New iPhone app Vhoto scans your videos to find (hopefully) amazing still photographs: “Use the Vhoto camera to record video, or import your existing videos. Vhoto’s Chooser looks at hundreds of still photos hidden inside your videos and finds you the best pics.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsELdVAlaU4
GeekWire has a few more details.
Thoughts? I’m reminded of this paper from Adobe’s Aseem Agarwala & UW researchers on selecting candid portraits from video.
[YouTube]
You can now view a given point in space at multiple points in time—useful for things like the Washington Post showing the rapid development of parts of DC.
If you’ve ever dreamt of being a time traveler like Doc Brown, now’s your chance. Starting today, you can travel to the past to see how a place has changed over the years by exploring Street View imagery in Google Maps for desktop. We’ve gathered historical imagery from past Street View collections dating back to 2007 to create this digital time capsule of the world.
Rolleirückblende—literally “Rollei flashback”—“the flood of memory released when looking at old photos.”
[Via Torrie Selwyn]
I… I don’t even.
Wow.
Because, gravity.
Seems like a great way to end up on Tosh.0—or Faces of Death.
[Vimeo] [Via Dave Werner]
Russell Brown, let’s burn this candle:
[Vimeo]
Google + Adobe = photographic coolness; seems rather up my alley, eh? Via PetaPixel:
The tutorial will show you how to take a RAW file, prep it in Lightroom, convert it to black and white in Silver Efex Pro 2, and then finish it up back in Lightroom. And although it’s meant specifically for images shot with the Fuji X-T1, it’ll give anybody who wants that grainy, filmic black and white look — which is particularly well suited for street photography — a great place to start.
If this is up your alley, check out more tutorials on the Google Help Center.
[Vimeo]
If you care about the future of photography—how it’s captured, processed, experienced—check out David Pierce’s thoughtful piece on Lytro’s new Illum camera.
What Lytro plans to do is not just change how we take pictures, but to make the very pictures themselves mirror the way we see them in the first place. We interact with the world in three dimensions, touching and moving and constantly changing our perspectives, and light-field photos fit perfectly.
Photographer Kyle Thompson (who at 22 is kind of a badass) notes, “You don’t have to focus exactly on one certain point in the photo, but you also have to remember to try and keep all points of the photo interesting.”
This is the future… [L]ight-field photography — the notion that the future is about turning the complex physical parts of a camera into software and algorithms… — seems almost obvious. Why capture one photo, from one angle, with one perspective, when we could capture everything? When I can explore a photo, zooming and panning and focusing and shifting, why would I ever want to just look at it?
What do you think? Gimmick or game changer?
Lytro-like refocusing, Photo Sphere creation, and more are available in the new Google Camera app:
Lens Blur lets you change the point or level of focus after the photo is taken. You can choose to make any object come into focus simply by tapping on it in the image. By changing the depth-of-field slider, you can simulate different aperture sizes, to achieve bokeh effects ranging from subtle to surreal (e.g., tilt-shift). The new image is rendered instantly, allowing you to see your changes in real time.
You can go nerd out on the Google Research blog. [Via]
Will Burrard-Lucas shows what one man with a GoPro & a tiny RC chopper can do:
He writes,
To get this footage I was sometimes a kilometre away from the copter, operating it via a live video feed. These devices have incredible potential in wildlife filmmaking and photography; they are quieter and more manoeuvrable than a normal helicopter so they can get closer to animals with minimal disturbance.
It would be cool to see him run this footage through the new GoPro lens correction support in Camera Raw.
[YouTube]
Whether or not you’re in the market for a new cam, this funny, concise, and highly readable post from my friend Stu Maschwitz is well worth a look (if just for technical phrases like “pure photolookbetterium”). And yes, you should “shoot a ton of shots like a crazy person.”
More weirdness:
CamMe uses gesture recognition to enable hands-free photography, and they say it’s been downloaded more than 1 million times.
