The Friend Poster is a fun product product offered by grad student Benjamin Lotan through his new website PrintingFacebook. For $20, you’ll receive a 20 x 40 inch high-quality poster with thumbnails of the profile pictures of all your friends (works best for 200 to 2,200 friends). What’s neat is that the posters are created using a traditional photographic print process:
We use Fuji Crystal Archive photo paper in a RA-4 photochemical process. This means that we use a high-quality professional grade paper with real weight, it will not rip or fold easily. Because we expose your poster on to this paper and develop it in traditional photo chemicals, your print will have a richer image quality than any ink-jet printer process.
This product has been mentioned in quite a few places on the web today, so we’re not exactly sure how Lotan plans to fulfill all the orders, but the website is still accepting orders. Whether or not Facebook sends Lotan a cease-and-desist over the domain name or design that he picked is another story…
TDK has unveiled a monstrous 1 terabyte (1000 gigabyte) optical disc at CEATEC 2010 (the Japanese equivalent of CES), which wrapped up a couple days ago. The disc has 16 layers on both sides that each store 32GB of data, and is the equivalent to about 213 of the recordable DVD discs that you might be using to back up your image files. As someone who uses multiple external hard drives and countless DVD-Rs to backup my photos, I’d love to use these massive discs for backups and redundancy.
However, unlike improvements in hard drives, optical discs technologies can take forever to find their way to consumers — just look at how long it took Blu-ray to become the de-facto successor to the DVD. We can dream though, can’t we?
Ars Technica published an interesting story today about how photos uploaded to Facebook remain on their servers months — or even years — after they’re “deleted” from the service. We decided to test this out ourselves, uploading the above photo to Facebook, copying the direct URL to the image file, and then deleting both the photo and the album. As you can see from the hotlinked photo above, the image continues to live on as a zombie photo on Facebook’s CDN servers. Read the rest of this entry »
Content aware fill was mind-boggling enough when it came out earlier this year, but what if the same concept could be applied to video… while the camera is recording? That’s the idea behind Diminished Reality, a topic being researched by Jan Herling and Wolfgang Broll at the Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany. Basically, you select something in the scene against a uniform background, and it disappears from the resulting video. Pretty crazy.
If James Nachtwey were a street photographer, he wouldn’t be the type to stand on the opposite sidewalk and stealthily capture unsuspecting strangers using a telephoto lens. As you can see from the photograph above, Nachtwey has a fearless attitude when shooting in dangerous situations, getting up close and personal with the subjects.
The photo is from a documentary titled “War Photographer” by Christian Fei, which was nominated for an Academy Award (Best Documentary Film) in 2002. The film follows Nachtwey for two years as he documents conflicts in Kosovo, Rawanda, Indonesia, and the West Bank. Read the rest of this entry »
Denis had wanted to do such a project for 25 years, but it wasn’t until he was almost 42 that he had the technical know-how to actually do it. Except for the shutter curtain fabric, ball bearings, and screws, all of the individual pieces that were used to create the camera were custom made. Read the rest of this entry »
If you use GIMP as a Photoshop alternative, but would like a free program to handle the processing of Raw image files as well, check out RawTherapee. It’s a free raw image processing program that has a polished user interface and a solid list of features. Unless you want to compile the source code yourself, you can download the latest version of the program from this page. It’s available for Linux and Windows, though Mac OSX versions are available too (though they might not be as stable).
When Ria van Dijk of the Netherlands was sixteen years old back in 1936, she visited a shooting gallery in which a camera shutter was triggered every time a target is hit. She fell in love with the gallery, and faithfully visits it each and every year, only missing the years 1939 to 1945 due to WWII. Ria van Dijk is now 88 years old, and still collects a photo of herself hitting the target. The resulting photographs have been compiled into a book titled “In Almost Every Picture 7“.
You can check out an online gallery of her photographs here.
You’ve probably seen time-lapse videos spanning hours, days, weeks, or months, but how about years? Ramon, a videographer based in Paris, spent three years shooting the same location in Paris, documenting the teardown of an old skyscraper and the construction of a new one. The photographs were shot between January 2007 and September 2010 using a Pentax K110D DSLR, and a whopping 45,000 photographs were captured.
At the end of the video, the 3 years are played back in only 20 seconds. Crazy.
It’s Friday, so let’s kick back – here’s a dose of completely-useless-but-kinda-interesting trivia: Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs has done wedding photography. Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison is good friends with Jobs, and when Ellison married novelist Melanie Craft in 2003, Jobs was the official wedding photographer. The other photographer was Ellison’s son David.
It’d be interesting to see the resulting photographs.
