Being able to preset one’s flight path on a map seems like a great way to set up shots that transition from day to night—especially cool when done with hyperlapses. Now to find a sufficiently interesting area in which to try it. See below for a demo/tutorial.

Oh, and there’s a really significant (for me, anyway) tweak hanging out in the corresponding firmware update: “Fixed issue: could not open Sphere panorama photos in Facebook.” The absence of the correct metadata was an ongoing pain that prevented me from seeing panos as interactive in Google Photos or making them interactive on Facebook. I haven’t yet installed the update, but I have my fingers crossed. [Update: It works!]

[YouTube]

Whoa—apparently Irish Wonder Twin Powers involve an insane work ethic for finding interesting earthly patterns:

I was getting a sense of deja vu watching this, and PetaPixel helpfully writes,

If project reminds you of “Arena” by Páraic McGloughlin, there’s a good reason for that: Páraic is Kevin’s twin brother and the two had originally planned to create a single collaborative video before splitting and working independently on two separate videos while working in the same office.

[Vimeo]

Just a little drone fun my Mini Me & I had in Barstow, CA, at New Years (with a big hat tip to Mr. Johnny Cash):

And on the very off chance you’re interested in having a very rail-savvy 9-year-old tour you around the Western America Railroad Museum, well, you’re in luck. 😌

[YouTube]

[YouTube 1 & 2]

This makes me briefly—very briefly—want to move back to the land of the ice & snow:

[Vimeo] [Via]

The lads and I are just back from an overnight visit to the USS Hornet, a decorated World War II-era carrier we last visited some 7 years ago. This time around we spent the night with our Cub Scout pack & several hundred other scouts & parents from around the area. On the whole we had a ball touring the ship, and I had a little fun flying my drone over the Hornet & her adjacent Navy ships:

And here’s an interactive 360º panorama from overhead. (Obligatory nerdy sidenote: This is the JPEG version stitched on the fly by the drone, and although I was able to stitch the raw source images in Camera Raw & get better color/done, I’ll be damned if I can figure out how to inject the proper metadata to make it display right. As usual I used EXIF Fixer to make the JPEG interactive.)

[YouTube]

“It’s a hell of a lot easier to sit on your ass in a vehicle for thousands of miles than it is to carry 80 lbs of gear on your back into the wilderness for dozens of miles,” writes Nicolaus Wegner, explaining his interest in capturing storm time lapses. “Plus, I think supercells and other forms of severe weather are just about the coolest events our planet manifests.” Agreed:

[Via]

I have no idea whether this thing is worth a damn—but I’d sure like to find out (well, with the caveat that if it’s awesome, it’d be one more piece of bulky kit to schlepp around):

Using an astronaut’s perspective on intuitive motion through space, we have patented a unique and intuitive drone controller that anyone, whether they’re eight or eighty, can pick up and begin using immediately.

The FT Aviator is designed to incorporate the relevant 4 degrees of freedom of movement (x, y, z, and yaw) to drone flying, eliminating the awkward interface and steeper learning curve of existing dual thumb-controlled drones. It intuitively unlocks human potential to fly and capture stunning imagery.

[YouTube]

We just passed the 50th anniversary of the creation of “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken,” captured on Christmas Eve, 1968, by astronaut Bill Anders during the Apollo 8 mission. Here’s a great short look into this photographic history:

[YouTube]

What a gorgeous way to ring in the still-new year:

Pilot/photographer Sigurður Þór Helgason writes,

Happy New Year 2019. This is Reykjavik city on New Years Eve. Most households shot their own fireworks just before midnight so the outcome is a spectacular firework show, unlike any other. Music by Adi Goldstein.

Note: I shot this with my Mavic 2 Pro. I used D-log M, ISO 1600, shutter 1/25 frame rate 25 and used the LUT from DJI to bring the colours back. No other adjustments and no, there are no special effects in this video or post production. Hope you enjoy this.

I find this kind of thing endlessly, eerily fascinating:

A collection of high quality remastered prints from the dawn of film taken in Belle Époque-era Paris, France from 1896-1900.  Slowed down footage to a natural rate and added in sound for ambiance.  These films were taken by the Lumière company.

