There is a large number of third party lens attachments for smartphones available. You can choose from fisheye, wide-angle, macro or tele lenses, or even attach an entire camera module. The Micro Phone Lens Kickstarter project is different though. It’s a minuscule lens attachment made from a scratch-proof polymer that turns your smartphone or tablet into a microscope with a 150x magnification factor. Learn more
[ By WebUrbanist in Design & Fixtures & Interiors. ]
With a mostly-open floor plan tucked into 60 square meters of space, the design challenge was to effectively fit the functionality of five rooms into the footprint of two.
The De Rotterdam project by star architect Rem Koolhaas, a Netherlands native and head of OMA, is the biggest building in the country but, being all about density, sports some of its smallest apartments as well.
A series of convertible furniture designs by Clei Italia makes it possible to expand side surfaces into dining tables, hang spare chairs on the wall and turn both desks and sofas into beds on demand.
The project’s developer, Wim De Lathauwer, explains that the Dutch are used to thinking in multi-functional terms – making the most of every inch (or rather: centimeter) of available area.
The approach not only to makes these small apartments livable for singles or couples, but also to allow the units to support surprisingly large gatherings and overnight guests as well. The living room and kitchen combination becomes a bedroom, dining room or office as needed.
Beyond merely extending solid ground like most downtown-on-the-water expansions, this project creates new mobile infrastructure right out on the waves.
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Combining ancient earthen-architecture approaches and cutting-edge robotic technologies, this contour crafting process promises a revolution in how we address …
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From tetris tables to sofa beds on steroids, shelves that fold down into seats or that double as decor and much much more.
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[ By WebUrbanist in Design & Fixtures & Interiors. ]
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Google has launched an update for its Google+ for Android app, which offers many features found in the popular editing program Snapseed. Most of the new features are imaging-related and make Google+ a more powerful image editing, storing and sharing platform. Integration with Google+ allows continuous editing across devices, and editing is non-destructive. See more on connect.dpreview.com.
[ By Steph in Design & Furniture & Decor. ]
Scaffolding is ugly, and steals valuable sidewalk space from city residents – but with a simple kit of parts that fit onto the frame with brackets, it transforms into an instant pop-up park. The Kit of Parts by Softwalks includes fold-up chairs, planters, counters, light reflectors and decorative screens that snap right onto scaffolding to create impromptu public spaces that encourage congregation and conversation.
Inspired by the interaction with urban environments that’s fostered by sidewalk cafes and by the sturdiness and ubiquity of scaffolding (or ‘sidewalk sheds’), the designers came up with a few essential components that make for a comfortable resting place. Leaving scaffolding up for long periods of time can have a negative effect on businesses, communities and sidewalk culture, and Softwalks saw an opportunity to change that.
The pop-up park kit can’t be ordered by just anyone, and there’s a reason for that: the designers don’t want people potentially interfering with active construction sites in a dangerous way. But lots of scaffolding is ‘passive.’ The Softwalks team found that in New York City, when businesses fail the mandatory 5-year facade inspection, they sometimes leave scaffolding up for a long time to avoid having to do expensive repairs. In one case, scaffolding remained in place for 12 years.
The design team identified an ideal site to install the parts for the pilot project, ensuring that there was plenty of room for pedestrians, and plan to make the kit available to cities for use at special events, street festivals and for temporary installations.
Designing and building custom furniture might seem out of reach for most people, but these creative DIY brackets let you turn boards into whatever you need.
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Scaffolding has strict safety guidelines… but the rules aren’t always followed. Here are 24 construction sites that you don’t want to be working on.
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In cities where highways and high-rises have taken up virtually every square foot of real estate there is to be had, lush parks, pedestrian walkways and bike …
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[ By Steph in Design & Furniture & Decor. ]
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The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX350 features an 18.2 megapixel BSI CMOS sensor and the company’s latest Bionz X processor, and puts it into a slim body with a 20X, 25-500mm equivalent F3.5-6.5 lens. The WX350 also shoots up to ten shots at 10 fps, records 1080/60p video, and has a ‘Motion Shot feature’ for capturing things like golf swings. And, like most of Sony’s midrange cameras, the WX350 also has Wi-Fi with NFC. The camera will ship in March for $ 320.
[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]
Vhils is adept at carving, cutting and peeling to reveal art inside solid surfaces, but his artistic experiments also include carefully-calculated explosions to create pictures and phrases when the dust settles and debris clears.
While this Portuguese artist (real name: Alexandre Farto) has exhibited in galleries, his 3D building-side murals are somehow especially sublime, tied as they are to gritty urban contexts and turning crumbling paint, plaster and brick into physically and emotionally layered portraits.
His work with explosives is also powerful, playing with both relentless reality of controlled demolition and the festivity of fireworks, with elements of unpredictable chaos thrown into the mix.
Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, has become famous for his stunning murals, created by scratching away what’s already there, rather than adding additional material.
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These layered creations are surprisingly realistic, even in black and white, thanks in part to their scale and reinforced by their shadows and context.
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White wall frames cracked red bricks shaped like rust-colored autumn leaves, all trailing down to a black silhouette of a painter and his bucket – but …
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[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]
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[ By Steph in Technology & Vehicles & Mods. ]
Anyone who has driven in heavy snow has witnessed an overconfident driver in a 4×4 go whizzing down the icy street only to fishtail or veer off into a ditch. Four wheel drive may not turn vehicles into magical snow beasts that can handle the worst of winter conditions, but these will: the Track N Go system, a series of treads that installs in just fifteen minutes to basically turn an ordinary vehicle into a monster truck.
