Click

Stop Motion On So Many Levels

sniker — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:49:01 GMT

I just came across a neat stop motion film posted on photojojos Twitter feed. Admitted it's one of this damn ment-to-be-viral ads (and I hate it when these things work and turn me into a salesperson) but it's still worth the 3 minutes of your lifetime. Hot Tip: If you stop the video at 3:00 exactly, you can pretend this isn't an ad at all.

Enjoy.

We shot 60.000 pictures, developed 9.600 prints and shot over 1.800 pictures again. No post production!

Tilt-shift + time lapse = awesome

sniker — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 21:06:56 GMT

I came across a very beautiful tilt-shift video the other day and found out that it is part of an ongoing project by Sydney based photographer Keith Loutit. He creates stunning little videos combining tilt-shift and time-lapse photography portraiting ordinary places around Sydney. Worth a peak!

So this is the video called Bathtub IV (you better watch this in HD on vimeo):

Not only is the music just yummy but I love the look and feel of this stuff. The good part is: there is more. Keith is doing an ongoing personal project to "document 12 months of life in 'Little Sydney'". The rest of his videos can be viewed in HD on his official vimeo channel.

But how?!

So after drooling for a while I started wondering how this had been done. I looked around for a while and found a great interview with Keith in which he explained the process:

My technique combines thousands of photographic stills into short films that each last less than 3 minutes. My process begins with the identification of subjects and the planning of locations. Once these elements are established, I move onto more detailed planning around timing, lighting, and weather, with the aim of getting the image sequence right first time.

He than confirmed to me via e-mail that the videos "are all timelapse sequences of real subjects shot using a DSLR with tilted lenses." What an extraordinary effort!

Tilt-shift? Time lapse?

For those of you not familiar with tilt-shift and time lapse Wikipedia has some pretty informative entries on the topics (as usual). And for everyone interessted in creating your on there is some more nice sites for you to look at:

Use Photoshop to make your tilt shift and safe to money for a lense.
Too cheap for Photoshop? No Problem use this neat webservice called Tiltshiftmaker.com
Last but not least a tutorial I found on a forum on daytime time lapse.

Seconds & Thirds

And now for those hungry for more: some nice examples of timelapse.

Again HD on Vimeo recommended.

This great examples can only be watched on the creators site. Be sure to check it out!

Last but not least a classic, that probably a lot of you have seen before:

Find out who's stealing your photos with TinEye

sniker — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:33:15 GMT

Today I came across an interessting website. It's a search engine but stay with me, here. TinEye does what they call "Reverse Image Search". Pretty interessting concept with a downside: the still very small index.

Since reading is exhausting, let's just watch the pretty lady explain it to us.

In other words, you can enter an image URL or upload an image and with the help of a "digital fingerprint" of the image TinEye searches its index for dublicates, crops and altered version. Pretty amazing.

Possible uses

Okay, now how can this come in handy?

First of all, you can find out where an image came from that you found on the web.
Got an image of the web and need a higher resolution? Test your luck.
Afraid someone might be stealing your photos? Find out who.
But also: You have released something as public domain or under a CC license. See who uses your work where and for what purpose.
Last but not least, find altered versions of your pictures. See what other people make of it.

But does it work?

That's what I was wondering. The video shows a nice little demonstration of Mona, but would it work with my images? The technology must be somewhat alright if Adobe has licensed it.

Well, I tried it with some of my older photos. None of them were indexed. Then I tried it with my public domain atom feed icons. No luck either. One of them didn't turn up any results. The other quite a few, but nothing I had hoped for.

As this icon uses a fairly common symbol the search turned up quite a few results, but no dublicats of my icon but rather a bunch of other images using the standard atom icon. No hard feelings. Apparently the Twitter clone indenti.ca has not been indexed, yet (they use this icon e.g.).

I was impressed to see, though, that the images found were very similar and although they all used slight variations of the symbol they all were decent matches.

So what now?

Would I say this works? Yes, but... Since the index is still very small the results are fair but not great. But if we are to believe the lady from the video TinEye's busy crawling spiders are at it. So let's give it some time, shall we?

Click

Stop Motion On So Many Levels

Tilt-shift + time lapse = awesome

But how?!

Tilt-shift? Time lapse?

Seconds & Thirds

Related Links

Find out who's stealing your photos with TinEye

Possible uses

But does it work?

So what now?

Related links

*Click*

Stop Motion On So Many Levels

Tilt-shift + time lapse = awesome

But how?!

Tilt-shift? Time lapse?

Seconds & Thirds

Related Links

Find out who's stealing your photos with TinEye

Possible uses

But does it work?

So what now?

Related links

Click