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Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recently snapped a picture of the Opportunity rover perched on the rim of Victoria Crater. Opportunity drove more than 5 miles from its landing site to get there. High resolution photo here. Here’s where Opportunity is located on Mars.
Instead of megapixels-worth of light sensors, a new experimental camera uses a series of mirrors to focus all the light on just one sensor. Somewhat related question that I’ve been wondering about for awhile: why do digital cameras need shutters? Why can’t you just turn the sensors on and off electronically? Seems like you could then use many more arbitrary “shutter” speeds, like 5 seconds or 1/50000 of a second.
Museum camouflage photographs by Harvey Opgenorth. (via nick baum)
Some nice photography from Corey Arnold, specifically the fishing portfolios. (via thih)
Nikon recently sent a bunch of new D80s to some Flickr photographers and are now using some of the shots those photographers took in an ad campaign. “Nikon did what every major brand should be doing…it got out of its own way and let the real people that counted do the talking: their own consumers.” PDF of the ad spread.
LifePixel will modify your digital camera (Nikons or Canons, mostly) to shoot in infrared. “Camera manufacturers stop infrared light from contaminating the images by placing a hot mirror filter in front of the sensor which effectively blocks the infrared part of the spectrum while still allowing the visible light to pass. We remove this hot mirror filter and replace it with a custom manufactured infrared filter.”
Huge gallery of unusual cloud formation photos. Personal weirdest cloud story: late afternoon in the Wisconsin fall, clouds covered perfectly one half of the sky while the other half was completely clear blue.
Space tourist Anousheh Ansari is Flickring photos from the International Space Station. NASA reportedly spent 250,000 man-hours building a module to upload snapshots from space via the Flickr API.
Update: That NASA man-hours stat is a joke, sorry. NASA is not that absurdly wasteful. I have no idea how she’s getting the photos on Flickr. Do they have web access on the ISS?
Update: Ansari called Larry Page today and reported that there’s no internet access on the ISS. Email is delivered in batches…so she’s either emailing them to Flickr or someone’s uploading them for her. BTW, the first kottke.org reader in space…could you give me a call when you get there? (thx, terrell)
Update: According to Ansari’s blog (from space!), email is sent from the ISS three times per day.
A collection of snapshots by Andy Warhol of his friends from a recently published book, Warhol’s World.
If you asked me today to choose a medium in which to focus my future artistic energies, I’d have to go with the photo can. After finding this great Photojojo tutorial yesterday on using tin cans and glass jars as photo frames, I selected three recent pictures I’d taken and made this can triptych:
So cool! And simple too. I didn’t follow Photojojo’s directions exactly and I have a few observations to offer for those looking to play around with this:
Good luck!
Nice symmetry to this photo taken by Jake Dobkin of some people walking in front of graffiti.
According to Joerg Colberg, Thomas Weinberger makes his photos with two long exposures, once in daylight and once at night. The result is these spooky washed-out photos, a kind of analog HDR effect.
Some photos from a recent trip to Austria, featuring shots from near Linz, Salzburg, and Innsbruck. I went so crazy with the photos in Austria that I didn’t take a single picture once we got to Zurich…I was all photographed out.
Female Tech has combined her love of technology and an artistic sensibility to create photos of herself posing with various gadgets: a stratgically placed PSP, Sega Genesis cuddle, and GameCube piggyback. Reminds me somewhat of a certain Palm parody from back in the day. NSFW.
Tutorial on adding surprisingly realistic beards to people with Photoshop. (via photojojo, who’s having a contest for the best bearded woman)
Interview with photographer Michael Wolf, who did the great Architecture of Density and 100x100 projects.
Todd Deutsch’s photo gallery, Gamers, contains photos of video game enthusiasts and the (non-virtual) world they inhabit.
State of Emergency photo shoot from the September 2006 issue of Vogue Italia. The editorial of these fashion photos exceeds that of much photography found in more conventional US news media. (via bb)
Bed Jumping: photos of people jumping on hotel beds. More on Flickr. (thx, joshua)
The “fondue” tag on Flickr has a surprising amount of entries. Our fondue in Switzerland. See also: the “wurst” tag.
Stolen mobile phone + automatic upload of the thief’s photos to Flickr = art project. (thx, stewart)
The New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery has tons of great old photos of Central Park…among other things. thx, bryan
Great composite photo of Andre Agassi playing a point against Andrei Pavel in the US Open last night. Looks like Agassi had Pavel running a bit.
Update: Nice appreciation of Agassi with a summary of his career.
Photographer Noah Kalina has taken a daily photo of himself for more than 6 years and recently made a movie of the results.
Completely mesmerizing. Best viewed large. (via kdunk)
Flickr just launched an interface to geotag your photos. Geotag = situate your photos on a map.
Remember those neat library pictures I pointed to last week? Turns out that the Jedi archives in Star Wars Episode II were modeled after the Long Room Library at the Trinity College of Dublin. (thx, everyone who sent this in)
New Yorker piece on Clifford Ross’ new camera, a “high-resolution digital video camera that shoots in three hundred and sixty degrees”. Ross is one of my favorite contemporary photographers.
Amazing photoset depicting the aftermath of a hailstorm in Northfield, MN. Tennis ball-sized hail puts holes in everything. (via eyeteeth)
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