Elsewhere S.E.L.F.I.E. is the “The Self Enhancing Live Feed Image Engine”. It’s “triggered by simply standing in front of it and holding a smile,” after which it auto-tweets your photo.
Hearing this song on the radio the other day, I thought I might having an aneurysm (“Did they just name-check specific Instagram filters?”). Now I kinda want to jump out a window—and yet somehow I cannot look away.
On a theoretically related note, “An artist known as Billy Butcher imagined what would happen if various Marvel comic book heroes were all as selfie-absorbed as everyone else.” Check it out:
[YouTube]
Lovely: “7 minutes of underwater Galapagos shot September 2008 with Sony EX1 and custom made housing. It’s just a short video inspired by Hans Zimmer’s music.”
[Vimeo]
Fascinating footage of a ball breaking glass:
And no, I swear this blog isn’t devolving into just a re-share of PetaPixel, but they’ve been on a roll with good stuff lately. In this case they explain,
Filmed with a HyperVision HPV-X camera made by Japanese manufacturer Shimadzu, the footage is slowed down so much that the ball, once it hits, appears fixed in space while the cracks in the glass slowly expand outward like an intricate spiderweb from the point of contact.
[YouTube]
Why do I feel like I’ve just been dropped into a Beastie Boys video?
PetaPixel writes,
[W]ith the help of a 3D printer and a half-dozen GoPro Hero 3s, [Jonas] Ginter created a 3D printed mount that holds the six GoPro cameras side-by-side to create enough overlapping footage to pull out a full 360º viewing angle.
[Vimeo]
Part of me wants to write a backmasking joke in reverse; .os od ot yzal oot si em fo tser eht
PetaPixel writes,
When you first play the clip above, you might wonder why this guy is the only one walking normally in a world of backwards walking people and backwards driving cars… and then it hits you: he’s the one walking backwards, and the video is being played in reverse.
[Vimeo]
Nature doesn’t suck:
PetaPixel writes,
Created and posted by Earth Unplugged, a YouTube channel used to help fund BBC programs, this quick look at the hunting ferocity of the “cheetah of the sky” is just a small snippet of footage captured from their full episode, “Goshawk Hunts in Slow Motion.”
[YouTube]
I love some of the fast, Street View-like transitions. Would someone smart please explain how they get the effect of having a camera attached to the car not show the connecting rod?
[YouTube]
Happy April Fool’s! Erik Murphy-Chutorian writes,
Google+ Auto Awesome is all about fun surprises that bring your photos to life… Now with Auto Awesome Photobombs, you too can get a celebrity photobomb—no red carpet required. We’re starting with surprise appearances by +David Hasselhoff, everyone’s favorite crime-fighting rockstar lifeguard.
Upload a new self-portrait, or a group photo with friends, and leave some room for The Hoff. He might just make your photo a little more #Hoffsome.
He even photobombed me in the café the other day.
So terrific:
This Is a Generic Brand Video is a generic brand video of “This Is a Generic Brand Video,” written by Kendra Eash for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. No surprise, it’s made entirely with stock footage. All video clips used are from dissolve.com. See and license them here.
[YouTube] [Via Aravind Krishnaswamy]
Three minutes of really clever, engaging storytelling for a good cause:
[YouTube] [Via David Besbris]
Little did I know that a stick bomb is a “spring-loaded device constructed out of flat sticks woven together under tension,” much less that 30,000 of them + an RC toy Subaru would make for a really unique commercial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvQ9InhEKu0
As usual I find the making-of video (capturing three days of work in a Japanese studio) even more interesting than the finished product:
You say “DJI Phantom flies into Volcano,” I say, “and how the heck does it fly back out??”
[YouTube]
So, on the off chance the boss randomly asks me, “How do we make photography 10 times better,” what should I tell him? 🙂
[YouTube]
Mike Hill created this time lapse using “685 photographs taken over 24 minutes in Porto Alegre, Brazil.” I dig it:
[Vimeo]
What if I told you that you could…
And you could do it all for free, right now? That would be kinda great, no?
