HDR Photography Makes Japan Look Like CGI

UPDATE: This article has been moved to 1over100.com

No.6 [Kanagawa prefecture] — Photo: dokool

There is something unreal, or perhaps hyper-real, about HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. It evens out the lighting, makes everything crisp and colourful, and gives it an artificial, if not computer generated, kind of look. Now combine that with Japan’s often surreal urban landscapes and techno-kitch culture and you have a killer combination.

Shibuya Backstreet [Tokyo] — Photo: yongfook

Pink Tentacle has plucked some of the best Fantastic Japanscapes out of the Japan HDR Flickr Photo Pool for your enjoyment. Thanks to Scott Beale at Laughing Squid for the link via Twitter.

Boxing With Robyn

This average (and two-minutes-too-long) remix by Ocelot of Robyn’s pseudo-hit from 2005 gets a new video that really packs a whallop midway through – some interesting camera work, some hopefully contractually obligated participants, one pink boxing glove, and some ungodly fast shutter clicks later, we have a music video that mostly has me wondering about what professional boxers must be enduring over their professional careers.

Super Mario Galaxy Photography IRL

Super Mario Galaxy is filled with tiny planets (or galaxies as they are called in the game) with their own dense gravity.

The spherical panoramas of Alexandre Duret-Lutz (aka gadl) resemble real-life replicas of the popular Wii game. He has even named his flickr set Wee planets, and explains the involved technique on his photo page. Here are a few samples (out of 215!):





(via Wii-volution.com)

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

This is one of the finest book titles I’ve ever seen.

Link

My New Ffffound Ffffriend!

Ffff**k! What a simple and beautiful idea to capture and display images you come across in various internet wanderings. I tend to pull images off of sites and place them into my ‘wallpaper’ folder, which then becomes a designy screensaver. My biggest complaint about my own system is the lack of metadata in the image: I don’t know where it came from once I have copied it onto my drive. Ffffound fixes this problem, creating a social medium for bookmarking images. The EXTRA bonus is the recommendations and associated images that come with every picture. You can easily spend hours meandering through hundreds (soon to be thousands and then millions) of images. I will be first in line when this comes out of private beta.

Ffffound (with 4 F’s) describes itself thusly:

FFFFOUND! is a web service that not only allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, but also dynamically recommends each user’s tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience!!

Look for a new wave of sites to be named with four consonants now, instead of missing vowels. I’m serious!

Link via Daniel Burka on Pownce.

Gisele’s Water Dress!

UPDATE: This article has been moved to 1over100.com

Do I still have write anything for this? Its just awesome and sexy!
Anyway its aimed at protecting the Xingu river from pollution…

IdeaFixa Treasure Trove

 

Ideafixa.com is a cool publication. It’s an e-mag that publishes bimonthly on specific themes. Issue 8 is Self-Portraits. While that has all the hallmarks of student disaster, the quality of the work is very impressive. The depth of the collection is fantastic, you just keep turning page after page after page. A lot of the work comes from South America and it’s  refreshing to get exposed to the talent of the South. There is also a bio section for some of the artists which makes for some interesting reading. They work on a submission policy and the next theme is Food. So get out your pencils, camera, wacom, emo, etc and try and overwhelm the curators with your genius.

IdeaFixa

Why Can’t Every Site Be Lateral?

 

Sometimes I despair of social networking sites. They have a promise of interesting connections and influences and then fall a bit short of the dream. Much like any kind of technology I guess. I’m thinking that Virb is not going to live up to it’s designer promise. The pages dedicated to Art, Photography and other creative output have not arrived, despite months of promises. I’m sure they’re busy and music is the easiest way into this business, but c’mon! Most of the people I chat with on the site are designers of some sort and how awesome would a chart of top illustrators on Virb be? Anyways, every now and then I’m surprised by someone that wants to be friendly and what they’re attached to.

The other day a guy called Franks contacts me on Virb. And it turns out he is the Head of Design (and a damn good drawer) at a company called Lateral, based in London. They’re an interactive type of agency who’ve done boat loads of work on Nintendo DS and Levis. While their portfolio is impressive, it’s their website that caught my attention. It’s a damn clever piece of information design. Slick, simple and fast. The expandable blocks provide excellent bite size pieces of information and the colour work is fun and intuitive. I think it’s built in Ajax.

It’s a lesson in how a single page can be an entire information architecture.

Lateral 

Content Aware Image Resizing = Awesome!

Now imagine having this in Photoshop!

UPDATE: Adobe Hires Co-Inventer of Image Resizer Technology
ANOTHER UPDATE: Some Patrick Swieskowski builds his own prototype of this scaling technology that you can try with your own picures.

The Screaming Quiet: Julia Fullerton-Batten

 

Julia Fullerton-Batten is a photographer who creates compelling images from the seemingly mundane. The old woman in the washroom. The school girls in a playground. The house of cards on a table. They all take on an unreal quality that just sucked me in. They’re sophisticated paintings of light and quite beautiful to sit and look at.  The visual depth she puts into her images make them seem like stolen moments. Julia has shown her work in The National Portrait Gallery in London and the work must be quite something to see in person.

Link  (via)