When two photographers got engaged in Japan, they asked their jewelry-maker friend to create wedding rings based on the Leica 50mm Summilux lens. The groom’s ring was the focusing ring while the bride’s was the aperture ring. The friend also created a stunningly realistic miniature Leica M3 to hold the rings (they slide onto the lens)!
Bryce Bell of cardnetics created this business card design that features a built-in aperture mechanism. Pull the lever down and the aperture opens up. If you run a photography-related business, this could be a neat business card to pass out to your clients. Pre-assembled cards start at $6 each, while you can buy kits that you put together yourself for $2.50. If you want to try printing and laser cutting the card yourself, the design templates are available here.
Did you know that you can turn any wall magnetic by painting it with magnetic primer? Communications company M Booth did this with one of its walls, then sent out employees onto the streets of NYC with Fujifilm Instax cameras. The result is this impressive wall displaying 800 instant photos! Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s an idea for a quick photo activity (perhaps on a rainy day?): pick a random color, walk around your house and collect things that match that color, neatly arrange them, then take a picture.
This compact camera is only one dollar… literally. Won Park, an artist that does origami using money, folded this camera using a dollar bill without cuts, glue, or tape. You can find more of his creations here, though this is the only photography-related one.
There’s plenty of time lapse projects documenting the passage of time and the process of aging with human portraits, but how about with animals? This video going viral on the Interwebs right now was creating by making a photo a day of Dunder, a German Shepherd, and shows him growing from an 8 week old puppy to a 1 year old adult. If you have a pet, this concept could be a fun project for getting it involved in your photography!
Flickr user Betty Ann recycled a photography book by transforming pages into these nifty pillow boxes, with each one showing a different camera. Stick a gift certificate to your favorite local camera shop into one and it’ll make the perfect gift for a photography-lovin’ friend! You can find a step-by-step tutorial on how to make your own pillow box over on eHow.
As the low-light capabilities of high-end (and even low-end) cameras rapidly improve, it’s easy to marvel at technology and forget how amazing our own eyes are, but here are some mind-boggling facts to consider: did you know that the human eye can detect as few as two photons entering the retina, and that, under ideal conditions, a healthy young adult can see a candle flame from 30 miles away? To see how mind-boggling that is, try using Google Maps to find a location 30-miles away from where you live.
Vodafone recently ran a pretty creative advertising campaign called “Pixel Hunt” for the purpose of illustrating how many pixels LG’s 5-megapixel Optimus phone packs. They published a 5-megapixel photograph (presumably taken with the phone) on a website and invited people to zoom in and click individual pixels, with 100 of the pixels “containing” a free Optimus phone. It took 300,000 visitors a whole month to click each of the 5 million pixels.
Now if only Canon or Nikon would do the same thing with their flagship DSLRs! I wonder how long it would take a 21-megapixel photo to be fully clicked by rabid Canonites/Nikonians. Any guesses?
Photographer Darren Samuelson spent seven months building a massive homemade large-format camera that’s about six-feet-long when fully extended. He shoots with 14×36-inch x-ray film that’s about 1/12th the cost of ordinary photographic film but much harder to develop. Read the rest of this entry »