I don’t know quite how I overlooked all this before joining Google. I love having my iPhone shots seamlessly mixed in with my SLR images (including galleries I export from Lightroom right into Drive folders), and I’m finding the little animations fun to share.
Now, a couple of details for my fellow nerds:
What do you think? What else do you need for this to be the most mind-bendingly awesome photo storage & sharing system in the world?
So. Friggin’. Great.
Jarbas Agnelli explains,
Reading the newspaper one morning, I saw this picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location of the birds as notes. I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating.
This work was made over the original photo, un-retouched, published in one of the biggest Brazilian newspapers, “O Estado de São Paulo” on 27/aug/2009, and shot by Paulo Pinto (note: I just erased the birds for effect at the end, but didn’t change their positions at all. What would be the point?). This short video demonstrates my interpretation of the birds as notes.
I hope that somewhere out there, some higher intelligence is playing music made as you & I go about our daily activities.
I find the creation process far more beautiful than the results, at least in this case:
PetaPixel explains,
Starting at a cool $500K for a 23×32-inch “print,” these portraits are made out of tiny spheres of one of the most expensive metals on Earth: Platinum.
You get a half-hour meeting with the company, after which they will assign a photographer to come shoot you for a couple of hours. From there, the image is digitized, hand assembled with the 13,000 platinum spheres, and you end up with a halftone portrait worth a whopping half million dollars… or so they would like you to believe.
[YouTube]
In this video by Tatia PIlieva, twenty strangers kiss for the first time, and it’s sweeter than you would imagine.
[YouTube]
1,000 gigs for 10 bucks a month. Wow; bring it on!
Check out the new pricing for Google Drive (which integrates with my product, Google Photos):
Storage is shared between Gmail, Drive, and Google+ Photos so you can focus on the content of your messages, files, and photos instead of how much you’re storing and where. Today, we’re making it more affordable for you to keep everything safe and easy to reach on any device, from everywhere.
We’ve lowered the price of our monthly storage plans to $1.99 for 100GB (previously $4.99), $9.99 for 1TB (previously $49.99), and $99.99 for 10TB, with even more storage available if you need it. You can sign up for one of these new storage plans at www.google.com/settings/storage. And of course, 15GB remains free.
In addition you can store an unlimited number of photos at 2048 resolution. To give it a spin, download Google Drive & start dropping in your raw files (or JPEGs, etc). They’ll sync with the cloud & be ready to edit & share via Google+.
What do you think? I’m still quite new to Google, so any & all feedback is welcome!
This cleverness makes me think of Russell Brown getting frisky with a flashlight & Photoshop Touch. Colossal quotes creator Michael Langan as saying,
There’s no CG in the video, just practical effects. Most of the video is lit by a single flashlight, drawn slowly over the landscape and later “echoed” up to 500 times to create patterns that fill the scene with light. We used a projector mounted to a motorized lazy susan to achieve the “sliver” shots of Nicole.
Enjoy:
[YouTube]
Sunset plane ride + photographer + DSLR = striking imagery. Matthew Vandeputte describes his approach:
A hyperlapse is a special photography technique where you take a series of photos with similar framing while physically moving in between every shot. After stabilizing the footage with special software, you (quite literally in this case) create a flight through time and space. Because you’re shooting at a slower framerate than the usual 24/25/30 frames per second, the rendered video will show the world in fast-forward.
The whole article is worth the quick read.
[YouTube]
How long until madness like this…
Skybox’s constellation of micro-satellites is putting out the world’s first commercial, high-resolution, HD video of Earth from space. Here you can see Mapbox Streets paired with this video from SkySat-1.
…seems totally passé? (A good while, I hope.)
We were spellbound watching “the Sanddorn Balance” in Cirque du Soleil’s Amaluna show on Saturday. Here Lara Jacobs Rigolo puts on the show:
Cirque’s Lili Chao performed the piece at Google the other day, and the subsequent talk about creativity is well worth watching.
