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Posts Tagged ‘Sand’

Popular YouTube channel creates camera lens from scratch using sand and rocks

05 Mar

Popular YouTube channel ‘How to Make Everything’ has published a new video showing the creation of a camera lens from scratch. The project didn’t start with pre-made components, as many DIY projects do, but rather with the purely raw materials, including sand and rocks for the eventual lens glass and copper housing.

The new project follows one involving the creation of a pinhole camera from scratch that the channel published in September 2018. This time around, the channel’s Andy George spends nearly half an hour walking viewers through the lens creation process, including many failed attempts.

Producing clear glass presented one of the project’s most time-consuming challenges, though casting the copper lens housing introduced its own difficulties. After weeks of work, however, the end result was a decently clear, though sadly ill-fated, camera lens with zoom functionality.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Sending Summer Off With a Bang: 55-Foot-Tall Sand Castle Snags World Record

05 Sep

[ By SA Rogers in Destinations & Sights & Travel. ]


It’s virtually impossible to get a sense of just how large this world-record-smashing sand castle really is until you see a shot that includes crowds of tiny humans gathered around its base. The German city of Duisburg may be landlocked, but that hasn’t stopped it from hosting an enormous sandcastle building effort two summers in a row. Last summer, their attempt at snagging the title was foiled when the castle faced a minor collapse during the building process. This year, they unseated a record set by a 50-foot-tall sand castle in Puri, India in February with their 55-foot-tall creation.

since last friday it is official. this is the tallest #sandcastle in the world. 16.68 metres. #landschaftspark #guinnessworldrecord #duisburg #ruhrpott #ruhrgebiet #ruhrgebietsliebe #sandburg #lpn #landschaftsparkduisburg

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Worldrecord sandcastle 16,68m ?? #sundaywalk #landschaftsparkduisburg #sunnyday

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It took 3,860 tons of very fine quartz sand, a team of designers from 10 countries and three weeks of building time to complete. The sculptors incorporated imagery from their own nations and histories, resulting in an interesting mishmash of global influences. Look closely and you’ll spot the Great Sphinx of Giza, the Acropolis, a Buddha, Elvis’ grave and the Colosseum. A Guinness World Record jury judged the enormous sculpture on Friday, making the win official.

#Sandburg#LandschaftsparkDuisburg #Weltrekord16,68m#Duisburg

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?#sandburg #duisburg #schauinsland #sandburgduisburg #sand #sandcastle #sandcastles #record #worldrecord #guinessbook #picoftheday #potd #cloudy #cloudyday #clouds #landschaftsparkduisburg

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Want to check it out in person? The city of Duisburg will keep the sandcastle standing through September 29th, assuming something doesn’t cause it to collapse before then. You can see lots more photos of the sand castle by searching Instagram for the tag #landschaftsparkduisburg.

Images via: manutografie, obootsman, michaela_schu, shopaholic2911

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[ By SA Rogers in Destinations & Sights & Travel. ]

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Messages in the Sand: 12 Great Guerrilla Ads at the Beach & the River

07 Aug

[ By SA Rogers in Design & Guerilla Ads & Marketing. ]

The beach is one big billboard for companies looking to surreptitiously market their products, from Game of Thrones to Jim Beam, which would be annoying if most of these guerrilla installations weren’t so fun. Plus, some of these site-specific seaside installations are the work of mysterious anonymous artists, or organizations raising awareness for issues like sea turtle protection and skin cancer avoidance.

Game of Thrones Dragon Washed Up on a British Beach

A 40-foot-long dragon skull seemingly washed up on Charmouth Beach in Dorset, England in the spring of 2013, likely only puzzling onlookers who aren’t familiar with the HBO series Game of Thrones. Still, it’s a pretty fun example of guerrilla marketing, especially since this area is known as the ‘Jurassic Coast,’ where lots of dinosaur fossils turn up. It took three sculptors over two months to design, sculpt and paint the skull. Who could resist climbing inside?

Jim Beam Creates the World’s Largest Cooler at Bondi Beach

Jim Beam and the ESKY cooler company teamed up to temporarily transform the Bondi Icebergs Pool into the world’s largest cooler for the filming of a commercial. The cooler was filled with about half a million gallons of water, over 500 giant ice cubes and 33 supersized Jim Beam cans.

