I can’t think of a better name for a person who build pole cameras than Polster. And fortunately for Jim, that is his last name. In addition to being the proprietor of Longshot Camera Systems, Jim is also a broad spectrum maker.
Inspired by Hektor the spraycan robot and following in the footsteps of the AS220 Drawbot and Harvey Moon’s Drawing Machine, Edinburgh maker Sandy Nobel’s Polargraph puts a spin on the hanging drawing machine. Using a dual-polar coordinate system instead of the standard cartesian gives the machine its unique name and particular style.
QR Code Island is a delightfully hare-brained concept design from Mat Barnes and Eddie Blake, which will continue to delight me until news appears that someone is actually trying to build such a thing.
Sebastian Korczak hacked together a 360° rotating 3D scanner using little more than a record turntable modified with Arduino, digital camera, and a laser pointer. Korczak’s laser was mated with a special lens to create a linear beam. The distortion of this beam as it scanned the room coupled with the video data is put into a Python script, which outputs a point cloud of whatever is scanned. In this manner he is able to get full real-time scans of entire rooms. Fortunately for us, he’s provided extensive documentation on his homepage.
As impressive as this bottle-cap self-portrait from artist Mary Ellen Croteau may be, I probably would not have chosen to mention her piece “CLOSE,” here, if it weren’t for the interesting way that she has used sets of nested plastic bottle caps and bottle-cap liners to achieve a much deeper color palette than would’ve been possible using bottle caps without the nesting trick. Clever!
Sometimes, I get this feeling like I’ve seen it all – that nothing that comes along is ever going to inspire or delight me the same way that certain ideas, systems, inventions, and/or artworks did when I was younger. It always passes, sooner or later, but while I’m under that spell it can be…well, it can be a bit depressing, honestly. So I feel like I ought to thank International Man of Mystery Nirav Patel, somewhat more personally than usual, for making and sharing this wonderful thing. I am inspired.
If you’ve ever found flash photography to be too harsh, but often wondered how the pros get those evenly lit studio shots, you should check out a ring flash. Shooting through a ring flash will get you smooth, even lighting, and that perfect twinkle in the eye. You’ll also lose the harsh shadows that usually accompany a flash.
