Matt Gosden and Rob Rackstraw give the old city the “New York in Miniature” treatment:

[Via Margot Nack]

Andrew Kupresanin’s Nadia project claims that “The camera that thinks, so you don’t have to.”  Instead of showing an image on its viewfinder, the camera leverages ACQUINE, the “Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine,” in order to display an aesthetic rating

As I’ve said previously, developments like this makes think of the Robin Williams character in Dead Poets Society excoriating a textbook that rated poetry along two axes:

Excrement! That’s what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard! We’re not laying pipe! We’re talking about poetry. How can you describe poetry like American Bandstand? “I like Byron, I give him a 42 but I can’t dance to it!”

Or, as The Online Photographer put it, “If You Think You Need This, Kill Yourself.”

I start wondering whether the art project here is a bit more “meta” than it appears: The point is to make photographers flip out–a sea of (largely) angry old white guys as the medium, unknowingly engaged in mass performance art. If so, touché! [Via Tobias Hoellrich]

Previously: “A computational model of aesthetics”

Remember the Historypin project I mentioned recently? Creating that kind of historical overlay is about to get easier.

“Computational rephotography,” says Wired, “is a fancy name for photos taken from the exact same viewpoint as an old photograph. Actually, that’s just rephotography. The ‘computational’ part is when software helps out.”

Adobe researcher Aseem Agarwala, together with MIT’s Frédo Durand and Soonmin Bae, are developing some interesting tech here:

According to New Scientist,

The team’s software runs on a laptop linked to a digital camera. The software compares the camera’s view to a preloaded historical scene and provides instructions to adjust the camera’s position and zoom to best match the scene.

The laptop is a temporary measure, however: “We envision the tool running directly on the camera,” the team says.

For more info, check out the project site and papers (including a 135 MB PDF!).  [Via Thorsten Wulff]

Neat: two seconds of lightning slowed down to a minute and a half.

[Via]

I love the flavor of this cross-country roadtrip video from Levi’s:

It gets cooler when you check out the behind-the-scenes video (featuring things like a “MacGyver-style” protractor made in Photoshop):

[Via]
[Tangential, inside-baseball note: A big, wet, sloppy kiss to the folks at YouTube for now allowing one to specify the dimensions for embedded video. I can’t tell you how many times I used a blank document in Photoshop to calculate how to scale object height to match a certain width. Adios to all that!]

There’s some interesting food for thought here (the merging of video & still imaging, terabytes becoming the new megabytes, etc.). Skip forward 3 minutes or so if you’re short on time.

For more on research Adobe’s been doing around infinite-focus imaging, see previous. [Via Tom Hogarty]

The IPTC and the PLUS Coalition have created a free Photo Metadata Toolkit for Adobe CS3-CS5 applications. Together with the downloadable user guide, these tools help photographers & agencies store detailed descriptions of their content and data relevant for managing image copyrights.
According to the press release,

The IPTC-PLUS Photo Metadata Toolkit for Adobe CS includes easy-to-use IPTC-PLUS Metadata panels for Adobe Bridge CS3 and CS4, plus comprehensive user guidelines for these panels and the File Info panels already built into all CS5 products. The panels for Bridge include the granular metadata fields of the IPTC Photo Metadata and also a set of fields for the communication of image rights metadata, based on industry standard developed by the PLUS Coalition. Creating these panels was a joint effort of both organizations.

I saw Jeff Sedlik from PLUS speak here in LA yesterday, and long story short, if you care even a little about preserving ownership of what you create, take two seconds and add your copyright info. These tools make it easy, and if you’re in doubt about what to do, the guide explains things.
[Update: To clarify, the downloadable panels are usable/needed only in CS3/CS4, as the functionality ships in the box with CS5. The guide is relevant to users of all three versions.]

• The StreetMuseum iPhone app overlays the 19th century on top of current London. [Via]
• Monochrome:
  • Strobe photography pioneer Harold Edgerton captured Stonehenge at night by using “a 50,000 watt-second flash in the bay of a night-flying airplane 1500 feet above the ancient monoliths.” I’d really like to see a larger version. [Via]
  • Dig the otherworldly black & whites of Zoltán Vancsó.
• Kirill Kuletski shows that salt mines are good for you (really!). [Via]
• The Big Picture commemorates the eruption of Mount St. Helens, 30 (!) years ago. (I vividly remember sifting through ash in a Chicago museum at age ~5.)

On June 26th, Lightroom and Photoshop product managers Tom Hogarty and Bryan O’Neil Hughes will be leading a morning photo walk around New York’s Madison Square Park and Flatiron district. Meet up at Foto Care 41 West 22nd (between 5th & 6th Aves.) at 10am sharp. The walk is scheduled to last until 2pm and includes a free lunch and software tips/demos. Feel free to bring your disc camera & crampons whatever camera you’d like & comfortable shoes.

Space is limited to 50 participants, so please RSVP via the event page.

Other NY/next week-related reminders:

• On Friday the 25th from 4:30-7:30 pm, Scott Kelby & crew will be joining Adobe folks for a free Photoshop CS5 Summit.
• Tom and Bryan will be presenting LR3 and PS CS5 at Fotocare on the 28th and 29th; see details.

“Taking photos of multi-lane monstrosities all around Los Angeles,” says Photojojo, photographer David Yoon “wielded the power of Photoshop, and he narrowed LA.” Check out his novel technique, which includes drawing lines on his camera’s LCD:

Find more images & projects on his Narrow Streets: Los Angeles blog.

Beautifully smooth imagery from Alexandros Maragos:

[Via Katrin Eismann]

Great stuff from Sean Stiegemeier, particularly in the use of a motorized dolly. [Via Tom Moran]

We’ve had so much CS5-related news to share lately that I haven’t gotten to spend much time posting unrelated interestingness. In case you dig that type of thing, I’m going quick n’ dirty (er, cheap n’ cheerful) and unloading some of my recent finds:

• Photography:
  • “Matthew Albanese‘s photos of dramatic landscapes are gorgeous, but they are not what they first seem to be. These are meticulously hand-made models.” [Via]
  • Tim Hetherington has captured raw, eye-opening photography of Liberian war graffiti.
• Science-y:
  • Grab my Kenobi: Holograms you can feel (?).
  • In early July, “a photographer took a picture of what appears to be three Suns rising over Gdansk Bay in Poland,” writes Kottke.
  • Nebulous: Celestial soap bubble. (The fact that the thing got dubbed “PN G75.5+1.7” makes me feel a little better about some of Adobe’s naming choices.) [Via]
• Auto-Align, feelin’ fine: How Photoshop Helped Save My Dad from eBay Fraud. [Via]
• Shape Collage is a “Free Automatic Photo Collage Maker.”

And now for a hypnotically chill counterpoint, where nothing blows up. Photography by Charles Leung.

[Via]

Photoshop tech writer Eric Floch points out that the SJ Museum of Art is hosting an Ansel Adams exhibition that runs through this Sunday. He & some other team members checked it out, and he writes:

The photographs on display are quite stunning. It’s mostly small-scale prints Adams made from the 1920s through the 1950s. You can see the full evolution Adams made from the soft-focus “Parmelian Prints” of the 20s through the sharper works to come out of the f/64 school to the “classic” cooler, high-contrast prints we’ve all seen on so many posters.

Check out the museum site (link above) for a video & more info.