United Nations, under construction (note the smokestacks from a now demolished manufacturing plant).

Seagram Building

The Strange Beauty of Salt Mines – In Focus – The Atlantic.

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.

Great teardown of a 1984 Keithley 197 microvolt DMM by KuzyaTech.

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.

Reflow oven by Baken (read more about our new reflow oven)

James’ LED panels for Ra Ra Riot’s concert tour (more info)

Programming chips by Julian

Pallet of plushies by Tom

Scratch badges by Risa

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).

From RaspberryPi.org:

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!

Read more.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.

We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!

Inspired by The Bard, I staged a little scene on the tabletop.

Neat post up on Petapixel about these giant camera resolution charts scattered across the US:

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.

Spotted on that auction site, this lot of 1000+ cameras, starting at $34,999.

Life time Collection of Vintage Cameras!
Have been collecting it for 50 year.

1,000+ pieces of cameras, lenses, and accessories.
(definitely more than 1,000; maybe more, never count it)

All brands
All kinds
All types of cameras.
SLR, RF, TLR, Medium Format, P&S, etc

Canon, Nikon, Rollei, Yashica, Ricoh, Polaroids, Kodak, Fuji, Pentax, Petri, Pax, Mamiya, etc.
You name it.

So. Many. Rolleiflexes. *drool*

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.

Read more.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.

We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!

Cool! The source code for Photoshop v1.0.1 is now available at the Computer History Museum website!

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.

Check out the whole spread at the Atlantic site (some images NSFW).

Nicolas Renard used our Raspberry Pi Light Painting tutorial to create this awesome image celebrating the BMW M Series.

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Above, a before/after animated GIF of Curiosity’s drill test on Martian rock.

A blink pair of images taken before and after Curiosity performed a “mini drill” test on a Martian rock shows changes resulting from that activity. The resulting hole and surrounding pile of drill cuttings are not the only changes.

The images were taken by the telephoto camera of the Mast Camera instrument on Curiosity. The diameter of the hole created by the drill is 0.63 inch (1.6 centimeters). The before image was taken on the 178th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity’s mission on Mars (Feb. 4, 2013). The drill test was performed on Sol 180 (Feb. 6, 2013) and the afterwards image was taken the same sol.

The test drilling was a preparation for the mission’s first full rock drilling. The location is on a patch of flat rock called “John Klein.” If the cuttings are judged to be suitable for processing by the rover’s sample handling mechanisms, the mission’s first full drilling is planned for a nearby spot on John Klein. The full drilling will be the first rock drilling on Mars to collect a sample of material for analysis.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we’re debuting some new iNecklace photos. Check ‘em out above, and click through for the full-sized versions.

The necklace pendant is CNC machined from the finest 6 series aluminum for durability and beauty. The iNecklace is a remarkable accessory. Machined with a “screw in backing” that allows easy access to the battery using a coin. Each iNecklace pendant contains a circuit board with pulsating LED and battery. The pendant comes strung on a 18″ long sterling silver 1.6mm diamond-cut curb chain that has been treated to inhibit tarnishing. The necklace is placed in a black velveteen box, ready to given as a gift!

If you’d like to get your iNecklace by Valentine’s Day, you should order soon! You can get it by the 14th if you order on the 13th with overnight delivery!

On Saturday, New York’s Grand Central Station celebrated it’s 100th Anniversary. Grand Central has been a big part of life for many New Yorkers for years, and the Atlantic has a wonderful photo spread of some of the more memorable moments.

My favorite photo is probably the one above, bottom, of the crowd watching coverage of John Glenn’s historic Friendship 7 orbital flight in February of 1962 (51 years ago).

Check out the whole gallery at the Atlantic.

I love New York when it snows, even though my train got delayed

Steve Hoefer has written a great little how-to for building a $30 softbox for photo and video. While I tend to favor reflector-oriented lighting techniques, the ‘overwhelming softbox’ method (my term) that Steve outlines here is very useful for quick documentation photos or when you have limited space.

There are plenty of DIY softbox how-tos out there, but this one is exceptionally clear and well-written (like all his stuff), so you should definitely give it a look!

