Category Archives: photography

Apple products destroyed in the name of art

Design, Images, photography, Technology, , , , , , ,

Digital-imaging and CGI artist Michael Tompert is fascinated by the destruction of Apple products.  Ever wonder what an iPad would like after a sledgehammer beating and torch treatment?  Your inquisitiveness get resolved in the image above titled “Book Burning.”  Sick and tired of antenna issues and feel like pounding your iPhone 4 with an eight pound sledgehammer?  Don’t do that–just flip through the gallery below and visualize it.  There you’ll also find “Breathe”, a MacBook Air with 12 rounds in it (damaged by a Heckler & Koch handgun); “Liquid Crystals”, a sledgehammered and torched MacBook; “You’re So 2000&L8”, a disfigured iPhone 3G; and “Caltrain Fatalities: Left Track/Right Track”, a rainbow of iPod nanos ran over by a train.

All of these disturbing images are part of Tompert’s 12LVE photography exhibit located at the WhiteSpace Gallery in Palo Alto, California.  “The images are large-scale yet microscopic, providing a canvas for contemplating our relationship with fetish, fashion, freedom, and bondage,” says Tompert.  The inspiration behind the gallery is rather simplistic; when Tompert got tired of his two sons fighting over an iPod touch, he took it from them and smash it on the floor.  “They were kind of stunned — the screen was broken and this liquid poured out of it. I got my camera to shoot it,” he told the LA Times.  “My wife told me that I should do something with it.”  And the rest, as they say, was history.

It’s important to note that Tompert is not anti-Apple; in fact he calls himself “an Apple fan from Day 1”.  If that doesn’t do it for you, he’s a former Apple graphics designer.

Again, take a look in the gallery below to gaze at the beautiful destruction and head over to Cult of Mac to gain insight into the making of the gallery.

[Via CNET]

A ball of water in the palm of your hand

Design, Images, photography, , , , ,

UK-based photographer Edward Horsford specializes in high speed photography and one day decided to work with water balloons.  His motivation?  He is interested in “capturing a moment rarely seen and almost never captured.”  He admits that “[his] camera is really the least important part of the shots.”  So he uses a custom, Arduino-based flash trigger to produce specific lighting arrangements required to capture the water balloon at the precise point of explosion.  The timing of the flash is key; the aforementioned trigger picks up the sound of the balloon popping and flashes at what it thinks to be the most opportune moment.  Horsford must be a patient man.  And what might be considered the most impressive feat here?  He manages to do it all without any assistance; from setting up the trigger, to holding and popping the balloon, to taking the picture.  Impressive stuff, huh?  Look in the gallery below to find a few more of these high speed water balloon shots, and head over to Horsford’s Flickr page to view the entire collection.

[Via Gizmodo; NPR; DYIPhotography; Flickr]

Tiny walk sign dude comes to life in this light stencil animation

Design, photography, Video, , , , ,

If you liked iPad light painting you will love this light stencil animation.  “Subcarpati”, produced by Ionut Negrila and Mihai Calota, features an animated version of the walk sign man.  But you want to know how it was made.  The producers share that it took 5,313 pictures of 57 stencils, 3 different light sources, many calculations, measurements, and camera settings adjustments to make it happen.  They hope their video inspires the creatives of our world to push limits and produce some captivating work.  Look after the break to watch a brief behind-the-scenes look at the sheer amount of work that was required to make a stop motion video of this magnitude.

[Via Vimeo; Gizmodo] Continue reading Tiny walk sign dude comes to life in this light stencil animation →

Adobe details its new plenoptic lens; out-of-focus, be gone!

photography, Technology, Video, , , ,

At NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference, Adobe detailed a direction in photography.  With a plenoptic lens and advanced rendering software, a future you will have the ability to take a picture with a digital camera and change the precise area of focus after the image is taken.  As the post title exlaims, out-of-focus imagery be gone!

But how does it all work?  A plenoptic lens is made of hundreds of very tiny lenses placed together; it gets fitted between a camera’s standard lens and image sensor.  When you snap a picture with a plenoptic-aided camera, the captured photons are recorded from multiple perspectives, allowing for an “infinite” depth of field.  Transfer the data-filled image to your computer and a simple slider can be used to determine an exact area of focus within the image.

