Lightpainting requires a certain sort of skill to get the sort of marvellous results we’ve seen previously, but Croix Gagnon and Frank Schott went the whole nine yards and played an animation of a cross-sectioned human body on a laptop, which they then whizzed through the air and took long-exposure photos of. More »
Steadycam Pro is an iPhone 4 app which does exactly what it says it does: works as a software steadycam to iron out the bumps and wobbles in handheld video.
Not only that, the app also corrects for the horrible rolling-shutter effect you get when shooting video on a camera without a real hardware shutter. If you ever looked at some footage you’d shot and saw everything turn to jelly as you panned the camera, you’ll be familiar with the rolling shutter. But enough talk. Check out the video to see how well it does:
The app uses everything in the iPhone 4 to do its stuff, which is why it will only work on the iPhone 4 and nothing else. Digital signal processing along with info from gyroscopes and accelerometers lets Steadycam Pro correct the video in real-time, as you shoot.
Skeptical? It doesn’t matter: the app is free to download, so go grab it and try it out. And try not to be too scared of the app’s icon, which looks a little too much like 2001’s HAL 9000 for my liking.
Introducing SteadyCam: the first real-time video stabilization app for your iPhone [Midnox. thanks, Alex!]
SteadyCam Pro product page [iTunes]
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Nikon’s D5100 is a solid update to the already decent D5000
Two years ago, almost to the week, Nikon announced the D5000, a bargain-priced video-shooting DSLR (back when video in SLRs was still news) with a handy flip-out screen. Today, Nikon launches the D5100, which improves on its older brother in almost every way, albeit incrementally.
The video and the flip-screen are still there, only now the screen has jumped from 2.7 inches and 230,000 dots to three inches and 921,000 dots, and the video can be shot at up to 1080p vs. 720p, and uses the AVC-HD H.264 codec instead of the memory card gobbling Motion JPEG. The sensor has more pixels — 16.2MP up from 12.3 — and its sensitivity increases from a maximum of ISO 3,200 to ISO 6,400 (with a new “boost” mode of up to ISO 25,600 and a low-res Night Vision mode of ISO 102,400).
The D5100 is also lighter (560g vs. 611g with battery) and smaller, looking less tall and gawky than before.
Otherwise, it’s mostly tweaks, but they’re everywhere. One really neat new feature is image filters. These are the same as you’d find in any camera, letting you Lomo-fy your photos, but it’s the first time Nikon has put them in an SLR. But that’s not the neat part — after all, it’s better to shoot RAW and tweak later on a computer. What’s cool is that you can do this with video, something that fewer people want to process back at home.
Nikon has also announced a new stereo microphone, the ME-1. This slots into the hot-shoe and plugs into a standard 3.5mm jack socket on compatible cameras.
The price of the D5100 is very similar to the launch price of the D5000, creeping up $70 to $800 body-only and $900 for the kit with an 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR lens. Don’t buy the kit. Never buy the kit lens, as they are always too slow. Buy a 50mm ƒ1.8 instead, for around $120, and enjoy a lighter camera, a much brighter viewfinder, punchier pictures and a healthier, fitter you, thanks to all that walking instead of lazy zooming.
Nikon D5100 product page [Nikon. Thanks, Geoff!]
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Zdenek Kalal’s Predator object-tracking software is almost uncanny. Show anything to its all-seeing camera eye, and it will quickly learn to recognize it and then track it, whether it fades into the distance, hides amongst other similar objects or — in the case of faces turns sideways.
It really lives up to its name, reminding us of the Predator’s HUD-enhanced vision in the movie of the same name.
Kalal is a Ph.D. student at the University of Surrey in England, researching projects that make computers see. His Predator algorithm is both fast and powerful.
After telling it what to look for (by dragging a box over the onscreen image) the Predator gets to work. Within seconds it can recognize patterns, objects and faces and track them as they shrink, grow and rotate. When Kalal hides from the camera and holds up a sheet of paper with his photo among a patchwork of thumbnails, Predator picks his face out immediately.
Four minutes might seem like a long time in today’s attention-starved world, but you should watch Kalal’s demo video. It’s worth it just to see him scooting hyperactively around on his office chair.
Keep watching past the credits and you’ll see plenty of other uses, such as tracking individual animals for research, and chasing cars and people across multiple security cameras. It’s not hard to imagine more.
Remember the assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in Dubai last year? The Dubai authorities tracked the assassins — probably Israeli Mossad agents — across hours and hours of city-wide security footage. Predator would likely make that a lot easier.
I have another, civilian use for this algorithm. Imagine a Nerf-shooting, camera-equipped aerial drone which could acquire and lock onto targets, and then rain holy hot foam onto them from above. That would be a pretty awesome addition to your office warfare arsenal, right?
Surrey student hailed as computer technology pioneer [University of Surrey]
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We were tempted to call it an April Fools’ joke, but it seems the story’s true: Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer reportedly let slip that his company is producing cameras for the next batch of iPhones and iPads during a public interview with the Wall Street Journal. Traditionally, Apple’s sourced its sensors from OmniVision, including the delightfully backside-illuminated 5 megapixel CMOS unit you’ll find in the iPhone 4, but since Sony too has BSI tech and OmniVision has reportedly encountered delays, your next portable Apple product might house a Sony Exmor R sensor like the one we admired on the Xperia Arc. Mind you, that may not end up actually happening, because of the context in which Sir Howard revealed the news — according to 9 to 5 Mac, he said that the factory producing sensors for Apple was affected by the Japanese tsunami. Oh well.
