I used a lot of interesting tricks when I was taking landscape photography. You could use a dirty mud puddle to make amazing shots that looked like you were on the beach or overlooking a lake. It works for shooting people too. Epic shots are often all about lighting and focusing on split second shot. A good reminder in the Instagram era where everyone is posting ‘perfect’ pictures.
Looking Glass is now making the Looking Glass Go – a much thinner and mobile version of their glasses free holographic Looking Glass Portrait display. This isn’t new tech, but it is interesting to see people working in the space again.
With their software, you can make your own images and display animated content as well. Viewing angle is about 60 degrees and is created from up to 100 different still images.
It’s not limited to static images. You can even use the Looking Glass API to run this Unity version of Doom on the display and can look around pillars and objects.
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Amazing Mavic drone footage of the climbing route up Mt Everest.
Microsoft has released a fascinating new framework for generating lifelike talking faces called VASA-1.
Given a single static image and a speech audio clip, VASA-1 is capable of producing lip movements that are synchronized with the audio and capture a large spectrum of facial nuances and natural head motions.
See more here, read the paper here and here.
Getting worried you’ll be replaced by AI yet? If this gets perfected (it’s not perfect yet, but the results get better and better each year), then you can pretty much get rid of any ‘talking head’ jobs.
This could also be used to fool people on conference calls where video quality would totally render any minor glitches as unnoticeable or easily ignored as just streaming artifacts.
Just slap the CEO’s face into this, set up a conference call with finance via some very easy phishing, and approve that $1m transfer to your Swiss bank account.
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Emm used her iPhone 12 Pro + @Scenario3d iphone app to generate this 3D image of her daughter.
Scenario makes a number of products. Read more about Scenario3d here.
LumiLabs also has some of their own offerings to capture scenes.
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Dune 2 cinematographer Greig Fraser talks about using Unreal Engine to visualize the shots he wanted in the movie. It’s part of a trend of using Unreal as a previsualization and rendering engine for a variety of high quality, high budget movie productions.
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Just getting to the location of an eclipse is only half the battle. The rest of the trick is the weather; which is often only known 2-3 days before the event. It’s a very good idea to have a changeable fares for air, hotel, and car rentals. For the 2024 eclipse, I needed to switch from Austin, TX to Indiana 2 days before the event. Fortunately I had paid for changeable reservations with became key.
The other part was knowing where to go for accurate data and who to trust. Here’s some of the resources I used:
The most important part was cloud cover. There was a lot of last minute nail biting and plan changes trying to make your bet on where the clouds would split.
Day-of visible live cloud pattern and prediction websites to know where to drive to avoid clouds!
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The Arsenal device attaches to your camera and provides a number of previously more manual operations. It’s supposed to automate photo stacking, long exposures, focus stacking, timelapse, removes moving elements (people/cars/etc), color enhancing, and other features using advanced intelligence and AI.
I got captured by their ad because almost everything was filmed here in Oregon and boy is it slick looking:
Is it any good? I wondered if they were able to put the smarts of a good photographer into a device. Well…the British aren’t one for candy coating things:
So, it’s another great reminder that you should take the fabulous promises in a slick video and a smash Kickstarter with a grain of salt.
Christian Möhrle shows you how to magnify specific areas of your photographs using the perspective warp tool in Photoshop. Fstoppers has a number of other interesting tutorials for those who are interested.