Water Droplet Photography with Raspberry Pi by David Hunt via Pi blog!

Here’s how to build a Water Drop kit using a Raspberry Pi as a controller for a solenoid valve and camera trigger.

We’re getting ready to do some awesome stuff in 2013!

We can’t tell you about it yet, but we wanted to give you a bit of a teaser, so here’s a photo of an upcoming product that’s straight out of the future.

View it full-size on Flickr (warning: 4800×3840 — it’s huge) to get the full effect.

Happy New Year everybody — see you on the other side!

Marc made this cool temperature monitor using an Arduino Uno R3 and our thermocouple breakout board. In the photo above, he’s using the circuit to monitor the temperature of milk for making yogurt. He writes:

Monitoring cooling milk during yogurt making with Arduino Uno R3 and thermocouple. Phase 1 of yogurt making is heating the milk to 190-200 F, phase 2 is letting it cool to about 120 F, phase 3 is adding yogurt from a previous batch, phase 4 is letting it culture. This photo is phase 2, letting the milk cool. The sensor and electronics will tell me when the milk is close to 120 F, so I can be ready to add the yogurt (cooling can take over 30 minutes).

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You can click through to see all these photos in a larger size, or visit our Flickr page.

Here’s a project from SVA’s Products of Design student Clay Kippen:

I’m really excited to share the Music Box Portrait with you. As you all know, I’m obsessed with analog photography (thats why many of my prototypes at SVA have been focused around cameras). This project is a 3D printed camera body that plays music and takes a picture when the user turns a crank. I even included some mirrored plexi so that you could check your hair before the big shoot.

Its a little absurd, but thats the point.

This particular iteration, “Version 2.0 ” is outfitted to work with a disposable camera.

Read more.

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!

From a diagnostic station in the blockhouse at Launch Complex 5, Cape Canaveral.

The leaf is sitting on the sunroof of a car in a parking lot.

The Triple Nickel. My first attempt at focus stacking.

Spiderwebs on a foggy day.

John Sarik’s Nixie Sudoku at MakerFaire Rhode Island 2010

A Mitch Altman outdoor soldering workshop — MakerFaire Rhode Island 2009

Demolition Derby at the New Jersey State Fair, 2010

Detail of an old modem board

the Adafruit iCufflinks.

Some PCBs for my BB313 project

Trammell Hudson‘s been using his USB microscope to take pictures of all kinds of things. This time, it’s a crystal oscillator. He writes:

Microscope view of the die inside a crystal oscillator. The die was covered with potting compound that was disolved with solvent to expose the electronics.

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Gian Luigi Perrella writes:

Remote Shooter BT 2.0: Howto control a Nikon D50 and more via Bluetooth from a PC or Android APP.

Remote Shooter BT 2.0 features:
#1 Remote Shoot;
#2 Time Lapse (interval in sec,repeatition);
#3 Shutter Speed Settings;
#4 Aperture Settings;
#5 Iso Settings;
#6 Bracketing on/off;
#7 Shake&Shoot;
#8 Free get/set of PTP command/property

www.pic-ap-board.blogspot.it

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Photography: bringing people together since the 19th century.

Today’s gift guide is all about photography. In this guide, I’m going to present a few handy tools that I’ve found useful as a working photographer. Any of these would make a great gift for the photographer in your life (or yourself!). Before we get to that stuff, though, let’s talk about cameras. I would point out that a camera is an item I think everyone should choose for themselves, because it’s a tool of self-expression. However, there are some general rules to keep in mind whether you’re buying for yourself or somebody else. If you’re looking for technical specs or reviews, there are literally hundreds of websites — my personal favorite is dpreview. As far as finding the camera that’s right, though, it’s really all a matter of personal preference. I find it useful to consider the following:

1. How intuitive is it? Are the controls easy to understand (or easily learnable)? Does it feel comfortable to use? If it’s impossible to figure out how to change the focus point or turn the flash off within 30 seconds of picking it up, put the camera down and look at another one. This is probably the most important thing. The only way to take better pictures is with practice, and the learning feedback loop is considerably smoother if the photographer is not constantly fumbling with awkward controls.