King Kong Footsteps at the Santa Monica Pier

Giant footsteps and a smashed lifeguard truck appeared to signal total chaos at the Santa Monica Pier in June 2010, signaling the opening of the new Universal Studios Hollywood theme park attraction, King Kong 360 3-D. This ambient advertisement by the firm David&Goliath was a accompanied by a ‘news report’ on YouTube. Does this make anyone else miss the old King Kong ride? RIP, King Kong Encounter, which burned down in 2008.

Unexplained Giant Lego Man

A life-sized Lego Man washed up on a Florida beach with the somewhat nonsensical message ‘NO REAL THAN YOU ARE’ printed on its chest. Measuring about 8 feet tall and weighing 100 pounds, the ‘man’ was discovered on the Siesta Key beach. The Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office sent out a tongue-in-cheek press release reporting that they had taken the ‘man’ into custody, and found ‘Ego Leonard’ written on his back. Then, another one washed up in Japan. Turns out, Ego Leonard is the pseudonym of an anonymous Dutch artist, and his creations show up periodically on beaches around the world. Somebody should warn King Kong, so he doesn’t step on him.

Next Page – Click Below to Read More:
Messages In The Sand 12 Great Guerrilla Ads At The Beach River Banks

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Dismal River in Nebraska Sand Hills from Above

06 Jun

The Dismal River in Nebraska Sand Hills is one of my favorite paddling destination. I started paddling the Dismal in 2001 when training for Texas Water Safari. The river felt quite similar to the San Marcos River in Texas. Since […]
paddling with a camera

 
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Moving Miniature: Tiny Landscape Made of Sugar, Spices, Salt & Sand

11 May

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

Nothing about the hazy sunlight, languid motion of a tire swing, branches blowing in the breeze or puffy white steam pouring out of a factory chimney gives you any idea that the scene you’re looking at fits on a tabletop. Not only is this landscape a miniature – it’s made out of ordinary household objects and materials. Artist Matthew Albanese uses salt, sugar, flour, sticks, moss and other easily procured items to craft stunningly realistic tableaus, but for the first time, he’s incorporated movement, sharing a video.

‘The North Jersey Din’ is a moving version of a tree that Albanese has frequently used in a series of images called ‘A Tree in My Backyard.’ The attention to detail that went into this work is pretty incredible. In order for the miniatures to look realistic in the final images, Albanese employs a mix of techniques perfecting the scale, depth of field, white balance and lighting.

“This video is my first attempt at creating a moving miniature. Everything is designed for movement. The tree itself is made from brass tubes soldered together with springs at every joint. The leaves were die punched and machine cut, each threaded one by one. This video was filmed with just an iphone set to slow motion at 240fps. The audio is a set of recordings I made in my backyard capturing the sounds of the typical North Jersey Din.”

On his YouTube channel, Albanese also shared a video that captures four months of work in 33 seconds. ‘Making of a Promised Land’ is a time lapse of stills documenting the construction of another diorama, giving us an idea of just how much work goes into creating a single one of these photos.

Some of the scenes use materials you’d never expect, like faux fur standing in for the fields and sifted tile grout for mountains in ‘After the Storm,’ above. Among the items used in ‘Wildfire’ were cooked sugar, Scotch-Brite pot scrubbers, yellow glitter, clear garbage bags and party bulbs. Click on individual works on his website to see more behind-the-scenes images.

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These Brutalist Sand Castles Might Be Cooler Than the Real Thing

28 Mar

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

modernist sand castles 11

Brutalist architecture is often criticized for seeming cold, impersonal and out of human scale, but the same can’t be said for these structures when they’re miniaturized and ephemeral, destroyed in seconds by the sea. In fact, when they’re crafted out of sand on a beach, outside their usual context, we can appreciate the beauty of their geometry more than ever. Calvin Siebert’s modernist sand castles might just be better than the real thing.

modernist sand castles 10

modernist sand castles 9

While staying on Rockaway Beach in Queens during the summer, the professional sculptor and self-described ‘box builder’ crafts amazingly complex architectural structures that remain in place just long enough to photograph them, inevitably washing away. You might say that nature is… brutal.

modernist sand castles 12

modernist sand castle 1

While it’s not hard to imagine seeing some of these designs in the hills of Los Angeles, using sand as a medium enables Siebert to get more creative than the average architect in envisioning fantasy structures that could translate to concrete.

modernist sand castile 2

modernist sand castle 2

He doesn’t start with sketches, plans or even anything particular in mind, preferring to work intuitively, allowing the forms to take shape. He’s been creating these temporary works of art for the past six years, and has thousands of photos documenting them on his Flickr.

