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  • 30 Years of Graffiti: Peeled Dutch Wall Sample Reveals Colorful Art History

    [ By WebUrbanist in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

    The sides of the structure are painted from ground to roof, but peeling back layers of artwork reveals just how far back the building’s vibrant history goes.

    “This is Doornroosje, the location where I took the piece from, “explains Paul De Graff. “It’s a Graffiti Hall of Fame in the city of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. What started as a 70’s Hippie cult place, became a center of music and art in the early 80’s.”

    It was apparently “one of the first places where it was legal to smoke cannabis” and “the building is surrounded by walls that are all spray painted from top to bottom.”

    And over its many years and various uses, the building has gathered coats of paint, which De Graff has deconstructed like a geological core sample (or piece of Fordite).

    Like a good urban scientist (or someone trying to sell proof with a section of the Berlin Wall on the streets of Germany), he also shows people exactly where it came from, then includes a banana for scale.

    Gratuitous Graffiti: Wild Robot Makes Random Wall Tags

    Graffiti takes time whether you’re an amateur or a seasoned expert. This crazy robot lets you sit back with a cold beer while it goes at the work of tagging an entire wall with your choice of …

    Cellograff: Wall-Free Graffiti Sprayed on Clear Cellophane

    Tagging is typically considered an urban art. At the very least you need walls to write on, right? Not necessarily – some clever artists have started to stretch cellophane between any available …

    Colorful Art Writers: 10 of the Best Graffiti Artists

    Humans have been expressing themselves by scrawling on walls since the earliest people lived in caves. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that we started taking our messages to the walls, trains and …

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    [ By WebUrbanist in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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  • Video tutorial: how to make a double exposure in Photoshop

    Youtube user Eye Stocker makes a lot of useful Photoshop tutorials and we found this one in particular to be valuable. Even if you are not well-versed in the program, this double exposure tutorial is easy enough for anyone to follow along. And for those already comfortable with PS, it’s still full of useful tips and advice.

    After all, one of the beautiful things about this Adobe staple is there are a near infinite number of ways too accomplish a task. And it’s always nice to watch someone else achieve an outcome in a completely different way than you might.

    To get started, all you will need to make a cool double exposure is two images that pair well, a copy of Photoshop and a desire to learn. There’s also written steps, which some might find easier to follow.

    Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

  • Benjamin Button captures *and edits* your family video footage

    As a parent, I take a lot of photos and videos of my children and the things we do together as a family. I edit most of the photos but barely any of the videos, because who has time for that? Even when I manage to set aside some time to go through them, I get sucked into a rabbit hole of watching old videos of my son laughing for the first time or my daughter running around the house with a waste can on her head. Those videos are adorable, seriously.

    That’s why the announcement of a Kickstarter for a new HD video camera that captures, culls and edits (!!) video for you has caught my eye. Benjamin Button is a hands-free and kid-friendly “button” that clips to your child’s (or your) clothing and records up to 3 hours of video. When you plug it in to recharge, it automatically processes the video and uses a combination of face detection, sound recognition, and human activity to analyze the footage and edit it into a movie for your enjoyment. You can also use a mobile app to manually select footage that you want to be included, so you get some control over the results.

    We haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but I sure am curious. Will this be the gadget that gives me family videos more recent than 2010? Or that gets me into a video or two, rather than just my disembodied voice saying, ‘No, come back here’? Do you think I can clip it onto one of my children’s jackets without them noticing so that I can find out who really started the argument? Or will this go the way of the pet’s view cameras that were so popular a few years ago? (Turns out my dogs don’t do anything very interesting when I’m not there.)

    Press Release

    Benjamin Button – The World’s First Smart Wearable Camcorder for Kids

    It’s never been easier to capture and store childhood memories.

    CHICAGO, June 12, 2017 – Many parents have long struggled to balance the chaos of life with kids and recording all of the precious moments that happen along the way. Especially those that children will most likely not remember, but play a significant role in forming their lives and personalities (from 0 to 4 years old, children have a very limited memory). Thanks to the team at Benjamin Button, now there’s an easy solution. They’ve just launched the first smart wearable camera in the shape of a button created for kids and parents alike.

    Parents simply clip Benjamin Button to their child’s clothing and they will get authentic, natural, and loveable full HD content from their child’s perspective with up to three hours of recording time. Based on sound recognition, face recognition and action recognition parents will automatically be given only the best parts of the day that have been captured with Benjamin. There’s the option to hand choose the best moments after they have happened, too. The button is large enough to eliminate any risk of choking, has advanced encryption privacy security, no WiFi or Bluetooth radiation, and is made of safe BPA-free plastic.

