Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

Mystery Camera and the Film From Within…

Every once in a while I’ll stumble across a ‘classic’ camera when I visit the local second hand store. I recently picked up a Kodak Duaflex IV that was in pretty bad shape. The faux leather case was hard and cracked, there is rust on anything that could rust and weird corrosion on whatever wasn’t rusty but the lenses looked OK and the shutter moved. I was thinking that this would be a great camera to pull apart for the glass and shutter mechanism. I’ve been doing an on again off again search for simple camera shutters for my own creations, the Kodak looked to be a likely source. I’d rather have a nice Copal or Zeiss shutter from a folding camera but this would do.
How I managed not to open it while I was at the store is beyond me. If I had I would have noticed the exposed roll of vintage 620 format Kodacolor-X that was neatly waiting for someone to process it. Read the rest of this entry »

BeetleCam Wildlife PhotoBot

Very neat. I once did this with an old VHS-C camcorder and was fascinated by the results. Watching video shot with a wide angle lens that is only six inches off the ground is actually quite captivating.

“We booked a trip to Tanzania and set about designing, building and testing BeetleCam. The first step was to get up to speed on the necessary robotics and electronics that would be required to build such a vehicle from scratch. Having conducted some research, we sourced components from around the world. Construction then began in earnest with sawing, soldering, sewing and super gluing taking place around the clock in Will’s garage.”

Burrard-Lucas Blog Wildlife Photography.

via MAKE

LOREO 3D Lens in a Cap

Normally I don’t like the idea of using a beam splitter to take 3D photos but this lens from Loreo looks like it has a few features that would change my mind.

“3D photographers will be familiar with trying to take closeup photographs with wide image pitch 3D devices. The 3D effect depends on the parallax between left and right images, but too much parallax makes for unnatural 3D, which is difficult to fuse. A 3D lens with a 50mm stereo base is very good for 3D photographs in which the subject is 1.5 – 3 meters away. At the same distance, a 90mm stereo base 3D lens would produce image pairs with excessive parallax, where left and right images are too wide apart to fuse. The 50mm stereo base lens however would not be capable of producing spectacular 3D at 5 meters or more away.”

The parallax compensation while focusing is the big thing that got my attention. As the ad copy says excessive parallax will mess up a 3D photo. My only wish would be that the lens would communicate it’s f-stop to a digital camera so you could use aperture priority to make it easier for faster shooting.

LOREO 3D Lens in a Cap 9005.

The Awesome Beauty of Time Lapse DSLR video…

Stomacher – Untitled/Dark Divider from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

Using well over 20,000 photos (most are three photo high dynamic range composites) photographer Sean Stiegemeier used the motorized head from a telescope (broke two doing the entire video) to create these beautiful motion control shots for this music video. The video for the band “Stomacher” was shot on Canon 5D, 5DmkII, Anamorphic 35mm. I hope to have more information about this video in the future. Make sure you see the high def version of the video!
More of Sean Stiegemeier’s videos on Vimeo.

The Sandpit

The Sandpit from Sam O’Hare on Vimeo.

Such a wonderful mix of tilt-lens camera work and time lapse technique.

“It is shot on a Nikon D3 (and one shot on a D80), as a series of stills. I used my Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 and Sigma 50-150mm f/2.8 lenses for all of these shots. Most were shot at 4fps in DX crop mode, which is the fastest the D3 could continuously write out to the memory card. The boats had slower frame rates, and the night shots used exposures up to two seconds each. The camera actually has an automatic cut off after 130 shots, so for longer shots I counted each click and quickly released and re-pressed the shutter release after 130 to keep shooting.”

For more info about the making of this short visit:  “The Sandpit” – A short film by Aero Director, Sam O’Hare!

[via MAKE]

Bigshot: Focus on Cool!

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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