"I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand"
Architectural photographer Ezra Stoller photographer the American skyline as it was being inextricably altered by geometric modernist towers rising in from its centers. In the midst of color photography’s rise, Stoller insisted on shooting in black and white. via butdoesitfloat:
United Nations, under construction (note the smokestacks from a now demolished manufacturing plant).
Salt, an essential element for all animal life, is abundant here on Earth, but it still requires extraction from stone deposits or salty waters. The process of mining that salt can produce beautiful landscapes, including deep, stable caverns, multicolored pools of water, and geometric carvings. Some of these locations have even become tourist destinations, serving as concert halls, museums, and health spas touting the benefits of halotherapy. Collected here are images of salt mines across the world, above and below ground.
We’re all suckers for photos of ash, lava, lightning, all the stuff signaling the apocalyptic demise, of well, everything around. But when it all occurs together? You get this, courtesy of photographer Martin Rietze via My Modern Met:
An update to a new product we announced last week. We’ve added a new photo to the product page for our 10″ Pixel Qi LCD Display, to illustrate how it looks in reflected mode.
We’re really excited to offer the revolutionary Pixel Qi display, a full color screen that can also be used in daylight. The Qi has three modes – backlit color, backlit grayscale and daylight grayscale. In normal office/indoor use you’ll want to go with keeping the backlight on to reveal the color layer. The screen works just like any other 10″ TFT with fast refresh (not like slow e-ink). When a bright light shines on it, the display turns ‘gray’ but is still visible. When outdoors in bright light, the backlight can be turned off to revert to a transflective display mode which is much lower power. For much more information please check out the Pixel Qi website.
Several of us here at Adafruit post quick phone pics of what we’re working on throughout the day to Instagram, so here are a few that we thought you’d like! Above is my pic of Collin during our LED Ampli-Tie photoshoot.
Check out this post from Gordon Hollingworth, Head of Software over at the RaspberryPi Foundation about his work testing the 2D / 3D helmet cam rig he has been putting together with the Raspberry Pi mini-HD camera module. He catches us up on the first tests (that we have shown before) and then and shows some promising 3D tests (that require glasses to view so were not the best thing to post on our site).
A few years ago I really wanted to play around with a helmet-mounted camera for my mountain biking. There were quite a few out in the market, but they were quite expensive, and it’s always difficult getting toys past my wife! Because I was working at Broadcom, I was able to get my hands on what we called the MicroDB (the thing David and Eben first showed to the BBC as the Raspberry Pi), and since I had all the software and a bit of competence, I decided to try doing a bit of HD helmet recording.
The hardware I used was based on the same BCM2835 chip that we all know and love. The hardware also had a PMU chip (power supply), which meant you could power it directly from a lithium ion battery and record 720p HD video for about an hour.
So I rigged up some properly engineered mounting. I used a rubber from my daughter’s pencil case (Americans, breathe easy – this is the UK word for what you call an eraser), a couple of cable ties, and a USB socket! I set out on a voyage of discovery…apologies in advance for the lycra clad arses, but It’s something you’ll just have to put up with!
When people test cameras and lenses for resolution, they commonly use special resolution test charts that are filled with black bars of varying lengths and thicknesses. They’re kind of like eye charts, except for cameras instead of eyeballs, and with lines instead of letters.
Well, did you know that in dozens of locations around the United States, there are gigantic resolution test charts on the ground?
The Center for Land Use Interpretation writes that the strange “land-based two-dimensional optical artifacts” are used for the development of aerial photography — cameras built into airplanes and drones.
The resolution charts were mostly used during the 50s and 60s, but some of them may still be used nowadays to calibrate “flying cameras.” They have dimensions of around 50-80 feet and are coated in heavy black and white paint.
This great timelapse controller takes advantage of the USB port on a Raspberry Pi and is a great demo of our LCD plate! From David Singleton:
A few weeks ago, I found this beautiful video on Youtube – a timelapse video of stars and the Milky Way. Seeing the stars appear to rotate overhead (due to the rotation of the Earth) and the intricate structure of our own galaxy gave me a profound feeling of the scale of the universe that we move through on spaceship Earth. Of course, I wanted to record my own Milky Way timelapse.
Capturing the Milky Way requires dark skies and long exposures, so this seemed like a great project to build using my fairly old Canon EOS 350D and Raspberry Pi. I also spent some time exploring what existing timelapse controllers can do – the holy grail of timelapse is to be able to capture sunset (and sunrise) seamlessly, where a wide range of shutter speeds need to be used to capture an appealing scene as the ambient light levels change profoundly. You can see at the end of the milky way video I linked above that sunrise is not handled so well! There are a number of scripts which can be run in-camera with homebrew firmware (e.g. chdk) but these cannot choose the best shutter speed based on the images taken – they have to guess the best values once there is too little light for the camera lightmeter to judge. Since we can run fully featured image processing software like ImageMagick on the Linux based Pi, I decided to build a controller which could capture sunset.
I also recently got hold of an Adafruit LCD Plate for my Pi so I’ve added a User Interface too.
I haven’t yet been able to make the Milky Way timelapse which is my end goal, but hope to do so in the coming weeks next time it’s dark, clear and I’m at Lake Tahoe, but the controller is working nicely.
Read on to find full instructions, some demo videos and the software so you can try it yourself.
With the permission of Adobe Systems Inc., the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code to the 1990 version 1.0.1 of Photoshop. All the code is here with the exception of the MacApp applications library that was licensed from Apple. There are 179 files in the zipped folder, comprising about 128,000 lines of mostly uncommented but well-structured code. By line count, about 75% of the code is in Pascal, about 15% is in 68000 assembler language, and the rest is data of various sorts. To download the code you must agree to the terms of the license.
Some amazing images from the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards, showcased over at the Atlantic. One of my favorites is the photo of the wall in Rome, Italy (above, top), shot with a large format camera on manually processed color film.
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