    “We wanted to create a product that made it possible for parents to be free to focus on enjoying time together with their child, rather than operating a camera. That’s exactly what Benjamin Button does! Our long term goal is to create an ecosystem around family memories and create a revolution in parenting by allowing parents and their kids to spend time together and capture and keep memories for future generations to enjoy. Through the memories of the youngest family members we are creating a world where we are bringing families together in this fast and demanding era,” said Dominik Orfanus, CEO of Benjamin Button.

    Benjamin Button’s Specifications

    • 140 degree diagonal FOV aspherical lens
    • 1080/25 fps full HD recording (video), time-lapse mode, advanced video enhancement features
    • 16 GB storage
    • Custom made Li-pol battery
    • Automatic turn on and turn off system
    • 3hrs of video recording
    • Water, dust and kids-proof (IP 66/67)
    • USB type C connector
    • 264 video encoding
    • 2 inch (53 mm) in diameter and 0.79 (20 mm) inch in thickness
    • Weight of 65 g (2.3 Oz) = 4 packs of chewing gum
    • No active WiFi or Bluetooth

    About the Benjamin Button Team

    The Benjamin Button team is led by serial entrepreneur and former journalist, Dominik Orfanus. Together with Andrej Spanik (CTO), co-founder of the tech company and serial entrepreneur too, they are now focused on bringing the final hardware prototype to life. The girl power behind Benjamin Button: Michala Lipkova is in charge of UX and product design, together with Boris Salapa, the Head of Marketing and Ivan Za?ko, the crowdfunding manager, they have launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign.

    The company is taking pre-orders for Benjamin Button exclusively through Kickstarter until July 3, 2017. The campaign, where early adopters can still take advantage of the special Kickstarter only discounted prices, was funded in under four hours.

    Kickstarter page: http://kck.st/2rajbZB

    For additional information about Benjamin Button please visit our website, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

    Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

  • The good, the bad and the ugly of aerial photography part 5: examples and comparison

    The Holuhraun eruption in Iceland, taken from a helicopter. This remains one of my most rewarding photographic experiences.

    So far in this series I have talked about the advantages of aerial photography and about shooting from a helicopter as opposed to shooting from a light plane. I have also talked about the right equipment for this kind of shoot, and about technique and parameter selection. In this final article in the series I want to discuss my experiences from 4 aerial photography sessions, compare them and analyze what I learned from them.

    I won’t be presenting any new info, but I think it’s important to do a comparison since I learned a lot from these short sessions, and if you can learn from my experience and mainly from my mistakes, I will have done what I set out to do with this series of articles.

    My first ‘serious’ photography flight was in Namibia, in March of 2014. I flew over Sossusvlei to capture the dunes of the Namib Desert in morning light. It was in a Robinson R44, mentioned earlier as a great helicopter for photography flights, and both doors were taken off. I flew around for 1:15 hours and the hourly rate was about $ 850, which is quite good. I took one Canon EOS 5D Mark III with a Tamron 24-70mm F2.8 stabilized lens on it, plus a 70-300mm which I never actually used. This was the flight on which I understood the need for 2 bodies, but I really did fine with the 24-70mm as most of the beauty was in the larger-scaled structures, mainly the shapes of the dunes.

    About half an hour into the flight the pilot noticed mist between the dunes ahead, and it was an easy decision to carry on flying and shoot the dunes shrouded in mist. Overall the flight was a huge success, and it triggered my love for aerial photography. I highly recommend flying in Sossusvlei. The fact that the pilot was flexible and had enough insight to suggest flying further above the dunes made a huge difference. Where possible, you should always opt for a pilot with experience of photographers, and make sure you listen to their suggestions.

    The second flight was during a very special event: the Holuhraun volcanic eruption in Iceland. I had come back to the hostel after shooting the eruption from the land three days before the flight, and I encountered several days of harsh winds and sand storms. Then finally the weather improved and I secured my spot on a sunset flight. We had an unbelievable flight over the volcano with a pink sunset in the background, and even today, that flight ranks among my favorite photography experiences

    I took two bodies, a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and a 5D Mark III, with 24-70mm and 70-300mm zoom lenses. I used the telephoto lens quite a bit to shoot the details of the eruption, and in this case it was a good decision to opt for a telephoto instead of an ultra wide.

