Morning Cup O' Joe

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Transporter – An alternative to cloud storage

I qualify as a heavy user of cloud storage. Services like Dropbox and Google Drive are essential to my collaborative workflow. There are certain caveats to this, though:

  1. As a photographer, sharing 20GB of photos (from a single wedding shoot, for example) through Dropbox is cost-prohibitive. Collaborating on multiple wedding shoots will cost a pretty penny. Videographers have it worse.
  2. Companies require certain rights to your files in order to provide the “sharing” portion of their service, since your files will be living on their servers. As such, you are subject to their whims. (In general, you should be wary of any free service you make use of. Facebook, for example, just released new “functionality” in their mobile apps that automatically uploads ALL photos you take into a private album onto your account. It sounds convenient, but realize that once your files are on their servers, Facebook has certain rights over them.)
  3. My particular cable internet provider has a data cap of 250GB/month for my service tier (30Mbps). Once we hit that limit, we get throttled down to around 1.5Mbps (which is still preferable to getting overage charges). When I was experimenting with online backup solutions, I hit that data cap in half a month.

Enter Geoff Barrall, CEO and founder of Connected Data (and former CEO and founder of Drobo, Inc.). He is aiming directly at users like myself with a new product called Transporter. In a nutshell, it is a non-RAID NAS that provides Dropbox-like sharing. The kicker is how it works with other Transporter devices. If, let’s say, my photo business partner had a Transporter, we can have a synced folder for wedding photo shoots. Our Transporters will sync with each other automatically. The only “cloud” element is in the hand-shaking protocol between Transporters so that they can find each other. None of your data passes through their servers. This seems like a near-perfect win to me. It takes care of caveats 1 and 2 above.

Transporter has a KickStarter if you want to get in on the action early (and get a discount). According to an interview with Geoff Barrall, the Transporter will go on sale in 2013.

Transporter [website] [kickstarter] [video]

Interview with Geoff Barrall (starts at 1:07:00) – This Week in Photo

December 24, 2012 Posted by | Geeks and Gadgetry, Photography, Science and Technology | , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Human Planet

2-15-2012 3-26-34 PM

I’m late to the game on this amazing BBC series called Human Planet. If you have a moment, I highly encourage you to check out this audio slideshow by Timothy Allen. His captures are emotional and breathtaking. I can only aspire to even approach this level of photography.

Thanks for the link, Darren!

via BBC

Human Planet (audio slideshow | wikipedia | website)

February 15, 2012 Posted by | Photography | , , | 1 Comment

Bent Objects

Zombies-are-Nuts-About-Brains

“Zombies Are Nuts About Brains”

Sculpture + Photography + Twisted Sense of Humor = Bent Objects

via Wired via Bent Objects

February 15, 2012 Posted by | Humor, Photography | , , , , | Comments Off

High Speed Video of Canon DSLR Shutter

The action begins at the 60 second mark.

Here’s a great video showing the mirror and shutter mechanism in a Canon DSLR. The action begins 60 seconds in.

Keep in mind that the entire real-time duration of the mirror swinging up, the shutter coming down, the exposure, the shutter coming back up and the mirror swinging down is .213 seconds.

Great find, Tom!

January 26, 2012 Posted by | Photography, Science and Technology, Video | , , , , | Comments Off

Google Store View

image

My favorite camera store, B&H Photo Video, is one of the first businesses participating in having virtual tours of their stores via Google’s Street View technology.

If you look up B&H Photo Video on Google Maps, you can step inside.

via Wired.com

January 19, 2012 Posted by | Photography, Science and Technology | , , , | 2 Comments

Capturing video at the speed of light — one trillion frames per second

So what kind of camera do you have? How fast can it shoot? 1/4000th of a second? 1/8000th of a second? Pshaw. What do you think of a camera that can shoot 1/1,000,000,000,000th of a second? That’s so fast that it can capture light traveling in slow motion!

MIT researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion exposures per second. That’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of a burst of light traveling the length of a one-liter bottle, bouncing off the cap and reflecting back to the bottle’s bottom.

via MITnews

December 13, 2011 Posted by | News, Photography, Science and Technology | Comments Off

Photography Themed Rube Goldberg

2D Photography Rube Goldberg

I’m a sucker for elaborate contraptions—especially ones that involve themes that are near and dear to my heart.

Enjoy!

July 19, 2011 Posted by | Geeks and Gadgetry, Photography, Video | , , , , , | 2 Comments

Leica Lenses Sliced in Half For Science!

Pictured above is a Leica Tri-Elmar-M 28-35-50mm lens cut neatly in half. Call it death of a lens. I call it an interesting display on the intricate mechanical workings of a camera lens.

These were actually made by Leica students as a graduation project and boxed as a “cutaway model” of the lens.

This also gives you a good mental image of what you can potentially break if/when you drop your lens.

Thanks for the link, David!

via PetaPixel

May 18, 2011 Posted by | Geeks and Gadgetry, Photography, Science and Technology | , , , | 1 Comment

Light Field Photography with a Plenoptic Camera

Light Field Photography with a Hand-Held Plenoptic Camera.jpg

I’ve been keeping my eye on plenoptic lenses since I saw this Stanford Research paper on the topic back in 2005. In layman’s terms: with a Plenoptic Camera, you’ll never take an out-of-focus image again. Using a special lens composed of an array of micro-lenses, more information is captured than your usual camera setup (see image below from Laptop Magazine):

From LaptopMag.com

Special software takes the above image and resolves it into a traditional photo. The kicker is, though, the user can choose where the focal point is during this post-processing step. It’s pretty amazing and will revolutionize photography as we know it. Here’s a video demo:

Light Field Photography with a Hand-Held Plenoptic Camera [Stanford University]

Never Take an Out-of-Focus Picture Again: Adobe’s New Plenoptic Lens Tech [Laptop Magazine] via @AngeloAlcid

September 24, 2010 Posted by | Geeks and Gadgetry, Photography, Science and Technology | , , , , | Comments Off

Bound for Glory: America in Color

Color America

This is an amazing collection of color photographs taken during the Great Depression prior to World War II.

From The Denver Post:

These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations. The photographs are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color.

Great find, James!

via The Denver Post

August 4, 2010 Posted by | News, Photography | , , , , , , | Comments Off

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