Photography & Video

The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for creating and editing digital photos and videos, as well as how to make your own still and video cameras.

The Sandpit: a tilt-shift movie

You’ve heard of tilt-shift photography, right — pix shot with a special lens that makes everything look like little models. Well, check out Sam O’Hara’s The Sandpit, an awesome tilt-shift movie of a day in the life of New York City! [via Kottke] More: DIY tilt-shift lens Weekend Project: Tilt-Shift Photography HOW TO – Make […]

DIY Movie Making article roundup

Beware the Ides of March! I was itching to say that. Ahem. Here is a collection of MAKE magazine articles related to DIY movie making. Note that most back issues of MAKE are available for purchase in the Maker Shed. Don’t miss any future articles … subscribe! MAKE Volume 01 $14 Video Camera Stabilizer – […]

Seasonal Flickr color cycle

Seasonal Flickr color cycle

This visualization of the way colors in Flickr images change over the course of the year was created by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg of IBM’s Visual Communication Lab. It’s called “Flickr Flow.”

The two of us see the world as a stream of color, and in 2009 we finally had a chance to draw the river in our heads. We began with a collection of photographs of the Boston Common taken from Flickr. Using an algorithm developed for the WIRED Anniversary visualization, our software calculated the relative proportions of different colors seen in photos taken in each month of the year, and plotted them on a wheel. The image [above] is an early sketch from the piece. Summer is at the top, with time proceeding clockwise.

The finished infographic, complete with seasonal labels and callouts of representative images, appeared in the Metric section of Boston magazine in March of 2009. You can view a low-res version of it here.

iPhone image stabilizer

People shoot pretty impressive video using smartphones. There’s even been some rather ingenious hardware solutions developed to improve the fact that you’re still shooting video with a smartphone. When I ran across this iPhone image stabilizer (original Japanese) I was impressed with how well it seems to perform. In order to save the viewer a little time I’ve skipped ahead to a decent spot in the video.