    The flight was very costly. For 1:45 hours I paid 2600 Euros, at a rate of almost 1500 Euros an hour. Ouch. Helicopter flights in Iceland are more expensive than in other countries, so make sure it’s really worth it if you intend to fly there. These are some of my favorite shots from this flight. You can decide for yourself if it was worth it or not, but note that unique images such as these are the key to getting noticed: thanks to this shoot alone, I sealed an ongoing postcard deal in Iceland (which alone paid back for the trip), an interview with Iceland’s largest news website, several new private clients and a share by National Geographic on Facebook, hitting over 124,000 likes.

    My third photography flight was in Disko Bay, Greenland. Unfortunately, this was also my most disappointing experience. I flew in a small airplane with a tiny hatch to shoot from, which both made it very hard to achieve a decent composition, and caused the lens to vibrate violently, rendering many of my shots blurry.

    On top of that, communication with the pilot wasn’t good enough, and he didn’t understand that I needed more room on my right to shoot from. I paid way too much, over a thousand Euros for a flight I could have definitely done without. It was a bad experience, but at least I learned a great deal about what not to do.

    My fourth and most recent photography flight was above the Lofoten Islands in Arctic Norway. It was an amazing flight, and it reinforced my belief in light planes. The pilot was highly experienced and understood exactly what I needed, even without words. It comes to show how important a good pilot who understand photography actually is. The flight was affordable at about $ 300 per hour, and the conditions were excellent.

    Due to their relatively small size, the Lofoten Islands are a perfect place for photography flights. You can get from place to place very quickly, and the mountainous landscape is incredible from above. The famous shooting spots are easily recognizable, too, which is a wonderful bonus.

    Aerial photography is amazing. I doubt that anyone who tries it will not like it, but it comes at a cost. I hope this series has helped you understand the benefits of shooting from the air, the different options and the importance of being prepared. Enjoy your flight!

    Erez Marom is a professional nature photographer, photography guide and traveler based in Israel. You can follow Erez’s work on Instagram, Facebook and 500px, and subscribe to his mailing list for updates.

    If you’d like to experience and shoot some of the most fascinating landscapes on earth with Erez as your guide, you’re welcome to take a look at his unique photography workshops around the world:

    Land of Ice – Southern Iceland
    Winter Paradise – Northern Iceland
    Northern Spirits – The Lofoten Islands
    Giants of the Andes and Fitz Roy Hiking Annex – Patagonia
    Tales of Arctic Nights – Greenland
    Saga of the Seas and The Far Reaches Annex – The Faroe Islands
    Desert Storm – Namibia

    More in This Series:

    • The good, the bad and the ugly of aerial photography – Part 1: Why shoot aerials?
    • The good, the bad and the ugly of aerial photography – Part 2: Aircraft
    • The good, the bad and the ugly of aerial photography – Part 3: Equipment
    • The good, the bad and the ugly of aerial photography – Part 4: Technique

    Selected Articles by Erez Marom:

    • Parallelism in Landscape Photography
    • Behind the Shot: Dark Matter
    • Mountain Magic: Shooting in the Lofoten Islands
    • Behind the Shot: Nautilus
    • Behind the Shot: Lost in Space
    • Behind the Shot: Spot the Shark
    • Quick Look: The Art of the Unforeground
    • Whatever it Doesn’t Take
    • Winds of Change: Shooting changing landscapes
    • On the Importance of Naming Images
    • On Causality in Landscape Photography

    Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

  • Through the lens of black women photographers

    Photography is storytelling, and the photographer’s perspective can be an important part of the story. The exclusion of diverse perspectives deprives us of valuable insight. In an attempt to address this exclusion and the associated under-representation of black women photographers, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn and her colleagues have self-published “Mfon: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora”.

    Read about the first issue of their planned series publication at the New York Times LENS blog or watch their video above to learn more.

    Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

  • ICYMI you can print your own lens hoods for free

    If you’re looking for a cheap, DIY alternative to shelling out cash for a replacement lens hood, look no further than lenshoods.co.uk. They offer free PDFs with rounded and petal lens hood designs for plenty of lenses from Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Sigma, Tamron and Tokina. Of course, they recommend printing on a darker, more rigid material than plain white paper if you can. But if you’ve already got a printer and the paper, you certainly don’t have much to lose giving it a shot.

    Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

  • Synology launches lower cost NAS with DS1817 and DS1517

    Storage solutions company Synology has released ‘value’ versions of two of its recent NAS systems that use lower spec processors, less RAM and which have less comprehensive software packages. The Disk Station DS1817 and DS1517 are slightly scaled back alternatives to the DS1817+ and DS1517+ devices.

    Technical differences include the use of 32-bit 1.7GHz Annapurna CPUs instead of the Intel Atom 64-bit 2.4GHz processors of the ‘+’ models, as well as 2GB (DS1517) and 4GB (DS1817) of RAM instead of up to 8GB. The DS1517 has no expandable memory options, while the DS1817 has built in 10GbE instead of the option to run with 10GbE or M.2 SSD cache like the DS1817+. As standard the DS1817 offers sequential throughput of up to 1,577 MB/s reading and 739 MB/s writing, while the DS1517 can manage reading throughput of up to 436.32 MB/s and writing throughput over 449.69 MB/s.

    The DS1517 offers 5 drive bays and the DS1817 has eight, but both can couple with two DX517 expansion units which can hold a further five drives each. The maximum capacity of the DS1517 is 50TB, or 150TB when the two DX517 units capacity is included, while the DS1817 can manage 80TB, or 180TB with the DX517s .

    The company says that the biggest differences between the value units and the ‘+’ units is the software packages that come with them. The value DS1817 and DS1517 come with fewer business applications and a more limited compatibility with certain file types.

    • DS1817 – $ 849.99/£689/€793 ex tax
    • DS1817+ (2GB) – $ 849.99/£688.33.80/€809 ex tax
    • DS1817+ (8GB) – $ 949.9/£745/€875 ex tax
    • DS1517 – $ 599.99/£567/€653 ex tax
    • DS1517+ (2GB) – $ 699.99/£567/€666 ex tax
    • DS1517+ (8GB) -$ 799.99/£623/€732 ex tax

    Follow these links for more detailed comparisons between the DS1517 and DS1517+ and the DS1817 and DS1817+ on the Synology website. These products come with a 3-year warranty, though in many countries a further two years is available.

    Press release

    Synology® Introduces DiskStation DS1517 and DS1817

    Powerful all-in-one NAS solution optimized for your growing needs

    Synology® Inc. launched the new DiskStation DS1517 and DS1817, powerful and scalable 5-bay and 8-bay desktop NAS. DS1817 is the first Value series equipped with built-in 10GbE LAN ports and an expandable RAM module, delivering future-proof, high-speed storage for professionals and growing small/medium-sized businesses.

    DS1817 is powered by a quad-core 1.7GHz processor with RAM module expandable up to 8GB. Thanks to the built-in 10GbE interfaces, DS1817 can achieve outstanding sequential throughput performance exceeding 1,577 MB/s reading and 739 MB/s writing when using RAID 5. The built-in 10GBASE-T ports and 1GBASE-T LAN ports pave the way for businesses to upgrade to a 10GbE environment, and provide the support of Link Aggregation and failover.

    DS1517 is powered by a quad-core 1.7GHz processor, 2GB RAM, and four Gigabit LAN ports featuring failover and Link Aggregation. It delivers sequential throughput performance over 449 MB/s writing and 436 MB/s reading when using RAID 5.

    “Growing small and medium-sized businesses expect a cost-effective storage solution that is versatile and expandable for their future demands, while minimizing the initial investment required,” said Katarina Shao, Product Manager at Synology Inc. “The DS1517 and DS1817 are engineered to fulfill such needs, and provides the high performance and flexible scalability to manage, protect, and share data at work.”

    Both DS1517 and DS1817 can be scaled up to a raw capacity of 150TB and 180TB respectively with two DX517 expansion units. DS1517 and DS1817 support Synology High Availability (SHA), providing redundancy in case of unexpected network failure or disasters, and ensuring seamless transition between clustered servers. Moreover, DS1817 provides storage solutions for virtualization environments with VMware®, Citrix®, and Microsoft Hyper-V® certificates.

    DS1517 and DS1817 run with DiskStation Manager (DSM) 6.1, the powerful and intuitive operating system for Synology NAS devices. Featuring a wide range of applications to bring better productivity at intensive work, DS1517 and DS1817 can serve as a centralized data backup destination. Synology has received numerous media accolades, such as topping the mid-range NAS category in TechTarget’s storage solution survey.

    DS1517 and DS1817 are backed by a limited 3-year hardware warranty. An additional extended warranty option is available in select regions for up to five years of coverage.

