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)

“Zombies Are Nuts About Brains”

Sculpture + Photography + Twisted Sense of Humor = Bent Objects

via Wired via Bent Objects

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!

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

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

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

Enjoy!

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

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):

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

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

A co-worker pointed showed me an interesting abstract sports photo using a technique called “strip photography.” Naturally, I did the smart thing and did a search for “strip photos” in Google. Then I quickly closed that tab and did a search for “strip photography” and found a great article on this interesting art.

This diagram sums it up nicely:

The concept is simple enough, but the results are breathtaking. Thanks for the tip, Tim!

via Sports Shooter