In the Harry Potter series, a Pensieve is a magical stone that allows people to store and replay memories. While photography helps us store moments, there’s obviously quite a bit of life that slips through the cracks. The Revue by Vicon is a wearable camera that passively takes photographs through the day to document your life.
Based on Microsoft’s SenseCam project, the device snaps photos based on either an internal sensor or using a 30-second interval. While it’s currently a research tool to help people who suffer from memory impairment, if the device were made unobtrusive enough, it may become popular with people who’d like to keep a photo log of their day to day life.
Here’s an example of a day captured using the Revue:
As disk storage becomes cheaper and cheaper, future versions of this kind of device might record HD video and sound. A neat project might be to create a photoblog and publish a 24-hour timelapse every day of the year.
The Revue is available for purchase, but its current price of £500 (~$700) will surely deter most potential buyers.
Stereo Portrait Project, by Alex Fry and Jamie Nimmo, is a 3D photography exhibition documenting Australian creatives. Their version 1.0 rig used two Nikon D90 DSLR cameras attached to a custom camera rig, separated by a distance that is intended to emulate human eyes.
To synchronize the cameras we used an RF trigger split out to two preload shutter release cables. We tested how fast we could sync both shutters together with the flashes, and got reliable sync up to 1/160 speed. Giving us the ability to have people move around, talk to us and not inhibit their performance. This was very important since hands in front of the body look fantastic in 3d.
The photographs were sorted in Aperture, exported to Nuke (compositing software) and tweaked, and finally combined into 3D photos. Here’s an example:
Sadly, you’ll need 3D glasses to appreciate these photographs. I just ordered a pair for about $1.50 on eBay, since it’ll probably be useful to have a pair lying around as 3D continues to explode.
The show is running at the Oh Really Gallery in Sydney, Australia from May 27 to June 10, 2010.
Gail Mooney and her daughter Erin Kelly are about to embark on a three month documentary project around the world using Canon DSLRs, and the above photograph shows the kit they’re bringing along. Check out this blog post to see everything they’re bringing. What’s amazing is that everything here fits inside two backpacks. Whoa.
The resulting film will be titled, “Opening Our Eyes”, and you can follow along on this blog.
Streetmuseum is a new (and free) augmented reality iPhone app created by the Museum of London that allows you to browse historical photographs in various parts of the city.
The app leads you to various locations around London using either the map or GPS. Once you’re there, click the “3D View” button, and the app will recognize the location and overlay the historical photograph over the live video feed of the real world, giving you a brief glimpse into how the past looked.
We’ve seen projects that overlaid historical photos over modern ones, but this is the first time we’ve seen an augmented reality app do it for you in real time. Here are a few more examples:
If only this were available in every big city around the world.
Nikon has a couple neat interactive tools that make it easy to explore and compare lenses. Their lens simulator lets you see what resulting photographs might look like with any lens and camera combination, while their new lens positioning map displays the NIKKOR lineup on a grid with aperture and focal length as the two axes.
Once you’ve found lenses or combinations you like, you can save them for future reference.
It looks like Imagelogr, a new search engine for images, has gotten off on the wrong foot. Only weeks old, the service has sparked quite a response from photographers after it became clear that the service was offering copyrighted photographs for download without any links or attribution.
Their “about us” section states,
Imagelogr.com is an image & picture search engine. We try to index pretty much every picture & image currently available on the free internet. With our powerful search engine finding these images should be fairly easy.
The problem was, photographs that weren’t “free” were being indexed as well, including Flickr images marked “All Rights Reserved.”
Imagelogr claims to be scraping the entire “free web” and seems to have hit Flickr especially hard, copying full-sized images of yours and mine to their own servers where they are hosting them without any attribution or links back to the original image in violation of all available licenses on Flickr. If people on Imagelogr want to they can manipulate your images, rotate them, see them at different sizes up to 300% and even download the images with a download button directly from the site. [...] The site currently boasts to be tracking over 24 *billion* (yes, billion with a B) images. If their numbers are true, this may in fact be the largest image grab in the history of Flickr.
A thread about the service was also created in the Flickr forums, but was quickly closed by the Flickr staff, since they felt that the thread was going down “Lynch Mob Road”.
Hours later, the service was taken offline, and was replaced with a simple message stating,
Imagelogr.com is currently offline as we are improving the website. Due to copyright issues we are now changing some stuff around to make people happy. Please check back soon.
We don’t know much about this service, and hadn’t heard of it prior to today’s events. Their domain name was registered last month, and details are so non-existant that it feels almost like a class project. However, the fact that they’ve indexed 24 billion photos seems to argue against that possibility.
When they come back online, you might want to type in your Flickr username to see if your photographs show up.
Here’s an oldie but goodie that I’m guessing many of you haven’t seen before. It’s an episode from Deke McClelland’s video podcast dekepod in which McClelland shares 101 simple Photoshop tips at a blazing fast pace. What’s interesting is that it’s probably not as difficult to follow along as you might think, even though it averages to a tip every three seconds. This might be one of the closest things to learning like Neo does in the Matrix.
