| Charlie Chaplin in Color ★ | geh.org |
© George Eastman House
Printed on color plate with the Autochrome process, circa 1917-1918.
More gems here.
18 April 2011
| TouchRetouch ★ | iphotomania.com |
Did you know about the Content-aware feature that came out in Photoshop CS5? The one that does magic with your image?
A Ukraine-based Adva-Soft came up with an iOS app three iOS apps that do just that on your iPhone, iPod Touch & the iPad.
Despite the clever-yet-redundant naming, the $1 TouchRetouch & TouchRetouch HD managed to touch-out some clutter on my test image nicely, with an interface and icon that are well-thought easily found in a more expensive package.
If you think $1 is too much, there’s an ad-supported TouchRetouch Free on the table for you to steal.
On a personal note, I’d rather have a $2 clean & universal app rather than a-buck-each excess for my iPhone & iPad, too bad I can’t just retouch the clutters, but thankfully, the app reads just “Retouch” on the homescreen.
15 April 2011
| Langdon Graves ★ | cargocollective.com |
© Langdon Graves
Drawing Art Extraordinaire.
14 April 2011
| ‘It was a camera that didn’t use any film to capture still images’ ★ | pluggedin.kodak.com |
©Kodak
Coming from the folks whose main business was selling film:
On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder. Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like.
I have used that very photo in my basic digital workshop course material, and I have quoted Steven Sasson for countless of times for opening up a whole new world of digital imagery.
New York based photographer David Friedman had made a nice video profile on Steven Sasson, who fondly revealed that he chose 30 as “the convenient number between 24 and 36” which at the time was the number of shots can be captured on a roll of film.
PS. I have always preferred 24 @ ISO 400.
| Built for Human ★ | flyingmeat.com |
Acorn, a Mac-only image editor has just reached version 3.0, almost at the same time with Adobe’s mid-cycle refresh that doesn’t contain any updates to its popular photo editing app.
New in Acorn: Layer styles, Live Gradients, Quickmask, plus 50 more, a trial version is available for download from the website and they’re having a time-limited special on the Mac App Store.
They’re not joking when they said “Built for Human”, for it has the most humane UI design for a complex software of a robotic nature.
8 April 2011
| When Gravity Fails ★ | srulirecht.com |
© Marinó Thorlacius for Sruli Recht
I know what it will look like before I do it, but there is a mid point where everything liquefies, all forms and finishings… and hardens right at the last moment.
6 April 2011
| Chicago, 1949. ★ | howtobearetronaut.com |
© Stanley Kubrick/U.S. Library of Congress
By none other than the venerable director, star journalist of his time, a New Yorker, Mr. Stanley Kubrick. (via DF)
| Dubois & Barral ★ | byDandB.Com |
© Dubois & Barral
Two frenchmen got together and did something wonderful:
One day, Mr D (Laurent Dubois) contact Mr B (Fabien Barral) and told him “I like what you do, I can do nice print on fabric, we should work together”… They found an amazing playground, the Excelsior Latin Hôtel in Paris who need to be decorated. Mr B creates a serie of images that Mr D prints in large size… And then they share good dinners and talk about doing cushions, wall prints…
Great imagery over at Fabien’s flickrstream where photography meets graphic art, fabric meets print, modern meets vintage art, but most importantly, perfect harmony of two artistry that brings such partnerships to a new level. (via graphic-exchange)
Vintage Reloaded
© Courtesy of RE-35
Plug-in digital film is not a new concept but a forgotten one.
I never heard of any actual product that shipped with flexisensor; one major reason I think is the actual cost of production and the actual sellable price point the market can bear. Nonetheless, a half-baked, 2-page website with a ‘coming soon’ placeholder has just popped up on my radar screen this morning:
The RE-35 cartridge replaces the film in your classic analog 35-mm camera. Set the ISO to 400 and your done — your camera will now take high quality digital pictures. […] RE-35 will be availlable later this year. Check this site regularly for more infos.
None other than an apple-esque product teaser & an impressum that leads to a website of what looks like to be a design firm responsible for their initial web teaser are available at this point, so I wouldn’t hold my breath to it. Alas, it would be a kick-ass competition to the broken digital imaging industry if a) they ship, and b) they ship an incredibly usable product with a lucrative price point.
They seem to have got the design right, but I’m not too sure about the RE-35 name (nice domain name, though) — there’s a reason why the iPad is not named TB-123, and the iPhone is not named Re-Phone, easy to pronounce, catchy word is as important as the product’s design & packaging.
Film fanatics would have a woo-hoo-nostalgic party night when it happens, and I would be thrilled to see an actual product ship. (Thanks Bimo!.)
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.