France-based photographer Fabrice Wittner has a neat project titled “Enlightened Souls” that consists of ghostly portraits created by light-painting with stencils (which are themselves created from actual portraits). Wittner first started the project in May 2011 after the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand.
I first thought of it as an artistic and morale contribution to the 6.3 quake’s aftermath. I used stencils to paint enlightened characters to remember human losses and to show the spirit of a wouned city. It turned out to be an intersting way to share ideas and feelings about society and life. After all, this is what street art is made for.
Heavier tripods are generally more stable than lighter ones — wind doesn’t affect them as much — but hauling them around can be a pain. Instructables user Andrew Axley came up with the brilliant idea of making his simple tripod more stable by adding his own weight hook. The tripod is light when not in use and when you need extra stability you simply hang your camera bag onto the hook. All you need to do is figure out a way to attach a hook securely at the center — Axley chose to drill a hole through the side of the center column and attach an S-hook using a bolt and nut.
Perhaps inspired by the vintage camera nightlights we shared last year, photographer Laura Merz decided to upcycle her old Kodak digital camera by turning it into a nightlight for her house. She writes,
I took out all the tiny screws and gutted the camera very carefully as to not crack the exterior case. Be careful — some of the parts are pretty sharp. Removing the lens is the last step, and allows you to insert a small round night light through the opening. I had to crack off the exterior casing on the night light, but with a little force, it snapped right off.
It’s a creative way to breathe new life into an outdated or broken digital camera.
Flickr user Chris captured this remarkable photograph of the Eiffel Tower at night by panning his medium format film Hasselblad 500CM while snapping a long exposure photograph.
Here’s an interesting look at the amazing camera being developed at MIT that shoots a staggering one trillion frames per second — fast enough to create footage of light traveling:
[...] the researchers were able to create slow-motion movies, showing what appears to be a bullet of light that moves from one end of the bottle to the other [...] Each horizontal line is exposed for just 1.71 picoseconds, or trillionths of a second, Dr. Raskar said — enough time for the laser beam to travel less than half a millimeter through the fluid inside the bottle.
To create a movie of the event, the researchers record about 500 frames in just under a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second. Because each individual movie has a very narrow field of view, they repeat the process a number of times, scanning it vertically to build a complete scene that shows the beam moving from one end of the bottle, bouncing off the cap and then scattering back through the fluid. If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion moving through the same fluid, the resulting movie would last three years. [#]
They believe that the technology may one day be useful for medicine, industry, science, or even consumer photography.
Flickr user Twin-Reverb made this nifty DIY flash diffuser using a cardboard paper towel tube, a paper towel, and some aluminum foil. Read the rest of this entry »
On a rainy day recently, light painting photographer Jeremy Jackson was playing around with a green laser pointer when he discovered something interesting: all the out of focus raindrops in the photograph had a lined pattern in them — and each one was unique! These “water drop snowflakes” were found in all of the photos he took that day.
Here’s an illuminating (pun intended) video walkthrough by photographer Eric Curry, showing how he went about creating a photo of a B-25 bomber. His technique for lighting the plane is similar to the real estate photography walkthrough that we featured last weekend, and involves lighting the scene a bazillion times from different angles, and then combining the different parts of the photo in Photoshop.
As he says in the video, it’s a useful technique that can be done by “anyone with a digital camera and a tremendous amount of patience.”
“What Light” is an incredible stop-motion video that features sunlight dancing around a bedroom. It might look like it was done with CGI, but the sunlight was actually manipulated using cut-outs and stencils placed in the window. Creator Sarah Wickens says,
I noticed how the sun came through the windows in my bedroom, creating patches of light that moved throughout the day, as the sun changed position in the sky. So I started experimenting with ways of using that light to make animation, sticking cut-outs and stencils on to my windows to carve the light into different shapes [#]
The result of her efforts is one of the most creative stop-motion videos we’ve seen.