While monster trucks may seem ridiculous when seen on the streets in summertime, watching them tackle four-foot snow banks without a hitch might give some of us a twinge of envy when we’re sliding along at ten miles an hour after the latest blizzard. The Track N Go system is a series of four treads that lock onto a vehicle’s wheels to provide traction that tires can’t match.
There’s a catch: you can’t exactly install these things on your Toyota Camry. They’re for 4x4s only, and they’ll set you back $ 25,000. But being that smug driver going where other vehicles can’t, and actually knowing that your car can handle it, might just be priceless.
Of course, there have already been some Southerners perking up asking, do they work in mud? The answer is ‘maybe’ – they were developed specifically for snow, and mud trials haven’t started yet.
Soviet ingenuity made these amazing snow vehicles, which featured aircraft engines and could take civilians and soldiers through even the harshest winters.
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Car modifications are sometimes awesome, often horrible, and always expensive. The best are horribly expensive, and awesome enough to take your breath away.
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We’ve all seen an abandoned car or truck, a deserted bus or road … but stop to admire them? Abandoned vehicles are more than just an eyesore; they can be …
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[ By Steph in Technology & Vehicles & Mods. ]
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[ By WebUrbanist in Design & Furniture & Decor. ]
Designed as carefully as it is hand-crafted, this Tablet Desk has a deceptively streamlined look that hides a series of modular features and space-saving strategies, all made with technology in mind.
If setting aside a whole room for a home office is simply not an option, this dual-purpose wooden desk and end table lets you put work aside with relative ease, then flip out extra surface area supported with magnetized wooden legs.
Both the original two-toned and the newer 2.0 version from UK design studio Bee9 combine efficient storage and work space with minimal materials. Each also has a small-as-possible physical footprint, all oriented toward digital-first and future-proof use cases.
Modular panels and other moving components acknowledge that users will have wants and needs that cannot be universally anticipated, including ways to route cords (and places to keep them out of the way) and vertical surfaces against which to lean tablets or other devices.
The making-of video above shows the initial Tablet Design being carefully constructed – watching it reveals some of the subtle detailing and much of the behind-the-scenes effort required to integrate all of the necessary functionality.
From the designers: “Deceptively simple and endlessly adaptable, the Bee9 tablet desk is designed to redefine where you can put a desk. Frugal in its use of material and space, the desk [plus] side table makes optimum use of limited space.”
Offices don’t have to be drab and unimaginative, as proven by these 12 modern, playful, clever office interiors and furniture designs.
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Science meets luxury in this levitating coffee table composed of hovering blocks that seem to magically shift back into formation when applied pressure is …
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These 14 modern detached offices and studios are compact, self-contained and easy to assemble, making them perfect for serene backyard work spaces.
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Tamas Dezso is a fine art documentary photographer based in Budapest. Since 2011 he has been documenting the disintegration of former Communist Romania’s infrastructure in a series of photographs called ‘Notes for an Epilogue’. In his own words, the purpose of the project is to ‘render a world which may disappear forever imperceptibly and very rapidly due to the transitional nature of the [Communist] era’. See gallery
Where do you begin when you are considering using textures in your photography? I suggest you begin with the absolute best photo possible. Adding a texture to a bad photo does not make it a good photo. You want to make sure you have it exposed correctly, composed well, have a clear subject and not too much in the competing in the background competing. Textures work best with photos that are not too busy to start. Once I have chosen the photo I am going to work with, I do all of my edits before I add the texture, including adjusting the colors and sharpening.
In this article I’ll share some of my techniques for working textures into your photography.
You want to sharpen your photo before you add the texture. This is so that your subject is sharp and the texture isn’t over sharpened compared to the subject. You want the texture to enhance your photo, not compete with it. When I sharpen the photo I use the high pass filter as opposed to the unsharp mask. I like this method best because it defines and clears up all the edges of your subject without over-sharpening all the fill areas. Below is how I do this and the settings:
Finished image with texture and vintage paper applied
Once I am finished adding my textures to the photo I might do a final sharpen at the end if needed.
Once you are finished with your edits and sharpening, you are ready to add the texture. One concern people have in adding texture is how to erase the texture from the subject without it being obvious. You wouldn’t want to have the face of a baby be texturized, for instance, but you would want the face to match the rest of the photo in color and tone.
5 Steps:
Working with vintage papers is another fun aspect of textures that you can use in your photography. I get vintage papers from several great sources including my own family documents from the mid 1800’s, flea markets, online searches, Etsy, etc. I have curated several collections on my website for sale if you don’t want to go through the trouble of searching for them yourself. I especially love vintage French papers because of their wonderful scripts, markings, and fancy headers.
Working with the vintage papers is the same as working with textures. Place the paper on your photo in the approximate location that you want to use it. You will notice in the sample that I have placed it on the top of the many textures I have used in this photo, but you can place it on any layer that you want, to get the look you are trying to achieve.
Next, adjust the layer using the darkening blending modes: darken, darker color, color burn, linear burn, and multiply. Experiment with them all to see which one works best on the photo. The goal is to make the paper part of the document disappear, and have just the writing remain. Then just adjust the opacity to suit your taste. You can add a mask to this layer if you want to strategically erase some of the text which I do quite often.
Finished image
I hope you will give some of these techniques a try whether you are new to textures or have been doing them for years. If you do, please share in the comments below!
Further reading on using textures in your photography:
The post Techniques for Working Textures Into Your Photography by Denise Love appeared first on Digital Photography School.