March is a time when spring is dawning and we (at least those of us in colder climates) can’t wait to bust out of our cabins and break the fever of breathing our own exhaust all winter long. Spring offers newfound possibilities for making things, for being creative. Combine the desire to get out and […]
Polar and horizontal mounts of solargraph 35mm pinhole-can cameras. Images captured in Nuremberg, German. Camera: plastic 35mm film cans, paper: Agfa BS310 RC. [Spotted on the MAKE Flickr pool] More nifty solargraphy pics in the Solargraphy Flickr pool. Polar and Horizontal Can-Mount
Anybody have any guesses how this was done? Neurosonics Live on Vimeo by Will clark, JFB, and Beardyman. Just a little warning, there’s a little bit of swearing at the very end of the video. [Thanks, Jamie!]
My favorite pranksters in the Fatlab (Free Art & Technology) visited Berlin for the Transmediale festival, during which they replicated a Google Street View car and toured around town filming skits like asking for directions and lurking in front of the Chinese embassy. Check out the site for a video of it in action and […]
Ever wish you could plug any USB peripheral into your cell phone? Well, now you can, at least if you have an Android-based Droid phone.
Interesting article over on TwistedSifter about the use of so-called “dazzle” or “razzle-dazzle” camouflage beginning during WWI. (The Wikipedia article is pretty good, too.) It’s a kind of practical op-art: The idea was not so much to make the ship invisible against the background, but to confuse enemy weapons operators as to its distance and heading. The Rhode Island School of Design has a wonderful online collection of various paper plans for dazzle camouflage schemes donated by Maurice L. Freedman, who was district camoufleur for the 4th district of the U.S. Shipping Board, Emergency Fleet Corporation, and would go on to invent the board game “Battleship.”
A reader who saw Marc’s recent post about an Arduino-controlled laser photo trigger wrote in to tell us about the amazing work of Belgian photographer fotoopa (which, we hear, as “foto opa,” means something like “photo grandad” in Dutch). That’s him in the picture above, and that’s his awesome homebrew laser-triggered camera set up that he uses to capture amazing pictures of insects in flight and splashing drops of colored water. I’m generally skeptical of film purists, but fotoopa makes the compelling point that no digital camera has the shutter speed necessary to do this kind of imagery. He claims the Compur #1 shutter used in his 2008 setup has a speed of less than 5 milliseconds. Technical details about his 2009 setup are available here. [Thanks, Wilco Schillemans!]
