“17 Countries. 343 Days. 6237 Photographs.” Financial analyst turned photographer Kien Lam has created a high-speed tour of the world:

Check out his site for tons of additional information on the project. [Via Martin Bunyi]

• The Photojojo folks point out Pic Scatter, a free tool for generating a Facebook Timeline-friendly image by collaging your existing FB-hosted photos.
• They also note the funny F Yeah Facebook Profiles Tumblr, full of clever hacks to profile pages.
• From there I found Neal Campbell’s Facebook Timeline Cover Template PSD, useful for making one’s own hacks.

“J. Mettälä took a camera under a frozen lake in Finland,” writes PetaPixel, “and captured this beautiful (and mind-bending) footage of his friends fishing in an upside-down world.”

Here’s the blog post I was drafting Wednesday:

Dear 5D & 24-70: I don’t know what I did to make you disappear, but on the off chance you read this blog, please come back. I miss you very much.  — Love, J.

I was utterly bewildered by it, but I’d begun slowly coming to terms with the disappearance of my camera and big, stupid-expensive lens. The pair had been MIA since Halloween, and all the king’s horses, children, wife, babysitter, and cleaning lady could not find them again.

Thus on Wednesday evening I found myself at San Jose Camera, checking out 60D’s, 7D’s, and stupid-expensive lenses. I was all set to ask your advice on the matter (how’s the 17-55 2.8 lens? are live view and/or a swiveling screen worth a damn? should I maybe go Nikon overall?), and I’d secured a cam or two to borrow from the Photoshop QE locker (one of the best perks of this job). After mourning my loss, I’d started getting excited about having features like video capture.

And then, what do you know, as I was talking to my wife about it at home, my eyes wandered into the china cabinet (never lit except, oddly, at this moment), into a crystal serving bowl… and to the camera!!  Our elderly sitter later remembered that she’d stowed it there while the boys were roughhousing–then utterly forgot about it.

And thus we come to the Germans*: Doesn’t it seem they should have a term for “Relieved delight in one’s good fortune, tinged with vague disappointment, seasoned with guilt regarding the disappointment”?

In any case, I’m looking forward to getting the big rig back in action. It’s true I shoot much less with the SLR these days, and yet when you need to nail a shot (e.g. with family visiting for the holidays), “accept no substitutes.” I just can’t miss any more kid photos when the iPhone or even the S95 takes its sweet time to fire the shutter.

Welcome home, boys.
J.

*Interesting read: “A Joyful & Malicious History Of ‘Schadenfreude’“: “By leaving Germanisms untranslated, one always points to the sentiment expressed by the word as fundamentally and even organically German. My favorite, ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung,’ means roughly to overcome or to come to terms with the past… In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon notes ‘the German mania for name-giving, dividing the Creation finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from named.’ Naming is not only a form of identification or labeling, but also of creation. To the eye, mouth, and ear, capacious German words seem to embody and externalize the weight of difficult emotions.”

From Jan Minol:

[Via]

Rob Whitworth makes frenzy look lovely:

[Via Kevin Connor]

Kinda fun, though the YouTube comments really make it (“Did you know that just like how DSLR’s have a P for Professional mode, Minivans also have an R for Racecar mode? #coolfacts”; “DANG and to think I have been shooting in ‘M’ for ‘Moron'”).

“MWAC,” incidentally, is “Mother With A Camera.”

Russell Brown puts Photoshop Extended through its paces:

Absolutely lovely work from Tom Jenk­ins (just trust me & take the two minutes):

Update: Here’s some great making-of info from Digital Arts.
Apropos of very little, I saw a Google Street View car sitting alongside Page Mill Road last week, its little optical turret spinning away. I hoped it was secretly one of their self-driving robots in disguise. [Via]

Small, ubiquitous video capture & aviation make a potent combo. The NY Times features a story about amateur video helping in air crash investigations. Elsewhere, clashes in the streets of Warsaw have been captured by small, remote helicopter:


I find the effect both exciting and unnerving. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” and capturing misbehavior begets exposure, outrage, and action. Or does it? I wonder whether the aerial footage introduces a “cinemification” element, a sense that real life is simply more TV, more entertainment. I don’t know; I’m not complaining, just wondering aloud a bit. [Via]

Another time lapse, really?? But check it out–Ken Murphy has created a really novel piece:

A camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds. From these images, I created a mosaic of time-lapse movies, each showing a single day. The days are arranged in chronological order. My intent was to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year.