2. How comfortable is it? Can you imagine someone carrying it around for an entire day?

3. How durable is it? Will it be tossed into a bag without a second thought, or gingerly returned to the case after each use? Think about how it will be treated, and choose accordingly.

That’s it. Battery life is important (though you should always buy and carry spares), but megapixels don’t matter very much — all modern digital cameras are capable of producing film-quality 8×10 prints. Unless it’s expected that larger prints will be required, 8 megapixels is plenty. Lower Mpix counts also tend to have lower noise, so when shooting a lot in available light without flash, it can actually be an advantage.

Now that we’ve gotten the camera advice out of the way, let’s move on to the gear!

Datacolor Spyder4Pro Monitor Calibration Package ($169 – B&H Photo)

A calibrated monitor is indispensable when it comes to editing photos. On their own, most monitors have a very strong blue-to-green color cast along with poor tone and color rendition. A monitor calibrator analyzes the output of the monitor against a fixed standard, generates a corrected profile, and gives this information to your video card, where it is applied to the output.

The corrected color and tone mean that things look more like they’re supposed to, whether it’s photos you’re editing, movies you are watching, or whatever. If you spend a lot of time in front of the screen, you’ll find a calibrated display is easier to look at, because the greys and whites of the windows actually look grey and white.

Be warned: the first few times you use a calibrated monitor, the greys and whites will look reddish, because you’re used to a blue-tinted display. But eventually, you’ll wonder how you ever got on without one.

Adobe Lightroom 4 ($109.99 – B&H Photo)

For processing of RAW images, I use Adobe Lightroom. Now, to be fair, I have a PC, so I sorta have to use it. If I had a Mac (or a Hackintosh), I would seriously consider Aperture, because it’s an excellent program too. I used to use Photoshop to convert files from RAW, but since I started using Lightroom I find I do 90% of my work in half the time, and I only use PS for more involved editing and retouching. If I just have to color-correct, crop, and downsize, I can do all of that in LR. Lightroom 4 also features support for printing and tethered shooting (for certain cameras), and the ability to upload directly to Flickr, Picasa and other photo-hosting services.

Monolight Strobes (Alienbees 400, 800, 1600 – $225-360, Paul C. Buff, Inc.)

I love these little guys — they’re the only lights I use now. Ladyada uses them too! They’re well made, reliable, not too expensive. Granted, there are less expensive generic monolights out there, but I’ve never found any of them to be as durable as the Bees. And the customer service from Paul C. Buff, the manufacturer, is excellent. I also like that they offer a full line of accessories which are equally well made.

Another point to consider is that it’s very easy to make your own modifiers. Unlike many light systems, which use a custom flange/bayonet for mounting things to the light, the Bees use a a simple spring clamp, which fits inside a 3.5″ circle. If you want to attach your own modifiers, just cut the appropriately-sized hole in them with a hole saw and clamp them on.

There are three models of the classic AlienbBees light: the B400, the B800, and the B1600. The only difference between them is light output. The 400 puts out plenty of light for shooting things like products on a table or headshots, but consider upgrading to a B800 or B1600 if you plan to do large group portraits or use a large softbox (softboxes absorb a LOT of light).

Manfrotto 055XB Tripod with Quick-release Ball Head ($232 – B&H Photo)

You can buy one good tripod for $230 and keep it for life, or you can buy a $99 tripod every 12 months when your old one breaks. Aside from providing a camera platform for self-portraits, a solid tripod is very useful for landscapes and cityscapes. It’s also absolutely critical for macro shooting, where shutter speeds are rather long and vibration can be a significant problem. Speaking of macro…

Dedicated Macro Lens ($300-900, depending on focal length and manufacturer)

For folks looking to take close-up photos to the next level, you should consider buying a dedicated macro lens. Most zoom-telephoto lenses have some macro capability, but it’s limited, and the quality is often less than ideal. Dedicated macro lenses are available for nearly all SLR brands, often in several different performance tiers and focal lengths. Nikon, for example, offers a 40mm macro for cropped sensor (DX) cameras ($276), a 60mm midrange ($550) and their top-of-the-line 105mm with vibration reduction ($900). Likewise, Canon offers a 60mm ($500) and two versions of their 100mm lens — the standard version ($600) and an L version ($900), as well as some specialty lenses. Macro lenses are optimized for performance at close focusing distances and larger magnifications, which means they tend to have greater resolving power. This translates to a much sharper lens in general use.

