Category Archives: Photography

Lights, Camera…

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This looks like a camera, but just barely. It looks like a smartphone and a very modern camera had a baby, and in truth that’s a pretty good description of what it does. Designed by the same company that built a specialized camera that captures the entire light field (basically allowing you to focus pictures after you take them), the Lytro Illum is the consumer version of that. The broad spectrum of light capture allows you to explore perspectives, focal points, dimensions… basically turning each photo you take into a thousand possible unique variations. The Illum sports a 4″ touchscreen display which allows editing and viewing, and also allows you 8x zoom within the picture and focus by tapping.

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And this is just the camera on its own. There are computer desktop tools that will allow a user even more editing power. This camera is a photographers dream.

What Sparks Our Fire: The entire spectrum of light captured in one picture sounds like science fiction, but it’s available this July.

Would you buy this $1,500 camera for the photographer who has everything?

Creative Dissipation

Have you ever needed to hide your body heat from others in order to avoid detection?

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If you answered yes, you’re either in a Predator movie or you’re an elite soldier. If it’s the first, we hear mud works. For the rest of you, the Army has got something for you that isn’t a convenient plot device.

In a world where the enemy can be looking for you with everything from binoculars to infrared night vision predator drones, it pays to be hard to see.  A revolutionary suit developed by Raven Aerostar breaks up the heat waves emanating from a body, effectively rendering it invisible to infrared detection devices.

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The body heat of soldiers did not become a giveaway until very recently. In general, most insurgents couldn’t afford the kind of tech that lets you see in the dark the way the US Army does. However, with recent advances there’s now an app for that, and any guy with a cheap thermal sensor can pick out the enemy from thousands of yards away. This suit, called the Nemesis turkey suit, negates that advantage, keeping soldiers hidden and saving lives. The suits are available through Raven Aerostar or the U.S. General Services Administration, and are currently being tested for military service.

What Sparks Our Fire: Something that actually hides heat signatures that isn’t made up for a movie.

Do you think this is a relevant line of research and development?

Cuddling with a Predator

The leopard seal is the second largest seal species in the Antarctic, and is one of the most dangerous predators in the area. It’s not surprising, then, that National Geographic Photographer Paul Nicklen was nervous to enter the water with the largest sea leopard he had ever seen. What happened next is incredible.

What Sparks Our Fire: Photographing the natural world, up close and personal.

What do you think of these close and personal shots?

Twelve Celebrities, One Selfie, and Two Million Retweets Later

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So, let’s talk about why this photo got millions of tweets and favorites in a matter of hours. It’s a very simple concept of the collusion of several very strong brands into something much more than the sum of it’s parts. In particular, the followings of Jennifer Lawrence, Ellen DeGeneres, and Brad Pitt individually are staggering in the first place. When all of these people come together and do something very normal and human, i.e. take a selfie, not only does that bring all the strength of their collective personas to bear on a single social media post, it also manages to bring the rest of us up to their level. One can imagine being there and being a part of such glamorous proceedings, and to experience that camaraderie even further one shares or favorites the post.

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We can expect the post to reach at least 2.5 million retweets and possibly half as many favorites, in addition to media coverage, social media mentions, and astute blog posts about that very subject. It may be that some enterprising advertising executive may decided to get all these people together again to create a new campaign, referencing this photo.

Also this happened, because the internet.

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That is far too much Spacey for one picture.

What Sparks Our Fire: The most retweeted tweet ever.

What do you think will be the results of this post?

The Neighborhood’s Going Downhill

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Apparently grungy is in. You have your reclaimed wood tables, exposed brick walls, and raw metal beams, all of which add to a certain aesthetic and serve to add a certain hip-ness to the area. Now, according to sociologist Gordon Douglas, a certain amount of graffiti can contribute to the gentrification of a neighborhood.

Long the symptom or result of economic malaise or poverty, graffiti has a predominately negative connotation. According to Douglas “A huge amount of social science throws [graffiti] into a camp of being a sign of crime and disorder.” Baruch College sociologist Gregory Snyder compared rates of violent crime versus graffiti and found that places with more tagging had lower rates of crime. In his book Graffiti Lives, he writes that in SoHo, “residents, tourists, and high-end boutiques, co-exist with graffiti vandalism in a relatively symbiotic fashion.” He claims graffiti-ed neighborhoods “[attract] the type of urban ‘cool’ consumer marketers call ‘taste makers’ and advertisers and retailers so desperately want to reach.”

So that’s probably not an excuse to tag any old wall, but in a world where the works of artists like Banksy can command prices of $100,000, this kind of organic street art may just attract the kind of people that gradually gentrify neighborhoods.

What Sparks Our Fire: The shifting perceptions of what is art vs. vandalism and how the public as a whole reacts to it.

Do you feel graffiti adds to the je ne sais quoi of a neighborhood?