Whenever you look at vintage photographs taken using old methods, there’s always a certain haunting quality about them. The life captured is so still, the eyes always seem so dark. It’s almost joyless. Photographer Victoria Will wanted to see how old photographs would translate with modern people so she used an 1860’s era method of photography called tintype to capture celebrities today. It’s fantastic.
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So this is cool: Filmmaker Thomas Jullien created a pretty sweet short movie by weaving together random strangers’ Instagram pictures to form a story. It starts with a bike ride to Paris and zaps you to New York and pretty much everywhere else in between. 852 Instagram pictures from 852 Instagram users come together for this lovely little story but by seeing all these pictures in a pseudo stop animation you realize how similar all of our photos end up being. Nothing is original. We’re all just frames in someone’s next movie.
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It can be hard to take a good picture of something moving relatively fast, but it’s really hard to take a good picture of a jet moving at 400-ish MPH through the sky. Yuri Acurs, stock photographer extraordinaire, tried to tackle that challenge with excess—in the form of 30,000W of flash.
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The best camera is the one you have with you, they say. What they don’t tell you is that if that camera is your phone, it also doubles as the worst camera because of all the stupid pictures you have saved and forgot about in your camera roll.
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Starting today, you can preview Flickr’s new picture viewer, with a 25% bigger picture that pushes the info bar off to the side. It’s the latest addition to the full-site redesign
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Anyone with a ticking heart and an Instagram account takes too many pictures of their newborn. It’s okay to be proud! It’s okay to coo and adore and love and snap photos of your baby! But at a certain point, probably past the 700 mark, those pictures become variations of the same damn thing. Helpless baby lying on bed. Helpless baby lying on bed with mouth open. With arms raised. Crying. You get the point.
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Google added Snapseed photo editing to its Google+ apps on Android and iOS back in March, and now it’s bringing them to the desktop. The new tools include Auto Enhance, selective adjust editing, and filters, all powered by the Chrome browser’s Native Client tech. Not familiar with how that works? Google brought Native Client to Chrome back in 2011, and it allows developers to port code written in languages like C and C++ so it runs in the browser. Vic Gundotra said on Google+ that this is the Snapseed app built for Chrome, so we’ll see if more mobile apps and features follow it over.
If you’re not using Chrome you’ll have to live with basic crop and rotate editing tools on Google+, but even those have been shifted around to make them easier to find. Once the new options are available on your account (as usual, they’re rolling out slowly over the next few weeks) all you’ll need to do is select one of your photos in Chrome and hit “edit” to see them. Until then, check out the video demo embedded after the break.
Source: Josh Haftel (Google+)
In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you’d like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with “Insert Coin” as the subject line.
Sure, crafting flawless 360-degree photos of objects can be a slog, but Jared Bouck’s taken to Kickstarter betting that his solution can whip up such pictures and make them web-embeddable in as little as 15 minutes. Dubbed Zcapture, the hardware packs a rotating platform for items and cooperates with custom software to edit and produce the images without additional post-processing. As it stands, the gear works with cameras that boast external shutter controls (specifically Canon and Nikon models at the start), but stretch goals may bring support for other shooters, including IR header compatibility for point-and-shoots. With an Arduino at its core, and coupled with a circuit board packing additional ports and headers, the box is designed with modding in mind. In addition to snapping photos, Zcapture can even be used as a rotating base for 3D scanning.
If you’re wondering just what the system is capable of, just take a look at Bouck’s work at Rotate 360 Studios, where he’s made product shots for the likes of Foster Grant, Reebok, Xi3 and others. A USB-powered mini Zcapture along with the software is priced at $150 (or just $100 for the program), while other kits range from $300 to $690 for a fully-loaded version paired with soft box lighting. If the project meets its $46,000 funding goal, the contraption is expected to ship in December. With a little over $4,000 pledged so far, we hope — if not for our review photos, for our eBay listings — that it hits its goal before the two-month deadline.
Filed under: Cameras, Peripherals, Software
Source: Kickstarter, Zcapture
At this point doctored and enhanced photos are so ubiquitous that we tend to assume any photo we’re looking at has gone through some type of processing. And programs like Photoshop are always releasing new tools
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It just wouldn’t be the Fourth of July without the climactic boom of fireworks. If you want to keep that memory all year—or at least share it with all of your friends on Instagram—these tips will help you get lovely photos with your phone, even if you’re not a pro.
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