This is a bit different. Microsoft have a website PhotoSynth which lets you view places from different angles. The idea being to take lots of different photos (viewpoints/angles etc) and let you view them.
Well this is a lower budget attempt to do the same thing. Click on a place on the left and move your mouse over the photo; you can see the different transitions highlighted. When you click on a photo at the bottom (of the same thing), it transitions in a pseudo 3D way to the new photo. Cleverly done.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Over a year ago, there was a Portent Story on turning photos into 3D at Carnegie Mellon. There is a working website at Stanford University where you can upload a photo (it needs registration) then have it processed into 3D and you can view it using Shockwave.
If you haven’t got Shockwave installed, it will do it for you and once it’s in, you can view your photo or others, zoom in, pan. It’s not bad at all, but it depends upon the original photo and landscapes like the one shown make the best images.
It takes about 5 minutes from uploading until your photo is ready to view. If you’re interested you can download and view the source code in C and C++, but it is a 42 MB file. There’s also a neat integration with Flickr so you can search for photos by tag on Flickr and use those.
Popularity: 16% [?]
Don’t recognise the face? That’ Bill Heine, the man who put Headington on the map with his shark through the roof.
MagMyPic is an excellently implemented generator of magazine covers. Just upload a photo, select a magazine- there’s 14 to pick from Vogue, Time, National Geographic and many more and the results are plain to see.
The man pictured is responsible for increased reporting of sharks (not the legal ones!) in the Oxford area. See the previous story!
Popularity: 20% [?]
I’ve seen this effect used recently in an advert in a newspaper or magazine so I expect to see it happen more over the next 12-18 months before it becomes a clche and advertising agencies look for something else new and fresh.
That said, it’s still pretty clever and must take a fair bit of time, tweaking and adjusting to get just the right shadow you want.
Link
Popularity: 23% [?]
It has taken fifteen years since they were first introduced but it has finally sunk in that Speed Cameras are not deployed for safety but as a form of taxation on driving. We were amongst the safest roads in Europe until speed cameras were introduced but then the year on year improvements in safety and reduction virtually came to a halt. See the portent story on SafeSpeed for details.
It stands to reason that if you drive with one eye on the speedo and one looking for cameras you are not as safe a driver as if you are looking for potential problems. And the big lie that speeding causes 1/3rd of casualties was finally shown to be totally wrong- the Govt measured figure is nearer 5%. Inattention is the main cause.
But as the Boston Tea Party showed, you can push people so far before they fight back and this site shows people fighting back- by destroying Gatsos. There are many photos…Now if only they’d do the same for the Speed bumps and stupid 20 mph zones.
Popularity: 12% [?]
This appeals to my subversive, resist authority nature. In their words Strictly no photography is a photo-sharing site for photographs taken where you are not allowed to take them. From the inside of the Kremlin to Kensington palace, from art galleries to war zones.
The rise in the number of compact digital cameras and phone cameras with increasingly good photo taking ability means that photography has become something that everyone can do. No flash bulbs needed or having to develop photos. My Nokia N73 phone takes some excellent photos. So it gets harder in fact probably impossible to ban photography in places as this website demonstrates. I just wish they’d change from white text on a black background!
Popularity: 16% [?]
The title makes it sound like some sort of website for detecting animal droppings! This is a new BBC website for the TV series Earth which will be appearing soon.
The tracking part of the website follows migratory paths of penguins, polar bears, whales etc. This will be particularly invaluable for hunters everywhere (joke!). As you’d expect from the BBC the production values are high with gorgeous photos, though the flash animation about the series crashed my browser - I suspect you need a fast connection to get the most out of this site.
So if you’re in to animals, highly recommended. But if you aren’t or you think the BBC Licence is too high…
Popularity: 12% [?]
This is a wonderful set of photos of a climb up the Bay Bridge and showing the views from the top which are just amazing.
Popularity: 21% [?]
Well there are high-brow websites and cultural ones but then you get something a little less intellectual like this one. The title may be a clue: statue molesters.
It’s a fairly easy concept to explain. Take a statue- the ruder or sillier the better, have somebody pose near it, maybe holding their hands or posture in a rude or naughty way. Take a photo… The gallery screen shot gives you a clue… there are a lot of pages of photos…
Popularity: 14% [?]
Somewhere you don’t expect to find lots of lovely and interesting photos is Wikipedia (well I didn’t!).
Australian David Iliff has travelled to quite a number of places (poor bloke is currently in London- hard luck mate!) and these are some gorgeous photos and panoramas he has taken and put on on his user page in Wikipedia.
Popularity: 18% [?]
Taken just a few week’s ago and uploaded to Wikipedia, this panoramic photo is 17,458 x 2,904 pixels in size. Even compressed as a JPG it’s 18MB in size so may take a while to download.
It looks down into Paternoster square and for miles around. If you look on the skyline you can see the Post Office tower and just to the right of that the big arch of Wembley Stadium which must be five or six miles away.
The photo also includes the Gherkin, Canary Wharf, Tower Bridge and the London Eye. Impressive.
Popularity: 7% [?]
(Taken from Wikipedia)Yann Arthus-Bertrand (born March 13, 1946) is a renowned and internationally-recognised French photographer. He originally specialised in animal photography, but later turned to aerial photography of subjects in many locations across the world. He has produced over 60 books of his landscape photographs taken from helicopters and balloons. Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s work has often been published in the National Geographic magazine.
As you’d imagine, with that kind of background, the website has some stunning photography. There are three parts- the earth from above, the French people and animals. Since he started “the earth from above” project, he and his team have taken over half a million photos and put a selection on here. The website itself runs in Flash and is very nicely done.
You’ll also find more photos of his here on the yannarthusbetrand.com website.
Popularity: 13% [?]
It’s easier usually, camouflaging people or vehicles to blend in the background. These photos though show an entire aircraft factory (Lockheed Burbank) being camouflaged by building false fields to make it look as if it was plain country.
Obviously from the ground this probably wouldn’t fool the eye but from a mile above, which is where you would expect Japanese aircraft to attack it should easily confuse them. Clever stuff. There are 9 photos in all.
Popularity: 18% [?]
Some of these statues are very strange indeed. Some aren’t exactly statues- like the Mini parked up the wall but they are all all a bit odd.
The rhino hanging in mid air is my favourite, followed closely by the women swinging the kid.
Popularity: 41% [?]
This beautiful looking King Cobra is made out of cans all stacked high and is one of a number of photos from some exhibition somewhere.
Of course Andy Warhol made cans of Campbells soup famous in his paintings but I doubt he ever envisaged this use of cans!
Popularity: 21% [?]