British musician Robbie Williams was recently featured in Nikon’s “I AM NIKON” advertising campaign, with a commercial showing a fun experiment he did at a concert in 2003. He asked his audience to pull out their cameras and, on his cue, fire off the flash. The resulting scene was pretty awesome to behold. The full clip of the experiment is above.
Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve already got plenty of gadgets designed to facilitate photography: there’s auto-focus, face detection, and some crazy features in Photoshop that can effortlessly add and remove entire elements (and people) in photographs. So now why not have a camera that tells you whether you’re taking an aesthetically pleasing photograph?

Designer Andrew Kupresanin created this project camera that utilizes the Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine Acquine to judge photo quality even before you take a photograph. The screen in the back of the camera simply shows a percentage rating, in lieu of an LCD display. The camera is actually a Nokia N73 camera connected with a Mac over Bluetooth. Kupresanin seems to be using his experimental project to make a poignant statement about the automation of photography and aesthetics. Kupresanin says on his site:

Within pop culture and society artificial intelligence has been a topic that is approached with hope, fear, cynicism, curiosity and caution. However many intelligent devices have already been effortlessly absorbed into our culture and everyday lives.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few guys in Los Angeles recently convinced their friend to let them borrow his new iPhone 4 (that he waited 4.5 in line for), and got onto a rooftop with the help of another friend. Using some large helium balloons, they attached the iPhone and started recording 720p video of downtown LA as it rose up to 1000 feet into the air on the end of a kite string. They also made a fun behind-the-scenes video of their project.

This setup is definitely cheaper than an RC plane or helicopter, and somewhat safer and more stable than a kite.

“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:

This is similar to the JPG generation loss experiments we posted last year. Experiments with VHS generation loss are also pretty interesting.

(via Boing Boing)

The New York Times’ Lens blog is attempting a project similar to the worldwide 4am project we covered recently.

A Moment in Time is an attempt to capture a slice in the history of the world by allowing readers to submit photographs taken at Sunday, May 2, at 15:00 hours (U.T.C.).

While the photographs don’t have to be taken exactly at the specified time, they ask that you try to stay within minutes of the target. Once you’ve taken a photo, submit it through submit.nytimes.com/moment.

The submitted photographs will then appear on both the Lens blog and on NYTimes.com, and notable photographs will selected and featured more prominently on the blog.

If you’re interested in participating, mark your calendar and be ready with your camera on May 2!

(via 1854)

This video, created by PhotoErrant, shows a Canon 7D shooting at 8 frames per second on high-speed continuous mode. This definitely isn’t something you should try yourself, since it whacks hundreds of shutter actuations off the lifespan of your camera and exposes the sensor to dust. Luckily for us, there’s people willing to do these experiments and upload them to YouTube.

In 2007, Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten conducted a social experiment in which he recruited one of the world’s great violinists, Joshua Bell, to play in a Washington D.C. subway station. Just two days prior to the experiment, Bell had played in a sold-out Boston theater in which ordinary tickets sold for $100 apiece. The entire experiment was filmed using a hidden camera:

In the end, of the 1,097 people who passed by Joshua Bell, only seven stopped to listen to the music. His 45-minute performance of six famous (though not necessarily recognizable) classical pieces earned $32.17 from 27 passersby, with some dropping pennies. As a result of his experiment and subsequent article for the Post, Weingarten won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

I recently thought about this experiment, and whether the general public is just as blind to greatness in photography as it is in music. Our our fast paced lifestyles and millisecond attention spans, many recent trends in photography seem to be pushing towards delivering eye-candy and a quick “wow” factor rather than substantive work that will stand the test of time.

For example, consider the following photographs:

On the left is a HDR photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge that was a hit on Flickr, attracting 344,783 views, 1,097 favorites, and 248 comments. On the right is “Los Angeles, California”, taken in 1969 by Garry Winogrand. The image on the left may attract eyes due to its surreal nature, dark clouds, and over-saturated colors, but I would question whether it has any ability to “stand the test of time” and become significant as a photograph. Some might call it “eye-candy” (not to bash on HDR, since I do believe HDR has its place and can be done beautifully).

On the other hand, the photograph by Winogrand may not attract eyes as easily (and some may even ignore it due to it being black and white), but it provides a beautiful glimpse into a period of our history that is delicately mindful of framing, lighting, and timing.

Thus, I feel as though credit for “greatness” is often bestowed upon modern-day photographers whose work may soon lose its appeal and become utterly insignificant, while those who are producing great work may fly under the radar and never be noticed by the general public.

What are your thoughts? Are there any modern day photographers who are under-appreciated now, but have the potential of becoming the next Ansel Adams or Dorothea Lange?

Image credit: Golden Gate HDR by vgm8383