    For more information on DS1517, please visit https://www.synology.com/products/DS1517
    For more information on DS1817, please visit https://www.synology.com/products/DS1817
    For more information on extended warranty, please visit https://www.synology.com/products/extended_warranty

    Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

  • This video of Boeing’s new planes has nothing to do with photography but we’re posting it anyway because it’s cool

    Boeing’s new and very shiny 737 MAX 9 is a pretty cool plane. And so is the equally new and equally shiny 787-10. And in Boeing’s latest promotional video you can see its two newest airliners flying together in close formation, ahead of the annual Paris Air Show.

    Does this video have anything to do with photography? Absolutely not. But you should watch it anyway.

    Read about our experience recently shooting the 737 MAX 9 first flight

    Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

  • Photographer uses ‘antique’ photo technique to illustrate struggles of Native Americans

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    During the Dakota War of 1862, the United States government hung 38 members of the Dakota Indian Tribe in Mankato, Minnesota – the largest single-day mass execution in US history. A day after Shane Balkowitsch learned about this event – something most Americans have never heard of – he made the plate ‘Death by Oil’ (pictured above) using an antique photo process called wet plate collodion, which was first developed (no pun intended) in 1848.

    The oil in the photo links the struggles of Native Americans in 1862 to the present time, in which they are again standing up to the US Government to protect their homeland. In this case, it is from the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline.

    Wet plate photography requires subjects to sit still for long exposures, sometimes as long as 30 seconds. It involves applying a collodion emulsion onto a glass plate and sensitizing the plate for 3 minutes in a bath of silver nitrate, then taking the photo while the plate is still wet (which requires a portable darkroom). According to Balkowitsch, while the photos come out black and white, ‘they capture real life more beautifully and romantically’ and they will last for hundreds of years, unlike more traditional modern photographic prints. Balkowitsch is one of a very small group of photographers still using the collodion wet plate process and has made over 2300 plates since 2012.

    Balkowitsch’s full collection of wet plate photos is available for viewing online.

    Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

  • Crazy Cat Castle for Sale: 20 Acres of Terror in the Arizona Desert

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

    Are you one of the 3 billion people worldwide estimated to be infected with toxoplasmosis, the brain-controlling parasite passed onto humans by our feline overlords? This protozoa invades the host’s brain and makes it do things that are counterproductive to survival – and apparently good taste. How else would you explain this Arizona real estate listing for a dream home only a crazed cat mom could love? “If you love cats this is the home for you!” reads the Caldwell Banker description. “If not bring your sandblaster!”

    The first important thing to note is that the former owners actually only had two cats. This isn’t an out-of-control animal hoarding situation. It’s just an extremely bonkers decorating scheme carried out by people who are really, really into cats. You might think – “So, what, they’ve got some built-in cat walkways and cat castles?”

    Oh, they’ve got those things, all right. Including a three-story Medieval cat castle made of stone. Upstairs, in what was apparently the cat overlords’ bedroom, every single surface is plastered with stuffed cats, photos of cats, oversized posters of cats, cat toys, cat houses, stockings full of cat treats. But that’s not all.

    Continue going through the photos and you’ll see that the theme carries throughout the rest of the house. The kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedrooms are all similarly decorated (on top of log cabin wall surfaces painted a garish mix of colors.) There’s even a cat-shaped chandelier.

    The 2,500-square-foot home is listed for $ 240,000, and it comes with 20 acres of land in the town of Concho, about 200 miles northeast of Phoenix. The town itself has a population of just 38. So really, what we’re looking at is the perfect place for mind-controlled cat slaves to establish their very own cat-worshipping compound. Or, you know, just a really great sanctuary for cats that need a safe and loving home.

    Wild Nights In: 18 (More) Crazy, Creepy & Kinky Hotel Rooms

    Ever want to sleep suspended in mid-air, stay in a barn loft or live out some other strange fantasy you’re afraid to tell anyone? If you can think of it, chances are someone has created it – be …

    Crazy Decor: 10 Insane Interiors & Radical Room Designs

    It’s been said there’s a fine line between creativity and insanity, and the more creative designers get, the more insane their creations become. These 10 insane interiors and radical room designs …

    Fortified Farms: In the Svanti Mountains Every Home is a Castle

    Facing threats from all sides, the Svans of Georgia became highland gatekeepers of their mountain passes, each distributed dwelling turned into a individually defensible …

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

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