Lomography has launched the LomoKino, the world’s first consumer 35mm movie camera. It’s an old-school hand-cranked camera that uses standard rolls of 35mm film (yeah, the kind you use in film cameras). The camera captures 144 individual frames onto each roll of film, producing a video that lasts 50-60 seconds. Once you have your film developed, you can watch it using a separate LomoKinoScope: a hand-cranked movie viewer! Read the rest of this entry »
Seeing a double rainbow is a relatively rare treat, but how about three or four rainbows? Scientists have only reported seeing triple rainbows five times over the past 250 years, but German photographer Michael Theusner was recently able to capture this first ever photograph of a fourth-order rainbow. Ordinary rainbows (first and second order) appear in the area of the sky opposite the sun (and aren’t seen in his shot), but when higher order rainbows appear, they show up on the sunward side.
Last year, U.S. Naval Academy meteorologist Raymond Lee and a colleague, Philip Laven, laid out a prediction for the conditions that would produce third-order rainbows, and they challenged rainbow-chasers to go out and find one. Among the requirements: dark thunderclouds, and either a heavy downpour or a rainstorm with nearly uniform rain droplets. If the sun broke through the clouds under these conditions, it could project a dim tertiary rainbow against the dark clouds nearby, they said. [#]
Back in May, a photographer named Michael Grossman followed this advice and succeeded in capturing the first ever photo of a third-order rainbow. Lee’s challenge and Grossman’s success are what inspired Theusner to try his hand at photographing higher order rainbows. You can find more background info on Theusner’s blog and in his recently published scientific paper.
P.S. Capturing all four rainbows in one shot is exceedingly difficult and hasn’t been done yet. Now there’s a challenge for those of you looking for a difficult photo assignment.
Image credits: Photograph by Michael Theusner/Applied Optics
Instagram is changing not just the way photos can be shared, but how music videos can be made. UK indie rock band The Vaccines recently created a website that asked fans to snap photographs of themselves while at music festivals and then tag them with “#VACCINESVIDEO”. After receiving nearly 3,000 submissions, the band used them to create the music video for their song “Wetsuit”. Aside from a few video clips, everything you see in the video was submitted through Instagram.
P.S. Building upon this idea: what if a band were to ask fans to snap photos during a live performance of a song, and then combine the photos afterward using the timestamps of the photos to sync them with the song? That would be crazy.
Cell phone photography is a huge trend these days with Instagram skyrocketing past 10 million users this past weekend, but have you ever wondered how it all started? An entrepreneur named Philippe Kahn is credited with creating the camera phone back in 1997. On June 11th of that year, Kahn took the first “camera phone” photo of his newborn daughter in a maternity ward, and then wirelessly transmitted the photo to more than 2,000 people around the world. Since “camera phones” didn’t exist at that time, Kahn actually hacked together a primitive one by combining a digital camera and a cell phone to send the photos in real time.
Kahn then went on to start LightSurf, a company that was hugely influential in picture messaging. LightSurf technology is still used by Sprint, Verizon, and other major carriers around the world.
Wedding photographer Brian Adams and wedding videographer Rainer Flor claim to be the first to capture a wedding entirely using the iPhone 4. Flor volunteered his own wedding last November for the experiment, and a total of three iPhone 4s were used: two for the photos and one for the video.
“We proved that the iPhone technology is advanced enough to handle an event like a wedding, and simple enough that it doesn’t take a lot of experience or extra equipment to shoot high-quality video and pictures,” said Adams. “The user still has to have some creativity and a good eye, but this gives them a great tool.”
Would you rather have a great photographer shoot your wedding with an iPhone 4, or a mediocre photographer shoot using professional gear?
This is the first color photograph ever taken underwater. It’s a hogfish captured off the Florida Keys in 1926 by National Geographic photographer Charles Martin and Dr. William Longley. In addition to some special waterproof camera housing, the duo used pounds of highly explosive magnesium flash powder to illuminate the scene. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s an interesting portrait of Steven Sasson by David Friedman, shot at Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, New York. Sasson invented the digital camera as a Kodak engineer back in 1975, and provides an interesting glimpse in this video into how that first camera worked.
This strange looking device is the Leica S1, the first digital camera created by the company back in 1996. At at time when film was still the medium of choice in the photo industry, the S1 packed a whopping 26-megapixels, shooting 5140x5140px medium format images. The strange looking handles on either side help the user frame the shot, but aren’t designed for handheld stabilization — each shot took three minutes to expose. Only about 160 of these cameras were built, and were mostly sold to museums and research institutions.
Did you know that the first digital camera invented in 1975 didn’t actually produce the first digital photograph? The first digital photo actually came almost two decades earlier in 1957 when Russell Kirsch made a 176×176 pixel digital image by scanning a photograph of his three-month-old son. The low resolution was due to the fact that the computer they used wasn’t capable of storing more information.
This photograph of Boulevard du Temple in Paris was made in 1838 by Louis Daguerre, the brilliant guy that invented the daguerreotype process of photography. Aside from its distinction of being a super early photograph, it’s also the first photograph to ever include a human being. Because the image required an exposure time of over ten minutes, all the people, carriages, and other moving things disappear from the scene. However, in the bottom left hand corner is a man who just so happened to stay somewhat still during the shot — he was having his shoes shined. Read the rest of this entry »
