. Then, per PetaPixel,

The site then analyzes that picture using facial recognition and puts it through an aging simulator to spit out a version of yourself that is 20 years older… and in my case British… so that was weird. I know he was British because, not only does this spit out a picture of your future self, it lets you talk to the guy or gal via webcam using Google speech recognition.

Impressive stuff, though as to why all of this is a good idea, I’m a bit stumped.

[YouTube]

Man, how terrible is my reading comprehension, at least on a tiny phone screen? Seeing this collection of beautiful images of the SF bay’s purple salt flats, I immediately sent it to my friend Julieanne Kost, thinking it would be up her alley. Only later did I realize that Julieanne was the photographer! D’oh. In any case, you can see more great images from the shoot via her Behance portfolio.

If you can get past the blowhardy, self-aggrandizing narrative, you’ll likely dig this clever recreation of shots taken over the course of Leica’s 100-year history:

[YouTube] [Via Ying Ying Liu]

Witness the craziness over Lincoln, NE, this summer. As Kottke writes,

There’s an incredible 16-second sequence in this video of clouds, starting at around 10 seconds in. It looks as though the sky is a roiling ocean wave about to crash on the beach. I’ve watched it approximately 90 times so far today.

[YouTube]

Clever, useful innovation? Indictment of a self-indulgent, self-centered culture? Both? PetaPixel writes,

Like a camera watch with propellers, Nixie (in theory) could detach itself from you with the flick of a wrist, fly a few feet away, take your picture (or a panorama or a movie), and then return to your wrist in something resembling a gadget you might have seen in Minority Report.

Check it out:

[YouTube]

Just like it says on the tin:

Show Focus Points is a plugin for Adobe Lightroom. It shows you which focus points were selected by your camera when the photo was taken.

Requires LR5 + Canon or Nikon SLR images.

Check out a unique perspective from the newly acquired Skybox team:

TechCrunch writes,

[T]he GIFs actually prove Skybox’s big advantage over other satellite companies. Since its micro-satellites are much smaller and therefore cheaper, so it can more of them up in space than companies building big, expensive, traditional satellites that power the infrequent updates to products like Google Maps. One of those might have missed the ephemeral Burning Man event entirely.

Transcendent work from Tim Sessler captures NYC in a fresh, magical way:

Shot with the Freefly TERO in the streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
Stabilized with the Freefly MōVI M10 and M15.
Shot on the Phantom Miro LC320S (1500-2000fps) and Red Epic Dragon

Khoi Vinh puts things really nicely:

[A]s its four-plus minutes of slow-motion footage shot on the streets of New York City rolled by, I came to realize that it was capturing details that I hadn’t seen before, even after living in the city for many years—tiny, delicate moments, some of them unexpectedly abstract, hidden within the hurried onslaught of urban life.

It’s amazing just how fleeting these moments were, as you can see in a behind-the-scenes peek:

Bonus from the archives: Andrew Clancy’s “A Year in New York” looks (and sounds) just lovely.

[Vimeo 1, 2, and 3]

The delight is in the minimalism & brevity:

[Vimeo] [Via]

 Here’s a powerful—if ungainly (“…Ladies”) new wearable tool for map makers. TechCrunch writes,

The Cartographer uses a process called “simultaneous localization and mapping” (SLAM), a technique that’s typically used for mapping new locations and that Google is now putting to use to map anything from hotels to museums.

As the backpacker walks through a building, the floor plan is automatically generated in real time, Google says. The wearer also uses a tablet to add points of interest while walking around the building (say room numbers in a hotel or the exhibits in a museum).

“Is this that weirdo festival we go to?” asks Finn. Nope, not Maker Faire, kiddo—but they’re related. Check out Fest300’s aerial take on this year’s Burning Man:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hzMGy8zNRA8%3Ffeature%3Doembed%26start%3D86

[Via]

Elsewhere, do not taunt Unhappy Ram Ball—especially with your little quadcopter:

[Via] [YouTube 1 & 2]

Fun and (of course) borderline-overwhelmingly twee: As Kottke writes, this is “A compilation of some of the vehicles used in Wes Anderson’s movies, shot from the first-person POV”:

[Vimeo]

*Do* taze me, bro: “Photographer Patrick Hall films people’s reactions as they get tased with a handheld stun gun.”

