Paul Smith and Lomography Cameras have teamed up to create the Paul Smith Fisheye No2 Camera, a camera that takes 180 degree, wide-angle images with a “stunning” fisheye barrel distortion effect.
With a bulb setting for long exposures, a switch for multiple exposures on the same frame, and the ability to fire both a hotshoe flash or the built in flash, it’s got all the features a lomographer could ever hope for.
Plus, with a true fisheye viewfinder, full metal jacket body, and signature Paul Smith milti-stripe design, it looks good too while you take good looking pictures.
In their continuing effort to prove to the world that they haven’t yet fallen off the face of it, Yahoo! has launched a campaign called “Start Wearing Purple” to emphasize the fact that they’re…purple?
Whatever the reason, one of their better purple projects is called Purple Pedals.
Think: Bikes + Flickr + GPS + Purple +Holy moly, is this one cool ride or what!?
The idea was to give camera/GPS enabled bicycles out to webrities and have them chronicle the life of their bike with pictures that are automatically taken every 60 seconds, geo-tagged, and then displayed on a Yahoo! map.
It might not get you to switch to the ‘hoo, but it’s a cool site to check out while the search wars rage on.
Considering last week’s Iranian missile story, I though that Henry Hadlow’s Tell A Lie project was rather fitting:
The most controversial lies told with photography today are those told by news photographers who manipulate their work photographs to tell a different story, for example, Liu Weiqiang’s faked photograph of antelope and the China-Tibet rail link.
He also ads that he wanted to “flip this lie on its head and use a camera to mimic common Photoshop effects”.
Along those same lines, I thought that Fubiz’s Google Images idea was another fantastic way to take a photo with a digital spin that gives it a simple yet fun effect:
The Image Fulgurator is Julius von Bismarck’s photo hijacker that uses a flash gun and an old SLR camera to sense the flash of another camera and then project a message (either image or text) onto the surface of whatever is being photographed.
Apparently the reason for the Fulgurator is that Julius wants to challenge the confidence that people have in the accuracy of their photos, though I think that it’s more than a little fun to watch the confused faces of tourists who just can’t figure out what’s wrong with their camera:
This weekend, grab your camera (or your friend’s camera), set the timer, and toss it in the air for a new style of photography called Camera Tossing.
The results are often a beautiful art piece that is less about documenting a moment, and more about creating an emotional picture that is filled with color and motion.
Check out COLOURlover’s article on Camera Tossing for a brief history of the technique, and some fantastic examples that should give you more than enough inspiration to get going.
I was trying to explain to someone how incredible I think the fact that we landed the Phoenix rover on the surface of Mars is, and was unfortunately coming up short for words.
However, I think this picture does it pretty good justice:
Not much to see, eh?
Well, think about this: What you’re seeing is a photo of the Phoenix rover as it descends to the surface of Mars under its own parachute. The photo was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera as it circles a planet that is tens to hundreds of millions of miles away. As it circles that planet, it’s tracking and photographing a man made object that is gracefully touching down onto the surface of that planet under the guide of its own parachute. Both objects are acting remotely and robotically, and then sending their data back to earth at the speed of light (and it still takes 15 minutes to get here). In short: We created a remote controlled vehicle, shot it millions of miles into the sky, landed it on a precise location on another planet, and then programmed it to run its own scientific experiments and then report back to us with the results.
(What I like most about the Phoenix Twitter is that it’s probably one of the smartest people in the world (a NASA scientist) that has to dumb down what he’s saying and then put it into the third person so that the rest of us can understand what’s going on. Somewhere there’s a guy sitting in a room that’s hating life and wondering when he can leave his Twitter post and get back to playing with the world’s coolest remote control car.)
Kipp Wettstein makes his own large format cameras as part of what he calls The Camera Project.
The cameras are designed to suit Kipp’s “operational tendencies for the singular application of mobility”, and make a “simple, elegant and accurate method to connect the lens and film planes”.
The beauty of the design is that it is built around the elegant form of the image cone produced by the lens. Not only does this design yield an attractive camera but it is extremely accurate. The lens and film planes have a parallel accuracy within the fractions of a millimeter. These designs have no perspective-controlling movements. They are small, lightweight and extremely precise.
His latest, called the 8×10 Carbon/Aluminum, is a beautiful “portable, wide-angle camera using a molded carbon fiber cone attached to a body plate machined from a solid block of 7075-T651 aircraft aluminum”. The lens is a Schneider 165mm Super Angulon, and “at four pounds, its weight nearly matches that of the camera body”.
Want one?
He’ll make one for you (or at least take your inquiry about one), but keep in mind that “ultimately, large-format photography is a costly process”.
How do you advertise for the first ever production V8 in a BMW M3?
Hire IdeaCity to cut manifolds, shave cylinders, drill lighting holes, and whatever else it takes to fit cameras, lenses and lights inside of the engine so that you can film the inside of the beast as it does its thing.
This spot took two weeks to study and prepare for, and four, 20-hour days to film, but in the end, 420 horsepower has never looked so good. (This single revolution was filmed at 10,000 frames per second without any computer-generated effects.)
Unphotographable is “a catalog of exceptional mistakes. Photos never taken that weren’t meant to be forgotten. Opportunities missed. Simple failures. Occasions when I wished I’d taken the picture, or not forgotten the camera, or had been brave enough to click the shutter.”
(If a picture is worth 1,000 words, how many pictures are Michael Murphy’s words worth?)
If you’re still using a Polaroid camera to capture life on film, then be sure to snap a shot of the next Dodge Viper that you see, because both are soon going to be gone.
Polaroid has confirmed that they will no longer produce instant film after this year, and it’s rumored that Dodge will no longer be making the Viper after 2011, which means that the loss of a quirky technology and a venomous supercar come as a one two punch.
All is not lost however, as old Polaroid cameras can turn into quite the clever webcam, and the Viper’s demise hopefully means that Dodge has another supercar in the works, but the news definitely puts a damper on my dreams of Viper ownership. (The Viper was the car that got me excited about cars in the first place.)
If you’re still using a Polaroid camera to capture life on film, then be sure to snap a shot of the next Dodge Viper that you see, because both are soon going to be gone.
