So this is how high-rollin’ Canon photographers roll. This coffee table is much easier to do now with those Canon lens coffee mugs, but the 1D bodies would still cost a pretty penny.
Image credit: Photograph by Philip Kwong
The rolling shutter used by the majority of consumer CMOS sensors can do crazy things to photos and videos. The video above shows what an airplane propeller looks like when shot with a Nokia N95. The rolling shutter makes the plane looks as if it’s dropping boomerang bombs that quickly disappear into thin air.
This topic also came up a couple weeks ago when a strange photograph of a boy caused debate regarding whether or not a rolling shutter was the culprit. In case your wondering, DSLRs have this issue as well.
Photographer Petra Hall‘s fiancé recently bought a used MG convertible right before going on a vacation. However, on the way back from work the weekend before the vacation was to begin, something in the car exploded and the car went up in flames.
The list of gadgets in the car is enough to make a grown man weep: a Canon 7D, a Canon 24-105L lens, and a MacBook Air. Everything burned up.
Read the rest of this entry »
With a select few companies currently dominating the digital camera scene, less popular brands are forced to come up with creative ways to capture market share. One possible way is to introduce esoteric features that most consumers would have absolutely no use for, and that’s exactly what Casio seems to be doing with its new EX-FC160S compact camera targeted towards golfers.
When playing back video recorded at 240fps on the camera, a special mode can overlay lines that help you check whether you’re swinging properly — in slow motion. If that’s not enough, the camera comes with commentary by professional golfer Chie Arimura.
The 10 megapixel camera will go available starting late August with an initial production volume of 5,000 cameras. To check out the announcement, visit the Casio Japan website (though you’ll probably need to translate it).
Coming soon: a compact camera that doubles as a metal detector.
(via 1001 Noisy Cameras)
This is probably not the most ergonomic camera body, but it puts fisheye into a whole different context.
Back in 1971, StarKist tuna sold promotional cameras in the shape of StarKist mascot Charlie the Tuna for $4.95 and three StarKist can labels. The camera, manufactured by Whitehouse Products, takes 126 cartridge film and accepts flashcubes on top of its head.
If you’re a collector, KEH Camera is selling a used Charlie Tuna camera for $79.
(via KEH Camera Blog)
“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)
Accordion Obscura is a sculpture by Andrew Lewicki that mashes together an accordion keyboard and the front of a 4×5 large format camera, joined together with the part they share — bellows. The result is a strange piece of equipment that would certainly cause weird looks if the thing were actually used on the street, though making the setup usable is a whole nother story.
Image credit: Photograph by Andrew Lewicki and used with permission
The Mark III Hythe Machine Gun Camera was a camera designed to mimic the American-made Lewis machine gun, and was used by the British air force during World War I to train their aerial gunners in air-to-air combat. The reason was that 120 film was much cheaper than live .303 ammunition, and that the resulting photographs would inform the evaluators of how accurate the pilot was during the combat simulation. To train the gunners in changing magazines, the gun camera included a fully functional — albeit useless — Lewis gun magazine.
Needless to say, this camera would probably give you problems if you were to use it nowadays.
(via Gizmodo)
Adobe Photoshop does miracles for wrinkly skin, and it’s now available in a cream! If that’s not enough, you can also check out Photoshop Toothpaste.
We’re also hearing murmors that their “Stamp Tool for the Face” will be announced soon.
Here’s an interesting gadget that can help you with wildlife photography, or can simply make you look beastly while doing street photography. This tactical sight can help you lock your camera onto a faraway animal, making finding it much easier to find when you start looking through your massive telephoto lens. With longer focal range lenses, it can be pretty easy to lose sight of where exactly your subject is, and finding it again might require pulling your eyes away from the viewfinder. This sight can help you more accurately lock onto the subject prior to using the viewfinder.
After poking around a bit, it looks like this is actually a Phantom Tactical Sight for rifles that has been rebranded and repurposed for photography:
The sight can project a point, circle point, circle cross, or cross onto the screen (it’s not a laser pointer), and has two colors (green or red) and three intensities. This gadget will set your back about $45. Happy shooting!
Wildlife Photography with Tactical Four Reticle Sight (via Wired)