modernist sand castle 4

modernist sand castle 5

modernist sand castle 6

“Building ‘sandcastles’ is a bit of a test,” he says. “Nature will always be against you and time is always running out. Having to think fast and bring it all together in the end is what I like about it… once I begin building and forms take shape I can start to see where things are going and either follow that road or attempt to contradict it with something unexpected.”

modernist sand castles 7

modernist sand castles 8

“In my mind they are always mash-ups of influences and ideas. I see a castle, a fishing village, a modernist sculpture, a stage set for the oscars all at once. When they are successful they don’t feel contained or finished. They become organic machines that might grow and expand. I am always adding just one more bit and if time allowed I wouldn’t stop.”

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Garden of Whispers: Surreal Sand Dunes Fill 13th-Century Gothic Church

31 Oct

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

garden-of-whispers-installation

A makeshift wooden walkway winds along a strand-lit and tree-lined path between dunes, creating a surreal environment within the context of this historic church.

surrealistic-church-setting

Set in a religious space in Toulouse, this strange journey is punctuated by small vignettes that speak to the history of the place. In addition to physical installations and visuals, the space features a soundscape of whispered voices playing in the background and array of carefully generated aromas.

staged-sleeping-area

Along their way through the sandscape, visitors will find a full campsite nestled in the low hills as well as other small shelters with pots, pans, bedding and fireplaces – temporary and nomadic signals juxtaposed with a sturdy historical structure.

art-church-installation

The materials date from various ages, including modern plastics as well as ancient-looking tents of rough-hewn wood and fabric. The end result fits the artist’s aim of “creating a timeless experience outside known references.”

staged-lighting

Nor is the experience entirely static – live persons add dynamism to the mix. Artist Hans Op De Beeck “has staged a number of serene figures that quietly perform mundane, everyday acts. From time to time, these silent live performers offer tea to visitors.”

surrealist-path-art

campfire-art-performance

surrealistic-camp-ground

“Overall, the ‘Garden of Whispers’ incorporates a range of historical, religious and mythological references, yet most importantly, aims to offer a profound experience of the present, regardless of explicit references.” The temporary installation will be open to the public through this November.

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Sand and sky: Photographing Morocco

05 Jun

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Travel Resource Editor Michael Bonocore has been across the globe and back again to photograph exotic locations, but even he was unprepared for the experience he had in Morocco. From the clear nights with star-filled skies to the golden dunes of the Sahara, it was an otherworldly experience. See a few of his photos here and head to Resource Travel for more. Have you made a trip to Morocco? Share your story in the comments.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Sand and sun: Sony a6300 real-world samples

02 Mar

The Sony a6300 has some sizable shoes to step into. With a 24MP CMOS APS-C sensor, 8 fps continuous shooting with live view, 425-point on-sensor phase detect AF system and 4K video capture it looks like a solid update to the a6000, at least on paper. Eager to get our hands on a fully functional model, we joined Sony in Miami for some shooting opportunities. From bright white beaches to the intense action of a parkour gym (that’s a real thing), we’ve just started putting the a6300 to the test. Check out some preliminary samples. 

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Urban Ant Farm: Colony Encouraged to Hack City of Glass & Sand

15 Nov

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

ant farm hybrid

In this Urban Ant City installation, hundreds of Spanish ants were set loose in a scale model of Rotterdam, allowed to navigate the existing street and carve their own paths and tunnels.

ant city angle

Using the same basic principles of a tabletop ant farm, STUDIO 1:1 (images by  Ossip van Duivenbode) added a twist to their approach, giving the sandy landscape sandwiched between glass panels an initial shape.

ant city display

The ants, in turn, are following their instincts, creating custom routes that evolve the existing cityscape, all set prominently on display at the the Office for Metropolitan Information.

ant farm closeup

The pending project results have potential to show how nature takes its course with cities over time, highlighting the intersection of planning and organic forces, and may add a new layer of meaning to EUsociality. It also just looks awesome.

urban ant farm

“OMI is an initiative of UrbanGuides, Perplekcity and Ossip Architecture Photography. These organizations offer city explorations, urban planning and photography combined in one place.”

ant farm urbanism

“In addition, an array of books and city guides have been collected and are presented at OMI, in collaboration with NAi Booksellers. Urban Ant City installation of STUDIO 1:1 is realized together with AIR, the architectural centre of Rotterdam.”

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