If you plan to take pictures of subjects like flowers, lenses in the 60mm range (or the Nikon 40mm) are a good choice because they have a wider field of view. They also tend to lighter and be more compact, which is nice if you’re walking around with them all day. The downside is that you have to get closer to small subjects in order to fill the frame, which can be uncomfortable and interfere with lighting (you + your camera block the light).

For subjects which are smaller or further away, the 100mm range is useful because it gives you a greater working distance between the camera and the subject — that is, you don’t have to be right on top of the subject to take a picture of it. These lenses are also wonderful as portrait lenses, due to their large aperture (f/2.8), which allows you to throw the background completely out of focus — many of them have image stabilization too.

A nice compromise between 60 and 100mm is the highly-regarded Tamron 90mm/2.8 ($500), which is available for Nikon, Canon, Sony/Minolta and Pentax cameras, and also has image stabilization.

LowePro SlingShot 202 AW Backpack ($62 – B&H Photo)

A nice, lightweight back for day tripping and hiking. Enough room for three or four lenses, a speedlight, memory cards, and a pocket on top for all your other stuff. It also has a built-in ‘raincoat’ you can deploy to keep your gear nice and dry.

Dedicated Hard Drive for Photos (prices vary by size — numerous vendors)

It’s a wise idea to keep all personal photos on a dedicated hard drive, physically separate from your OS and applications. Store all originals and edits on this drive, and don’t use it for anything else. At least once a year, it’s a good idea to buy a new one, copy the most recent photos onto it, then remove and store the original in a secure place (like a safe or safe-deposit box at a bank). These are your original photos, so you should take care of them.

If you’re going the safe deposit box route, consider buying a smaller 2.5″ laptop harddrive, which takes up less space. Remember that this drive is only used for storing and loading photos, and not for constant use, so you can get away with a 5400RPM model and/or a 16MB cache.

Boom Lightstand with 22-inch Reflector ($85 – B&H Photo)

Great for shooting small stuff on a tabletop, and particularly useful for shooting video. The reflectors can be used to bounce light back into a scene and to provide fill light. You can use the disc without a reflective covering as a diffuser, or use it with a cover to cast a shadow. You can also mount a speedlight on the boom arm to put a light source in an otherwise difficult spot, or use the clips to mount a small acrylic mirror, for a focused fill effect.

SHIPPING DEADLINES

Here are your 2012 shipping deadlines for ordering from Adafruit. Please review our shipping section if you have specific questions on how and where we ship worldwide for this holiday season.

UPS ground (USA orders): Place orders by Friday 11am ET – December 14, 2012 – Arrive by 12/24/2012 or sooner.

UPS 3-day (USA orders): Place orders by Wednesday 11am ET – December 19, 2012 – Arrive on 12/24/2012.

UPS 2-day (USA orders): Place orders by Thursday 11am ET – December 20, 2012 – Arrive on 12/24/2012.

UPS overnight (USA orders): Place orders by Friday 11am ET – December 21, 2012 – Arrive on 12/24/2012.

UPS International: Place orders by Monday 11am ET – December 17, 2012. Can take up extra time due to worldwide delays and customs. Should arrive by 12/24/2012 or sooner.

Please note: We do not offer Saturday service for UPS.
Tuesday, Dec. 25, 2012, Christmas, no UPS pickup or delivery service.
Tuesday, Jan. 1, 2013, New Year’s Day, no UPS pickup or delivery service.

United States Postal Service, First Class and Priority (USA orders): Place orders by Friday – December 14, 2012 – Arrive by 12/24/2012 or sooner.

USPS First class mail international (International orders): Place orders by Friday – November 23, 2012. Can take up to 30 days ore more with worldwide delays and customs. Should arrive by 12/24/2012 or sooner, but not a trackable service cannot be guaranteed to arrive by 12/24/12.

USPS Express mail international(International orders): Place orders by Friday – December 14, 2012. Can take up to 15 days or more with worldwide delays and customs. Should arrive by 12/24/2012 or sooner.