0:08 – Notre-Dame Cathedral (1896)
0:58 – Alma Bridge (1900)
1:37 – Avenue des Champs-Élysées (1899)
2:33 – Place de la Concorde (1897)
3:24 – Passing of a fire brigade (1897)
3:58 – Tuileries Garden (1896)
4:48 – Moving walkway at the Paris Exposition (1900)
5:24 – The Eiffel Tower from the Rives de la Seine à Paris (1897)

If that’s up your horse-trodden alley, check out a similar piece from NYC that I posted earlier in the year:

[YouTube 1 & 2]

Somebody page Alan Parsons, ‘cause this is one heck of an eye in the sky:

And here’s a peek at the light-bringer itself in action:

[Vimeo 1 & 2]

Trent Mitchell shares his incredible devotion to capturing ethereal, ephemeral moments in this terrific short film by Robert Sherwood:

“My aim to render the true essence of the human condition and a mirror of one’s self could only be captured within the moment and in a single breath,” writes Mitchell. “In a space that moved the subject and the viewer with equal pull.” [Via]

Illuminating stuff as always from Stewart & Drone Film Guide:

Of course, I’m reminded that before I even bother with this stuff, I need to move myself off the absolutely shite color tools in iMovie and onto… what, exactly? As I mentioned the other day, the new Adobe Rush’s tools are really anemic; learning Premiere Pro seems like no joke; and I don’t care to pay for Final Cut. Hmm—to be continued.

[YouTube]

History? Check.
Photography? Check.
Aerospace? Check.

I am there for this:

Smithsonian notes:

• The distinct H-shaped yoke determined both roll and pitch. Airspeed was controlled by the number of rocket chambers—up to four—fired by the silver thumb-switch to the left of the yoke; there was no throttle.
• The Mach indicator above goes to Mach 1.5; it was most likely installed after Yeager’s first transonic flight. It’s flanked by a conventional altimeter and airspeed indicator. The fastest Glamorous Glennis ever flew was Mach 1.45.
• Yeager signed his name in the cockpit of Glamorous Glennis on many occasions over the decades. (He piloted 33 of the aircraft’s 78 career test flights, including its last, on May 12, 1950.) Can you find all his signatures?

[Via Bryan O’Neil Hughes]

Just a quick bit of flying Thanksgiving weekend near Pismo Beach. A few thoughts:

• Color grading in iMovie is for the birds, but somehow it’s no better in Adobe Rush (which lacks an Auto button (!), much less key framing), and learning Premiere Pro always seems like too big a hill to climb.
• I likewise find it hard to cut on the beats—a problem compounded when I share the output to YouTube and Facebook (where, I swear to God, somehow the audio & video get differently out of sync).
• I’ve gotta learn how to avoid (or later compensate for) the gross propeller shadows that appear in a few shots here.
• No, the soundtrack doesn’t really fit (an assessment my 9-year-old Henry cheerfully volunteered 🙄), but, eh, I found the juxtaposition oddly fun. YMMV.

Haunting work from SF Drones, showing what we pray won’t become our new normal:

Unknown artist’s juxtaposition:

[Vimeo] [Via]

I can’t wait:

Here Peter Jackson talks about the painstaking restoration process, featuring some cameos by Photoshop:

[YouTube 1 & 2] [Via]

I sure don’t need it, but it sure does look fun—especially the clever timelapse & pano features shown later in this vid:

Review:

[YouTube 1 & 2] [Via]

Short, sweet, spectacular:

PetaPixel explains,

ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst… shot the photos in the timelapse by mounting a camera in the Cupola module and using an intervalometer to snap photos at regular intervals. Played back at 8 to 16 times normal speed, the timelapse above shows around 15 minutes of the rocket’s launch.

[YouTube]

Happy Thanksgiving, gang. If you’re bored over the holiday, try making your own gingerbread zoetrope, or just enjoy the results:

[YouTube] [Via]

Thanks, NASA, for these minutes of Zen:

Kottke writes,

This is easily the most awe-inspiring and jaw-dropping thing I’ve seen in months. In its low Earth orbit ~250 miles above our planet, the International Space Station takes about 90 minutes to complete one orbit of the Earth. Fewer than 600 people have ever orbited our planet, but with this realtime video by Seán Doran, you can experience what it looks like from the vantage point of the IIS for the full 90 minutes.

Happy Monday.

[YouTube]

Whoa:

PetaPixel writes,

After filming the band performing the song, director Johnny Jansen spent $680 on printing out 2,250 of the frames on regular paper with a laser printer. With a crew of 6 people, Jansen then painstakingly photographed each print in a new photo to create the stop-motion video.

