Google Street View Stop-Motion Animation
Address Is Approximate is a stop-motion animation project by director Tom Jenkins that uses Google’s Street View in a novel way to take some desktop toys on a cross-country holiday. It’s a clever bit of storytelling and photography and it makes me want to go on a trip across the USA.
Photoshop Deblurring Sneak Preview
Check out this video on a plugin for Photoshop that removes blur from photos – a potential feature in future versions of Photoshop just might make you gasp in awe as it did for this audience at Adobe Max 2011:
It looks like photographers may soon be able to rescue images from previously unusable states of blurriness. I don’t expect this to be a substitute for good shooting technique, but everybody makes mistakes. If this software can help fix those mistakes, as Rainn Wilson says, people will love this. If nothing else, it should raise the quality of drunken iphone photos on facebook.
Cross your fingers for this to be included in CS6.
A Year in the Life of a Remote Camera
It’s amazing all the critters you can spot with a remote camera in Banff National Park in Canada. This video shows the animal and human traffic through a clearing for 365 days in under five minutes.
Rob Hornstra in Sochi, Russia
Rob Hornstra is a dutch photographer whose current project is to document the city of Sochi, Russia before the Winter Olympics of 2014. His method is one of slow journalism that involves visiting and re-visiting areas over the course of years instead of days, weeks or months.
There’s some good behind the scenes time spent on him working on location and getting the locals comfortable in front of the camera as well as insight into how he has financed his projects and brought them to fruition in this age of self-publishing.
And I get a special bonus when watching this one. At about 14:30 of this video, Hornstra is shooting a lounge singer whose last name is not too far off from mine: Sasha Savchuk. I’m told that Sawchuk derives from Savchuk, so, Sasha and I are probably very distantly related. Very.
Via Gill Moore’s twitter.
RED Digital Stills and Motion Camera
RED, makers of the digital video camera RED ONE, have announced their new camera system: the RED DSMC (digital stills and motion camera).
As the title of the system suggests, we’re not just looking at another video camera here, the specs on the higher end sensors promise to rival those of current DSLRs. As with the Nikon D90 and the Canon 5D Mark II, digital stills and digital video are converging, but this particular thrust comes from the video side.
The infinitely-configurable system from RED is so different, it’s almost confusing. The RED Scarlet and RED Epic sensors (with funny names like Mysterium Monstro) can be combined and interchanged with different lens mounts (including Canon and Nikon mounts), batteries, recording modules, lenses (of course) and so on. The idea is that the camera can be configured and tailored to your needs in a myriad of ways. Further, as technology advances and new components become available, they will integrate into this system and you won’t have to upgrade the entire camera.
All of this, of course, comes at a price. A lot of it is pretty costly stuff, but perhaps the less expensive options will allow budding filmmakers to buy into the system and upgrade into the more high-end options as their needs may advance. The lighter weight versions, however, do seem fairly affordable for the ability to get good quality HD video.
On the photography side of things, I’m not sure the specs / cost will win over too many DSLR shooters. The higher-megapixel options are a lot more pricey than their DSLR counterparts. What we have here is the reverse of a camera like the 5D Mark II. RED’s system will allow filmmakers to branch out into still photography where the Mark II will give photographers the option to try their hand at making some moving pictures.
Though it will likely be a long while (if ever!) before I get to play with one of these (especially since it doesn’t an official release date yet) it’s still fun to watch the technology blossom and to imagine where things may go next.
Darby Sawchuk is a Canadian-born photographer who currently resides in Manchester, England. He has travelled to over 40 countries and is always adding more to the list. He creates stock for multiple agencies and is available for assignments.
+44 0790 992 8932