Watch Adobe’s presentation in the video above to see a demonstration of this future technology.

[Via LaptopMag]

HDR video results in ultra realism for aspiring videographers

photography, Technology, Video, , , , ,

The fellas at Soviet Montage Productions have managed to implement the HDR process in video using two professional DSLRs.  HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and it involves the process of taking multiple photographs (one underexposed, the other overexposed) and combining the best qualities from each to create the best image possible.  Sounds familiar?  I explained this process recently when Steve Jobs announced that iOS 4.1 would include HDR support in the iPhone’s camera software.  What Soviet Montage has so impressively done is implement the HDR photography technique with video.  Using two Canon 5D MarkIIs and beam splitter, they captured video under different exposure values and used “HDR processing tools” in post to create the visually spectacular video you see above.  The production team find HDR video extremely useful; they say it can “allow for even exposure where artificial lighting is unavailable or impractical.”  The level of detail and realism is mind-boggling, isn’t it?  I look forward to the day Jobs takes the stage to announce HDR video in iPhones; this tech must come to the masses!

[Via Engadget]

The magic of Photoshop time warps present day with WWII era

Images, photography, , , , , ,

Holy frick (on a stick with a brick) this is spooky!  Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov has managed to combine old WWII era photographs with present day pictures to create a visual time portal.  Using simple but effective Photoshop techniques in tandem with perspective-matching images, Larenkov was able to blend war-torn Europe, including famous cities like Saint Petersburg and Leningrad, into what we consider normal, everyday life.  Above Georgy Zhukov of the Soviet Union glares into the camera standing on steps full of rubbish as tourists flock around him and his lieutenants, minding their own business.  The gallery below contains a bunch more enhanced images like this one, so check ’em out.  Want to see more?  Head over to Larenkov’s website and get sucked into a whole ‘nother dimension.

[Via Larenkov; Gizmodo]

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75 gigapixel panorama of Budapest is the world’s largest image

Image cache, photography, , , , , , ,

Remember that 45 gigapixel panorama of the Dubai cityscape I showed you back in early May?  Well a new gigapixel photograph has arrived, dethroning the Dubai image as the world’s largest digital photograph.  A whopping 75 gigapixel image, 360 degree panorama of Budapest is the new champ.  The image was taken with  two 25-megapixel Sony A900 digital cameras fitted with 400mm Minolta lenses and 1.4X teleconverters.  And get a load of this: a printed version of the image measures at 15 meters long and the image file size is 200GB!  But enough blabber.  Head over to site the hosts the intertactive image.  Click the top button on the control bar at the left to enter full screen mode, scrub around the enormous image using your mouse, and feel free to see what the neighbors are doing by using the zoom slider on the left.  You see all those teeny tiny houses scattered in the image above?  Thanks to the highly detailed nature of this image you can zoom all the way into them.  Mind-boggling impressive, eh?

[Via Engadget; 70BPBudapest]

A walk across America in stop-motion

photography, Video, , , , ,

One Canon EOS 5D Mark II.  One tripod.  One tape measure.  One protractor.  A couple of friends.  That’s all you need to produce what you see above.  Conscious Minds Productions and director Sam Griffith hired a model and approached Levis (the jeans and clothing company) to pitch an idea to film a person walking across America in stop-motion.  Levis jumped on board and sponsored the shoot.  With over 1.4 million views to date, Levis made a great decision–it’s viral marketing at its finest!  Anyway.. the final product is quite impressive.  The video consists of 2,770 individual still frames, or photographs, bundled together.  The magic of stop-motion and time-lapse photography provide the awesome illusion of movement.  The 14-day shoot and the editing process that followed were extremely tedious and required much patience.  Due to the lack of expensive professional instruments, the team was forced to “MacGyver” their way through it all.  Producer Peter Cote: “We did not have any really expensive instruments to ensure really smooth orbital camera moves.  ‘I created a protractor in Photoshop printed it out and taped a piece of string to it.”  There was a fantastic behind-the-scenes video that accompanied this video on YouTube, but unfortunately it was taken down for some reason or other.  I will be sure to update this space if it pops up again.  Click here to view their their journey in Google Maps.  (Diggin’ the song?  It’s “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.)

[Via Planet5D; MailOnline]