[YouTube]

“Haboob bonanza”? Yes please, Mike Olbinski:

[YouTube] [Via]

Visiting the NY Times was always among the real treats of my time working on Photoshop. I was always struck by the thoughtfulness & professionalism of the staff, but also by the gritty, brass-tacks considerations of cranking through thousands of images daily, often using some pretty dated infrastructure.

Now Google’s Cloud Vision tools are helping to tap into that infrastructure—specifically, bringing treasures of “The Morgue” back into the light by making their patchwork annotations searchable.

The morgue contains photos from as far back as the late 19th century, and many of its contents have tremendous historical value—some that are not stored anywhere else in the world. In 2015, a broken pipe flooded the archival library, putting the entire collection at risk. Luckily, only minor damage was done, but the event raised the question: How can some of the company’s most precious physical assets be safely stored?

Check it out:

[YouTube] [Via]

This completely blows my mind. Have a happy, reflective, and grateful Veteran’s Day, everyone.

Check out their 360º captures on Google Street View. Blind Navy vet & expedition leader Lonnie Bedwell writes,

I believe we can’t abandon our sense of adventure because we lose our ability to see it, and it has become my goal to help people who live with similar challenges, and show them that anything is possible.

In 2013, I became the first blind person to kayak the entire 226 miles of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon But, I always felt it didn’t mean anything unless I found a way to pay it forward. So I joined up with the good folks at Team River Runner, a nonprofit dedicated to providing all veterans and their families an opportunity to find health, healing, community, and purpose. Together we had the audacious goal to support four other blind veterans take a trip down the Grand Canyon.

[YouTube]

Hop aboard a raptor to cruise through Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca stadium:

[YouTube] [Via]

Time, they say, has the nice property of keeping everything from happening at once. But what would it look like if everything did happen at once?

Photographer Páraic McGloughlin hung out on a bridge in Sligo, Ireland for 19 hours, to create a single, day-long shot that he then manipulated. Colossal writes,

“Using a fundamental image (a time lapse) to mask and cut into, I tried to show the variable possibilities within a limited time span, maintaining the integrity of each individual photograph while dissecting and rearranging the overall image.” The visual content was matched with each layer of audio created by Cooper to form the song, which stacks up to over one hundred layers. 

Check it out:

My colleague Richard is in charge of Google News, and in addition to doing a million other interesting things, he’s an accomplished aerial photographer. I enjoy the perspectives—literal & figurative—he shares in this meditative piece:

[YouTube]

Man, apparently some of the biker scouts from Endor lived on & now thread drones through forrest gaps over crazy mountain biking trails, as seen in this bonkers project from Cinematic Flow:

“We designed and refined FPV drones since 5 years now. When Kilian spoke about his idea of putting a GoPro Fusion on one of our drones, we were intrigued but thrilled about this new challenge. The design and the flying of this set up are so different than what we are used to, there were loads of crashes but the end result is so refreshing and pushes the drone shot to the next level.” Pierre, engineer at Cinematic Flow

Now, how about a look behind the scenes?

We trust the cam, we ensure a light flying and tighten the buttocks to export!

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

[YouTube 1 & 2] [Via Luke Wroblewski]

Wow—check out this amazing sneak peek from Adobe’s Long Mai (see paper):

Enables any photograph to be turned into a live photo; animating the image in 3D, simulating the realistic effect of flying through the scene.

This is especially dear to my heart.

As a brand new Photoshop PM (in 2002—gah!), one of my first trips was back to NYC to visit motion graphics artists. Touring one shop I was amazed to glimpse a technique I’d never seen, using Photoshop to break 2D photos into layers, fill in gaps, and then animate the results in After Effects. Later that year the work came to the big screen in The Kid Stays in the Picture, the documentary that now lends its name to this ubiquitous parallax effect.

Here Yorgo Alexopoulos talks about how he developed the technique & how he’s leveraged it in later works:

So, while we wait for Adobe’s new tech to ship, how could one do this by hand? Below, artist Joe Fellows gives a brief, highly watchable demo of how it’s done (although it physically pains me to see him using the Pen tool to make selections & no Content-Aware Fill to at least block in the gaps):

[YouTube 1, 2, and 3]

Man, I used to hate demoing alongside After Effects during internal Adobe events: We had Photoshop, sure—but they were Photoshop on wheels. You could just pencil them in for the Top Gun trophy nearly every time.

