TeamDroid | Photography

Posted on 01.11.10 by John @ 7:49 pm

I can only hope that this eventually makes it into the regular market:

A camera designed for kids can be much more than just a toy: it can serve as a powerful educational medium. We believe that such an educational camera must have a radically different design from that of a typical consumer camera. (a) It should be designed as a kit for assembly by students. The assembly process should not only demystify the workings of the camera, but also expose students to various science and engineering concepts. (b) It should include features that cannot be found in other cameras, allowing students to explore new creative dimensions. (c) It should be low-cost, with the potential to serve as the basis for a scalable social venture. Bigshot has been designed with these goals in mind.

The killer is the rotating lens board on the front. The lens wheel (or polyoptic wheel as it’s called)has three settings: normal, panoramic, and stereo. Normal is what you would think it is, normal photo. The panoramic lens gives you a 72 degree field of view and creates a nice barrel distortion, and the stereo is a small prism that acts as a beam splitter to shoot a left and right image onto the sensor.Software that comes with the camera will adjust the distortion from the pano lens and create red/blue anaglyph stereo images when you use the beam splitter. Oh, did I mention that the camera can be powered by either a single AA battery or a few cranks on the built in dynamo?

[via MAKE]

Bigshot: A Camera for Education.

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Filed under: Cool and DIY and Mad Science and Photography and Technology
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Boeing 787 First Flight in 3D

Posted on 12.28.09 by John @ 9:13 pm

Grab your 3D glasses and have a look at the Boeing 787 Dreamliner as it takes to the air.
First Flight – a set on Flickr.

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Filed under: Cool and Photography and Technology
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FUTUREPICTURE: Light Field Camera Project

Posted on 12.17.09 by John @ 6:21 pm

Multi camera madness to be sure…

So, what does this thing do? The primary function of this array is to capture the Light Field, a four-dimensional function that is capable of describing all rays in a scene. Surrounding you, now, and always, is a reverberating volume of light. Just as sound echoes around a room in complex ways, bouncing from every surface, so does light, creating a structured volume. Traditional, single-lens cameras project this three dimensional world of reflected light onto a two dimensional sensor, tossing out the 3D information in the process, and capturing only a faint, sheared sliver of the actual light field. By taking many captures at slightly shifted locations, it is possible to capture a crude representation of the light field. The number of slices determines the resolution of capture; our 12 captures at 7cm separation is a bare minimum. What can you do with a light field? The lowest hanging fruit is computational refocusing. By computational refocusing, we mean focusing the image AFTER it is captured.

> FUTUREPICTURE

Popularity: 41% [?]

Filed under: Artistic and Computers and Cool and Mad Science and Photography and Technology
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Hackable ‘Soft Camera’ for Computational Photography

Posted on 09.03.09 by John @ 8:56 pm

Hackable 'Soft Camera' for Computational Photography

An open-source digital camera platform… Wow… The video for this project makes mention of on the fly dynamic range adjustments and infinite focus via micro lens arrays. Amazing stuff, I can hardly wait for something like this to make it to the general public.

Anyone will be able to create new features for the camera by writing aps that control all the camera’s functions — focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash, etc. Cameras could be taught new tricks with downloadable apps, analogous to iPhone apps.

[A tip of the CyberHelm to Special Agent Greg for this one]

Stanford open-source camera could revolutionize photography.

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Filed under: Cool and Mods and Photography and Technology
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3D Astro Images

Posted on 06.22.09 by John @ 6:24 pm

Imagine if you had a head as larger than a planet, OK good. Now imagine that you are looking up at the ’sky’ (with your head being larger than the planet you normally live on some would say that the sky is everywhere but I digress…) and things that would normally appear flat begin to have depth. You can see that the moon is closer to you than the sun and that planets really do look like they are way out there. Astronomer JP Metsavainio has been taking wonderful photos of the night sky and then enhancing them to give you the illusion of what they would look like it you were of a galactic size. His estimates of depth are a best guess but I’m going to say that for the sake of argument that he is correct. Seeing these nebula and galaxies with stereo depth is just cool.

Astroanarchy

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Filed under: Cool and Photography and Space
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Blackbird Fly TLR Camera

Posted on 05.30.09 by John @ 8:59 am

blackbird-fly-camera-1 Using traditional film has become the ‘hip cool thing’ for photographers these days. The heck with the instant gratification and low cost of use that digital gives you, shoot with a medium that you have to wait for the results until after you get it back from the expensive lab. Don’t worry if you think the only place you can find a film camera is at a thrift store or a collectible camera store, you can still buy them new. I happened across this fine example of a modern 35mm camera the other day. I give you the Blackbird Fly TLR (wiki: Twin-Lens Reflex). The camera sports a waist level viewfinder, two shutter speeds (bulb and 1/125) and two apature sizes (f-7 and f-11), three format (normal 24mm x 36mm, square 24mm x 24mm, and a full frame with sprocket holes) masks, a hot shoe for a flash, and a manual variable focus (.8 m to infinity). These specs won’t hold up next to a Rollei or a Seagull but then you aren’t paying for that. You get a cool yet functional retro looking (in three colors no less) camera that lets you get all creative with your snapshots. Plus as it uses standard 35mm film you can grab film for is just about anywhere (a little tip: get the out of date stuff, it’s cheap and if the colors are a bit off you can credit that to your artistic abilities).

[via Trends in Japan]

Blackbird Fly

Support my blog and pick up a Blackbird Fly in blue, black, or orange from my Amazon store.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Filed under: Cool and Japan and Photography
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