David Lindsey Wade – Photography

Here’s another gimmicky way to interact with a website, here for David Lindsey Wade photography. You can either choose to navigate in a conventional mouse click kind of way. Or you can activate your webcam and use a wave of your hand left or right to scroll through the images of the site. It’s actually quite difficult to master this interaction and you need to sit bang on into the correct position for it to work. It also gets tiring quickly using this method to navigate. I know we all think that Minority Report looked cool. But I really can never see the day where we actually interact for long with sites in this way.

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London by night

A really stunning photoset over at the Boston globe featuring some incredible photos of London by night from above.

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Adobe’s Infinite Images

Here’s an interesting piece of tech from the Adobe team that was featured at the last Adobe Max conference in Milan. It’s called Infinite Images and is a photostitching piece of software that analyzes your image and places it in a logical central place. This way you create a tunnel effect that you are able to zoom into sections of the photograph. You remember the scene in Blade Runner where the surveillance software continues to zoom into a blurry image. Well that dream is taking one closer step to reality with this. Well at the very least you’ll be able to mimic the effect.

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Inauguration Photosynth

Inauguration Photosynth

I don’t often blog about Microsoft technology as I’m rarely impressed by their work. Photosynth is different. It is a technology they bought a couple of years ago in an effort to be a bit more cutting edge and experimental and is based on an existing Seadragon tech. It is a photo stitching technology that allows you to piece together photos of the same event in 3D space. The software analyzes each picture and then places it into a 3D space in relation to the other shots. What you end up with is a snapshot of time and something that you can navigate around as if it is a model. Building on this is the ability to generate a point map of the 3D space which analyzes all the photos and produces points where the object would exist in a real space. In this way you are able to use the free downloadable software and by snapping several shots of the same object create a workable 3D model. It’s impressive stuff.

CNN here have used the technology by getting as many people as possible to take a snap of the inauguration from their vantage point at precisely 12.00pm. The results are great.

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The photographic adventures of Nick Turpin

Space

The photographic adventures of Nick Turpin is a piece of work by Lean Mean Fighting Machine for Samsung’s new 8 megapixel camera phone, Pixon. The work sets out to show off how good the camera and video capabilities of this phone are by hiring a well known UK photographer to document a journey. The journey starts with Nick in his home town of Dulwich in London where his task is to take a great photo and post it to the online environment that had been setup both on the website and via Flickr. People could then vote on the photo by clicking on an area of the photo they found interesting. In this way a map of clicks were generated and wherever the most activity occurred this would lead the photographer on to his next location around the world. So a bit of graffiti of Mickey Mouse would lead him to Disney world. The aim being to navigate the globe in one direction ending up at the Samsung HQ in Korea.

I got to attend the gallery event last week where all the work was on display in chronological order with the photographer and press in attendence. It was a great peek into an excellent piece of work. The project is over now but you can see the website here, the Flickr stream here and his YouTube page here.

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Just this #1

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Ralph Richter photography

Ralph Richter photography

Some incredible photography here by Ralph Richter. Great set pieces and a lot of production design has gone into each shot. Bleached colour treatment gives the impression that each shot is taken in some kind of wacked out junk yard. Check out his portfolio site : his work edges on themes of symmetry, colour play and structure. Rightly so he has done a fair amount of work for the automobile industry and his style fits in neatly to the aspirational values of this world.

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Photography meets Illustration

See the full photo set here

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chris jordan

Chris Jordan is a US based photographer who is doing some really interesting portraits of America. His fascination with patterns in consumerism have driven him to take pictures of the effects of our ceaseless consumption upon our environment. Often his work is only revealed upon closer inspection as you look closely at the work and see that what looks like a beautiful and colourful pattern is in fact a mass of plastic bags. His work is often significant in the numbers he uses: the quantity of cell phones thrown away each week, for example. Some of his work is photoshopped and some isn’t. His reflection on the devastation of Hurrican Katrina shows his interest in the way mother nature can wreck havoc back on her unworthy inhabitants. Powerful stuff. And some genuinely unique photography and artworks.

running the numbers

intolerable beauty

in katrina’s wake

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javier ferrer vidal

I am totally blown away by this site for photographer Javier Ferrer Vidal who is in himself a fantastic photographer who concentrates on portrait work. This flash site is slick to the enth degree. The opening view of the kid in glasses has been broken up in Photoshop and put on layers within flash to create this really slick parallax effect. Little details like the plane flying through the sky really add to the drama of this shot. This kind of parallax thing is VERY in vogue at the moment and I can think of quite a few examples of this being implemented really well (check out this months winner over at the IAB for a good example). I am actually deeply involved in a project now for a client who wants this effect to showcase their product.

As you delve deeper into this site you get to the photography which is all laid out in a 3D space in a haphazard manner. Rolling over one image turns it to greyscale and blurred (god bless flash and clicking on an image gives you an enlarged version. The navigation throughout is simple. One click to zoom in and another to zoom out. This style of navigation is quite intuitive these days and it is pretty much a given that by clicking on the background it will take you back out. I think this kind of work will lead nicely into any multi-touch work that may come in the future as we figure out what kind of gestures will work for this new interface (check out my other blog posts on multi-touch).

And then to finish off there is the contact section with an underlying bit of video as a background of some people on a merry-go-round. As you move your mouse right they playhead goes forward and as you move left it goes back. Yes this is really simple to implement but the effect is perfect especially given the subject of the video. Oh and underpinning all this work is a sound track of considerable talent. It is perfectly fitting and really quite catchy. All round a great site, perfectly exectued in my mind.

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