Making Content-Aware Fill work at all is hard—but making it effective over multiple frames (“temporally coherent,” in our nerdy parlance)? Well, that requires FM technology—F’ing Magic. Here’s a naive implementation (not from Adobe):

Cool, artsy—but generally not so useful. And here (at 1:50:44) it is as the After Effects team intends to ship it next year (first sneak-peeked last year as Project Cloak):

Special props to Jason Levine for vamping through the calculation phase & then going full “When Harry Met Sally deli scene” at the conclusion. As a friend noted, “I’ll have what he’s having.” 😝

[YouTube]

Very cool:

FB writes,

[Y]ou just take a photo in Portrait mode using your compatible dual-lens smartphone, then share as a 3D photo on Facebook where you can scroll, pan and tilt to see the photo in realistic 3D… Everyone will be able to see 3D photos in News Feed and VR today, while the ability to create and share 3D photos begins to roll out today and will be available to everyone in the coming weeks.

Check out their post for tips on composing a 3D-friendly image (e.g. include lots of foreground/background separation; avoid transparent objects like drinking glasses).

Just a little evening flight over the lovely church & plaza of San Jose del Cabo Viejo during our visit last week:

[YouTube]

C’mon, you know you can relate. 🙂

[YouTube]

“Everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.” — Richard Feynman

In that spirit, I found myself surprisingly captivated by this single narrated shot of a Saturn V lifting off. I bet if you start watching, you’ll stick with it longer than you’d have guessed:

And here’s a similarly nice one for the Space Shuttle:

[[YouTube 1 & 2]

One of my favorite creative-learning experiences of the last several years was the Art of Visual Storytelling seminar from SNL director of photography Alex Buono. He pointed out that sure, tech & gear matter—but they’re all in service of more timeless storytelling principles & techniques. Learning those (“the ‘why’ behind the ‘how’”) is far more important and rewarding, at least for me, than any passing piece of kit.

In a similar vein, Stewart from Drone Film Guide covers reviews film history to cover five classic Hollywood aerial shots that drone flyers can incorporate into their work (well, modulo having numerous police cars at your disposal :-)):

[YouTube]

Wait for it… wait for it… BAM!

[YouTube]

Oh man—my little railfan Henry is gonna flip his lid for this immersive project.

The team writes,

Anyone can now explore India’s railways in unprecedented detail with over 100 exhibitions that bring together more than 3,000 images, 150 videos and 150 iconic locations across India. Zoom into ultra-high resolution images made with our Art Camera, like maps of the East Indian Railways that the British used to connect Calcutta with the North West Provinces; get a 360 degree look around the workshops of cardboard rail model enthusiasts; or take a behind the scenes peek at Darjeeling loco shed.

If you’ve ever rocked out to Ladytron, you know Reuben Wu’s musical work—but it turns out he’s a helluva photographer, too. Check out his recent drone work in Peru:

For as long as he can remember, Reuben Wu has been obsessed with mountains. […] Wu’s new project uses night drones to illuminate the ice blue walls of the Pastoruri Glacier in Peru, 16,000 feet high in the sky. Taking breaks in between shots to catch his breath and warm his hands, Wu attempts to photograph his vision, painting the landscape with light from his drone, the stars and the moon.

[YouTube] [Via]

Hmm—I wonder how this tech (available from Topaz for $99) compares to the RAISR technology we shipped a couple of years ago.

[YouTube]

I love seeing the creative lengths to which the Geo team goes in capturing our planet’s richness:

At over 100 kilometers long and 30 kilometres wide, Lake Toba is the largest volcanic lake in the world. A small team of Googlers spent the last two months scouring every meter of its coastline, using a Street View Trekker mounted on a boat,  to collect gorgeous 360-degree imagery around this former supervolcano.

[YouTube]

Whoa—songs of ice & fire:

“We probably could have done this digitally, but we actually shot all of this practically in a studio” says Alan Dye, Apple Vice President of User Interface Design, of the motion faces. “What I love about the fact that we did this is that it’s just so indicative of how the design team works. It was really about bringing together some of our various talents to create these faces. There are of course art directors, and color experts, and graphic designers, but also model makers who helped build these structures that we would eventually, you know, set on fire.”

[YouTube]

Photoshop’s venerable (oh God, how can it already be venerable?!) Content-Aware Phil is growing up nicely, as seen in this new sneak peek from my friend Meredith. I look forward to seeing whether the increased power/finesse more than offsets the apparent jump in complexity—as I expect it will.

[YouTube]

When I first bought a drone, I naively assumed that one could traverse the camera independent of body orientation. Now that’s possible, if not entirely discoverable: just swipe!

[YouTube]