Behind the scenes:

[[YouTube 1 & 2] [Via Scott Valentine]

Check out Google’s slick little app for capturing & sharing spherical panoramas. Here’s a quick how-to video (posted earlier when the feature was Android-only; the feature remains available for Android inside the Google Camera app):

[YouTube] [Via]

Sitting in the dermatologist’s office (the curse of the Irish—well, one of them), I’m intrigued & a little unnerved by this project. As Colossal explains,

Artist Thomas Leveritt recently setup a special UV motion camera in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park with the intent of filming random passersby. Ultraviolet rays have the ability to expose not-yet-visible changes to human skin, namely freckles, that turn even the most unblemished faces into dark explosions of dots.

[YouTube]

Patrick Cheung shot more than 6,000 images over the course of a year in Hong Kong to make this hyperlapse hip hop vid for Ghost Style. The Bullet Time levitation effect around 1:16 is well worth a look:

So, how exactly do these things get made? The crew from DigitalRev worked with Patrick to show the importance of careful framing in this informative little tutorial:

[YouTube] [Vimeo] [Via]

Speaking of hyperlapses, the guys behind the recent Barcelona piece have provided a peek into the North Korean capital:

My friend Sam Potts has traveled to Pyongyang & provides a sobering assessment:

It feels deeply fake as filmmaking, to me. Thus I mistrust it as a document of what real Pyongyang is like. You don’t see any of the details to that reveal, even in PY, how very poor a country it is. Some of those buses didn’t have tail lights. They had blocks of wood painted red to look like tail lights. And the library computers are incredibly poor quality.

The filmmakers provide more info via an FAQ on the Vimeo page.

I love scrappy hacks like the ones David F. Sandberg used in his short film Not So Fast. PetaPixel writes,

Using an IKEA trashcan, a 150W CFL bulb and a few other pieces of equipment he had lying around (some from IKEA, others from eBay, one from the trunk of his car) he created a lighting rig that focused a very bright light source right on his actress’ face.

[Vimeo]

Photoshop master Ben Von Wong dropped by Google the other day, and the lecture he gave is now online:

Ben Von Wong, Engineer turned “Visual Engineer”, creates Epic Hyper-Realistic Photography. Come see how he gathers the resources to put together his out-of-this-world photoshoots with Fire, Water and occasional Medieval Armies!

Ben will also break down the art of pulling resources together to make epic productions on zero budget, and share the simple post-processing tips and tricks that make his images stand out and pop, along with featured image deconstructions.

[YouTube] [Via Akshay Sawhney]

Rob Whitworth put in epic work to create this novel, flowing tour of the beautiful city. Production required, he writes,

363 hours work
75 Hours Logistics and Travel
31 Hours Scouting and Location Finding
78 Hours Shooting
179 Hours Post Production
26014 Camera Raw Files
817gb of data

[Vimeo]

Have you seen this human-sized stop motion piece? It’s rather great:

Here’s how they did it:

[[YouTube 1 & 2]

Julieanne Kost gives a great 2-minute overview of this very well received feature:

To dive into the details of applying perspective correction across multiple images, check out her follow-up post.

[YouTube]

Russell Houghten used “Lots of masking in Adobe After Effects” to bring stillness to LA, turning its freeways into a solitary playground for skaters. (Stick around to the end to see regular life start to flow back in.)

[Vimeo] [Via Alex Powell]

Photographer Brendan Fitzpatrick uses X-Ray equipment to peer into cheap plastic toys, then colorizes the results. Check out the series.

[Via]

Khoi Vinh writes,

This is a brilliant if spooky Tumblr from artist Mario Santamaria that exposes a meta-layer of the Google Art Project, which documents artworks, galleries and ornate buildings around the world. Santamaria has collated instances wherein Google’s camera captures its own image in the mirror. The hint of self-awareness, even if illusory, is surprisingly terrifying, perhaps made even more so by its inadvertency.

Check out The Camera In The Mirror.