[YouTube]
Years ago, being a crappy boyfriend, I bought Margot a bag of old-school rubber GI Joe heads from Seattle’s Archie McPhee. I took to photographing one of these dudes everywhere I went—e.g. out in Death Valley:
Noting his tendency to pop up a la the ubiquitous Goldbug in Richard Scarry stories, we granted him the rank of Sgt. Goldbug. I’m reminded of this seeing photographer Andrew Whyte’s much superior series featuring a Lego minifig:
Of the project he says,
“I love to document everyday things and build them into mini-series,” Whyte says. “But quite often there’s nothing cohesive about what I shoot from one day to the next. As soon as my kids discovered the camera accessory at the Lego store, which fits in the hand of a mini-figure, I worked out a way to start placing the character in my day-to-day shots and he became a cohesive element. For the whole year, I really never left home without the figure.”
Check out the article to see the gallery. [Via Laura Williams Argilla]
Interesting news from Engadget about a new system that promises depth sensing, better zoom, and more:
The big trick here is Corephotonics‘ use of two lenses with two different focal lengths. One lens is wide-angle, while the other is at 3x zoom. This means you can switch lenses to magnify more distant subjects without resorting to digital zoom. In the test set-up shown in the video above, which compared the dual-lens system side-by-side with a traditional smartphone camera (with both modules pointed at a test card around a foot away), the Corephotonics system outputted a clear 13-megapixel image regardless of whether it was at 1x or 3x zoom.
(which is not just a great potential band name) Cool to see how wearable cameras like the GoPro are making it possible to capture & tell stories that would have otherwise been impossible.
[YouTube]
Whoa—now this looks rather cool.
Years ago I wrote that “Photoshop 3D is not about 3D,” at least as people would first imagine from the name. Interacting with this sort of data capture is the kind of thing I had in mind.
[YouTube]
A few years back photographer Martin Evening took a series of photos…
Pretty slick, eh?
I find this all deeply exciting. How can we bring imaging magic to everyone—to people who don’t know it’s possible, much less how to do it themselves?
Speaking of refocusing images (per the previous post), Qualcomm has posted a number of demos showing how they can capture multiple images at once (either with varying focal distances, or with flash/no flash), then synthesize interesting results.
[YouTube]
Tesseract promises “a new camera technology that allows you to perform SLR-like depth of field effects, digital refocusing, 3D color filters and much more on your mobile phone.” Noting its ability to generate separate layers, TechCrunch says, “It’s part RAW, part PSD but straight from your mobile device’s camera.”
Post-capture refocusing still strikes me as a parlor trick, but image segmentation to enable better extraction, compositing, and depth of field effects seems highly useful. You can get a bit more info from founder Kshitij Marwah’s recent talk.
Meanwhile, the company has released FOCII, a printable transparency mask that lets you “take any existing DSLR and convert into a light field camera for post capture refocusing with a simple $1 filter!”
Check out The Wider Image, a nice find from reader John Stevenson:
Using photography + technology to bring people together with cultural richness; man, I love stuff like this. Gautam Gandhi writes,
Starting today, anyone with an Internet connection can explore the Taj Mahal and 29 of India’s most iconic national monuments through Street View on Google Maps and the Google Cultural Institute.
Using the Street View Trekker, we’ve brought you images that let you virtually stroll through the vast grounds of Humayun’s Tomb, admire the red sandstone walls of Red Fort, and explore the ancient temples at Muvar Koil.
[YouTube]
You tell me. DesignTaxi writes,
In this video, a group of skydivers’ GoPro camera accidentally slips out of a member of the group’s hand. It drops from the plane, spinning tremendously and eventually lands in a pig pen.
All this while, the GoPro camera continues to record footage. It lands with the camera facing upwards, it quickly gets discovered by a pig, who is curious about the gadget’s existence in its pen.
Be advised: The ending did induce Margot to coin the phrase, “Operation Pig Tonsils.”
It’s nice to see my former teammates continuing to rock out:
