Posts tagged photography

Seven Summits becoming available on Google Street View.

Some of the most famous mountains in the world have been captured with Street View cameras and are available to check out now. Included in the list is Aconcagua (South America), Kilimanjaro (Africa), Mount Elbrus (Europe) and Everest Base Camp (Asia).

Find them on Google Maps yourself of go check out this gallery.

James Webb Telescope Model at South by Southwest

As big as a tennis court and as tall as a four-story building, a full-scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope model was on display from March 8-10 at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. 

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is the successor to Hubble and the largest space telescope to ever be built.

New camera sensor allows refocusing after the shot.
A new sensor module from Toshiba uses an array of 50,000 tiny lenses inside a 1cm thick unit, which allows photos to be refocused after the shot is taken. Although Lytro offers similar technology in their ‘light field’ cameras already, the Toshiba module is small enough to fit in a smartphone or tablet, and can perform the same function on videos, features which Lytro can not yet manage.

The company says the technology is still in development, although they hope to have it commercialized before the end of 2013, after which it will hopefully be picked up by multiple smartphone and tablet makers.

Macro photography captures snowflakes just before melting.

Russian photographer Andrew Oskin uses a 60mm or 90mm macro lens on a Nikon DSLR to capture the images of snowflakes in the moments after they hit the ground.

Check out the full gallery here.

Photo: ‘Earthshine’ illuminates the Moon.

A French photographer captured this image with a Canon EOS 100D camera and a refractor 1000mm telescope 

When sunlight reflects off the Earth and shines onto the moon, the phenomenon is called “earthshine.” A crescent moon is between a new moon and a half moon. The moon in this image is waxing at 16.7 percent of lunar illumination.

Photo: Orange battery.

The orange has a tiny light bulb inside, which is powered by a chemical reaction between citric acid and the zinc nails inserted into each wedge. The current was so weak that it required a 14 hour exposure to get this photo.

Check out more of the series by Caleb Charland here.

3D printing photobooth opens in Japan.

Omote 3D Shashin Kan will open in late November as part of a Japanese exhibition, allowing participants to take away a realistic 3D model of themselves. Much like the first photo booths, the 3D printing booth will require participants to stand still for 15 minutes, while a technician scans them in enough detail to pick up textures in clothing and hair.

A single figurine will cost around US$260, with discounts for groups of three or more.

Check out this three billion pixel image of the Olympic volleyball.

Photographer David Bergman created the image by shooting over 200 individual photos over a 21 minute period, before stitching them together to create the monster 98,101 x 31,747 pixel image.

The full image can be seen here, where you can zoom in and around the photo.

I hope you’ve got a big hard drive…

The age of gixapixel cameras has arrived. The AWARE-2 camera is able to take 1,000 megapixel images, or 1 gigapixel. Enigineers at Duke University who built the device say that while it’s currently the size of a milk crate, it could probably be shrunk down to fit a portable camera within five years, while also boosting the cameras resolving power up to about 50 gigapixels.

The AWARE-2 is made up of 98 microcameras, each with a 14 megapixel resolution. They share a single spherical lens, with each camera resolving a small part of the larger image. The device is currently such a large size because of the electronic and cooling systems needed to keep it running.