Gift Certificates are always available at any time.

When in doubt contact us!

Photograph of 28 climbers on needle mountain that looks like it has been photoshopped.

It may look like it has been through some serious digital altering to show the progress of one climber trekking across a mountain top, known as time-lapse photography, but in fact this shot has not been tampered with at all.

This incredible snap show not one, but 28 climbers posing in perfect symmetry as they scale a near-vertical mountain in the Italian Alps.

It was taken on the ‘Ago del Torrone’ (a shard of rock known as Cleopatra’s Needle, 3,000ft above sea level on the border between Switzerland and Italy) perched 3,000ft above sea level, and took five hours of climbing and preparation in freezing temperature.

Curiosity Snaps ‘Arm’s Length’ Self Portrait: Big Pic @ Discovery News.

In this intimate scene we can see Curiosity, as if in mid-playtime, in its Mars sandbox — a geologically interesting area called “Rocknest.” In the lower left are the scoop trenches where samples of Mars soil have been excavated and in the upper right, the base of Mt. Sharp (the unofficial name of Aeolis Mons, a 3-mile high mountain in the center of Gale Crater). Wheel tread-marks surround the rover.

Cool Brain Machine photo by John Biehler!

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Incredibly Small: Best Microscope Photos of the Year.

Every year for nearly four decades, Nikon has received hundreds of entries in its Small World microscope photography contest. Every year, the images are more amazing, and this year’s winners — selected from nearly 2,000 submissions — are undoubtedly the best yet.

Super-close-ups of garlic, snail fossils, stinging nettle, bat embryos, bone cancer and a ladybug are among the top images this year. The first place winner (above) shows the blood-brain barrier in a living zebrafish embryo, which Nikon believes is the first image ever to show the formation of this barrier in a live animal.

“We used fluorescent proteins to look at brain endothelial cells and watched the blood-brain barrier develop in real-time,” the winners, Jennifer Peters and Michael Taylor of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, in Memphis, said in a press release. “We took a 3-dimensional snapshot under a confocal microscope. Then, we stacked the images and compressed them into one – pseudo coloring them in rainbow to illustrate depth.”

Here are the top 20 photomicrographs from the 38th Nikon Small World competition, selected for their originality, informational content, and visual impact by a panel of scientists, journalists and optical imaging experts.

Above, the blood-brain barrier in a live zebrafish embryo by Jennifer Peters and Michael Taylor, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee.

See more.

Viktor’s DIY: Zeus: Lightning Trigger for Cameras…

I have always been fascinated by photographs about lightnings. While it is relatively easily to put a lightning strike in any photograph using image editing techniques I still prefer the real thing. Since photography is a hobby of mine, I wanted to be able to photograph lightnings. However, when I tried to do it without any specialized equipment, I didn’t have much success.

Reading a bit about the subject on the internet I found there are many designs/solutions available, to get around the problem. Since the price of the commercially available ones are too high for my budget (and let’s face it, it’s not much fun buying something ready made when you can also make it yourself), I decided to make one for myself for less.

Steve on Flickr writes: “A recently acquired 1978 Heathkit dip meter, in excellent shape and tested very close to calibration. Had to replace the rotted foam that held the 9volt battery in place, but that was no hardship.”

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Photographer Caleb Charland made alternative batteries from apples on trees, stacked coins, and other fun things, then made these gorgeous photographs. via Colossal

Pete Prodoehl captured this photo of our skill badges on a lab coat. Hey Surreality Labs– looking’ sharp!

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A very nice writeup over at Wired about the 17 cameras aboard the Curiosity rover:

One of the best parts of having NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars is the incredible images that it’s going to start beaming back to viewers on Earth.

After the probe’s safe landing, it sent several pictures of its wheels on the ground to mission control to let engineers know that everything was okay. But these dusty, close-up images cannot compare to the snapshots that the rover will soon be taking.

Curiosity is packed with no fewer than 17 cameras to shoot high-quality photos and videos in black-and-white, color, and 3-D stereo of the Martian landscape. While scientists are no doubt quite eager for the information that these images will contain, most of us will be excited to live vicariously through the rover and experience some breathtaking views on Mars.

