Photography
Talk about the various useful gadgets for digital photo takers
Take a walk inside the Big Bang
Thanks to modern movies, most of us have seen way too many explosions. Of course, very few films have attempted to show us what it looks like to be inside of an explosion.
A Chinese sculptor named Zhan Wang is trying to show the inside of an explosion with this sculpture that you see here, entitled My Personal Universe. In looks like Wang is trying to show us what it might be like to be in the biggest explosion of all, the Big Bang.
In order to inspire his creation, Wang actually blew up an actual boulder and filmed it with six high-definition video cameras in different locations at about 2,000 frames per second. From there, he was able to hang about 5,000 realistic steel boulders to create this awesome effect.
Continue reading » Take a walk inside the Big Bang
Take smarter videos with your smart phone with Mobislyder
One of the problems with shooting video with your phone is that a phone was never really designed with that purpose in mind. Moving shots in movies and television are often done with tracks and pivots, in order to avoid that shaky feeling that comes from unsteady hands.
Now smartphones have the Mobislyder, which is a portable dolly designed for small video enabled devices. It requires a lot less set up than professional video equipment.
There is a video of the Mobislyder in action after the jump. As you can see, it can be placed on any surface with its glider track and a swivel for many angles.
Continue reading » Take smarter videos with your smart phone with Mobislyder
Moosejaw’s catalog and X-ray App bares…some
I have been excited about augmented reality since I first saw it at CES three years ago, but I did not think of this use. Moosejaw’s new catalog has a feature that allows the user to look at the models in their underwear with a smartphone app.
I tried this out, just to see if it would work, and it does. By the way, I told my wife that I was doing this. All that is required is to download the free app from Apple’s App Store and the Android Market. The catalog is available in print form, or it can be viewed online on the MooseJaw website.
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Digimo Camera Concept
As you can tell by the headline, this is a concept camera. The Digimo has three cool features, and even one would be enough to sell it on the existing camera market.
The first is that it can split in two. This comes in handy for situations where you need to take a picture of something remotely. You can even see a picture of what you are taking, as there is an LCD on both halves.
The second feature is that it can do 3D pictures. As you might know, 3D pictures are taken with two different camera lenses. When both halves are put together, this camera can get you the 3D pics that you want, if you are into that type of thing.
The third feature is that the Digimo is very modular. It has an extendable telescopic leg that can reach up to 50 centimeters, and you can see the ball and socket connectors that can stand one half of the camera at an angle.
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Take a 360-Degree Panoramic Photo with the Camera Ball
What you are seeing here is not some spherical shaped Rubik’s Cube, but you are right in assuming that those glass circles are cameras. It has 36 cellular phone camera sensors in all, and the green pieces around it are Nerf-like foam.
This is the camera ball, designed by Jonas Pfeil, and its purpose is to take 360-degree panoramic pictures. The user tosses the ball in the air, and it takes a picture when the ball is in apogee (the point where the ball is stationary at the top of its throwing arc).
As you can see in the video, the camera ball can take some pretty impressive pictures in the right surroundings. You will note that some of the video shots look a little like something like the bullet time of the Matrix. I honestly hope that the user has the ability to do that.
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I Want SCANDY! To scan my documents with my smartphone!
In case you missed the joke in the title of this posting, it is an allusion to a song called “I Want Candy” by 80′s band Bow Wow Wow.
The SCANDY is a very cool device that allows you to scan a document with a smartphone. This is something that I have done before at libraries. I find that when I do this, I can’t help but feel like a cold war spy snapping pictures of secret documents with my spy camera. Of course, I do it with my smartphone, and it does slide together like those old spy cameras from movies.
It is difficult to hold a smartphone camera steady when taking pictures of documents this way, which is why SCANDY can literally screw in to the side of the table. There is a video of it at my Source if you want to see it in action.
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Toshiba’s new ad breaks Guinness World Record
I remember seeing all sorts of examples of “bullet time” a year before The Matrix came out, and then I ended up seeing years of knock-offs. This commercial by Toshiba called “Time Sculpture” is “bullet time” with a machine gun.
Go ahead and watch the video after the jump, and you will see how impressive simple moves are when put together, and viewed in 360 degrees. I hope that you appreciate the work that went into it.
It took 200 cameras on a rig to get this shot, and the circular rig that surrounded the actors had to be taken out with a computer. It took about 110 hours worth of film with 20 terabytes of data, and it has broken the Guinness Book of World Records as the highest number of moving image cameras in a composite shot.
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Russian Arm responsible for your favorite car chase scenes
If you like movies with car chases as much as I do, then you should know the invisible star of them is the Russian Arm.
The Russian Arm looks like a tank with a gun with two swivels. It is a gyroscopically-stablized camera crane that is responsible for action shots in car chase scenes like Transformers, The Fast and The Furious, and others. The crane of the Russian Arm is designed to keep steady while its SUV mount is moving at high speeds, even if the pavement is uneven. It can even go off-road.
Continue reading » Russian Arm responsible for your favorite car chase scenes
