Photography: Insects lift off at 3,200fps

Photography

Hats off—and wings up—to Prof. Adrian Smith & team from NC State:

[They] utilized a black light to attract unusual insects, like a plume moth, eastern firefly, and a rosy maple moth that, as Smith notes, resembles “a flying muppet.” He then recorded the creatures’ flight maneuvers at 3,200 fps to capture their unique wing movements, which he explains during each step. 

Let your freaky proboscises fly:

[Via]

Ikea + Lego = BYGGLEK!

Design

“Man, I thought this was gonna feature some Swedish Meatball-printed bricks, but it’s just boxes? Hmm.” — Finn Nack, who at age 12 is now deeply hard to impress 😌

Skepticism of tweens notwithstanding, this seems like a fun, simple way to upgrade storage for kids, and who doesn’t want to yell “BYGGLEK!” (a la Vonnegut’s “Gilgongo!”) from time to time?

The BYGGLEK collection will hit stores worldwide with a variety of sizes, from a three-box set priced at US$10 to a US$15 huge box, from October 2020. There will also be a LEGO brick set with 201 pieces sold along with the boxes.

VFX: Kaleidoscopic highways

Illustration

Hey, remember highways?
Remember places?

They still exist, quarantine notwithstanding, and Worldgrapher + Visual Suspect have made some trippy, beautiful footage showing some:

Made by simply cropping and duplicating real footage, the dizzying video twists and turns through complex interchanges that are repeated in patterns and emblazoned with headlights and the city’s glow. Many of the shots descend into the center of the transportation systems, glimpsing the moving cars and traffic lights.

[Via]

This Photoshop panel is a joke. (Seriously!)

Miscellaneous

Years ago we laughed about creating an in-app Photoshop assistant called Brushy the Talking Airbrush who would, in a slack-jawed Gomer Pyle voice, intone things like “Hey, it look like yer tryin’ to retouch a photo!”

Along somewhat similarly cheeky lines comes Infinite Jokes:

“What if Photoshop could verbally judge your decisions while you were working, or tell you the best photo related puns and jokes? Infinite Jokes is just that!” reads the description. “The free light hearted panel is the perfect retouching buddy that will provide humor for hours on end.”

Yuk it up:

Canon enables easy WiFi backup to Google Photos

Google Photos, Photography

“Eh, who’s gonna care about that—10 million people? Thbbbt!” — an ex-Adobe colleague at Apple in 2011 when I asked for better camera->device->cloud integration.

I’ve remarked before on my saltiness at our whole industry’s rather, er, sedate pace in enabling slicker integration between dedicated cameras & cloud backup/editing, so I’m really happy to see Canon & Google collaborating to automate camera->cloud transfer:

The team writes,

With the latest version of the image.canon app (available on Android or iOS) and a compatible Canon camera, you can choose to automatically transfer original quality photos to Google Photos, eliminating the hassle of using your computer or phone to back them up.

In addition to a compatible Canon camera and the image.canon app, you’ll also need a Google One membership to use this feature. To help get started, Canon users will get one month of Google One free, providing access to up to 100 GB of cloud storage, as well as other member benefits, such as premium support from Google experts and family sharing.