Shooting Wide Open

A little fledgling program called Color a Sound, which uses pictures drawn on transparency to trigger sounds. It’s not overly impressive at this point, but I’d like to think that with a little more development, it could result in some creative musicking.

Color a Sound from blair neal on Vimeo.

At the least, tech makes consumption more about making and less about out of the box. Reminds me of Marc Levoy’s Frankencamera (watch out! web 1.0 site coming up!), which NPR
did a little piece on last year. It’s not what most people have time or patience for, but who knows what weird efficient things we’ve got up our own sleeves.

Either way, I really like the idea of the Edit button in programs. Instead of just being able to set certain parameters for predefined functions, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to change the function in a fundamental way? I suppose if your programming chops are good enough you can do that now by designing your own stand-alone program, but I’m hoping this will become easier for laymen. It’s not quite there yet, but the idea is seeping into consumer programs like Max for Live.

Combine this with the touchscreen technology (Max for iPhone?) and it could all get very visually appealing and interesting.

Hey, computers weren’t all that impressive when they first came out either. We’re still at the beginning of things – you don’t tell a five year old that his drawing sucks, right? Check back in 10 years…

David Teter (+ Flickr)

Both these photos were shot on an iPhone. Phone cam art is already happening, but I wonder when it’ll reached critical mass and become par for the course. This week I’ve been finding photography on Flickr that I really like. It’s ridiculous to expect too much from Flickr, which is best for socializing and interaction, but once you’ve found a few good photographers, you fall into a comfy group of people you admire. Someone commented in a discussion thread that bashing Flickr is like insulting the phone book, and I have to agree. All kinds live on Flickr.

David Teter

While we’re on tech, over the weekend, it occurred to me that the next big photographic revolution will likely be holographic cameras, 3D photography. You can already buy holographic photos and videos done basically with a stereoscopic or multi-camera / multi-angle set-up. Remember CNN’s election night faux-holographic coverage? Is it physically possible to produce true holograms from a single camera with a single-click? Some brief googling turned up a patent for a digital holographic camera filed by a Stanford professor who runs a laser lab.

From the description:

The holographic recording subsystem of the present invention can comprise, for example, a low-power laser and a spatial-light modulator. Multiple holograms can be recorded. The storage device may take the form of a monolithic card. The removable holographic storage device can be transferred to a dedicated reader. The reader can connect to a computer as a peripheral device or may be integrated into a computer. The reader can also be integrated directly into other devices, such as a printer dedicated to printing out photographs.

From a user’s perspective, the digital holographic camera of the present invention can operate in a manner similar to a conventional film camera. The capacity of each cartridge can be based on current film packaging, which emphasizes film speed and count. For example, cartridges can be differentiated according to resolution in a manner similar to the distinction between high-speed and low-speed film. By providing predetermined picture counts, e.g. 24 or 36, required capacity is based on count and resolution.

This was in 2002. You’ve gotta figure someone’s closer to cracking this nut by now.