Portrait-a-day time-lapse videos show the passing of time in a pretty striking way, but so does this project by a guy named Sam Klemke. Every year since he was 20 years old in 1977, he has made a short video of himself announcing the passing of the year. Now, 35 years later, he has created a compilation of the videos that allows us to travel back with him through time — from the digital age to the age of recording video on film. Maybe it’ll inspire you to start a photo or video project that spans decades!
You’ve probably seen gigapixel photos and timelapse videos before, but how about a fusion of the two? Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have a project called GigaPan Time Machine that features gigapixel time-lapse videos of things ranging from plants growing to a university carnival. They also set up a wiki describing how you can create your own time-lapse using a GigaPan Pro.
Slate magazine just published an interesting article on David Hobby and his popular blog Strobist, and shared this interesting example of how the photography industry is drastically changing due to low barriers of entry:
To get a sense of just how bad things are for professional photographers right now, the story of Robert Lam is instructive. When Time needed a photo to illustrate its “New Frugality” cover story in late 2009, it purchased Lam’s image of a jar of change from stock-photo agency iStockphoto. The going rate for a Time cover had typically been $3,000 to $10,000. Lam was paid $31.50. Nevertheless, Lam declared, “I am happy”—the payment was more than he’d expected the photo to generate, and he was delighted to have a Time cover in his portfolio. Veteran professional photographers were livid, calling Lam an “IDIOT,” among other unkind words.
The article also mentions how Robert Lam earns just $4,000 from his stock photography hobby, and that the Time cover photo was shot using DIY equipment purchased from a local sign store. What are your thoughts on the changing landscape for professional photographers?
It’s a good time to be a digital photographer — massive hard drives are becoming cheaper than ever, making it so photo-enthusiasts don’t have an excuse for not backing up their data redundantly. Here’s an interesting look at how the price of a Gigabyte of storage has changed over time:
YEAR — Price of a Gigabyte
1981 — $300,000
1987 — $50,000
1990 — $10,000
1994 — $1000
1997 — $100
2000 — $10
2004 — $1
2010 — $0.10
Nowadays, a cheapo flash drive given away for free at expos has more capacity than a $10K computer from 30 years ago. In another decade, you’ll probably be able to consolidate all of the hard drives you have now on a cheapo flash drive of the future (or whatever we’ll be using then)!
Do you like movies that make you think and make more sense the second time around? If so, “Tick Tock” is a short film that you’ll probably enjoy. This 4 minute film was shot in one take with a Canon 5D Mark II and 24-70mm lens, and required a whopping 36 takes to get right. If this doesn’t inspire you to do something awesome with your DSLR, we don’t know what will.
Here’s a cool and creative video that will only take 6 seconds of your time. Photographs from 3 different locations were taken every day over the course of six months, converted to HDR imagery, and combined into this short time-lapse video that shows the changing of a face and of seasons.
The changing of seasons in HDR is an interesting concept that we hope to see more of in the future!
TIME Magazine’s latest cover features a photograph of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung Sang Suu Kyi, with the feature story offering a glimpse into her life since being released from house arrest. The above is an interesting video in which Platon, the photographer behind the photo, tells the harrowing tale of what it took to make the photo. It’s guaranteed to make most portrait assignments sound extremely boring.
You can read the article and view the photographs here.
For his “In Transit” series, Diego Kuffer takes multiple photographs of scenes, then creates neat-looking composite images afterwards. Kuffer tells us,
The idea behind the series is all about time, but in a more condensed way, also known as “moments”. I wanted to capture a moment with photography, but it only allowed me to get instants. So I decided to use the idea behind the movie making techniques (a great way of capturing moments) and apply it to photography. So, I took several snapshots of the same scene, sliced them horizontally and vertically, and assembled them in to a single one, chronologically. I like to think about these grammar as Chrono Cubism.
TIME magazine has named the Sony Alpha A55 as one of the top 50 inventions of 2010. They write,
A.K.A. the camera that never blinks. Traditional digital SLR cameras take the nicest photographs around, but they’re hobbled by a decades-old technical limitation: when you snap a picture, the mirror that’s been redirecting the image to your eye and to a focusing sensor pops up momentarily as the image is captured. Until it goes back down, the camera can’t focus. Sony’s Alpha A55 ($849.99 with lens) fixes that with an ingenious translucent mirror that stays put. That means you can shoot up to 10 perfectly focused photos a second and record HD video that never goes blurry. Bonus advantage: with no need to allocate interior space for a moving mirror, the Alpha is noticeably smaller and lighter than its Sony SLR brethren.
10 perfectly focused photos per second? That’s a pretty interesting claim.
