I love simplicty and you don’t get much simpler than this visual depiction showing How Genetics Works | FlowingData. Thanks, Nathan, for another excellent post! Short and sweet.
Archive for the ‘Photography’ category
How Genetics Works | FlowingData
March 5th, 2010Collection: How to take insects in-flight
February 8th, 2010
fotoopa rig in use (from flickr)
fotoopa has posted photographs and schematics showing his hardware design for taking pictures of insects in flight. While the depth-of-field is very thin (credit card thickness), the pictures he has posted are astounding.
Focus distance can by adjusted to every value. The focus range of the detector is very narrow. 1 to 2 mm at a distance of 700 mm form the camera. Objects of 2 mm diameter can by easily detected. Detector works also on full black insects. 4 lasers are used, 2 IR 5 mw lasers at 850 nm and 2 x 10 mw green lasers. The green lasers are only for visual position to the insects.
The Online Photographer: The Worst Photograph Ever Made
September 7th, 2009From 12/12/08, Mike Johnston, in his blog The Online Photographer, calls this Annie Leibovitz photograph “the worst photograph ever made“:
[picture taken from pdnedu.blogs.com (http://pdnedu.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341ce76f53ef010536887d0d970c-pi)]
According to Mr. Johnston, “[the effort put into this photograph] was all done intentionally, front to back, top to bottom, money-no-object, by an army of the most talented professionals, from art director to stylists to make-up artists to baby-wranglers to lighting assistants to photographer to digital retoucher, all working assiduously in concert in pursuit of the utterly pointless.” Ouch!
Quotations from Sontag’s On Photography
September 5th, 2009I recently finished reading Susan Sontag’s On Photography [ISBN 0-312-42009-9; Picador, 1973] and, in the spirit of the book itself (which includes a collection of quotations from others), I decided to record some of the most interesting quotations.
I intend to represent her points objectively and don’t necessarily agree with all her statements, but wanted to capture them here.
Edgar Martins Posts Long Essay Addressing “Confusion” Around His Photographs
August 7th, 2009Edgar Martins replies to the whole controversy stirred up by his photographs in the NYT Magazine. Read his own words, where he quotes Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag.
None of his post sounds even vaguely like an apology in the modern sense of the word, but an apology in the classical sense — a proof of his beliefs. I should have known I was in trouble when he starts with a quotation from Nietzsche.
[via PDNPulse: Edgar Martins Regrets "Confusion" Over NYT Magazine Photos.]
See also my other posts regarding Mr. Martins.
Does the Roomba really cover the whole room? Question answered…
August 7th, 2009Ever wonder if the Roomba really covers the whole room? Wonder no more. Thanks to signaltheorist.com, you can see for yourself at Roomba, Economics and Long-Exposure Photography | signaltheorist.com.
[Thanks to coolinfographics.blogspot.com for the link, via http://roboticvacparts.com/]
Essay: Icons as Fact, Fiction and Metaphor – Lens Blog – NYTimes.com
July 27th, 2009Is photography always honest? Where is the line to be drawn between truth and fiction?
Essay: Icons as Fact, Fiction and Metaphor – Lens Blog – NYTimes.com. [See my post on Edgar Martins, too, here.]
Makes me think of Susan Sontag’s On Photography [page 86]:
A fake photograph (one which has been retouched or tampered with, or whose caption is false) falsifies reality. The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling, which is measured not only by a notion of value-free truth, a legacy from the sciences, but by a moralized ideal of truth-telling, adapted from nineteenth-century literary models and from the (then) new profession of independent journalism. Like the post-romantic novelist and the reporter, the photographer was supposed to unmask hypocrisy and combat ignorance.Canon’s New Anti-Blur Lenses Will Be Available This Year | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
July 25th, 2009One of the problems I’ve seen and experienced taking photographs is unintended blur. Taking a picture of a moving car or a picture of a waterfall, for example, you’ll probably want to have some blur to show motion (otherwise, it doesn’t look like the car is moving at all — though reading the labels of a tire on a car going 140 mph is pretty nifty 
. But usually blur isn’t a good thing. So, Canon will be releasing new anti-blur lenses later this year (according to Wired). Pretty neat, if it works. For details, check out Wired’s article. (Thanks to the Click for the link.)
