Light Warfare is a demonstration of what’s possible with light painting and stop motion given enough time and dedication. It was created by Freddie Wong, who also published a tutorial for creating light painting photographs on his website. This amazing 1-minute video required a whopping 13 hours of shooting over two days. Each frame needs to be individually “painted” and — seeing how complicated some of the scenes are — must have required pretty long exposures.
If you’re interested in learning more about how this was created, check out their behind the scenes video.
Here’s an interesting behind-the-scenes video by CNN showing Mario Testino in action. Testino is one of the world’s most sought after fashion photographers, and this three part series gives a short but interesting peek into Testino’s life and work.
If Nikon sticks to their regular schedule, the Nikon D4 should be announced sometime in the summer of 2011, 4 years after the announcement of the D3. About 24 hours ago, someone on the Nikon Rumors Forum posted a few links to what they claim is the upcoming D4.
Hi everybody. Friend of my have a chance to see new nikon D4. I have some photos without any other information.
Interestingly enough, the EXIF data in the images indicate that the photos themselves were taken with the D4, though this isn’t difficult to fake.
Do you notice anything in the photographs that would suggest that they’re fake?
If you need to fix some red-eyes in a photo, but don’t have an image editor handy, Red iGone is a quick and easy way to get the eyes corrected. It’s a simple web-based application that requires only that you select the eyes to be corrected. After that, all you need to do is download the fixed photo.
Here’s an example photograph that we ran through the app:
We were pretty surprised at how well the adjustment worked. It’s a great app for when you only want to fix red eyes and nothing else. PicTreat also offers web-based red-eye reduction, but it touches up the rest of the photo as well.
Gosh, if I had access to a HD camera capable of ultra-slow motion, I suppose this is the kind of stuff I’d play around with too. The above video shows various experiments at super slow speeds shot with a Phantom camera at this year’s Maker Faire. What would you record if you had access to an ultra-slow motion camera?
Microsoft is adding a boatload of new features to its Windows Live Essentials suite of free applications (for Windows users), and one of the features to appear in Windows Live Photo Gallery caught our eye. It’s called Photo Fuse, and what it does is take a number of similar photographs and allow you to choose the best parts of each one to include in the final photo.
For example, if you take a number of group shots, you can combine only the faces that are smiling and not blinking. What’s more, the resulting photograph is quite seamless, and reminds us of the Content Aware Fill feature of Photoshop CS5.
TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington had a chance to sit down with Brian Hall (GM at Microsoft), and recorded the following demonstration of the technology:
Keep your eyes peeled — the new features won’t be appearing in the suite for another few weeks. Now if only Microsoft would include a Content Aware Fill-type feature as well…
Just last week we wrote that the Museum of London had released an augmented reality iPhone app that overlays historical photographs over live views of the location.
If you don’t live in London, you can play around with the same concept using Historypin, a website that allows you to pin historical photographs onto Google’s Street View. The screenshot above shows a photograph of London bikers in 1926. Even though the views aren’t “live” like with the iPhone app, it’s still neat to see old photos in the context of present day images.
“I Am Sitting in a Room” is one of the best known works of experimental music composer Alvin Lucier. In the piece, he records himself speaking, plays it back while re-recording it, and repeated until the words become unintelligible and simply “the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself”.
YouTube user canzona decided to pay homage to Lucier, and “covered” the piece in his own room using YouTube as the medium.
I started this project exactly 1 year ago, almost to the hour. The final version is a lot different than I thought it would be, I was expecting a lot more digital video noise, and a lot less digital audio noise. Let this be a lesson, though, always be careful how you convert your digital media!
An homage to the great Alvin Lucier, this piece explores the ‘photocopy effect’, where upon repeated copies the object begin to accumulate the idiosyncrasies of the medium doing the copying. Full words: I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice as well as the image of myself, and I am going to upload it to YouTube, rip it from YouTube, and upload it again and again, until the original characteristics of both my voice and my image are destroyed. What you will see and hear, then, are the artifacts inherent in the video codec of both YouTube and the mp4 format I convert it to on my computer. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a digital fact, but more as a way to eliminate all human qualities my speech and image might have.
Here’s the original video before the 1,000 copies:
After the enormous success of the Canon 70-200mm Coffee Mug, it was only a matter of time before Nikon-branded cups joined the party. Nikoneans can now rejoice — a 24-70mm coffee cup has just appeared on eBay as a pre-order for $50. It doesn’t appear that Nikon has anything to do with this 1:1 replica cup, but those who have been eagerly waiting for such a thing to appear can now pounce on this awesome (but unofficial) accessory.
Those who want longer focal length coffee cups can also buy a 70-200mm coffee cup for roughly the same price:
Update: Nikon is not affiliated with these cups in any way.
