Eye Spy: Filmmaker Plans to Install Camera in His Eye Socket

Here is a bit from another interesting camera related story on the WIRED website.
Hmmm...If only they would make contact lenses that were cameras I would totally get one.

Rob Spence looks you straight in the eye when he talks. So it's a little unnerving to imagine that soon one of his hazel-green eyes will have a tiny wireless video camera in it that records your every move.

The eye he's considering replacing is not a working one -- it's a prosthetic eye he's worn for several years. Spence, a 36-year-old Canadian filmmaker, is not content with having one blind eye. He wants a wireless video camera inside his prosthetic, giving him the ability to make movies wherever he is, all the time, just by looking around.

"If you lose your eye and have a hole in your head, then why not stick a camera in there?" he asks.

Spence, who calls himself the "eyeborg guy," will not be restoring his vision. The camera won't connect to his brain. What it will do is allow him to be a bionic man where technology fuses with the human body to become inseparable. In effect, he will become a "little brother," someone who's watching and recording every move of those in his field of vision.

If successful, Spence will become one of a growing number of lifecasters. From early webcam pioneer Jennifer Kaye Ringley, who created JenniCam, to Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell, to commercial lifecasting ventures Ustream.tv and Justin.tv, many people use video and internet technology to record and broadcast every moment of their waking lives. But Spence is taking lifecasting a step further, with a bionic eye camera that is actually embedded in his body.

This is quite a lengthy article, read the entire thing on

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/eye-spy-filmmak.html

Hello all!

Some of you may have read this on the WIRED website.

Happy Accident Opens Door to Cheaper, Higher-Resolution Cameras

By Dave Bullock

12.01.08

LOS ANGELES — Scientific accidents have brought some of the most groundbreaking discoveries — vulcanized rubber, X-rays, penicillin — and now scientists at UCLA have accidentally discovered a material that could make digital cameras as we know them obsolete.

Graduate student Hsiang-Yu Chen was working on a new formula for solar cells when something went wrong. Instead of creating electricity when hit with light, the conductivity of the material she was working with changed.

"The original purpose [was] to make a solar cell more efficient," says Chen. "However, during the research we found the solar cell phenomenon [had] disappeared." Instead, the test material showed high gain photoconductivity, indicating potential use as a photo sensor.

Thanks to this lucky mistake, a new breed of camera sensors that are cheaper, higher-resolution and have lower distortion could be on the horizon.

Things To Think About

Hello all,

was hoping to find an image of a pinhole camera made from a turkey since it is close to Thanksgiving, but no such luck (I'm sure there is some form of turkey in Spam). Anyway, had a couple of ideas I figured you all could think about. Maybe we could do something where we all brought weird objects in class and worked on making pinhole cameras out of them. Then after we made the cameras we could take photos and show off what we came up with. Just a thought.

I know we talked about doing something with Polaroid in mind (which would be awesome!) since they are discontinuing the production of their instant film, but what about thinking about doing something for the whole digital to analog thing since we are making the change after next semester. Still trying to come up with a plan but if you all have any ideas feel free to share.

Hope you all have a great turkey or tofurky day

Polapremium????

Hey guys, found this site pretty randomly and I must say I am intrigued. The page only says "Polapremium -- The new home of instant photography" but that is enough to keep me interested. There is not much else there yet except for a countdown in seconds that seems to end around next Thursday or Friday (my math is not all that reliable). So keep your eyes peeled and hopefully this will be something worthwhile.

What do you guys think?

Google and Flickr and Smithsonian, oh my!

One of the great things about the Smithsonian being public domain is that eventually, it all winds up on the internet.  And it has.  

The Smithsonian Flickr Account has over 1200 images from the collection of the world's largest museum, or "a sample of the more than 13 million images in some seven hundred collections in our museums, archives, and research centers." This is some seriously cool public domain stuff, also available in High-def, ripe for both research and appropriation.

Because we do that.

Like Marchel Duchamp did.

LIFE Photo Archive To Be Made Available On Google

This may be more exciting to some of you than others.

Access to LIFE's Photo Archive -- over 10 million images in total -- will soon be available on a new hosted image service from Google, Time Inc. Ninety-seven percent of the photographs have never been seen by the public. The collection contains some of the most iconic images of the 20th century, including works from great photojournalists Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks, and W. Eugene Smith.

These images can be found when conducting a search on Google.com or on Google Image Search. Users can also search through the LIFE Collection directly by visiting http://images.google.com/hosted/life.

The LIFE Photo Archive featured on Google will be among the largest professional photography collections on the Web and one of the largest scanning projects ever undertaken. Millions of images have been scanned and made available on Google Image Search today with all 10 million images to be available in the coming months.

Geostationary Banana over Texas

Although this may not have anything to do with photography I found it quite humorous none the less.

The Geostationary Banana Over Texas project hopes to put a giant banana over Texas.

The artist behind the Banana Over Texas work is César Saez. Saez plans to put the banana between the high atmosphere and earth's lower orbit for about one month. It will be visible to Texans with the naked eye, day and night.

As stated on the website: the banana will be constructed like a blimp. Filled with helium, it will float between 30 and 50 km up in the sky. I will have a semi-rigid structure made of bamboo and a skin made with synthetic paper. Thanks to an extra load in gas and a valve system, it will keep its shape at all times. The final size of the piece will be 300 meters in length.

They were suppose to launch this thing in August 2008 but sounds like they ran into issues with funding of course.

Everything is bigger in Texas.. even the giant bananas floating in the sky.