None of the cameras has more than 2-megapixels of resolution, which at first seems surprising, but I think there are a few good reasons for it:

Lower resolution means smaller images. The bandwidth of the radios on Curiosity is limited to about 10-15Mbps (it tops out at 40, but it changes depending on position, and is shared with other streaming data), so larger images would take a much longer time to upload back to Earth. Anybody who remembers browsing the web with a 14.4k modem can relate.

Lower resolution also means lower noise and lower power. For a given sensor size, a lower-density sensor will have better noise performance than a higher-density design, assuming signal processing and fabrication tech are the same. It also means less physical gates on the chip, which reduces power consumption (and heat).

Finally, it’s important to remember that the cameras are mounted on a robotically controlled, motion-indexed platform, so taking adjacent, grid-aligned pictures that can be stitched together later is pretty easy.

Of all the cameras on Curiosity, I’d have to say the MAHLI is probably my favorite — it’s basically designed to act like a hand-held magnifying glass (if your hand is a giant robotic turret, anyway), taking macro photos of rocks and dirt. This allows geologists to note features like twinning, which can give clues about the origins of these samples.

UPDATE: There’s some more camera info, as well as a lot of other stuff about the “skycrane” procedure in this awesome article from Ars Technica.

This week’s photo comes from Dr_Speed:

I hate having to log into my laptop just to see what the current song is. Arduino displays song title, artist and album name.

Great use of one of Adafruit’s displays!

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This weeks featured photo is Daves LiPoly MintyBoost. Check out our MintyBoost and Batteries sections to get supplies to build your own.

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This is an idea I’ve been kicking around for awhile — I’ve wanted to do a photograph which captured what I think of when I think of makers, and which makers themselves would enjoy as a work.

All of us started the same way — as curious kids (maybe big kids). At first, most of us were following in the path of someone else — along what feels like a straight, well-defined line. But there’s a point where things start to diverge, and we go off and do our own thing. That’s what making is all about, and that’s what I tried to capture here.

Symbolism aside, I just dig this image. I’d like to sell it as a print, with a portion of the proceeds going to charity. What I’d like to know from you is if you’d be interested in buying such a thing. It’s always hard to judge whether or not a print will sell, especially for the artist, who is often too close to the work to be objective — that’s what galleries and curators are for. But I don’t want this to be a gallery piece. I’d like it to be an affordable work that people can hang in their homes, hackerspaces, shops, or offices and enjoy, so I’m asking you directly.

This would be an 8×12 digital c-print, matted to 6×10, without a frame. The image above is a mockup of the final print in a frame. You can see a larger version of the image here. The price would be no more than $30/print and would include a custom matte.

Please respond in the comments if you’re interested.

UPDATE: Wow! Thank you all so much for your enthusiastic response! I’m currently working out distribution (shipping cost, setting up a shop, etc.) but it looks like this could really happen. Prepping the image for print takes some time too, because I set very high standards for myself when it comes to prints. Thanks again for your amazing comments and encouragement — they mean a lot to me!

cross-posted from my blog

“so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” – t.s.eliot

1280×1024 desktop background here

This week its Allan Santiagos 8000mah USB charger!

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This week’s photo comes from g.christenson – OpenEVSE v5 Charging – nice character display!

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A friend of mine sent me this 2010 video tour of the Lee Filter factory. Pretty amazing how much manual labor goes into making these things.

We recently setup some new lighting/photo/video equipment at my home studio, so I thought I’d share the haul. Above is the light is suspended over the desk with a counterweighted boom arm to rain soft even light over the desk. A smaller light is acting as a fill, and with it I took this solder spool picture. I’m looking forward to exploring the possibilities with this versatile combination of equipment, and hope writing about it helps you take better photos and video too!

