Posts Tagged ‘photography’
Winners of the 2011 Astronomy Photographer of the Year Contest
Click here to launch a gallery of the best of the winning photos.
From among the winners, we've put together a gallery of our favorites, including auroras, supernova remnant and beautiful views of the Milky Way. These photos almost make us ready to pack up and move out of the city so we can reacquaint ourselves with the stars. Almost.
Astronaut Captures Perseid Meteor Shower From His Perch on the ISS
The 25 Best Places to Photograph on Planet Earth
Edison-Era Inventions Emerge From the Vaults of General Electric
A 100-year-old electric car charger, the earliest fuel cells, and much more
GE tells me that the motivation for the Tumblr was simple: "We like Instagram, we like Tumblr, and we like to geek out on cool tech. It's our tech, but at times it even feels a little sci-fi--there's always been an art to science that people continue to enjoy." GE called on photographer Hans Gissinger to shoot items from GE's archives as well as more modern projects being worked on right now. Most of these items are stored in GE's Global Research Center in Niskayuna, New York, near Schenectady, though they plan to head to other manufacturing plants across the country to capture the goodies stored elsewhere.
Here's the Instagrammed version of the photo we included at the top of this post:
[]
How L.A. Noire Rebuilt 1940s Los Angeles Using Vintage Extreme Aerial Photography
L.A. Noire's carefully reconstructed world owes a huge debt to Robert Spence, who photographed Los Angeles while leaning out of a biplane with a 46-pound camera in the 1920s
Since 1997, when players first sped stolen police cars through the bird’s eye canyons of Liberty City in the original Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar Games has constructed bigger, better, and more detailed virtual worlds than any other gaming house. These worlds--from the dusky horizons of Red Dead Redemption to the cocaine-dusted nightclubs of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City--have always owed as great a debt to the popular imagination as they have to historical research. They are uncannily skillful recreations of places we know from movies and magazines. They are hyperreal, rather than authentic.
But building a faithful version of 1940s Los Angeles for their newest, L.A. Noire (out today), required more than a mastery of popular culture and a healthy knowledge of . It required Robert Spence. A Los Angeles photographer, Spence was the subject of a recent profile in and was Rockstar's secret weapon in re-creating the city.
of Robert Spence's daredevil photos and the L.A. Noire screenshots they inspired.
Team Bondi, the Australian developer behind L.A. Noire, pored over Spence’s photographs in the UCLA Department of Geography, where they’ve been held since 1971. The pictures gave Team Bondi building locations and conditions, public transportation routes, traffic patterns; the real arterial structure of a city preserved mostly in film and literature. As a result, gamers will be immersed in the most accurate version of 1940s Los Angeles ever created.
"During the roaring twenties," writes Air and Space, "Los Angeles bigshots hired Robert Earl Spence to take aerial photographs of their homes, paying $10 a picture." Spence in turn hired a pilot and an accompanying airplane to complete the task, leaning out from the cockpit with his 46-pound camera (makes you think better of the "bulky by 2011 standards" , eh?) and shooting at an angle rather than straight down, as most other aerial photography was done at the time.
That was a huge help to Team Bondi--Simon Wood, production designer for Team Bondi, calls the Spence collection a "magical find, as they're the equivalent of satellite photography" decades before satellite photography would become common. Spence's photos actually showed Los Angeles as it was to its residents. Says Wood, "They showed us the density of the traffic and the pedestrians, the trolley car routes; they showed us different mosaics and sidewalk patterns that we couldn't make out from the other street photo reference materials. They showed the different types of rooftops and tar roof styles and air conditioner units."
The booming decade also meant a boom in real estate, which meant construction. Everywhere. Team Bondi incorporated details from the construction, captured by Spence, into several missions in L.A. Noire--without Spence's photos, Team Bondi never would have understood the now-abandoned construction methods used at the time. They even reproduced in full the now-unrecognizable Pershing Square--Los Angelenos can't experience, as Wood says, the "curved footpaths, street lamps, the food stall and the fountain" that were integral to the park. But players of L.A. Noire can wander around in the park to their hearts' content.
The Spence Collection held some surprises for Team Bondi, as versed as they were becoming in 1940s Los Angeles. "The most striking thing," says Wood, "were the oil wells! There was one on almost every corner, it was crazy! Reading about the mini-wells/nodding donkeys [the above-ground part of ] is one thing, but actually seeing them in people’s backyards was incredible." These photographs gave the developers and artists a more personal look at what living in Los Angeles at that time was really like, especially as the Spence Collection spans several decades, capturing the evolution of the great sprawling city and its surrounding areas--the filming of Ben Hur, the construction of Dodger Stadium and Disneyland, and the organic evolution of Los Angeles's peculiar downtown-surrounded-by-independent-communities layout.
We've compiled , courtesy of UCLA. They capture a Los Angeles long gone, but one that gamers are now able to experience. There's even a black-and-white mode in the game, to really get that film noir feel--and get that much closer to these amazing source photographs.
Reinvented Microscope Scans Entire Largish Area at Once
Could be a boon to skin-scanning for cancer
Typical scanner microscopes do their work by sweeping the entire area to be scanned, recording images the whole time, and then compiling them into one concise depiction. But this new microscope, created by the legendary and restless designers at (also known for and ), is different. It's packed with "a multitude" of tiny sensors, according to the Fraunhofer press release, which each capture an image of a tiny section of the entire area. That capturing is done simultaneously, so there's no need for sweeping back and forth--just click and done. Then some software stitches all those chunks, each only 300 x 300 micrometers big, into one image.
The device is unusually small, too. The folks at Fraunhofer basically tore up everything they knew about scanner microscopes and started over, so the way their creation works is totally different. Knowing that, maybe it's not so surprising that the microscope is incredibly thin--the optical length (which is essentially the length of the light's path before it hits the sensors) is only 5.3 mm, so the entire device is very small.
On the other hand, the current prototype only captures areas about the size of a matchbox. And not one of those big kitchen matchboxes, the little ones you swipe in threes and fours from restaurants. But the production seems to be pretty easy: Fraunhofer says they can mass-produce the lenses using a process they compare to "the dentist's method of using UV light to harden fillings," and thus be able to enlarge the microscope without absorbing too much added cost. Possible uses are as varied as medicine and governmental--one of these guys could be scanning your shoulder for skin cancer (SPF it up, guys) or scanning your passport sometime in the future.
[ via ]