Sony CEO casually mentions he’s supplying cameras to Apple originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 02 Apr 2011 14:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The field notebook is EXIF data for film shooters
If you ignore power-plugs and adapters, then my posts here on Gadget Lab skew rather heavily to notebooks (the paper kind) and photography. So I am almost contractually obliged to write about this field notes notebook from Etsy maker fabriKate.
The book (which is not from the actual Field Notes company) is a way to record “EXIF” metadata for your film photos. After snapping a frame, you can write down the date and time, the frame number, the exposure and location of the photograph. The $12 book has 80 pages, and is perfect bound (a square spine) on 60lb. heavyweight cream paper.
Believe it or not, some of us photo nerds used to actually write this stuff down. It was really the only way to learn, especially when you sometimes had to wait a week or more to get your photos processed and returned. Unless you had a good memory, you’d never remember the exposure settings you had used (although an educated guess could be made with experience).
There’s something deeply romantic about this setup. I have a picture in my head of somebody snapping a shot on a TLR and then pulling the notebook out to jot the details down, before continuing on with their walk. They’re probably wearing a sun hat, and maybe have a pair of Polaroid sunglasses pushed up onto their forehead. They’ll go home, pour a cold iced-tea from a jug in the fridge and drop the film into a little envelope, ready to be sent off to the lab. Sigh.
Available now.
Field notebook [Etsy via Petapixel]
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Kelly Angood’s cardboard Hasselblad is a fully functioning pinhole camera
Yes, you could make a pinhole camera from a shoebox. In fact, as a highly skilled (and likely highly attractive) Gadget Lab reader, you could probably chop up some cardboard and glue it into the shape of a real camera. But would you first screen-print the corrugated cardboard, and then cut the sections with a precision that almost matches that of the Hasselblad camera your model mimics? No, you wouldn’t. But Kelly Angood would.
Kelly is a prop and set designer, and also makes replicas of real objects. The Hasselblad you see here is part of a wider collection including an Olivetti typewriter and a full-sized, functional autophotomat booth.
The Hasselblad is a working pinhole camera, designed to take 120 roll-film, which will give you some lovely big negatives to scan and play with. This one can be bought as an art piece, for an undisclosed price, and comes with two hand-processed prints and a making-of book.
There is a smaller, 35mm version, the PDF blueprints for which will be available for download “in the next few weeks”. I love it. To paraphrase Doc Brown, if you’re going to build a camera into a cardboard box, you might as well do it in style.
Pinhole Hasselblad [Kelly Angood via PetaPixel]
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Brando’s cheap-o scanner lets you pirate magazines, or electronify your own notes
I have a folder somewhere in my iPhoto with the pages of my mother’s recipe books hastily photographed. The idea was to grab a copy of all my favorite childhood dishes and render them into a form I’d actually use — OCR-ed images.
As you might expect, things didn’t go so well. I was late for the airport, so I rushed things, ending up with blurred pictures, pages out-of-square and image files that are way bigger than they need to be. Brando’s wonderfully-named “O King Scanner” wouldn’t have gotten me out of bed any earlier, but it would have helped everything else. But first, a bullet point from the product blurb which makes the whole thing sound almost Victorian.
The image files scanned by O King Scanner (S200) could be faxed to destination through network fax so that you do not need another fax machines or you can do it by traditional electrograph.
Electrograph! Don’t worry — it does more than prepping images for the fax.
The 1600×1200 (1.6MP) camera is situated in a fold-out arm with a stand. You flip it open, place it over the target paper item (up to A4 paper size — roughly the size of a sheet of legal paper) and hook it up to a computer via USB. From here you can grab shots after lining everything up on your big screen. Included Windows software will also perform OCR and allow you to edit the photo. Mac users can just use Preview and then send the pictures to Evernote of the OCR part.
For quick pictures of text, your cellphone can probably do the job just fine. For those with more paper to scan, but without the need for a proper, high end scanner, the $120 price might be just right. Available now. Oh, and if my mother is reading, can you send me your meat pie recipe?
O King Scanner product page [Brando via Oh Gizmo]
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MIC Gadget’s CF card reader does away with pesky cables
If you own an iPad and a DSLR, it’s likely that you have already sprung for Apple’s camera connection kit. And if your camera uses compact flash cards, then it is equally likely you own a card reader.
But if you don’t have any way to get pictures into you iPad, or you’re sick of stringing cables between otherwise convenient and portable accessories, then you might pick up the iPad CF Card Reader from MIC Gadget.
It’s a 2-in-1 reader which plugs straight into your iPad’s dock port and has CF and USB slots on the other side. Just plug it in and the images on the card will show up in the iPad’s Photos app, ready to be imported. The USB slot will read video and image files from a thumb drive as long as they are in a folder with a camera-y sounding directory name, such as “DCIM”.
The CF card reader will cost you $30, the same as Apple’s SD and USB camera connection kit. For space-conscious pro SLR users, it’s probably an easy decision.
CF Card Reader for iPad & iPad 2 [MIC Gadget]
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This little camera is in fact a pencil sharpener
Sticking a pencil into the top lens of this tiny TLR camera feels like you’re sticking a pointy stick in somebody’s eye, but that’s ok, as that’s not really a lens. In fact, this isn’t really a camera — it’s a pencil sharpener.
The design is delightfully camera-like. You pull the top section out and slot the pencil in. To adjust sharpness (pun in original) you move a small lever, and to actually do the wood-shaving you turn the film-winding handle on the side.
Back when I was a young schoolboy and still knew how to use pens, pencils and paper, I would have loved this sharpener, made by Chinese stationery company Deli. I would also have liked its $15 price, which is small enough to make this an impulse buy.
Vintage Camera Pencil Sharpener [Kikkerland via PetaPixel]
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