We picked up:

• Westcott BDS 36×48 shallow box photo/video kit (Spiderlite TD5 with soft box)
• Avenger A420 baby roller stand
• Avenger D600 mini boom arm (and a sandbag)
• SP Studio Systems compact fluorescent light
• Manfrotto 055XPROB tripod with 700RC2 mini video fluid head
• Manfrotto 244RC variable friction magic arm
• a few Manfrotto super clamps (for the magic arm and the flex arm we picked up for the small light)

The light stand has locking casters, making it easy to wheel around the studio (instead of lifting it, oof), then lock it in position. The locks can be operated with a foot alone, which means I don’t have to bend down at all (a big plus for my sore knees). Avenger gear is built to last for generations.

The Manfrotto magic arm uses a single dial to tighten up all three of its joints. It uses a compatible quick release plate to my tripod head (thanks, Johngineer!), so I can move the camera between the two simply. My desk is super sturdy with no wobble, otherwise I’d clamp it to a shelving unit or something else nearby that won’t move as I work on the project at hand.

The setup can be configured for people shots easily– the soft box is set to rake across the subject’s face while the fill light is clamped up high to shine down as a hair light. We chose a constant light source (instead of strobes) so it can be used for video and photos. I can’t wait to make more videos to share with you! Tell us about your setups in the comments.

Interesting news from the British Journal of Photography:

Kodak has announced that, as part of its “ongoing strategic review,” it will stop producing digital cameras, pocket video cameras and digital picture frames, but will continue to invest in its film division

I don’t know about you, but I’m thrilled about this announcement. After their declaration of bankruptcy, there was some serious concern among film users that film products would be first on the chopping block. For many of the years that film photography existed, Kodak was the big dog. It was all things to all photographers, and provided a huge variety of reliable products to all segments of the photographic market. However, when consumer digital photography came along, Kodak floundered as it tried to remain “all things to all photographers”, and ended up being nothing to anybody.

The fundamental problem was (and is) that digital photography is much less about taking pictures than it is about consumer electronics, which is something Kodak knew nothing about. As a result, they ended up outsourcing their cameras and electronics, and lacked a focused, core line of high-quality professional products around which a user base could form. But all that’s in the past now, and hopefully they’re setting much more realistic goals for themselves.

Now, I’m certain that this post is going to provoke at least one response along the lines of “film is dead” — and in a way it is, but there are lots of people (including yours truly) who still use and love it. I don’t use it for my professional work, because the turnover and workflow are just too slow for that kind of thing, but I still use it in my personal work. And so do a lot of other people — it’s still incredibly popular for fine art work.

When people hear that I still shoot film, they feel compelled to lecture me about all the benefits of digital: it’s faster / you have instant feedback / you can share it easily. All of those are true, but also true are my counterarguments: I want to work slow / I don’t want instant feedback — I know my camera well enough to know if it’s going to work / I’m not ready to share it yet.

Often, I end up comparing the film vs. digital debate to the difference between oil paint and acrylics. Acrylics have many advantages over oils: they mix easier, clean up easier, dry faster and they are cheaper. But there are things you can do with oils that you can’t do with acrylics: namely, you can’t spend a week retouching a painting while it’s still wet, you can mix many more pigments with oil, and finally nothing else has the depth and richness of an oil painting. Likewise, nothing else looks like a silver print from film. A well-made silver print on high-quality fiber paper (with maybe a touch of selenium toning) is a rich and stunning thing to behold. On top of all that, the process of developing and printing film photographs is one of the most enjoyable experiences I can think of, and I never want it to go away.

So, I’m hoping this announcement means that Kodak will turn it’s attention to the only loyal market it really has: film photographers who love Kodak film and chemicals (I’m a Plus-X/X-Tol man myself), and reaffirm its dedication to making these great products.

Also, bring back HIE!

Put a couple of the iron-on patches from the shop on my nerd bag. This is the bag I usually take with me to MakerFaire and other geek-tastic events. They look really nice against the black fabric background.

I need to get more hackerspace pins.

Quick tips for iron-on patches:

1. Make sure the fabric you’re applying the patch to is clean.
2. Use a high enough heat setting to melt the adhesive and let it permeate into the fabric below. I used a high “cotton” setting.
3. Apply firm, even pressure over the whole area of the patch for long enough to let the adhesive set (as above) — I ironed each patch for about 3 minutes each.
4. Use a handkerchief or thin cloth between the iron and the patch, or you risk damaging the threads on the patch.