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]

MONOCHRON – Monochome display clock kit


Another very cool clock kit to lust after. I swear, if I had my way my room would look like Doc Brown lived in it…

The second clock kit from ladyada & Adafruit Industries, we present MONOCHRON!

We wanted to make a clock that was ultra-hackable, from adding a seperate battery-backed RTC to desiging the enclosure so you could program the clock once its assembled

  • 128×64 LCD (KS0108) – we special-ordered the black and white display
  • ATmega328 processor (we even stuck an ‘arduino’ stk500 bootloader on there too)
  • Laser cut enclosure in black acrylic
  • Beeping/blinking alarm with 10 minute snooze
  • Battery backed-up real time clock (DS1307) keeps time even when power is lost for years
  • European/US 12 or 24 hour time display as well as date
  • Completely open source hardware, all firmware, layout and CAD files are yours to mess with
  • Plenty of space for mods, a prototyping area for soldering stuff in
  • Soothing animation of retro arcade style table-tennis for two

MONOCHRON – Monochome display clock kit.

30 Best Practices for Writing HTML

30 Best Practices for Writing HTML
Even if you are not a professional web developer and can only just cut and paste enough HTML to make a web page not totally suck these 30 tips are something that you should read. Lot’s of good practical advice, stuff like closing your tags and if you use inline styles an asteroid will strike you dead (not really but inline styles are still a bad idea). Read it and remember it the next time you are working on your magnum opus ‘Hello World’ page.

30 HTML Best Practices for Beginners

Space Wallpaper Direct From NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory


Brighten up your desktop with stunning shot of science imagery. Over 80 to choose from at various dimensions to fit even the most ’embiggened’ of monitors. There are even instructions on how to apply this as a desktop to your computer if you were wondering how that sort of thing was done. Space craft, planets, satellite pictures of Earth, there are enough pretty pictures to make most everyone happy.

Space Wallpaper, Earth, Mars, Saturn, Moon, Stars and Galaxies – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

FUTUREPICTURE: Light Field Camera Project

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