Here’s a new Sony Alpha concept DSLR camera that features a slanted LCD to keep your face away from the screen, similar to the Sony a352 concept camera that we featured last month. Unlike that one, which had a solar and rounded design, this one has a lot of edges and sharp angles, like what you might see in futuristic concept cars.
There’s also a concept flash unit that uses metal arms to make the flash extendable, allowing you to not only adjust direction but height as well.
What do you think of this design? Should camera makers design cameras to keep it away from the face, or do eyecup extenders suffice?
Mugtug Darkroom is a new browser-based photo editor that uses HTML5 rather than Flash. It was presented at the Google I/O web developer conference yesterday to show off what’s possible with HTML5, the proposed next version of HTML that’s gaining steam.
Web apps taking advantage of HTML can take advantage of new scripting APIs that allow such things as offline data storage and drag and drop functionality.
The app is indeed impressive, but only worked in Firefox 3.6 for us. It might or might not work for you depending on what browser you’re using.
After loading up an image via upload, URL, Flickr, or Picasa, you can do many of the basic edits you might do on a photo in more advanced programs like Photoshop.
Looks like there’s big improvements coming to our internet experience in the very near future.
TED has some of the most interesting talks you’ll find on the web, with topics ranging from how diet can prevent cancer to demonstrations of amazing new photo technology. They also have a great collection of talks by photographers, and we’ve compiled a list of 14 of them here. These short talks are eye-opening, jaw-dropping, and often quite moving.
You might want to bookmark this page to take them in slowly when you have some free minutes here and there. If you know of any other talks that we didn’t include in this list, please share it with us in the comments!
David Griffin on how photography connects us
The photo director for National Geographic, David Griffin knows the power of photography to connect us to our world. In a talk filled with glorious images, he talks about how we all use photos to tell our stories.
Jonathan Klein: Photos that changed the world
Photographs do more than document history — they make it. At TED University, Jonathan Klein of Getty Images shows some of the most iconic, and talks about what happens when a generation sees an image so powerful it can’t look away — or back.
Taryn Simon photographs secret sites
Taryn Simon exhibits her startling take on photography — to reveal worlds and people we would never see otherwise. She shares two projects: one documents otherworldly locations typically kept secret from the public, the other involves haunting portraits of men convicted for crimes they did not commit.
Frans Lanting’s lyrical nature photos
In this stunning slideshow, celebrated nature photographer Frans Lanting presents The LIFE Project, a poetic collection of photographs that tell the story of our planet, from its eruptive beginnings to its present diversity.
Edward Burtynsky photographs the landscape of oil
In stunning large-format photographs, Edward Burtynsky follows the path of oil through modern society, from wellhead to pipeline to car engine — and then beyond to the projected peak-oil endgame.
Nick Veasey: Exposing the invisible
Nick Veasey shows outsized X-ray images that reveal the otherworldly inner workings of familiar objects — from the geometry of a wildflower to the anatomy of a Boeing 747. Producing these photos is dangerous and painstaking, but the reward is a superpower: looking at what the human eye can’t see.
Yann Arthus-Bertrand captures fragile Earth in wide-angle
In this image-filled talk, Yann Arthus-Bertrand displays his three most recent projects on humanity and our habitat — stunning aerial photographs in his series “The Earth From Above,” personal interviews from around the globe featured in his web project “6 billion Others,” and his soon-to-be-released movie, “Home,” which documents human impact on the environment through breathtaking video.
Kristen Ashburn’s photos of AIDS
In this moving talk, documentary photographer Kristen Ashburn shares unforgettable images of the human impact of AIDS in Africa.
Ryan Lobo: Photographing the hidden story
Ryan Lobo has traveled the world, taking photographs that tell stories of unusual human lives. In this haunting talk, he reframes controversial subjects with empathy, so that we see the pain of a Liberian war criminal, the quiet strength of UN women peacekeepers and the perseverance of Delhi’s underappreciated firefighters.
Chris Jordan pictures some shocking stats
Artist Chris Jordan shows us an arresting view of what Western culture looks like. His supersized images picture some almost unimaginable statistics — like the astonishing number of paper cups we use every single day.
Rick Smolan tells the story of a girl
Photographer Rick Smolan tells the unforgettable story of a young Amerasian girl, a fateful photograph, and an adoption saga with a twist.
Wade Davis on endangered cultures
With stunning photos and stories, National Geographic Explorer Wade Davis celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world’s indigenous cultures, which are disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate.
Phil Borges on endangered cultures
Photographer Phil Borges shows rarely seen images of people from the mountains of Dharamsala, India, and the jungles of the Ecuadorean Amazon. In documenting these endangered cultures, he intends to help preserve them.
James Nachtwey’s searing photos of war
The embed code for this talk is broken, but you can click the image to watch this talk on the TED website:
Accepting his 2007 TED Prize, war photographer James Nachtwey shows his life’s work and asks TED to help him continue telling the story with innovative, exciting uses of news photography in the digital era.