Here’s more info on how it was done, the rig used, and more. [Via]

“For 17 days,” writes Joe Capra, “I travelled solo around the entire island shooting almost 24 hours, sleeping in the car, and eating whenever I had the time. During my days shooting this film I shot 38,000 images, travelled some 2900 miles, and saw some of the most amazing, beautiful, and indescribable landscapes on the planet.”
Joe used Lightroom (with an assist from LRTimelapse) and the new After Effects Warp Stabilizer to create this piece. For more info on the project, check out this interview with Michael Levy Studio.

[Via]

Filmmakers Green Renaissance created this beautiful, inspiring short piece. Our 2- and 3-year-old boys watch it obsessively and now know the “characters” by name (“There’s Cathy in the green hat! There’s old Jacques!”).

Michael König edited together beautiful imagery captured by the crew aboard the International Space Station (see the Vimeo page for more details):

Rip Curl and Time-Slice Films used GoPro HD cams to build a “’30 camera Array’–a line of cameras firing consistently as surfers ride towards and past it.”

The same team erected an in-water scaffolding in Malaysia’s Sunway Lagoon Hotel to mount 52 full-sized DSLR cameras:

Core77 features more details & photos of the rigs, along with behind-the-scenes videos.
[Via]

Another from the “Ah, What Could Go Wrong?” Files:

It denies any family connection to Imperial interrogation droids, but I’m not sure I buy its story. [Via]

Andrew Clancy’s “A Year in New York” is just lovely. Go Irish.

The song ‘We Don’t Eat’ by James Vincent McMorrow is available as a free download from Amazon. [Via Laine Fast]

A lovely little somethin’ somethin’ for a rainy Friday morning:

Dustin Farrell’s work is so beautiful, I almost can’t deal with it.

“Every frame of this video,” he notes, “is a raw still from a Canon 5D2 DSLR and processed with Adobe software.” Check out the Vimeo page for additional technical details. [Via John Dowdell]

Sixty seconds of beauty. (Full screen HD is a must, naturally.)

[Via]

Colin Rich has done the nearly impossible: He’s made me find Los Angeles beautiful.

[Via]

I find Junebum Park’s little videos totally charming.  Sadly it seems the longer, better-quality ones have been pulled from YouTube, but here’s a little taste:

Via Core77, ArtNews says,

In his short films… June Bum Park plays around with… shifts in scale: everyday scenes such as parking a car, constructing a building, or crossing a road are animated by gigantic hands (the artist’s own), and people and objects turn into playthings of a higher power. The manipulations appear tiny, their movements seem pre-determined, and all the figures do not let themselves be distracted from their goal. Cleverly they evade the intruder’s hands and continue on their way with the determination a column of ants.

More amazing aerial filmmaking from the folks who brought us Experience Human Flight:

Or, if you prefer your extreme sports photography to feature spraying blood and wildly overdriven guitars, try this on for size:

[Via]

• Photojournalist James Nachtwey grabbed his camera and ran towards Ground Zero. He captured incredible images, nearly paying for them with his life. You should read his story.
• Tom Junod’s article The Falling Man, about Richard Drew’s famous 9/11 photograph, is long, very difficult, and rewarding.
• “The Thousand-Yard Stare” : Peter Turnley talks about meeting Sal Isabella, the fireman whose image he captured the morning after the attacks.

Clever Kickstarter project CineSkates offers “a set of three wheels that quickly attach to a tripod and enable fluid, rolling video in an ultra-portable package.”

Uses:

• Arcing shots that rotate around objects
• Sliding shots that push or pull the subject into focus
• Rolling shots that glide over the subject
• Time-lapse shots that move the camera slowly and smoothly
• Panning shots that scan a wide area
• “Worm’s eye view” shots that slide just above the floor

[Via]